Interesting Articles

If you run across and interesting article or web site, post it here for everybody to see. As with the Message Board, we'd like to keep discussion to a minimum on this thread.

bump

I subscribe to, and get alerts from, Atul Gawande's Twitter feed, and he just retweeted an article from CBS News, titled What President Obama is reading on his vacation. Of his six books, two of them are in my list of favorite reads of 2014, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, last year's Booker Prize winner, and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande, which was my favorite book of the year; two others are high on my list of books to read this year, Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra.

I think we should invite him to join LT in 2017, after his second term in office ends.

>3 kidzdoc: I think we should invite him to join LT in 2017, after his second term in office ends.

That certainly would be interesting! And very cool.

Sounds great to me! He'd be a good addition to the 75ers.

I'll sign the official letter we write to invite him, in a split second. He deserves some good, relaxed reading time, and all the support we offer for people who love to read!

One of our new members, crotchetymama, posted a link to a podcast dedicated to HP Lovecraft and related weird stories here:

http://hppodcraft.com/about/

Ah, thank you. I have a graphic "novel" of some of his work which I need to read.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame has announced a new online book club, titled A Year of Books, which you can join on Facebook. According to the site, "We will read a new book every two weeks and discuss it here. Our books will emphasize learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies." The first book will be The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moisés Naim.

USA Today: Zuckerberg's New Year's resolution: Facebook book club

Here's an article listing picture books with great art from 2014.

A video about how to let go of your TBR guilt.

A link to 14 Novels about Muslim life that shouldn't be missed. I've read and enjoyed several of these.

>10 lycomayflower: Lovely artwork!

And here is Neil Gaiman's review of the new Kazuo Ishiguro book, The Buried Giant.

Ursula Le Guin on Kazuo Ishiguro's new book: “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”
more a discussion on genre vs literary than about the book itself
http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2015/03/02/are-they-going-to-say-this-is-fantasy/

Mr Ishiguro said to the interviewer, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”
Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?
It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.
To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

Where are today's Teddys? Perhaps among us here on LT....

Teddy Roosevelt on Reading

The BBC has a WWI anniversary drama which began back in August 2014, and posts a 12 minute drama daily on the effects of the war as it unfolds in a small British community. I am enjoying it immensely, although catching up is tricky! There is also an Omnibus edition which contains 4-5 days maybe? Can't recall. Sry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ww1homefront
It is available through iTunes, or, I think, Zunes? I use iCatcher app for my podcasts, and just entered the url in "Add" sites.

For those of us missing Terry Pratchett this news: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/11474455/Terry-Pratchett-will-...

Interesting piece on total sun eclipses and literature: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/19/how-the-solar-eclipse-and-vernal-eq...

Margaret Atwood gushes over Game of Thrones: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/mar/22/margaret-atwood-on-game-of-t...

Umberto Eco talks about the usefulness of a TBR pile. http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

For anyone dealing with aging parents, spouses, selves, this article on chronic subdural hematomas is important and very interesting. I've just seen an actual incidence of this in my boss, and it was frightening to watch him turn from a vital 72-year-old manager of everything to a shuffling, uncertain cranky old man over the course of a couple months. Once the cause was identified and treated, he was able to bounce right back to his old self, with some minor physical restrictions.

Thanks to ralphcoviello for a link to an interesting interview with China Mieville on the writing of The City & the City here:

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/unsolving-city-interview-with-china.html

NPR's Morning Edition Book Club has selected Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins for it's next selection. In mid-June she'll be on air to discuss questions submitted by readers.

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/05/402554435/join-the-morning-edition-book-club-as-we...

Jonathan Basile has created Borges' Library of Babel (The Total Library) on the internet. http://libraryofbabel.info/index.html

Dream catcher
His books occupy a tunnel beneath consciousness that’s equidistant from New Zealand, London or Tokyo, Haruki Murakami tells Sally Blundell.
http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/dream-catcher/

Interesting read -
Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/why-college-kids-are-avoiding-the-st...

'...Students are interested in profit and therefore care only about pre-professional degrees. Another answer popular among literature professors is that students spend so much time on Twitter that they have the attention span of a pithed frog.
But can it really be that students are more materialistic now than in those proverbial eras of backwardness, the 1950s and 1980s? And why did those Twitterized adolescents once immerse themselves in seven volumes of Harry Potter?
Could it be that the problem lies not with the students but with the professors themselves?...'

Interesting article about Warren G. Harding's escapades. "It was not the first time a president was accused of an extracurricular love life, but never before had a self-proclaimed presidential mistress gone public with a popular tell-all book. The ensuing furor played out in newspapers, courtrooms and living rooms across the country." Everything old is new again. I have a copy of Nan Britton's book The President's Daughter in the house somewhere.

Patrick Rothfuss had a wonderful article on his blog about the first interview he read with Sir Terry Pratchett and Sir Pterry's answer to the condescending question of "why fantasy?" It's great! All of you who wonder why some of us love fantasy so much--please take a moment and read it. And in the comments of the blog, a link to another article by Ursula Le Guin. I've read a fair deal of her writing on fantasy, but not this, and it's another amazing piece.

http://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2015/08/thoughts-on-pratchett/

http://elenajube.blogspot.com/2013/01/leguin-in-defense-of-fantasy.html

NPR's Book Conceirge for 2015:

http://apps.npr.org/best-books-2015/

Terry Pratchett's daughter remembers him.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/27/terry-pratchett-remembered-by-rhian...

"Remember everything and you lose the ability to forgive." Interesting review of Ishiguro's work that brings it all together.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-book-of-sorrow-and-forge...

What a difference an article makes: The Girl on the Train versus Girl on a Train

Think of all the books mentioned in other books, etc, etc...
http://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-books-that-do-not-exist/