Once again, there were a ton of awesome links out there this week.
Let’s start in the music world where The Paris Review talks about the poetry of Neil Young.
The film version of Cloud Atlas has made news this week, mostly for being a great book (I need to read that one) that shouldn’t have been filmed. Here is a list of ten more books that maybe should have been left alone.
I came across a couple of interesting discussion of genre this week. The first presents literary fiction as a genre. The second, from The New Yorker, struggles with the continual question of what, exactly, constitutes literature.
In what might be the coolest new story of the week, the world’s oldest un-decoded writing system is on the verge of being solved.
There’s going to be lots of Tolkien-ish stuff this year with the Hobbit coming out. Here’s a a breakdown of the demographics of the Middle Earth.
This is hilarious. I make plenty of typos, but none of them end up on national currency.
Another New Yorker post, this one about booksellers and the writer’s time as one. There is, I think, real value in the small indie bookstore because, frankly, they separate a lot of the wheat from the chaff for you.
For a long time, I really discounted Marilyn Monroe but, you know, she was a really interesting person. And I’ll always have respect for someone whose bookshelf featured Winesburg, Ohio.
This last one is kind of weird, but it does point out why Amazon’s rating system is almost completely worthless.
Our newspaper had a quote from Pat Conroy which seemed germane to the enjoyable discussions of genre and literature– “My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, ‘All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister. ‘ “. I personally love genre fiction, and believe the big divide is between good and bad writing, rather than category.