Welcome to our occasional feature in which we share bookish news and commentary that we’ve come across in recent weeks:
- How is blogging similar to boiling granite? Tom shares his thoughts at Wuthering Expectations (with help from Emerson).
- Kathleen Rooney at the New York Times Magazine talks about the way Jack Handey — yes, Jack Handey, of Deep Thoughts — has freed up genuine poetry, and the way she teaches it to undergraduates.
- Levi at I’ve Been Reading Lately shares some suggestions from Ford Maddox Ford on the uses of books (and bacon).
- Jenn at The Picky Girl mulls over Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and what it means to be an American.
- Lisa Leff writes an excellent long-form piece for Tablet Magazine about Zosa Szajkowski’s “salvaged” archival Jewish documents, rescued from the Nazis during the Holocaust in France. Here, she discusses possession, rescue, and the delicate nature of archiving.
- Shut the door! According to the Pew Foundation, people visit libraries to borrow books!
- Michael Dirda recommends a new study of early 19th-century American fiction: the novels “are collectively replete with violence, seduction, incest, serial murders, insanity, betrayal and revenge, personality disorders, orgies and much that is simply very, very strange.”
- At the OxfordWords blog, our friend Simon asks whether you can tell the Bible from the Bard.
Shelf Love 
Thanks for sharing the links, especially the Pew one. I’ve seen that report mentioned this week here and there a few times, but didn’t have a chance to check it out until today.
It was kind of a no-brainer, but nice to see confirmation, I guess. :)
Reblogged this on Xingu, Volume 2 and commented:
A fascinating find.
If I were reading Emerson in translation I would have to assume that “boiling” was some sort of mistake.
That book Dirda writes about is just my sort of thing. Hmm hmm hmm. Perhaps my library will buy it for me.
I put that link there specifically for you, Tom.
Kathleen Rooney is one of my best friend’s older sisters :-)