Last Week's Links

Last Week’s Links

15 Incredible Movies That Started As Books

How many of these have you heard of or seen? I’ve heard of nine but have only seen five.

On the Merits of Annotating

There’s no doubt than annotating books makes us active readers. Here’s how Anthony DeFeo writes his notes in the margin:

As I read, I keep a pen in hand. Whenever something comes along that intrigues me — if a reaction pops into my head, or I have a prediction, or I want to make a note of something useful for future reference as a writer — I jot it down between the margins.

Divided times: how literature teaches us to understand ’the other’

Fiction teaches us to think creatively about difference. Anthropological studies, psychoanalysis, sociology – all offer theoretical descriptions for what a novel teaches by example and by identification. “The imitation of an action”, is what Aristotle called tragedy. It would be difficult for one to think up a more groundbreaking mode of understanding the mind and the heart. Guilt, jealousy, despair, violence, anxiety, irrationality, the fear of death – nothing that is human is foreign to literature.

It’s not your grandma’s Book of the Month Club

I rejoined Book of the Month last summer when I discovered how much it has changed since I last joined back in the early 1970s.

10 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT HOW THE NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW WORKS

Since I rely a lot on the New York Times Book Review, this article caught my eye. Here are the two tidbits I found most informative:

  1. “The Book Review at The Times reviews about 1% of the books that come out in any given year.”
  2. The best book reviews are emotional.

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

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