In Craig Brown’s recently released Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings, Marilyn Monroe meets Nikita Khrushchev, President Richard Nixon meets Elvis Presley, Salvador Dali meets Sigmund Freud and of course, Marcel Proust meets James Joyce. These are just a few of the delightful and completely true stories in this book, which documents what happens when the famous, the genius, and the notorious bump up against each other, often to hilarious results. One of our favorite essays, which we’ve had the good fortune to be permitted to reprint below, retells the first meeting between Proust and Joyce in 1922 Paris — though accounts vary widely, one thing is for certain: neither had read the work of the other (or neither admitted to it). Click through to read this charming essay, and then be sure to check out the book for even more. … Read More
James Joyce
Are These the 10 Most Difficult Books?
We’ve all been beaten by a book before, whether due to its crazy length, disturbing subject matter, or intimidating reputation. Over at Publishers Weekly, Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg, co-curators of The Millions’ long-running “Difficult Books” series, recently compiled an interesting list of what they deem to be “the most difficult of the most difficult.” While they missed two of our personal “literary Mount Everests” — Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest — there are definitely a few books on here that we’ve picked up only to put down in defeat. Click through to see which titles made their top 10, check out the reasoning behind their picks here, and then head to the comments to share tales of the books that nearly broke you! … Read More
Exclusive Infographic: The Greatest Books of All Time
What are the greatest books of all time? And who should be the judge? Recently, Brain Pickings pointed out an awesome book of lists wherein 125 famous authors — everyone from Norman Mailer to Claire Messud to Annie Proulx to Stephen King — choose their ten favorite books. The book, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, then handily synthesizes all that info (544 works total mentioned in 125 lists) into a few important master lists: namely, the greatest books and authors of all time. Each book is assigned a value based on its position in any given list — that is, ”a first-place pick is worth ten points, and a tenth-place pick is worth one point” and so on — and those numbers are then added up to give each book a ranking. We’ve collected a few of the top rankings here in an easy to digest infographic. How many have you read? … Read More
15 of the Greatest Lists in Literature
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.
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10 Books to Put Hair On Your Chest
Of all the emblems of masculinity in pop culture, one of the most enduring also happens to be one of our favorite writers: the big game hunting, gruff talking, bullfighting enthusiast war hero, Ernest Hemingway. Today being the 113th anniversary of the author’s birth, we decided to honor him with a little list of books that might help you live up to the Hemingway memory by putting a little hair on your chest — totally metaphoric hair, that is (well, probably). Click through to see our reading list for tough guys and gals of all persuasions, and let us know which books you’d add in the comments. … Read More
How to Talk About 10 Important Books You Probably Haven’t Read
We’ve all been there: nodding along vaguely when someone brings up Ulysses in casual conversation. Everyone has those books that they repeatedly pick up and then repeatedly put down. These skeletons in our literary closet always seem to sink to the bottom of our summer reading list, destined never to be finished. Maria Popova’s recent post on University of Paris professor Pierre Bayard’s controversial book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read has got us thinking about how fluency in classic works of literature acts as a marker of a well read, culturally developed person. So, in case you’re interested in impersonating a more educated reader, we have compiled a little cheat sheet to guide you through 10 important books you probably haven’t read but whose cultural importance you should definitely understand. This way, you can save face at your next cocktail party — without sacrificing quality time with that Stephen King novel at the beach. (But hey, promise us you’ll give at least one of these a try before the year is out?) … Read More
Check Out Henri Matisse’s Lovely Illustrations for ‘Ulysses’
Fun fact: Back in 1935 an American publisher named George Macy paid Henri Matisse $5000 to create a series of etchings for a special edition of Ulysses. According to Open Culture, the story goes that the famed painter never even read Joyce’s massive book, even though he was given a French translation; rather,… Read More
25 Writers, Artists and Critics on James Joyce
In case you haven’t been trolling the literary blogs in the past week, we are happy to inform you that today is Bloomsday, the unofficial international holiday dedicated to canonical Irish writer James Joyce, and more specifically, to his most famous work, Ulysses. Though he has many enthusiastic fans (the man died over 70 years ago and still has young ladies dancing in the streets once a year to celebrate his life), he has always been a controversial figure in critical and social circles. For our own mini celebration of Bloomsday, we’ve put together a collection of some of our favorite quotes about the great writer and his work — some so flattering they read like silver-tongued worship, and some, well, significantly less flattering. Click through to read a cacophony of famous figures sounding off on James Joyce, and then get out there and decide on his merit for yourself. … Read More
10 Epidemically Overrated Books
Last week, we read a fun article over at PWxyz entitled “We Fix the Top 100 Novels List,” wherein the Publisher’s Weekly staff sounded off on which novels they’d add to the Modern Library’s ubiquitous Top 100 — and which they’d take away. The article got us thinking about which novels we think are lauded entirely too much, whether by the press or the public at large. Now, keep in mind that this isn’t a list of bad books — it’s a list of good books that (to our minds) just seem to get more accolades than they deserve — and it is, and can only be, based on our humble opinion. Click through to read our list of terrifically, epidemically, perpetually overrated books, and add to (or subtract from) our picks in the comments. … Read More
10 Fictional Characters People Need to Stop Idolizing
We all need idols, and considering how central books, film, and TV can be to our lives, it makes sense that so many of us count fictional characters among our role models. But not every charismatic protagonist is an Atticus Finch — or even a Leslie Knope. After the jump, we take a lighthearted look at some of the outsize personalities that never should have become cult heroes or objects of popular worship. These aren’t villains we relish for their cartoonish evil, but irreparably flawed (and sometimes downright sociopathic) characters people think are cool and/or strive to emulate, from a teenage rapist to pop culture’s ultimate kept woman. … Read More
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