February 1 – March 23, 2024

January 21 – March 9, 2024

The docuseries plans to reveal alleged abuse on millennial television favourites

This originally appeared in our Today in Books daily newsletter, where each day we round up the most interesting stories, news, essays, and other goings on in the world of books and reading. Sign up here if you want to get it.

_____________________________

Why Does Every Famous Woman Have a Book Club Now?

Of course, it is not every famous woman, and in fact, that hyperbolic headline actually does the very real trend a disservice. A more interesting question is: why is it these kind of famous women? Mostly white. All in the entertainment industry. Mostly between the ages of 27 and 47. I think Gould’s ultimate conclusion is largely the right one: the cultural currency that comes with being seen as aligned with books, primarily upmarket literary fiction, matters to these women. Which is great! Except that it doesn’t seem to matter to the books who get a turn, ever so fleetingly, in an Instagram Reel.

Higher Prices. Fewer Books Sold.

It’s not just your imagination. Books are getting more expensive. More expensive enough apparently to offset that fewer books are being sold. South Africa, strangely, exemplifies both trends, with a 7.7% drop in 2023 number of units sold but a price gain of 9.6%. Is anyone out there trying to correlate this? Are fewer books being sold because the prices are going up? Would the number of books sold be higher if books were cheaper? And if not, why aren’t prices even higher?

Introductory Book Fair Etiquette

I’ve read/followed Rebecca Romney for a long while, and though I am not a buyer of rare books, I find the world completely fascinating. She recently posted a thread, now blog post, about etiquette at rare book fairs (this is aimed at institutional buyers, fwiw). I never articulated this way, but I love reading about the “etiquettes” of micro-communites, be it rare book dealers or baseball players or art dealers or professional fly-fishermen or whatever.

Akira Toriyama was one of the most influential mangaka: he created Dragon Ball in 1984, which would later become the hit series Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super. This action fantasy comedy franchise inspired many other series, like One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach.

On March 7th, the official Dragon Ball Twitter/X account shared that Akira Toriyama had passed away at 68 from acute subdural hematoma. He was still working on several creative projects at the time of his death. He had a small funeral with family.

How Shakespeare in Love's 1999 best picture win changed the awards landscape

It’s hard to believe Lyn is dead, because her mind, her spirit, if you will, was always so full of life. The last time I saw her, when she was already quite ill, she talked about the comical way the Hollywood writers’ strike had affected commencement speeches, and about what she’d learned about AI from a scientist she knew on the Berkeley faculty. She was still engaged with the world, in other words, despite her situation. She was a very private person, yet she opened herself up to other people and to new experiences again and again. As she says in her book The Fatalist, ”I adventure and consider fate / as occurrence and happenstance as destiny. I recite an epigraph. / It seems as applicable to the remarks I want to make as disorder / is to order.” It was like her to see opposites (order/disorder) as part of a whole—which is not to say she couldn’t take sides against oppression. She could and did.

As a girl, she loved reading the journals of explorers. She was a kind of explorer herself. For example, in the late eighties, she taught herself Russian and traveled first with other poets and then alone to the Soviet Union to translate the work of outsider poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. (And she was scheduled to spend a winter with scientists in Antarctica when she was diagnosed with breast cancer some twenty-odd years ago.) She didn’t believe in borders or in endings. As she says in My Life, “But a word is a bottomless pit.” She didn’t think that was a bad thing. It made her curious.

She had a unique combination of generosity and discernment, equanimity and élan. I admire her more than anyone I know. Her generosity was utterly without self-interest; her curiosity was never intrusive. These traits shone in her poetry as in her life. When I had cancer in 2006, she helped to organize a kind of private fundraising campaign among friends and sent me several thousand dollars. Because of her discretion, I don’t know who had contributed what exactly, but I’ve always suspected she was a major contributor herself.

She has influenced countless other poets, but no one else could come close to writing a “Lyn Hejinian” poem. I was impressed, influenced perhaps, by the way her poetry was, to quote one of her titles, a “language of inquiry.” The first book of hers I read, back in the mid-seventies, was called A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking. Back then the consensus seemed to be that “thought” was the province of philosophy. But as I’ve said, Lyn didn’t believe in borders. Her “October 6, 1986” poem in her book The Cell presents resistance as a kind of measuring device: “resistance is accurate—it / rocks and rides the momentum.” It is like her to cast resistance as a form of exploration, of appreciation even. That poem concludes with her characteristic humor: “It is not imperfect to / have died.” Those lines strike me with full force now. I want to scream that it is far from perfect that Lyn is dead, but she knew best.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes, these books are brand-new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, we’re looking at a blockbuster hit from Māori author Rebecca K Reilly.