*** Interesting Articles *** Part One

Feel free to post any interesting literary-minded articles that catch your eye.

To start us off, here are a few "best of 2017" book lists.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2017-in-review/the-books-we-loved-in-2017

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/the-best-books-we-miss...

https://www.vox.com/2017/12/28/16807326/best-books-list-2017

that was fun, even if I just skimmed. Really enjoyed the Atlantic article's selections.

Not about books, but dovetails with my Old Adult Lit theme: NYT reporter does series of articles about those over 85 and suggests that, yes, the psychology of the elderly is significantly different from that of younger adults. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/nyregion/want-to-be-happy-think-like-an-old-p...

It's the anniversary of Anne Brontë's birthday. Here's an article on why she's the least well-known of the sisters.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/on-writing/times-and-life/2017/jan/how-siblin...

Yeah, Charlotte's shutting down of Tenant really annoyed me, I read about that after reading it and being blown away by how strongly she argued for women's rights in it, and then learning how pissed off Charlotte was about that. I still love her writing but it certainly knocked her, as a person, waaay down in my estimation.

Not quite an article but https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-united-states-of-books/ Penguin Random House has finished their lists of books for each of the 50 states. It's an interesting idea, and has actually made me a bit curious about some listed for my own (I've only read one of them, and while I am familiar with several of the authors, I know nothing of the works listed).

>6 .Monkey.: Nice list for Michigan! Usually it's Elmore Leonard and Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River stories. Maybe that will be my theme for next year.

Thanks for posting.

Always glad to share book lists! Haha.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/12/double-x-factor-why-women-are-bett...
We've been discussing this. Boyne makes a case, while being amusing.

Also:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/17/margaret-atwood-female-writers-dom...

>6 .Monkey.: almost worth a discussion in itself. Lots to bash, maybe. Fates and Furies for Florida? As #1? It's such a minor part of the book...

I'm not sure if the numbers mean much, I wasn't personally looking at them as a ranked list (though, the first spot is a bad choice for one that's less fitting, lol). But yeah I'm sure there is plenty up for debate on them! Haha. That's generally the case with lists. They're still fun to look through, and potentially debate over & discuss, though. :P

>9 BLBera: I was disappointed that Boyne, since she focused on Irish writers who didn't make the tea towel, didn't mention Nuala O'Faolain.

Another great Irish woman writer - Philip Watson interviews Dervla Murphy, in her eighties but apparently still as determinedly independent as ever: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/jan/24/dervla-murphy-travel-writer-inter...

And more from The Guardian - Atwood about Le Guin https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/24/ursula-k-le-guin-margaret-atwood-t...

tor.com collected a lot of the tweets, thoughts and links about Le Guin's death yesterday: https://www.tor.com/2018/01/24/the-science-fiction-and-fantasy-community-remembe...

I won't link the articles ones by one... tor.com did a marvelous work doing that. I am very sad :(

>15 AnnieMod: I'm heartbroken too, she's one of my most favorite authors, and humans. Such an amazing woman. I've been off buying up lots of her works that I'm missing. My wallet is unhappy, but my shelves will be delighted by the exquisite company.

>16 .Monkey.: LOA https://www.loa.org/books/writer/655-ursula-k-le-guin is collecting them pretty nicely (in case you had not seen these editions).

Le Guin was the author that convinced me that women can write genre fiction. Joan D. Vinge was the first one I read but it was Le Guin that convinced me that it was not one off... (at the time I could read only in Bulgarian and translations were not so numerous, let alone from women SF writers; she is also one of the authors I had read in 3 languages...)

>17 AnnieMod: I do know of those! Maybe someday I'll get the Orsinia one. For now a friend actually just ordered me the Hainish box set last night because I commented how much I needed it (hahaha) so he decided to make it a late bday gift. :P

That's awesome. :)) Speaking of great women of SF(F), have you read Nnedi Okorafor? I've only read one of her novels so far, but man, it blew me away.

Sad news, but LeGuin sure left a legacy, and I'm glad she lived to see her writing get the credit it deserved. One of my many perfidious boyfriends years ago bugged me me to read her books. That alone might shave a few thousand years off his time in Purgatory.

Ali Smith on Muriel Spark - “She is a writer who knows the discipline and the weighty thought it takes, to be able to tread that lightly, to be that airy”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/29/ali-smith-on-muriel-spark-at-100?C...

Not an article, but let's just take a moment to contemplate the rank ageism in the Kia Superbowl ad. That brand is on my s-list of products I will never buy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0YVbVXOjJv4

Not an article either, but I thought some of you would be amused by this.

