Friday links 1 September 2017

Friday links is where I post links to blogs and websites I want to remember without cluttering up my browser bookmarks, along with interesting articles, reviews and lists I want to bring to the notice of others, and other stuff I find on the web.

Is there a better way to declare your love of reading than to carry around a book or two and read whenever you get a moment? But what about those times you can't carry a book? Here's one solution: Book Pins. (Don't blame me if this sets you off on an online shopping expedition. I, however, am thinking of getting a book tattoo...)

Here's a literary magazine I came across while web surfing: The Threepenny Review. I haven't fully explored it, but it seems to be a mixture of essays, articles, reviews, criticism, poetry and short fiction.

While I maintain that romance novels are no worse than any other kind of genre literature, I think everyone can agree that the titles of many of them are terribly generic and unoriginal. One woman decided to have a bit of fun with a text-generating neural network and romance novel titles and fed 20 thousand Harlequin Romance titles into a computer and had it generate some titles. Much fun was had, and some of titles were considerably more original than anything I have seen on the shelves of bookshops.

In the last edition of Friday Links I posted a link to a Wikipedia page about common misconceptions. This week's Wikipedia entry is a list of misquotations. It includes both misquotations and misattributions. Here's one that's probably not included in the list because it's so obvious (to me, at least):

And now for today's list:

100 Books Across America: Fiction and Nonfiction for Every State in the Union: A Reading List for Your Last-Second Literary Road Trip.

I didn't count how many of these I have read, but I have read several of them and want to read several more.

Comments

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

Search This Blog