Spirited: Cocktails from Around the World (610 Recipes, 6 Continents, 60 Countries, 500 Years).
Early Morning Bondi Iceberg Photo Suggests Men Finally Taking Mindfulness Seriously
Coming in 2021
A steady stream of previews of books to look forward to in the coming year have been appearing, with Alex Preston now writing in The Observer on Fiction to look out for in 2021.
Other previews already out include:
- The 21 Most Anticipated Books of 2021 at Time
- 55 of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021 at Oprah
- At The Scotsman they have both Allan Massie's 2021 Arts Preview: The Year Ahead in Books and Stuart Kelly on the year ahead in books
- The 30 Most Anticipated SFF Books of 2021 by Christina Orlando at Tor.com
One thinks of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Stendhal’s Rouge et Noirand Tolstoy’s War and Peace; of Melville’s Moby-Dick, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Of these, among the most easily recognizable and celebrated titles in the history of western literature, not one exhibits a trace of the solipsism, self-referentiality, self-identity and the narrow, intolerant and vicious puppy ideology that are among the more disgusting features of the novel in the 21st century. Instead their concern is with the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it; with human society at every level and including every type of human personality; with history, war and peace; with ennobling adventure and thrilling experience; with high passions and great loves; with good versus evil; with life and death; ultimately, with the relationship between mankind and the Divine.
How Our Media Diet Has Changed
While Covid-19 quarantines have made television one of the more dominant mediums around, they’ve also altered the diet of what we watch within that medium. Pre-pandemic, people could watch movies in theaters, TV shows on Netflix, and live events at concert halls, clubs, and stadiums. Now, all of those things are channeled through televisions (or, in some cases, through smartphones, laptops, and other devices). Our definition of what it means to “watch TV” has changed a lot over the last few years. – Wired
George Orwell has a gift for the unusual and the memorable that means that even his half-forgotten novels are well worth discovering once again
At The Collidescope Ben Shore offers Squicky Clean: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.
Good to hear that, in response to the question: What is a novel you think deserves more readers ? his answer includes:
I've mentioned The Sot-Weed Factor to you a couple of times. As well, there are the wonderful Patrick White novels, Voss, Riders in the Chariot, The Aunt's Story ... Somebody first recommended him to me on my first trip to Greece, and a few years later, he got his Nobel Prize in 1973, but I still don't think he's anywhere near as widely read as he should be.Agreed !
At La Vanguardia Jorge Carrión has a stab at the popular exercise of determining what might be the top books of the twenty-first century -- taking a year-by-year approach --, in 21 libros para el XXI -- complete with 'affinity'-selections.
Not sure about the year-by-year approach, but at least it is a pretty broad variety, in several respects.
Similar exercises can also be found in:
- The 21st Century's 12 greatest novels (BBC, 2015)
- A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon(Vulture, 2018)
- The 100 best books of the 21st century (The Guardian, 2019)
The Fictional America And How It Powers Fictions No Longer True
“In the extraordinary drama of America, fiction is paramount to preserving systemic structures of imbalance. That’s how it has been for centuries, and that’s how Trump supporters would like it to remain. But that kind of fiction has no place in a healthy, stable democracy. It’s a contaminant and a cancer, a barrier to the remaking our country requires and the change ahead. In the America we want to build, we no longer have a need for it.” – Wired
… Review of Debra Di Blasi’s Selling the Farm.
In Di Blasi’s hands, memoir is not a work of confession. As she writes in the prologue, she views autobiography as pretense—observing the past inevitably alters it, and any memoir that fails to recognize this fact is fiction. She calls attention to her self-editing through white space, indented text that often breaks the fourth wall. As Di Blasi explained in an interview about the book, “The intent is not only to illuminate the many facets of remembering but also to reflect the process of writing and revising one’s recollections, exposing the fallibility of memory and the intrusion of self-aggrandizement
Coming in 2021 | Bestselling in the US in 2020
Barbara Epler Q & A | The Dark Domain review
Coming in 2021
The Millions has now posted their Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2021 Book Preview -- 152 titles to look forward to.
Meanwhile, at Vulture they present 46 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021.
Certainly some titles of interest here -- but there's a lot more coming out .....
Bestselling in the US in 2020
At Publishers Weekly John Maher has the numbers -- the top twenty-five bestselling titles in the US in 2020, along with the number of copies sold (as reported by NPD BookScan).
Barack Obama's A Promised Land was the only title to shift over 2,000,000 copies, and six more titles shifted over a million each. None of the top twenty-five are under review at the complete review.