>22 janemarieprice: Hahaha! We had a prof in college whom we suspected did not really read our papers to the end, so we always tucked in a mild random expletive or Frank Zappa gibberish in the conclusion to see if he noticed. We discovered he was reading some people's papers regularly and ditching others. Interesting little experiment.

>23 nohrt4me2: Ha! Very fun experiment. Did it turn out he was a Zappa fan? My high school algebra teacher signed all our yearbooks with Led Zepplin quotes and we were blown away.

>24 janemarieprice: No, pretty sure he had no clue. But he was kind of a cipher. So who knows.

The cartoon about Joyce reminds me of a quote attributed to his wife, "Jimmy, why don't you write books people can read?" Might be apocryphal, but I like it.

Hope it's OK if I hijack this thread for a sec to ask a 'how to' question. I think I've accidentally hit the 'x' on a few threads in CR I'd like to follow (got too industrious trying to tidy up my Talk page). Is there a way to bring those back into 'Topics from Groups You're Watching'?

>9 BLBera: Oh, that was a fun article, thanks for the link. So true, too, although there are exceptions.

>26 AlisonY: Alison, if you go to the CR main page, you will see your live discussions listed, and, below that, your x'ed discussions are listed in pink. Click on the x in the pink section to restore to your live list.

>26 AlisonY: In addition to >28 nohrt4me2:, you can also click on your ignored topics from the main Talk page. But since CR is annual and doesn't have a vast amount of threads, it's probably simpler in this case from the CR group page. :)

PS - https://www.librarything.com/topic/277920 this is probably the more applicable thread for the question, should the need arise in the future. ;)

>28 nohrt4me2:, >29 .Monkey.: thank you both. So simple yet could I find how to do that!

If you've never had to, it can be confusing, like many things on LT, hahaha.

Happy birthday, Bertold Brecht, schlafen in Frieden. Here's his poem, "The Burning of the Books":

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=24316

http://themanbookerprize.com/news/golden-man-booker

Any thoughts on who will be the Golden Booker Prize winner?

>33 AlisonY: If it comes down to an Internet vote, Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood must be in with a good chance. Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to be How late it was, how late...

>35 ELiz_M: and How late is such and excellent read!

>33 AlisonY: Interesting to look over the list (clearly my reading of Booker Prize winners ended in 2006)...but I'm tempted to agree with Mark.

I've not heard of How Late it Was, How Late - looks interesting.

I think a few people here have read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The film adaptation coming out this year might be fun:

http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a9174513/guernsey-lite...

Since you mentioned it, other movies coming out this year based on books:

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Ophelia by Lisa Kline (and Wm Shakespeare, of course)
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, limited series due 2019
The Alienist limited series on TNT, can't find the writer credit, but I'll assume it's Caleb Carr.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History by Stephen Talty (nonfiction)

These can all be found on IMDB.

*Good Omens has been updated

A few good ones there. Definitely some I need to read before I watch the film.

I enjoyed the Caleb Carr books. They would make good limited series. Who will play Teddy Roosevelt?!

>41 nohrt4me2: I did find the writing credits the second time and it is Caleb Carr's book. Teddy is being played by Brian Geraghty, Here's the link

>42 avaland: Thanks! I've seen that kid before, "Boardwalk Empire," probably.

Carr, of course, was the son of the notorious Beat hanger on, Lucien Carr.

I just read this incredibly strange article: 'The Story of a Weird World I Was Warned Never to Tell' about a woman whose family went on the run from a mafia conspiracy against them. Years later, she discovered none of it was real.

>44 fannyprice: Sounds like Stan was a lot like a cult leader, except his aim was only to bamboozle two families instead of a whole congregation.

>44 fannyprice: That was deeply weird.

On a somewhat book-related note, but more #metoo, another one bites the dust. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/05/589909379/it-just-felt-very-wrong-sherman-alexies... *sigh*

Not much of an article, but AbeBooks put together a list: The Best Female Authors of All Time, if you ignore the clickbaity "best," below the intro text they do call it 100 essential female writers, which is better. A nice list. :)

>48 .Monkey.: Seems to be very heavily skewed towards contemporary fiction, and even more heavily towards writers in English - by my count, Elena Ferrante is the only one in the list who writes in a different language.

>49 thorold: Good point. Who would be some writers not in English you would recommend? I would add Collette, Simone de Beauvoir, Selma Lagerlof, Grazia Deladda, and Sigrid Undset.

>50 nohrt4me2: I’m sure there are many more. Out of my reading from the last few years, these should definitely have been in the list (together with those you listed): Herta Müller, Annie Ernaux, Jenny Erpenbeck, Anna Seghers, Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Françoise Sagan, ...

