Category: words

Ultimately, crosswords can get you to see preconceptions that you might not have realized you held. Once words signify, the puzzle gets political. Crosswords quietly have an ideological agenda: to shake up your assumptions and put ideas from everywhere next to each other. – The New Yorker

Instead of the royalties authors might expect from book sales, “what comes trickling back are mostly email alerts about websites in brazen violation of copyright law, offering free downloads of books the authors have spent years of their lives producing. At the moment, I have about 400 such offers of my own books in an email folder labeled ‘Thieves.'” – The New York Times

It’s a quiet war, but it’s fierce. Macmillan is planning to block libraries from buying more than one digital copy of new books for eight weeks after the book comes out, starting in November. The claim: That library ebooks cannibalize book sales. But “studies consistently show library patrons to be more frequent book buyers overall—which is another reason Macmillan’s letter stung.” – Slate

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is repetitive, redundant, with reformulated ideas in every chapter – but sometime it works. (At least once you’re already also in rehab.) – LitHub

The crisis is this: As in the U.S., the number of teacher-librarians or librarians in schools has declined precipitously. Why? “Many principals opt to replace them with cheaper ‘library officers’ and ‘library assistants,’ often with no qualifications or educational training.” – ABC (Australia)

Theodore Seuss Geisel died in 1991, but his widow was cleaning out a closet in 2013 when she came across a box of his unpublished, and some unfinished, manuscripts. Or, as the Times headlines it, “Yes, They Found It in a Box.” – The New York Times

Barbara Newhall Follett saw her first book – about a wild little girl who longs to be free from structures of brick and glass – published when she was 12. By the time she was 25, “Barbara began to feel her dreams slipping away to the familiar tune of work and domesticity. She still wrote, but her work was no longer in favour with publishers and the rejections hurt. And then, in 1939, on 7 December, Barbara Rogers, née Newhall Follett, walked out of the apartment she shared with her husband. She left no note, took only a few dollars and some shorthand notes. She was never seen again.” – The Guardian (UK)

Well, that’s poetic, and sounds incredibly Irish. The director of the new Museum of Literature Ireland says, “We’re in competition with a lot of venues backed by private drinks companies, with all their marketing budgets.” And, says the writer, “He’s right, in Dublin, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s all about the distilleries, and the Guinness Storehouse.” No longer. – The Irish Times

It’s an important question as The Goldfinch, based on a rather lengthy novel, hits theatres. And then … what about movies based on Stephen King books? “The more sophisticated the source material, the stronger the obligation felt: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl were mere airport novels, I told myself, so no pressure there.” – Los Angeles Times

“It’s like a lawyer: if you find that the person you’re representing is a murderer you can’t then go around bewailing the fact you defended them – that was your job.” – The Guardian