One store, one book
Images by Miyuki Kaneko. Via Takram
Ebookfriendly tells us about a unique Tokyo bookstore that sells one book, and only one book, for six continuous days, from Tuesday to Sunday. Every evening an event is organized to discuss the book and connect its author with readers.
The one-book bookstore makes an old truth clearly visible: Every book is worth reading. In fact, every book on every shelf in every bookstore or a library in the world is worth reading. There is only one condition, very hard to meet. You need to focus on this single book for longer than a moment.
Read the whole story HERE
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Tokyo has endless attractions ranging from food to historic temples and unique architecture — and numerous bookstores.
One entire district, Jimbocho, is dedicated to used books and publishing. It’s Japan’s equivalent of a booktown and it is pure heaven for booklovers.
Read the whole story HERE
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12 Essential Books About Race in America
At Off-The-Shelf, Eloy Bleifuss Prado says that talking about race isn’t easy. It’s personal, it’s political, it’s visceral. However, literature has the power to provide a window into this most difficult of subjects. Prado offers twelve books that have changed the way we talk about race in America.
One example:
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie
Elegantly depicting the struggles of Native Americans to survive in a world that remains hostile to them, this is the book that made Sherman Alexie a literary star. Told through twenty-two interconnected stories that reveal different aspects of life on a Spokane Indian reservation, it runs the emotional gamut from humor to loss to a stubborn will to survive.
See all the books HERE
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This fabulous note was found inside a copy of The Hobbit
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The Cross-Dressing Heiress Who Decamped to the Algerian Desert
“I will never be content with a sedentary life; I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere,” wrote Eberhardt in ‘The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt’.
Isabelle Eberhardt in the Sahel desert, circa 1900. (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)
Just as the 19th century was drawing to a close, a penniless 22-year-old explorer and author named Isabelle Eberhardt left an unhappy life in Switzerland to roam Algeria, join a mystical Sufi Muslim sect, and dress as the male Arab she saw herself as, Ailsa Ross writes at Atlas Obscura.
Following an assassination attempt against her, the woman sometimes referred to as “the first hippie” died in a flash flood in the Sahara at the age of 27. Her vivid writings and travelogues were published posthumously.
Read her whole fascinating story HERE
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Why we need nature writing
A new ‘culture of nature’ is changing the way we live, Robert Macfarlane writes in the New Statesman.
“This culture is not new in its concerns but it is distinctive in its contemporary intensity. Its politics is not easily placed on the conventional spectrum, so we would do better to speak of its values.
“Those values include placing community over commodity, modesty over mastery, connection over consumption, the deep over the shallow, and a version of what the American environmentalist Aldo Leopold called “the land ethic”: the double acknowledgement that, first, human beings are animals and, second, we are animals among other animals, sharing our habitat with members of the biota that also have meetable needs and rights.”
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Pronounce it, I dare you
That looooooong Welsh name that takes up half the map of Europe if it’s spelled out on a map in letters large enough to read?
Surely you know the one….
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
I actually used that in a book. It’s one of those things — you NEED to use something like that somewhere in fiction, because … well because it’s just entirely too improbable to really exist in fact, isn’t it?
And so it made its way into my second Worldweavers book, “Spellspam“. No, I’m not going to tell you more. Go read it and find out.
Turns out there’s a NorAm version of a NameOfManySyllables like that, too. You can learn all about it in a song all about canoeing (but more precisely canoodling) on a lake which as best I can figure is in Maine somewhere, or at least somewhere apparently quite close to Canada because the canoe used to illustrate the video of the song has a very definite Maple on its prow.
The NorAm song can be found HERE
A song telling you how to pronounce the Welsh town HERE
And this TV weatherman nails it HERE
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Alma Alexander My books Email me
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