As much as I try to minimize politics and such in this blog post series, the events this month do creep in, so there may be a bit of that this week. With that in mind, here we go.
- Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon has a piece on seeking comfort in reading food memoirs.
- For a bit of entertainment as well as if you are a woman in need some reading, Cosmopolitan offers a list of 14 best book subscription boxes. One of the boxes matches romance novels with a sex toy.
- One hundred years ago this year, Agatha Christie published The Mysterious Affair at Styles and introduced the world to her great detective Hercule Poirot. Read more about it in this piece from Open magazine.
- Al Jaffee, the Mad Magazine cartoonist, retires this year. He is as of this post 99 years old. This makes him the longest working cartoonist in history at this time. Story via Open Culture. Like many others, I enjoyed his work over the years.
- In sad news, the oldest independent science fiction bookstore, Uncle Hugo's in Minneapolis, was burnt down during the riots along with its sister mystery bookstore Uncle Edgar's. Story via Science Times. TOR.com reports the store is working to rebuild.
- A ProPublica investigation found that Amazon's self publishing arm is basically a sanctuary for racists and white supremacists. According to the article, "That these books are widely available on Amazon does not seem to be an accident but the inevitable consequence of the company’s business strategy. Interviews with more than two dozen former Amazon employees suggest that the company’s drive for market share and philosophical aversion to gatekeepers have incubated an anything-goes approach to content: Virtually no idea is too inflammatory, and no author is off-limits."
- The Poetry Association in the United States and National Book Critics Circle gave responses addressing Black Lives Matter that were less than satisfactory to critics. As a result, there have been some resignations in the leadership of those groups. Story via The Guardian.
- One thing I noticed this week in particular is that in light of George Floyd's murder by that cop and the protests that followed, a lot of people and organizations have been putting out all sorts of anti-racist book reading lists. It seems that every time this kind of crisis happens (sadly George Floyd is not the first black person killed by police in racist conditions) the reading lists start sprouting out. So when I saw this article out of Vulture, it caught my eye. The article asks "What is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?" The writer states, "As a friend pointed out on Twitter, George Zimmerman was acquitted seven years ago. Donald Trump was elected four years ago. Black History Month happens every year. Cops kill all the time. The books are there, they’ve always been there, yet the lists keep coming, bathing us in the pleasure of a recommendation. But that’s the thing about the reading. It has to be done." That is a question for me, who does the reading? Because I have the feeling that the people that DO need to read these kind of books will not even bother to look at the list. So if the people who need to be reading these books are not reading them, who does the reading? As the article points out, the books have always been there. Personally, I have read a good number of them (or at least I did before I set up my politics and social issues reading moratorium after the Pendejo In Chief got elected; I was burned out and it became an issue of keeping my mental health). But the question is still there? Once those in the choir read the books, what else is there? As I often say, that is the Magnificent Question.
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