INTERESTING ARTICLES

Here's the space to post links to anything that catches your eye and you think the folks here would enjoy reading, or would enjoy disagreeing and discussing.

To start us off, here are links to that most dangerous of things -- lists of new and exciting books being published this year.

https://electricliterature.com/75-books-by-women-of-color-to-read-in-2024/

https://lithub.com/lit-hubs-most-anticipated-books-of-2024/?single=true

https://themillions.com/2024/01/most-anticipated-the-great-winter-2024-preview.h...

I'm looking forward to Bear by Julia Phillips (who wrote the incandescent Disappearing Earth), Real Americans by Rachel Khong (she wrote Goodbye, Vitamin), Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (he wrote There There), and The Wedding People by Alison Espach (She wrote Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance).

What are you looking forward to?

Interesting. I never look at lists of books coming out as my head is usually swivelled toward the past, but scrolling through these lists, I came across a few I'm excited about reading:

Waubegeshig Rice, Moon of the Turning Leaves (sequel to the Moon of the Crusted Snow)

Salmon Rushdie, Knife (about his being stabbed and the aftermath)

Vladimir Sorokin, Blue Lard (because what about a love affair between Stalin and Khrushchev doesn't sound entertaining and Ice Trilogy was brutually memorable)

>3 labfs39: I’m really looking ford to getting Knife
Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Not that I’m a great fan of his writing, but I’d seen him in Manhattan in restaurants and walking around and he seemed so relaxed after his years of being under the Fatwa. Though I think it’s dropped?

A Guardian article about ‘futuristic’ new libraries in Ghent, Helsinki and elsewhere:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/08/libraries-for-the-future-europes-n...

Angel City Press, a small publisher specializing in books about Los Angeles and southern California, looked like it was about to go under when its co-founders announced that they were retiring. But the publisher has been saved, acquired by the Los Angeles Public Library.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2024-01-08/the-l-a-public...

The newest decorating trend is books. This article is a little weird and as one commenter put it -- it's less about owning books than about owning an old house with a lot of wood and built-ins.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/style/do-you-have-bookshelf-wealth.html?searc...

Rather fluffy article about the dos and don’ts of bookshelves as backgrounds for video calls.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/shelf-absorbed-nine-ways-to...

>10 thorold: I like his tongue-in-cheek approach.

>10 thorold: I'm the idiot who organizes her books so that I can find them again. Such a fashion faux pas

>12 labfs39: Yes, I can’t think how we all fell into that trap…

>12 labfs39: Ha! I just sorted my paperback tbr into colors. Since I'm trying to read more spontaneously, I thought mixing them all up would encourage that. It does look very nice and I'm hoping I won't get frustrated at not finding a specific book and put it back into alphabetical order by author again soon.

>14 RidgewayGirl: When our house in Seattle was staged, the designer had me box about 90% of my books, arranged the rest by color and then brought baskets and such to put on the rest of the shelves. Fortunately I didn't have to look at it long, as I left and had others box the rest of the books and add them to my cargo to be shipped. The sight of all that empty bookshelf space drove me nuts, and my fingers itched to rearrange the books. That said, I do shelf my NYRBs and my Europa Editions together. Something about the sameness of the books yet random different colors is attractive to me. They are alphabetical though. :-)

When I still worked I arranged my closet by color. Now nothing makes it to the closet.

>16 dianeham: Ha!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1ryx_DLK7C/

Ann Patchett talking about two of her books being banned in schools in Florida.

>18 dianeham: Wow. I simply don't know what to say. Book banning has gone off the rails into ludicrous country. Maybe Florida should just stop teaching kids to read. Would that solve their problem?

>19 labfs39: Don't give them any ideas. They might go for that.

>18 dianeham: i saw that. And somewhere else in Florida (of course?) the dictionary was banned. I’m guessing this is all some sort of rightwing power-trip whose purpose is to make normal people gasp in horror. I can’t make any other sense of it.

