Category: words

From “The Big Short” to Naomi Klein to “Normal People,” a list of books that made an impact. – The Guardian

“When the American Library Association introduced the Caldecott in 1938, the United States was an industrial giant but still a cultural stepchild of Europe. … So librarians wanted to jump-start American creativity by limiting Caldecott eligibility to American citizens and permanent residents just as they had done for their literature award, the Newbery, over a decade before.” Needless to say, the situation has changed. – The New York Times Book Review

“The mixture of sadness and sentimentality in ‘Gift of the Magi’ befits a man whose life was marked by repeated human tragedies. … The diseases of alcoholism and tuberculosis would haunt [the author]” — and his family — “throughout his life.” – Smithsonian Magazine

“Our friendly neighborhood book review aggregators put on our black hats and seek out the most deliciously virulent literary take-downs of the past twelve months. It’s a ritual blood-letting exercise carried out in an effort appease the Literary Gods, thereby guaranteeing a good book review harvest in the year to come, and we take it very seriously.” – LitHub

“If you haven’t been in a public library lately, you probably wouldn’t recognize where you were if you entered one tomorrow. This is no longer, as I wrote early on, your mother’s library. The books are still there, the readers are still there, the librarians are still there. But sharing the same space are children busy with all kinds of active—and sometimes noisy—programs, inventors in maker-spaces, historians and amateurs researching genealogy, job-seekers scouring the internet, homeless people settling in quietly for the day, women and a few men heading to the yoga space, others watching movies, young entrepreneurs grabbing lattes… – The Atlantic

Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s past and present, as The 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent public service. Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it. – New York Times Magazine

The last British owner of Penguin, Pearson, announced that it was selling its remaining stake in Penguin Random House, the book publishing joint venture it formed six years ago with Bertelsmann, the German media group to rival Random House. – MSN

Lindsey started writing romance on a whim, and she wrote more than 60 novels – and sold more than 60 million books. – The New York Times

If you know the recipes date back to Portugal and Spain during the Inquisition, does that tell you what the secret is? “One of the most unusual recipes … uncovered [was] a sugary dessert called ‘chuletas,’ the Spanish word for pork chops. ‘It’s designed to look like a pork chop,’ Milgrom explains, ‘but it’s really made from bread and milk.’ Basically, it’s French toast that’s fried in the shape of a pork chop and dressed up with tomato jam and pimentos.” – NPR

The headline: “Was this decade the beginning of the end of the great male white writer?” (#NotAllGreatMaleWhiteWriters, of course.) “Though few publications have reached parity, the overall trend has been a shift in that direction. Even the dismal New York Review of Books stats (27.1% women in 2018) have shown an almost twofold improvement over 2010 (16.2%).” Well, uh, wow? Let the 2020s double that kind of not really twofold improvement, at least, maybe. – HuffPost