Summer Brennan attempts the Marie Kondo approach to organizing her library and learns about the heartbreaking difficulty of getting rid of books. Pair with this Millions essay on private libraries and what books reveal about their readers.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a Library
“It’s why the gift horse is a gift”
Recommended Reading: “The Tiny Men in the Horse’s Mouth” by Matthew Olzmann for New England Review.
Tuesday New Release Day: Vowell, Doctorow, Shepard, Atkinson, McEuen, Egan
New this week is Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes (reviewed here) along with new story collections from E.L. Doctorow (All the Time in the World) and Jim Shepard (You Think That’s Bad). Also new this week is Kate Atkinson’s latest Jackson Brodie mystery Started Early, Took My Dog and Paul McEuen’s debut mixing “science and suspense” Spiral. Out in paperback is Millions Hall of Famer A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.
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How to Be
If you were never satisfied with Hamlet’s answer to the famous “to be or not to be?” question, now is your chance to change it. Ryan North rewrote Hamlet as a choose-your-own-adventure book, To Be or Not To Be. You can play as Ophelia, Hamlet, or King Hamlet and choose from more than 110 alternate deaths. Brain Pickings got a first look at some of the book’s excellent illustrations.
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Porcupines at the University
“That to me was the rub. A writer freed from the need to calibrate with reality, or even be internally consistent, could put a washing machine into the sky along with a rainbow. So why not put a rhinoceros up there too?” On negative literary influences.
Curiosities
The Economist’s nifty, new(?) culture mag More Intelligent Life is putting together guides to the best critics, including those who cover books; film; dance, art, and classical music, and rock music. Scott has performed a similar exercise for book reviewers, as well.Polite magazine: “Where Are They Now? A visit with Encyclopedia Brown“The estimable New York Sun books section follows our lead in adding a review archive.Nextbook asks: Where have all Bernard Malamud’s readers gone?Vroman’s, a legendary Southern California independent bookstore and the employer of Millions contributor Patrick, has been named Bookseller of the Year by PW.Richard Russo:”My fictional Eliot [Spitzer] would be complex, would contain paradoxes. He would not be a hypocrite. My Eliot would believe with his whole heart in his crusades against the corrupt and the powerful and the privileged, even as he worked studiously to undermine his legacy. Fiction can accommodate such paradoxes, provided they’re explained.”An open letter to Steve Jobs pleading for Apple to create an iPod optimized for “a best-of-breed reading experience.” (via)One of our most anticipated books, Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes won’t be out in English for a while yet, but a new translation into German offers an opportunity for another review to trickle out.There are 1,000 Places to See Before You Die and 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, but forget all that and “Read this column before you die.”
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The PEN World Voices Line-Up
PEN World Voices, the great annual festival of International Literature, unveils this year’s lineup for the week of April 26, in New York and elsewhere. Highlights include Norman Rush, Patti Smith, László Krasznahorkai, Rodrigo Frésan, and Sherman Alexie‘s “Freedom to Write” lecture.