A very interesting essay on how we think and write about Keats, by Susan Eilenberg in the London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n02/susan-eilenberg/hooted-from-the-stage

Nominally, this is a review essay about two recent books on Keats (Lucasta Miller's Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph and Anahid Nersessian's Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse), but Eilenberg is making a broader point about how we tend to view Keats through a specific, tragic lens that was concocted by those in his orbit who sought to profit from, and take advantage of his suffering, for their own benefit. She is thinking particularly of Joseph Severn, an artist who accompanied Keats in the last few months of his life, and is particularly scathing about how Severn then leveraged this association for himself:

Severn would dine out on tender recollections of Keats’s gestures of appreciation and gratitude for the rest of his life; a professional celebrity widow, he would stand in his rooms in Rome, furnished with what Sue Brown, in her judicious 2009 biography of Severn, describes as ‘props’ carefully and as if casually displayed to elicit from admiring visitors questions about his art and his relationship to Keats; he would recall what it had been like to be in the presence of the poet when he was inspired to compose, say, ‘Bright Star’ – not that he would know, because he hadn’t in fact been there.

She has some equally smarting things to say about Shelley (whom I have personally never cared for). Her broader point is that to see Keats, we must de-Severnise. Thus taken, Keats is not just the tragic, dying, boy-genius, but also the trained surgeon who eschewed the scalpel for the word, who "wants what he has always wanted, to soothe pain. If he cannot soothe it, he wants to redeem it as creative power.". I found the essay interesting: it made me revisit some probably lazy assumptions I've had about Keats, purely because I haven't read enough about him. Based on her review, I'm likely to read Miller's book, and unlikely to pick up Nersessian.

This is interesting from the Washington Post - Breaking up with Goodreads: The best book-logging apps for 2024. LT is #2. Published today 1/22

https://wapo.st/3vOasDy

>23 dianeham: Amusing that what they focus on on LT is entering music and movies... Ah well, if they talked about how precise the cataloging can be they'd probably turn off most people.

>23 dianeham: Thanks, Diane.

>24 jjmcgaffey: IKR? for some of us using a barcode scanner to scan all our books was the big attraction.

For me it was partly that (CueCat, I started loooong before there was an app), but mostly that somehow (helped by said scanner, but I have/had a lot of pre-ISBN books), despite all the precision that LT wants/encourages in cataloging, I could actually get an entire section of my books cataloged here _before_ I bought new books, discarded books, or otherwise completely rearranged it. Which had not worked with paper, spreadsheets, dedicated cataloging software...LT just works for me.

An article from The Guardian about the controversy over this year's Hugo Awards: Science fiction awards held in China under fire for excluding authors

I found this one quite interesting, about the home/office of the man Black History Month : https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/realestate/black-history-month-woodson.html?u...

>28 Julie_in_the_Library: It will be interesting to learn what happened. Despite the growing number of popular Chinese scifi writers, I'm surprised the awards are being held there.

>30 labfs39: I can't remember if this article mentions it, but there were concerns about the possibility of issues like this when China first won the bid to hold the awards. As to whether we'll ever find out exactly what happened - that's an open question.

>30 labfs39: The Wirldcon was held there - and as the Hugos are part of it, they went there as well. It has nothing to do with the authors’ numbers. The bid is not for the Awards but for the convention - the awards are just the more visible part of it outside of fandom.

And where the WorldCon goes is chosen by the members of the one 2 years earlier (once someone says they can do one of course and bids for the year). There was a lot of noise when that one was selected with people expecting shenanigans. But the selection followed the rules so they got it.

>30 labfs39: >32 AnnieMod: It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, changes about the process going forward.

>28 Julie_in_the_Library: very disturbing.

>28 Julie_in_the_Library: just about to post that here first thing i thought of was china getting even with some unliked authors. Too bad because i thought it was a good place for it to be, considering how many asian authors are writing about scifi. so maybe not go there any more. bee interesting how this plays out

>32 AnnieMod: I didnt know that Annie thanks

Nice if true (or keeps holding)

‘Reading is so sexy’: gen Z turns to physical books and libraries

... Last year in the UK 669m physical books were sold, the highest overall level ever recorded. Research from Nielsen BookData highlights that it is print books that gen Z favour, accounting for 80% of purchases from November 2021 to 2022. Libraries are also reporting an uptick in gen Z users who favour their quiet over noisy coffee shops. In the UK in-person visits are up 71%. ...

