Forks and knives are in the top drawer

[ailiet]

BibliOdyssey - A collection of etchings, illustrations, and vintage book art.

For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her: On Paul Legault’s Emily Dickinson - A review of Legault's paraphrasing interpretation of Dickinson.

The Lord of the Rings Family Tree Project - "An attempt to place every character in J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional universe in a family tree."

Moby Dick Big Read - "‘I have written a blasphemous book’, said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’." I'm terrible at listening to audiobooks, but I may have to put the effort in for this one (and clearly Tilda Swinton needs to do this kind of thing more often, because I could listen to her all day).

On the Comfort of Bad Books - An interesting piece about books, comfort, and the definition of quality in literature.

I understand why, among writers, who are usually endless-appetite readers as well, the reading of books other than Real Books is a vaguely shameful activity. We all live on borrowed time, and there’s DeLillo and Nabokov and Pynchon I’ll never get to because of the hours I’ve spent reading… well, I’m even afraid to tell you their names. You can and will judge. But I do it anyway because sometimes I just need the comfort of falling into something that is ready to catch me. I need it to hold me. That feeling is a little sacred to me, actually. I guard my escape quite jealously, because there are times when I need it to go on.

Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük - A brief history of an invented language (and an ode to umlauts).

You better not tell me you forgot - Terry Castle reviews Lisa Cohen's biography, "of three now almost forgotten lesbian women: the American heiress and intellectual polymath Esther Murphy; Mercedes de Acosta, the Cuban-American Hollywood screenwriter, memoirist and seductress extraordinaire (Garbo and Dietrich and Isadora Duncan were among her conquests); and the brittle yet pioneering British fashion editor and stylesetter Madge Garland."