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Christopher Hitchens’ Reading List for an Eight-Year-Old Girl

By Emily Temple on

What should little girls read if they’re aspiring “free thinkers?” According to Christopher Hitchens, a lot of the classics. When Hitchens attended Texas Freethought Convention to accept the Richard Dawkins Award, an eight-year-old girl named Mason Crumpacker took the mic and asked him what books he would recommend that she read. Delighted, Hitchens asked her to meet him after the presentation, where he rattled off a few books he thought she might like.

According to the Houston Chronicle, with additional input from Mason’s mom, the list goes something like this: Greek and Roman myths compiled by Robert Graves (Mason claimed to have read these, but according to her mother, it’s I, Claudius she’s a fan of), The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins, anything satirical by Shakespeare or Geoffrey Chaucer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations, PG Wodehouse’s Sunset at Blandings (“for fun”), David Hume’s philosophy, and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Click through to watch a video of part of their meeting, and let us know if you’ll be adding some of these books to your reading list (it’s okay if you’re older than eight). … Read More

Books

10 of the Best “Makeovers” in Literature

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday, Emma Straub’s excellent debut novel Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures waltzed onto bookshelves everywhere. We loved the book, which follows a young girl’s rise to stardom in Old Hollywood, as she transforms from a sunny country bumpkin to a savvy brunette bombshell to something else entirely. Inspired by the novel, which is full of many transformations, both literal and somewhat more metaphorical, we’ve put together a few of our favorite makeovers in literature — from the kind achieved with a little spit and polish to the sort that requires a vast internal sea change. Click through to see which we picked, and let us know if we missed your favorite in the comments. … Read More

Television

Watch Your Favorite TV Characters Talking About Books

By Emily Temple on

If you’ve been paying attention to this space over the last couple of months, you already know that we’re fascinated by the reading habits of our favorite fictional characters. But what’s better than a simple reading list? A little informed dialogue, of course. Or even a few well-placed snarky comments. Recently, we spotted this excellent clip of The Wire‘s D’Angelo talking about The Great Gatsby over at Open Culture, and it inspired us to round up a few more clips of some of our favorite TV characters waxing poetic about their favorite (or least favorite) books. From simple proclamations of Dr. Seuss’s brilliance to Boardwalk Empire‘s very physical commentary on David Copperfield, we love seeing books we love figure into the drama. Click through to watch — and hey, you just might learn something. … Read More

Books

10 Books That Are Meant to Be Savored

By Emily Temple on

As Francis Bacon famously wrote, “Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; That is, some books are to be read only in parts; Others to be read, but not curiously; And some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” As voracious readers, we like to think we give each book we read its due diligence, but you can’t deny that some are worth lingering over, worth turning over in your mind, worth cherishing, longer than others. Of course, such a thing is only objective to a certain extent — everyone has their own favorites, and everyone’s own favorites are, for them, just as important as anyone else’s. Here, we present a list of ten books we think are worth savoring, poring over, and thinking about for years — add to it with your own choices in the comments. … Read More

Books

Literature’s Greatest Author and Illustrator Duos

By Heba Hasan on

Some of our favorite book illustrations have become just as near and dear to our hearts as the stories themselves. What would Winnie-the-Pooh be in our minds without those beautiful drawings of the pleasantly rotund, honey-colored bear? The best illustrator and author collaborations make the text inseparable from the images, to the point where we cannot picture the stories without the pictures, or vice versa. To honor the magical relationship that takes place when the right writer and artist meet, we have rounded up some of our favorite author and illustrator duos of all time after the jump.  … Read More

Books

15 of the Greatest Lists in Literature

By Emily Temple on

This week, Threaded reminded us of one of our favorite moments in Joan Didion’s The White Album — when she lists her packing list, incredibly simple and yet so revealing. Lists, of course, are no rare thing in literature, and have many uses, from adding quirk to showing off knowledge, and have storied positions in classic texts like The Faerie Queene (so many different kinds of trees) and The Illiad (200+ lines of Greek chieftains). Inspired by Didion, we spent some time thinking about our favorite lists in literature, from short to impossibly long, from lists that catalogue items to those that follow the train of imagination. Click through to check out the literary lists we think are the funniest, most revealing, most interesting or flat out strangest, and if we’ve missed your own favorite, tell us about it in the comments. And yes, it does not escape us that this is a list of lists. Meta is the way we like it.
… Read More

Books

Meet the Modern Descendants of Your Favorite Authors

By Emily Temple on

As you probably know, here at Flavorpill, we’re fascinated by just about every aspect of the lives of our favorite authors — including what happened after them. This week saw the release of Tigers in Red Weather, a sultry, pitch-perfect literary thriller penned by Liza Klaussmann, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville. Though her novel reminds us more of Fitzgerald’s gilded sneaking than Melville’s brutal sea voyage, we were inspired by her success to look up a few more of our favorite authors’ modern-day descendants. Just, you know, to check in. If you’re as addicted to prying as we are, see what they’re all up to after the jump. … Read More

Pop Culture

The Fictional 99%: 10 of Pop Culture's Poorest Characters

By Emily Temple on

Earlier this week, Forbes released its annual list of the 15 richest fictional characters, topped by Tolkien’s legendary dragon Smaug and featuring other one percenters like Tywin Lannister, Tony Stark and Robert Crawley. Well, that’s all very well and good, but the list got us to thinking about the other end of the stick — the poorest fictional characters across pop culture, from street urchins to hobos to a very special monster who lives in a trash can. Click through to check out our list, and since we obviously couldn’t hit them all, let us know if we’ve missed your favorite impoverished fictional figure in the comments. … Read More

Books

10 Great Books To Read Aloud

By Emily Temple on

Tomorrow is World Book Night, an annual celebration dedicated to “spreading the love of reading, person to person.” Tomorrow night, tens of thousands of people all across the US, the UK and Ireland will give away free paperbacks in their communities in order to promote reading and the love of printed books. If you want to spread the love of books in a more personal way, however, we came up with another way to celebrate the evening — by having someone read a book aloud to you, or by reading aloud to one of your friends. After all, reading a book out loud to someone else is one of the best ways to truly share and give a love of reading — at least, this author got hers from being read to every night as a child (and yes, sometimes as a grown up). If you’re in Brooklyn tonight, WORD is hosting a bookish event for the occasion. If not, click through to check out our list of wonderful books to read aloud or have read aloud to you, be sure to suggest your own favorite read-aloud fare in the comments, and then share a story with someone you love tonight! … Read More

Books

Literary Classics With Slang Makeovers

By Emily Temple on

Today marks the release of On the Bro’d, a parody of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel in which the entire book is translated into bro-speak. In case you’re not quite sure what that means, here’s a quote you may recognize, totally bro-ified: “The only bros for me are the mad awesome ones, the ones who are mad to chug, mad to party, mad to bone, mad to get hammered, desirous of all the chicks at Buffalo Wild Wings, the ones who never turn down a Natty Light, but chug, chug, chug like f*cking awesome players exploding like spiders across an Ed Hardy shirt and in the middle you see the silver skull pop and everybody goes, “Awww, sh*t!” Yep — and you can read even more over at the On the Bro’d website. Inspired by the whole idea, we decided to take an amateur hand to translating a few of our other favorite classic novels in various kinds of slang. Click through to see what we came up with, and feel free to do some of your own translations in the comments. … Read More