Links / Books
-
NPR’s “Books We Love”
№ 111
Great reads, thoughtfully curated by NPR. They've been doing this for a while, apparently, but I'd never come across it before; NPR added the year of 2025 to their Books We Love directory. You can use the sidebar on the left to filter for a combination of things (e.g. Staff Picks + Seriously Great Writing + Fiction), and then use the navigation up top to skip through the years.
I'm currently into short stories and essays, so this filter will be my go-to for now.
-
Photo by Anna Watts for The New York Times. Here's a place I'd like to visit: Argosy Book Store in Midtown Manhattan celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Surrounded by skyscrapers, it's run by three sisters (90, 88 and 84 years old, respectively). Already a couple of decades under their belt, they took over from their father in 1991.
The sisters still go on book-buying trips around the city by cab, sometimes several times a day. Back at the shop, they spread the books over a broad, green table in the middle of the main browsing area on the first floor, just as their father taught them to do. They assess, catalog and shelve their finds, in between assisting customers.
On retiring, Ms. Cohen (84) says:
I’d like to, too, but working here is really interesting,” she said. “Every day, you don’t know who is going to walk in the door or what books are going to come in.
Book stores are fantastic places. Every day presents a chance to make someone's day, and I dream of having one of my own, sometime.
-
The longlist for the 2025 Booker Prize has been announced.
The 13 novels transport readers to a farm in southern Malaysia, a Hungarian housing estate and a small coastal town in Greece. They shine a light on the lives of Koreans in postcolonial Japan, a homesick Indian in snowy Vermont, a Kosovar torture survivor living in New York, a shrimp fisherman in the north of England, a mother’s search for a child given up for adoption in Venezuela and even endangered snails in contemporary Ukraine. They reimagine the great American road trip as a slow-burning mid-life crisis and take us into the heart of the UK’s coldest winter.
Including a first longlisting for Fitzcarraldo Editions, who just steadily and impressively keep chipping away.
-
Dan Hollick is writing and illustrating a “reference manual for people who design and build software”, and he just released its first chapter: How does a screen work?. And, I appreciate him starting with the hardware before digging into the software:
[...] most people have no idea how a screen works. Any time you see a pixel light up, you are witnessing actual witchcraft before your eyes - light bending through electric crystals just so you can read a tweet in bed.
It reminded me of Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet, a typeface (or typographic experiment) he created in response to the technology found in a CRT monitor.
Implied in that experiment was an urge to truly understand the technology his work was created for or displayed on. It seems Dan's manual is aiming for a similar rigorousness, which is exciting!
-
The world's most popular book on art is the topic of my book club this month. I've never read it (shame on me), and had to choose between a paperback version or this large, clothbound luxury edition. Easy decision.
This luxury edition, with its bespoke cloth cover and preface by Professor Gombrich's granddaughter Leonie, is the ultimate gift purchase for all art lovers – a keepsake to treasure, and to inspire future generations.
-
"This site explores the graphic design of Penguin book covers, with a focus on series editions. […] The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1.400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched."
What a collection—beautiful.
-
A fascinating look behind the scenes of Bookshop.org's unexpected growth. What may come across as an overnight success is (of course) the result of lots of hard, hard work (although, there is an element of 'overnight' hidden in the bookselling-boom of the pandemic).
I'm currently awaiting my Bookshop affiliate profile. I was already linking to them from my newsletter, and will soon be linking to them from my website, as well.
