June 2012
16 posts
4 tags
Julian Barnes, 'My Life as a Bibliophile' →
‘There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.’
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Nora Ephron, 'The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut' →
‘“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”
He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.
“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”
But where in Sweden were they?...
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Alice in Wonderland as a Subway Map →
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Sheera Frenkel, 'Kafka's final absurdist tale... →
“I think that Kafka now could not rest in peace when two old ladies from Tel Aviv, a city he had never visited in his life, are fighting with the state of Israel, which [did not exist] when Kafka passed away,” Aderet says. “Yes, of course it’s Kafkaesque. Kafka could not describe it better.”
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Zadie Smith, 'The North West London Blues' →
‘Defend our libraries. We like libraries. Can we keep our libraries? We need to talk about libraries. Pleading, like children. Is that really where we are?’
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Haruki Murakami Bingo →
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Sheila Rowbotham, 'Meeting Mrs Satan in a Hedged... →
‘I have become more and more intrigued by discovering the extent to which information and ideas were transmitted internationally between radicals in the nineteenth century. There is a curious spasm of recognition when an interesting historical figure turns out to have been aware of another who I had assumed to be in an entirely different bag. It is like walking through a hedged garden maze...
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San Francisco, Literary City →
A typographic literary map of San Francisco. From Brain Pickings.
