“In his column, Manjoo goes on to call out virtual reality for being ‘a lonely, anti-social affair’—but, hey, isn’t that what reading a novel used to be? I mean, before we figured out how to make books ping and arouse competitive instincts by flagging favorite passages of readers who got there before we did. (I don’t mean to harp on Farhad Manjoo or to denigrate his excellent work; his reticence is shared by others in both legacy and new media cautioning against VR.)” It looks like VR is in desperate need of good storytellers.
Virtual Fictitious Reality
Stir Gently
Cookbooks, in general, are resistant to close reading, if only because their authors are barely present in the text, if at all. Yet sometimes we can discern a personality through the measurements and shopping lists. At Page-Turner, Kathleen Alcott reads the cookbooks of Nigel Slater. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen on reading cookbooks as literature.
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Roald Dahl Excerpts on Cereal Boxes
In an attempt to encourage kids to read, Puffin has struck a deal to place Roald Dahl excerpts on the back of at least 10 million cereal boxes in the UK.
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A Logical Fit
The Guardian posted a helpful Q & A to shed light on a great mystery: why is Penguin Classics publishing Morrissey’s autobiography?
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The James Salter Diet
James Salter’s women are “described over and over again as meals for the male protagonists to enjoy and then leave behind in various western European countries,” Lidia Jean Kott argues. Read Sonya Chung’s take in our review of All That Is.
AWP Events You Can’t Miss
Colson Whitehead on Making Eccentric Ideas Plausible
Colson Whitehead reflects on the fantastic fiction he consumed as a child and how it made the most eccentric ideas seem plausible.
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A to Z of the Shortest Book Titles
From Andy Warhol’s A to Vassilis Vassilikos’ Z (and now Tom McCarthy’s C), AbeBooks lists the shortest book titles.
Translators at Work
Clarice Lispector’s translator and Year in Reading alumna Katrina Dodson interviews Elena Ferrante’s English-language translator Ann Goldstein about private identities and the final Neapolitan novel.
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