Other strong candidates: Tove Jansson, Magda Szabo, Monika Maron, Sara Lidman, Marlen Haushofer, Irmgard Keun, Ilse Aichinger, Fred Vargas, Irmtraud Morgner, Violette Leduc, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Laura Esquivel, Carmen Laforet, Amélie Nothomb, Hella S. Haasse, ...

Female Japanese authors are very strong and fortunately are on a trend for being translated into English.

>49 thorold: Unfortunately most lists by English speakers are very heavy on the English-language picks.

>53 .Monkey.: Yes, I don’t think I would have reacted if they’d all been anglophone - when people say “writers” in that kind of context it almost always means “people who write novels in English”. It was picking Ferrante as the one exception that struck me as odd.

>54 thorold: I've always thought it would be interesting to see how these lists are made. My guess is that most of them are marketing ploys with the obligatory Atwood, the Brontes, and Austen thrown in there to make the list look legit.

I like a lot of the authors on there, but I'm a little cynical, I guess.

>52 lilisin: Names, please! One of my favorite books is the journal of Lady Murasaki.

Lists like these are good at starting conversations.

>55 nohrt4me2: My guess is that someone gets assigned the list and pulls it out of what they've read and what they've thought were good fits for the list. I mean, there's no objective way to put something like this together at all and the validity of any such list lies in how much credence people give it.

>56 BLBera: Yes, even if it sometimes seems to be the same conversation we have about every list!

Something completely different: Rhianna Pratchett on her late father as a Tove Jansson fan: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/mar/12/terry-pratchett-moomins-...

>55 nohrt4me2:

It turns out I actually only have a few female Japanese authors in translation as lately I've been reading more female authors but in Japanese. But these two were excellent:
Ayako Miura: Lady Gracia: A Samurai Wife's Love, Strife and Faith
Fumiko Enchi: The Waiting Years

Banana Yoshimoto is very famous for her work Kitchen which I feel you might already be familiar with. I'm actually not a big Yoshimoto fan but I can't deny the popularity of her works.

As for the comment I made about female Japanese authors on a trend towards publication you can see Pushikin Press's recent novella releases.

But, there is one more author I'm super excited about but I'm going to withhold from you for a couple more days because a) I still have 60 pages left before I finish this book, and b) it fits every category in your thread about "old adult" literature, and that makes me very excited to share the book with you. I'll be posting there as soon as I finish this book!

>59 lilisin: Well, now I'm getting excited! And thanks for the novella list. I love me a novella, a sadly overlooked form.

Since we sometimes discuss cover illustrations, here's an interesting (and depressing) article about books set in Africa.

https://qz.com/207527/the-reason-every-book-about-africa-has-the-same-cover-and-...

>61 RidgewayGirl:, Oh dear, that is striking when you put them all together like that.

The Frankenstein "snowflakes" thing is kind of old news at this point, but the Guardian does a humorous take on it:

Forget Frankenstein, what else are snowflake students getting wrong about classic literature?

>61 RidgewayGirl: That is really interesting. I wonder if there's a flip side: The acacia-sunset-veld-orange covers cue Western readers that these books are about Africa. People clearly want to read the books to better understand Africa. So perhaps the covers that draw in readers will raise consciousnesses enough to eventually lead to new covers?

Wondering if there are similar cues on books by authors from East Asia, the Subcontinent, Australia, or even parts of Europe.

Lately I have seen have seen Robert Campin's "Portrait of a Woman" used on covers of books about nuns (Julian of Norwich, a book about the beguines, etc.). The woman is not a nun.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/robert-campin-a-woman

>64 nohrt4me2:, Unfortunately there are no pictures associated with this article, but the veiled woman being used on the cover of almost any book from the Middle East, whether relevant or not, is definitely a common trope:

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/don-t-judge-books-by-their-cover-especia...

>65 fannyprice: Ah, yes! Good example! I suppose book covers are often off my radar because I read on an e-reader. The file opens to the first page. I should look at the covers more.

Because this deserves mentioning: https://betterbundobook.com/ and if you want the full story on why this exists & should be bought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs2RlZQVXBU

Sounds like something that would have appealed to Jorge Luis Borges...

Spanish publisher subverts court gag by using Don Quixote to recreate banned book :
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/21/don-quixote-cervantes-spain-farina...

Author Alexander Chee writes about combining his library with his new partner's books.

And as much as your library also represents an idea of yourself that you present to the world, it is also, I think, an idea of yourself for yourself, something private, perhaps not even articulated to yourself. And that is why it is so hard to combine them.

https://themorningnews.org/article/the-books

>70 RidgewayGirl: I think gradually libraries get combined (been married 35 years, and it happened about year 10), but you always know which ones are yours ...

>70 RidgewayGirl: The Internet seems to be full of blogposts inspired by Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris - if you put them all together, I wonder if there would still be any point in reading the book...?

