Recent Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo pays tribute to a youth spent in the theater in a new essay for the Guardian. She credits acting with starting her lifelong career in the arts. “I came to love acting so much I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” she writes. “Rather like the writer I eventually became, I relished inhabiting characters who were not myself, expanding my own character, personality and emotions beyond the limits of my teenage identity. I found the process fascinating, absorbing and deeply rewarding. […] I learned that the arts world cherished difference, unlike my predominantly white girls’ school where everyone wore the same haircut, which I could never achieve anyway.”
Bernardine Evaristo Thanks the Stage
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The Age-Old Tradition
Scientists are using x-ray to read fragments of 1,300-year-old manuscripts that have been reused as bookbindings. Pair with this Millions essay on private libraries and what books reveal about their readers.
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The search for absurdity
How The Daily Show may have an advantage over mainstream news, by virtue of its refusual to take “View from Nowhere.” Conor Friedersdorf makes the compelling case that comedy writers, with their eyes rooting out the absurd in the world, can put give the news some much needed perspective.
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Bookends on Russian Literature
To accompany this infographic on Russian literature, The New York Times asked Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser what makes 19th century Russian writing so distinctive. Pair with our own Matt Seidel‘s take on rejected Bookends questions.
Across Space and Time
“These sorts of connections are at the centre of nearly all time machine fiction. These novels usually draw attention to telling commonalities across historical eras, or between the past and the present. That gives an engaging puzzle quality to the books—we read seeking out the dropped clues that will shed light on the purpose of the parallel.” On fiction in which the plot takes place over multiple timelines.
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Book Nerd Gift Alert
I did not know this existed: Trivial Pursuit Book Lover’s Edition. I suspect that Millions readers would be quite skilled. Sample question: “What Hardy novel features a doomed title heroine who names her daughter Sorrow?” Bookslut took the game for a spin a few years back.