Issue #2: March 1, 2020
Hello and welcome to issue 2. After the initial excitement that propelled the release of issue one of the newsletter, this week forced me to slow down and think more about how I plan to collect and organize the content that will go into this newsletter as something I do on a weekly basis. Needless to say I have a lot I need to figure out and maybe I’ll share some of that once I do.
Anyway, here’s what I found of interest this week:
- This evening I watched The Farewell. Highly recommended. A line of dialogue in the movie struck me. It was said to describe a difference between East and West, but it spoke to me a more personal level too.
“You think one’s life belongs to oneself...[here] a person’s life is part of a whole.”
-
The 2020 Tournament of Books starts this month over at The Morning News. I’ve only read 2 of the 18 selections, but most of them are in my TBR pile.
-
I found a new newsletter that seems to be worth a read. A Personal Anthology by Jonathan Gibbs is described as:
“A regular bulletin from a series of guest contributors, each of whom is given the opportunity to fantasy-edit their own personal anthology of short fiction.”
-
I started to rewatch 30 Rock, which is available in its entirety streaming on Hulu. I’m as far as season 5 and I can say it holds up well, but I can’t help but feel that it represents a time and place in American culture that is permanently behind us.
-
The Smithsonian released 2.8 million Images into the public domain this past week. I found via Austin Kleon this list of open access image libraries, which has inspired me to try to find a way to add images to future issues of this newsletter.
-
I spent time reading Six ways to choose books to read and The mysterious world of book discovery this past week. Since I started reading again last year, my main way of discovering new books to read was from watching what my friends on Goodreads were reading, but towards the end of the year I significantly increased my TBR pile with all of the end of the decade lists and it will be quite some time before I catch up there. So far this year the long list of The International Booker Prize has provided another set of books to read. I think anyone who reads constantly and consistently will have to keep finding new and varied ways to find books to read, otherwise it is easy to fall into a rut or get stuck reading a certain time period, genre, etc. I also think that readers enjoy growing their pile of books to read almost as much as they enjoy reading them. I could spend years trying to read the books already on my list, but it doesn’t stop me from continuing to add to it.
New Reads Started This Week
- Inland by Téa Obreht
- Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants by Mathias Énard
Reading Challenge