>37 LolaWalser: I don't know if this is just a general trend, but today I also saw an article about how Gen Z is returning to analog photography as well. I wonder if this is a general reaction to a surfeit of digital content.

>39 rv1988:

I hadn't heard that, but it doesn't surprise me. Photographs in particular are so laden with emotion and memories and no matter how many digital backups one makes, nothing is as secure as a photo in one's hands. I lost so much precious digital data already. But the albums with "real" photos are still here. I fear the complete loss of "past" technologies. Heh, that reminds me--recently I gave a whole bunch of CDs to a colleague's kid but I also had to give her a CD player (my old portable Sony Walkman) because they had none. It was weird showing a 14 year old how to handle CDs and the player!

Dara Horn's article in The Atlantic last week is incisive, articulate, and devestating. The link goes to an archived version with no paywall.

as usual she hits the nail on the head. People are always surprised that antisemitism started with the Romans (mad that the jews had a revoltion against them) what shocked me was the discription of the blood libel at the same time period. Havent finished reading; but wondering is she will include something that we can do to counter this. sigh

>41 Julie_in_the_Library: I finally read this today. Painful.

An interesting article on censorship here. Although none of her examples include journalism, which I find frustrating.

>44 markon: Thanks for sharing that article. I appreciated the discussion of middleman and private censorship as a result of state censorship, not separate from it.

'Real' Mr Darcy was nothing like Colin Firth, academics say
A bit of fun.

The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire by Carlee Gomes is very interesting, even if you're not into film studies. She has a lot to say about shifts in American culture generally that I found fascinating, and definitely reflect what I've been seeing in fandom circles online.

A profile of Percival Everett in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/percival-everett-profile

I really enjoyed reading this. It's a peek into the mind of a genuine original. Here's a peek:

In 1992, Everett bought a ranch in the Banning Pass, between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, where he grew more than a hundred varieties of roses and tended to horses, donkeys, and mules. Neighbors were always bringing injured animals to his doorstep. One day, he found a baby crow that had fallen out of a tree. Everett cared for the crow until it was strong enough to fly, but the crow would simply fly in a loop, land beside him, and start to walk. When Everett tried to drive to town, the crow followed his truck, flying in tandem with his moving face. Everett built a perch out of PVC and stuck it in the cab so that they could travel around together. “I kept trying to get him to go out and have crow sex,” Everett told me. “I said, ‘Listen, you’re not going to get much satisfaction here.’ ”

At the time, Everett was working on “Erasure,” and the crow would shuffle down his arm and peck at the keys. But then he went on vacation, and the bird disappeared. Everett eventually assumed he was dead. He’d named him Jim. Jim Crow.

>49 rv1988: That's a lovely anecdote. He often uses a picture with Jim as his author photo.

For anyone interested in the US and Canada, here's a way to access Japanese works in translation.

https://tr.jpf.go.jp/jf-overdrive-digital-library/

>50 RidgewayGirl: Ooh, this looks great. I signed up immediately. I'm curious to see their holdings.

I just read an interesting article from about a year ago discussing how journalists have been approaching Covid: Three Years Later, Covid-19 Is Still a Health Threat. Journalism Needs to Reflect That.

I'm always interested in discussions about how we discuss or write about topics. There's a level of meta there that I particularly enjoy. And much of what is written in this is still applicable a year later, as far as I can tell.

>52 Julie_in_the_Library: The article provides a fresh pov on the topic of media coverage of covid. All I seem to hear is that the news (and liberals) are overinflating the issues.

>53 labfs39: agreed. And as someone who is both high risk and immunocompromised, it's pretty terrifying.

>54 Julie_in_the_Library: I was just reading about the increasing rates of long covid and the geographic disparities. I live in Maine, one of the states with the highest rates of long covid. Both my daughter and I had it, and my daughter still has effects four years later.

I found David Zvi Kalman's recent musings on Shabbat and the internet very interesting.

>55 labfs39: I'm sorry to hear that. Living with chronic illness stinks.