Truth stranger than fiction time (again) - anyone who’s read La septième fonction du langage will be tickled to see that Bulgaria is now claiming that Julia Kristeva really was working for their secret services during the communist period: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/28/julia-kristeva-communist-secret-ag...

No mention of any involvement in the death of Roland Barthes, for the moment at least...

On the lighter side, Sean Penn has written a book and it is very, very bad. Here are a few passages:

“Whenever he felt these collisions of incubus and succubus, he punched his way out of the proletariat with the purposeful inputting of covert codes, thereby drawing distraction through Scottsdale deployments, dodging the ambush of innocents astray, evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes.” ― page 36

“Behind decorative gabion walls, an elderly neighbor sits centurion on his porch watching Bob with surreptitious soupçon.” ― page 71

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sean-penn-bob-honey-who-just-do-stuff-revie...

Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas? Good grief....

>74 RidgewayGirl: Ouch.

>76 .Monkey.: I think someone bought him a thesaurus, but not a dictionary.

LOL

>74 RidgewayGirl: What the hell did I just read?

>77 RidgewayGirl: I think someone bought him a thesaurus, but not a dictionary - that did make me chuckle...

Friends don't let friends write while stoned.

Link to the 2018 Pen America Literary Award longlists: https://pen.org/2018longlists/

Quite an interesting look ahead to 2019's reading:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/apr/13/london-book-fair-roundup...

Vladimir Nabokov had a lot to say about other writers, mainly about how terrible they all are.

https://lithub.com/the-meanest-things-vladimir-nabokov-said-about-other-writers/

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/21/600902444/how-to-suppress-womens-writing-three-de...

Poet Simon Armitage on Marsden: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/02/simon-armitage-made-in-mardsen?CMP...

Ali Smith on Nell Dunn (famous for the sixties classic Up the junction) - her Talking to women is being reissued.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/04/ali-smith-on-nell-dunns-talking-to...

Is Muriel Spark’s only play going to make a comeback? https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/aug/08/a-thoroughly-entertaining-failure-...

>84 RidgewayGirl: On Ernest Hemingway:
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 40s, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

LOL and that is why I love me some Nabokov. Like the article's author, I don't agree with all of his opinions (not the least because he found all women's writing worthless), but he was absolutely brilliant and he had no use for filters. He will always be one of my number one authors.

Guardian interview with Patrick Gale, in which he not only reveals his fascination with novels about nuns but also talks about his affection for Anne Tyler’s books - not an obvious link, but it does make sense with hindsight.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/18/patrick-gale-interview?CMP=Share_i...

A luxury Maldives resort is recruiting a bookseller to live on the island, recommend books to guests, and write a travel and literature blog.

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/maldives-bookseller-job/index.html

If I had seen this 5 years ago I would have most definitely applied.

Review of dystopian apocalyptic Severance.

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/21/640570793/severance-is-a-sardonic-wake-up-call-fo...

On Walter Besant's The.Revolt of Man, Victorian speculative fiction about women running the world.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/what-if-women-ruled-the-world...

Interesting article on the changing of book titles between the UK and US:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/sep/13/us-uk-book-titles-change...

The National Book Award longlist is out! How many of these have you read?

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-2018-national-book-awards-longli...

I've read three of the fiction nominees and think that two of them really deserve to be there.

The National Book Award Shortlist is out!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/books/national-book-foundation-announces-fina...

And now for that most wonderful time of the year - when all the "best of" lists are published and our lists of books we'd like to read begins to get out of hand.

For those who enjoy crime novels, this was a superlative list of books, compiled from the favorites of editors, bookstore owners and writers.

https://crimereads.com/our-favorite-crime-books-of-the-year/

And here's a general one from The Library Journal

https://www.libraryjournal.com/?page=best-books-2018

My personal favorite, The Morning News Tournament of Books list of the best books of 2018

https://themorningnews.org/article/the-year-in-fiction-2018

A short, but well-chosen list from The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2018-in-review/the-best-books-of-2018

npr goes with a different approach -- using their Book Concierge, they invite you to use them to find the perfect book for you.

https://apps.npr.org/best-books-2018/

And, finally, here's LitHub's list.

https://lithub.com/lit-hubs-favorite-books-of-2018/

Are there any year-end lists that you find especially noteworthy?

LitHub puts out a side by side comparison of UK and US book covers. It's always interesting to see the differences.

https://lithub.com/who-wore-it-best-us-book-covers-vs-uk-book-covers-for-2018/

Gary Younge has spent a year reading novels by African women: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/15/novels-african-women-female-author...

- some interesting-looking titles, the only one I’ve read in his list is The map of love.

>98 RidgewayGirl: and >99 thorold: Thanks for the links!