**Interesting Articles - July/August

It's time for another installment of interesting article about books, reading, or whatever...

There may be help for Dyslexic Students

Well, jumping the gun on "July/August" by a few hours:

Julian Barnes: My life as a bibliophile

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.

A man after my own heart!

A short piece here about presses focusing on translated literature.

ETA: Annie - thanks, small matter of an = in the wrong place! I have corrected.

>4 wandering_star:

You are linking back to the thread :(

>3 rebeccanyc:
Absolutely :) And I also love the end: "When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it."

El libro que no puede esperar

The ink to this book only lasts 2 months! Better read it quickly!

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/book-printed-in-ink-that-vanishes-after-t...

Video from the publisher/manufacturer:
http://vimeo.com/43618619

#6 This is the perfect answer for all those people worried about huge piles of books on their TBR shelf. If they don't get to them in two months they disappear - perfect.

>6 lilisin: ¡Que buena!

>7 baswood:: What an utterly terrifying thought!

Knowing most of my friends, they cannot finish a book in 2 months... so that would be a problem for the non-readers. As for the readers - the idea is just... stupid. If you buy a paper book, it is because you want to have the book... otherwise you would go to the library, go for a virtual book or something like that (yeah yeah yeah, I know - does not work exactly like that)

An interesting article in yesterday's NY Times about rare book school.

Oh dear run by a Jesuit Priest!

Having no experience with the Jesuits, that didn't jump out at me! I'm not a rare book lover, but it did sound intriguing.

The idea of Jesuits teaching about books seemed somehow reassuring to me, in the some things never change category. I noticed the writer couldn't resist putting "missionary zeal' in the same sentence. The idea of Jesuits teaching about other things might be an entirely different matter.

Nice article.

A lighthearted article on "How to Write"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/books/review/colson-whiteheads-rules-for-writi...

Anyone in London able to go and visit this? A maze shaped like Jorge Luis Borges' fingerprint made out of books... http://www.theprisma.co.uk/2012/07/22/borges%E2%80%99-literary-fingerprint/ and picture here http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/amazeme-installation.

Argh. I'll just miss seeing that maze, as I won't arrive in London until September 6th.

A short bit on John Kennedy Toole's unpublished work:

Things You Can't Read: The Obscure, Early Typewritten Efforts of John Kennedy Toole

#18 Ha! As far as I'm concerned, A Confederacy of Dunces should have remained unpublished too!

>19 rebeccanyc: I'm glad I'm not alone in not finding Dunces utterly hilarious.

#19, 20. It is one of the few books I couldn't finish and is on my all-time worst list.

>12 baswood: - I'd be more worried if it was run by Judas Priest.

Top 10 difficult books from The Guardian.

#23 - That list keeps popping up on my Facebook page. The only one I've read is To the Lighthouse, which in comparison to lots of things I had to read for university, was not very difficult at all. And if they're going to talk about Woolf, I think it's The Waves they should have noted.

On the subject of difficult books, here are two lists from Dalkey Archive's website that I found several years ago:

"Challenging Novels College Students Should Read" and "Important Works of Fiction with a Reputation for Being Difficult"

Some of the choices are rather curious. I would not have considered The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter or The Grapes of Wrath especially difficult.

I also always find it curious that Dostoevsky is always on those lists. Or at least, Crime and Punishment as I admit I have yet to read his other books. What is the difficult part of that book? Not the writing at least? Seemed smooth sailing to me. I'm not saying his writing is trivial and easy like most fiction these days but it's not littered with incoherent passages. Is it the topic 'cause I found it fairly simplistic. What am I missing? Really, what am I missing? Russian allusions? I just have never understood. Maybe I should see what it is with one of his other works.

From the New York Times:

Among Readers in Polyglot New York, 50 Shades of Bestsellers.

And don't worry, it's not about Fifty Shades of Grey.

I heard about this on the radio yesterday, then looked up a matching article:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528775.000-software-reveals-the-most-inf...

A researcher has used a computer algorithm matching patterns in electronic texts to determine that Jane Austen and Walter Scott were the 19th century authors who most influenced their successors.

Oh dear. This article is about buying positive reviews for your self-published book

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand...

Here are some quotes

"One of Mr. Rutherford’s clients, who confidently commissioned hundreds of reviews and didn’t even require them to be favorable, subsequently became a best seller. This is proof, Mr. Rutherford said, that his notion was correct. Attention, despite being contrived, draws more attention."

"Potential reviewers were told that if they felt they could not give a book a five-star review, they should say so and would still be paid half their fee, Mr. Rutherford said. As you might guess, this hardly ever happened."

Your second quote was my favorite one from the article!

It's a cheap form of advertising after all...

Granta is starting to publish in Chinese: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/books/granta-expands-its-foreign-editions.html...

The September-October thread is up.