Reading about the reading life: October 4, 2020 edition

Welcome to another edition of "Reading about the reading life" here at The Itinerant Librarian. This is where I collect stories about reading and the reading life. Basically, these are items related to reading, maybe writing and literacy, that I find interesting and think my four readers might find interesting as well with a little commentary. As with other features I do on this blog, I do it when I have time or feel like it. Comments are always welcome (within reason).

 

• Boing Boing highlights the e-book site Standard Ebooks, which basically takes out of copyright works and puts them in a quality format (or at least an improvement over Project Gutenberg's plain text). May be worth a look. 
• Tor has an article on "a brief history of Mexican Horror Comics."
• MensPulpMags wrote back in July about their reading in Western, pulp, and some other genres. A lot to look at here. 
• With the COVID-19 pandemic, some people are documenting their experience in diaries and journals, and Notebook Stories takes a look at that. I've made small notes here or there my personal journal about it, but I wish I could write more. I think I still have some time to do a blog post on the experience so far down the road.
• Shelf Talk blog highlights that this year is 100 Years of Agatha Christie and her works. From her works, I've read The ABC Murders and Murder on the Orient Express a while back. I've also recently watched film adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express. I watched the 1974 with Albert Finney as Poirot back in April and the recent 2017 film with Kenneth Branagh portraying Poirot along with his epic mustache back in August. Watching those two films have made me want to read the novel again, so I have Murder on the Orient Express checked out from my local public library to reread soon. By the way, I also watched the 1982 film adaptation of Evil Under the Sun back in August. That one has Sir Peter Ustinov in the role of Poirot. 
• Speaking of anniversaries, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is 50 years old now.  Story via J-Stor Daily. This is a book I read when I was in education school as an undergrad studying to be a school teacher. I have reread it since, and I do keep a copy handy.
  
• Book Riot featured a piece reminding people why librarians are NOT child care. This is a must read for every parent who dumps kids in their public library and hope for the best. One of my previous workplaces, we found unsupervised kids in libraries, cops got called in, and then the parent had to deal with the cops and prove that yes, that kid was their kid. 
• Via the Literary Saloon, an announcement that Alberto Manguel donated his library to the Center for the Study of Reading in Lisbon. Manguel is one of those authors with a love of books that just makes you love books too. 
• If you like cookbooks, maybe this database of 5000 historical cookbooks may be of interest. Story via Open Culture.
  

Some Spanish language items, via Lecturalia: 

• On the benefits of rereading books. 
• A brief history of the Real Academia Española.
• An article on Agatha Christie's anniversary.