Happy Friday,
Cue the music, brew that pot. The orioles are around, a green heron flew through, and a baby skunk and myself scared each other while I was out for a run.
Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:
- Love these three roundups of interesting book dedications from Molly Young.
- RIP John Basinger, who memorized the entirety of “Paradise Lost” (my copy is 512 pages) by bringing his copy to the gym and memorizing seven new lines on the exercise bike and reviewing the previous 14 lines while lifting weight.
- It’s fun but quickly boring to notice the trendy Classics everyone is recommending online — last summer was “Lonesome Dove,” then it was “East of Eden,” and “Count of Monte Cristo” is still popular. So I really liked Tip #4 from Naomi Alderman’s list to google three books you love in quotation marks to find an article talking about those three specifically — which would likely recommend another book you’d like. (Mine? I switched to authors: Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, David Gessner. First result worked well!)
- Which helped me find this decade-old article about Annie Dillard, one of my favorite writers, and her book “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” one of my favorite books of hers. “That’s what interests Dillard: ‘ultimate concerns’. To address them she relies on two things: her senses and everything she’s read.”
- I like older interview-style shows that interview creatives — and I’d never heard of “Bookworm,” a public radio show hosted by Michael Silverblatt from 1989-2023 (!). Here’s a helpful link to the full archive. I’m listening to interviews from the 90s with Elmore Leonard and Tom McGuane.
- I’m nearly finished with Stephen King’s “Bag of Bones” about a writer grieving the sudden death of his wife and the ensuing writer’s block. The main character never reaches the top of the best-selling book lists and has to schedule his publications around other, more successful writers — which was inspired by King competing in real life with Tom Clancy.
- Really like this list of recommended reading for every summer mood. I’ve paired Stephen King with summer reading since late elementary school, so I’d recommend his for when you want the literary equivalent of walking out of the summer heat into the cool but eerie shade of a quiet forest.
- Do today’s writers have regular columns? The media landscape has changed so much, I can’t keep up, but I wonder if a column like Kurt Vonnegut’s or Hunter S. Thompson’s would work today — even if they’re as true today as they were over 25 years ago. When in doubt, write about human ignorance and imperfection, eternal truths.
- I feel like I never let myself be bored anymore. (Thanks phones and infinite scroll!) The closest I get is around 4 p.m. when my brain’s so full of information and exhausted from computer work that I do chores without even music or podcasts to fill my thoughts. Here are some things to do while waiting that I probably won’t do but will think about as I unlock my phone.
- Finally: end your week with this poem from Mary Oliver.