>56 Julie_in_the_Library: Im dealing with it myself; have bursitis of the hip since January, cant stand or walk very long. Gotten shots, doing excersise but nothing is helping. Going to another dr to see if he has any idea. I miss my dancing but right now trying not to hurt when I am standing to make my breakfast.....sitting is fine, so I am reading at least. (sorry not an article, just a vent)

At Fast Company, Elizabeth Segren reports on how font and layout changes at HarperCollins are making books shorter and saving trees:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91071102/harper-collins-made-a-tiny-tweak-to-its-boo...

>59 KeithChaffee: That's really interesting.

>58 cindydavid4: it's important to be able to vent sometimes. I don't think anyone here minds. I don't. You should try a rheumatologist, if you haven't already. They're good at figuring out these chronic mystery illnesses. That's how my lupus and CI/SU were diagnosed. I hope you're able to get the help you need to start feeling better soon.

>61 Julie_in_the_Library: been there done that along with ortho, a pain managment dr PT and now a sport doctor. I am hoping by the end of this it will finally heal ( thanks for your kind words)

According to CBS News and other media outlets, today is the last day as a bricks and mortar store for Liberation Station Bookstore, a Black owned children's bookshop in Raleigh, North Carolina whose parents decided to open an independent bookshop that sold books about children of color that they had read and approved for their two sons, and recommended for similar children, after not finding many of these books in Raleigh, a large college town which is also the state capital. It opened on Juneteenth (June 19th) last year, but it quickly fell afoul of White nationalists (Trump/MAGA worshippers), who began to send hate mail to the bookshop, along with death threats, including, most disturbingly, the description of what a young store employee was wearing on a White nationalist Instagram page.

Fortunately the bookstore will remain open in online form, but that in itself isn't nearly as useful as having a physical store in what should be a safe environment.

There are only an estimated 149 (make that 148) independent Black bookshops in the United States, which comprise roughly 6% of the total number. Considering that this country consists of 12% of the population it's easily to see that the Black community is grossly underserved, and the loss of a single bookshop, especially one that caters to our children, is a tragedy. Fortunately Philadelphia has several Black bookshops, including Harriett's Bookshop in Fishtown, my favorite bookshop in the city.

Black-owned children's bookstore in North Carolina is closing over alleged threats

>63 kidzdoc: Not sure what to say about this, it’s so sad and revolting.

An interesting article in the LA Times about how prehistory is used to push various political agendas (though I suppose the same could be said about pretty much any kind of knowledge, and how we keep instinctively rejecting the truth of complexity and nuance in favor of more engaging "stories"):

We're desperate for half-truths about human origins

New York Magazine's The Intelligencer put out an article in February looking into the ongoing shortage of ADHD medication: The Empty Adderall Factory: A drugmaker’s feud with the DEA is exacerbating the ADHD meds crisis — at a rate of 600 million missing doses a year

>63 kidzdoc: How awful.

Salman Rushdie Reflects on His Stabbing in a New Memoir
Knife is an account of the writer’s brush with death in 2022, and the long recovery that followed.

A few years back I saw Salmon Rushdie in SoHo NYC. He was at a table near the one I was sitting at, surrounded by his friends. I remember thinking “good”, he’s able to have a normal life.

“So it’s you,” Salman Rushdie remembers thinking on the morning of Aug. 12, 2022, as a black-clad man, a “squat missile,” sprinted toward him on an auditorium stage in Chautauqua, N.Y. Rushdie thought: “Here you are.”

Last night I read this Q&A article from Politico about the campus antisemtism at Berkley.

Pulitzer Prize Announcement: https://www.pulitzer.org/news/2024-pulitzer-prize-announcement-0

>71 janoorani24: I hadn't even heard of Night Watch before today.

>72 RidgewayGirl: Me neither. I put it on my wish list, though. Although, looking back at the list, I hadn't heard of most of them.

Interesting article by Marion Turner in LRB, reviewing a recent book on translators in the Middle Ages. She discusses the prevalence of translation, knowledge-sharing and multilingualism in this period. I learned a lot.

Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in the 1390s for his ten-year-old son, Lewis, is an English translation of a Latin version of an Arabic text written by Mashallah ibn Athari, an eighth-century Persian Jew. In the prologue, Chaucer says that Lewis only knows a little Latin, but is good with numbers, and so the treatise will teach him how to use the astrolabe he has just been given as a present. After all, Chaucer says, the facts remain the same whether Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek or English is used; he himself is a compiler, bringing together the work of old astrologers into ‘naked words in englissh’

Also, who knew that Chauncer was fluent in Tuscan?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n09/marion-turner/stop-talking-englissh

>74 rv1988: Fascinating! I am wishlisting Zrinka Stahuljak's book, as this is an area I am very interested in. I read a book about female Renaissance translators: Les traductrices françaises de la Renaissance : Ethos et discours paratextuel (1521-1568) recently, but found it disappointing. It was a run-of-the-mill PhD thesis - very literal and narrow in focus. It looks like Fixers: Agency, Translation and the Early Global History of Literature might be a more satisfying read :-)

In the 'how didn't I know this' category, on this day In 1958, the motorcade of Vice President Richard Nixon was attacked in Caracas, Venezuela, during Nixon’s goodwill tour of South America. An angry crowd rushed the motorcade, attacking with stones and fists and attempting to overturn the vehicle carrying Nixon. Several Secret Service agents were wounded. He was considered a hero when he arrived back home.

the wiki article was very interesting and gave me some more respect for tricky dicky. Although the incident lead to US interference in SA, and led to him considering which countries needed a dictator leader.

I was a year old at the time; anyone remember this ?

Today's issue of The New York Times features an article about a newly released movie about the great Southern Gothic novelist Flannery O'Connor, who is easily one of my 10 favorite American fiction writers. She died from complications of lupus at the age of 39, so her career was painfully cut short. I'm nearly as curious about her life as I am about Frida Kahlo's, so I'll try to catch this film in Philadelphia or NYC in the near future.

What Ethan Hawke's 'Wildcat' Gets Right About Flannery O'Connor

The article references her short story 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own,' which was adapted into a 1957 television drama 'The Life You Save,' starring Gene Kelly and Agnes Moorhead. O'Connor said that "the best I can say for it is that it conceivably could have been worse. Just conceivably."

https://youtu.be/ku6JwCcfyt0

Last week I read this article from Boston Globe Magazine that's absolutely wild: The Secret Lives of Shelby Hewitt.

I didn't remember her by name, but she does appear in our middle school yearbooks, and I do remember her face. (As the article mentions, she's not pictured or mentioned in our senior year high school yearbook, which is the only high school yearbook I got.) Obviously, this is not something that I (or anyone else) would have predicted back when we were in school together.

>78 Julie_in_the_Library: How bizarre. I'm curious what the result of the criminal case will be and her motivations. I have no doubt it will become a book at some point.

>79 labfs39: Bizarre is the word. I don't remember Shelby enough to speak to her high school experience, but for my part, there is not enough money in the world to make me voluntarily subject myself to being a teenager again. I genuinely can't even imagine wanting to, let alone going to such lengths to make it happen.

>78 Julie_in_the_Library: wow, this totally slipped by me. How very strange.

>80 Julie_in_the_Library: I so agree. being a teenager was probaby the worst time in my life. things got better as I got older and if given the change Id stay right here in my senior age, thank you very much

This one's a few years old, but it's an essay, not a news article, so it hasn't lost interest or relevance, and I only read it yesterday (though the tab has been open on my phone's Firefox browser since it was first published in 2022):

An app that identifies trees and flowers is changing my life
by Andrew Silow-Carroll

It's from the JTA's Ideas section, and in it, the author, Andrew Silow-Carroll, uses the experience of learning to identify local plantlife to discuss "the whole notion of naming things, and how this basic human impulse changes our relationship with the natural world."

A quote I particularly liked was "The more names I learn, the more the outdoors stops just being the background and becomes a text."

a plauge comes before the fall lessons from roman history

Thieves are stealing first edition Pushkins across Europe: https://www.newser.com/story/349778/crime-syndicates-odd-target-first-edition-pu...

>82 Julie_in_the_Library: This is a lovely article. I recently downloaded a similar app and I have been thoroughly enjoying learning a lot of new plant names. I took it to our Botanic Gardens and that was a real experience.