Back in an earlier life, when my professional responsibilities included curating content, editing and finding good art for a Sunday books section, I used to respond to frequent requests about how many books I was actually reading with a wry, somewhat mournful: “Well, I don’t read books — I read about books.” That was usually good for a laugh, but the other upside to it was the number of great literary websites I had occasion to visit and wallow around in. Here are three that still keep me interested:
Goodreads.com: Founded in 2007 by book lovers and life partners Elizabeth and Otis Chandler, this San Francisco-based site offers users a free place to build lists of books they have read or want to read, post their own reviews of them, see what their friends and other readers are enjoying (or not) and find and exchange information about the literary world. It initially attracted some 800 user members just from its founders’ friends and contacts, but grew exponentially in popularity until it was bought by Amazon in 2013, by which time its user base had expanded to more than 12 million. Although the Amazon takeover has drawn mixed reactions from readers, authors and some in the publishing industry — reports of “review bombing” have been cited, for instance — the site’s basic functions remain the same and have proven useful to those many of us members who are merely in search of their next great read.
Lithub.com: Launched some eight years later than Goodreads by executives at Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature, this newsy, deeply sourced website benefits from its partnership with more than 100 content providers, including large publishers, independent presses, bookstores, literary magazines and nonprofits such as PENAmerica. It describes itself on its “about” page as “an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life.” Early in its second year, it started Book Marks, a site that aggregates book reviews from a variety of sources and ranks them in categories from “pan” to “rave,” and followed that up later with Crime Reads, which — you guessed it — is dedicated solely to thrillers and mysteries and numbers a great many recognized crime writers as advisors. Bombing around on it recently while researching this column, I encountered a streamed interview with author Lauren Groff talking about dreaming up “a female Robinson Crusoe” for her new novel “The Vaster Wilds”; recommendations for nine “must reads” for fans of the wildly successful HBO series “The Last of Us”; and a news report that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, now that their collaboration on “Killers of the Flower Moon” has reached theaters, have agreed to turn another David Grann book, this year’s best-seller “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,” into another movie. Digging even deeper, I turned up irrefutable evidence about how inbred the literary world really is: a warm-hearted interview with Goodreads co-founder Elizabeth Chandler on how she and her husband got that website up and running!
Atkinsbookshelf.wordpress.com: This Bay Area-based blog, maintained as “a labor of love” by avid reader Alexander Atkins, owner of an eponymous graphic design firm, mounts posts designed to pique the interests of the “intellectually curious.” Topics streamed across the top of its home page include, besides the obvious Books and Literature, Culture, Movies, Music, Quotations, Phrases and Trivia. Diving into that last one took me down a rabbit hole that may or may not get me prepped for that fantasized-about appearance on “Jeopardy!” but endowed me with the knowledge that “alektorophobia” is fear of chickens. There are frequent posts running down the right side of its pages on “famous misquotations” that will disabuse you of any mistaken notions you may have had about who said what and when. (It was apparently not Aristotle, for instance, who first opined that “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”) Tapping into the Culture section brought me to three poems inspired by the 9/11 attacks, including an incredibly poignant musing on “The Names” penned by our former two-time national poet laureate Billy Collins. Atkins Bookshelf does solicit donations for its support and also prominently features its founder’s 2020 book, “Serendipitous Discoveries from the Bookshelf,” with, of course, the ever-so-helpful link to its Amazon page.
Get spooked: In honor of Halloween’s advent and courtesy of OpenCulture.com (another great website that includes literature among its topics), let us call your attention to Edgar Allan Poe’s chiller of a short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart, which was turned into a memorable cartoon narrated in seven and a half minutes by the incomparable James Mason back in 1953. The United Productions of America animated short designed by Paul Julian is distinctive for its eerie surrealism and for a few notable other achievements. It was the first animated feature to draw an X rating in Great Britain, because it so graphically presented content considered for adults only. It was nominated for the Academy Award for the best animated short. And in 1994, a survey of 1,000 professionals in the animation field voted it the 24th greatest cartoon of all time. (The 1957 Bugs Bunny classic “What’s Opera, Doc?” led the pack.) Care to see it? Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flKOtXC4oyM.
In the pipeline: The decade-long wait is over for fans of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Hours.” Michael Cunningham’s new novel “Day” (Random House, $28, 288 pages) comes out Nov. 14 and has already garnered a significant amount of sky-high praise from his fellow accomplished authors. “Brilliant” declares Colm Tóibín; Andrew Sean Greer pronounces it “another masterpiece”; Tony Kushner labels it “bordering on revelation.” The novel takes place over the course of our three-year global pandemic lockdown, focusing on the fissures developing in the lives of a Boston couple, their anxiety-ridden 5-year-old daughter and the wife’s younger brother, who is isolated in a mountain cabin in Iceland.
Genius has its rewards: Congratulations are in order for our national poet laureate Ada Limón. In early October, the Library of Congress announced she has been named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for 2023. The so-called “Genius Award” comes with an $800,000 grant spread out over five years and is based on three criteria: exceptional creativity, the promise of future achievement and the potential for the award itself to facilitate more creative work. A native of Sonoma who now lives in Lexington, Kentucky, Limón, 47, is the author of six collections of poetry and is especially concerned with heightening our attention to the wonders of our natural world and our connections with one another. Her new poem “In Praise of Mystery” will be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft when it makes its 1.8-billion-mile voyage to Jupiter’s second moon in October 2024. Find it and more information on her website, adalimon.net.
From page to screen: “All the Light We Cannot See,” Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning World War II novel from 2017, begins streaming as a four-episode limited series on Netflix on Nov. 2. It stars newcomer Aria Mia Loberti as the little French blind girl Marie-Laure and Louis Hofmann as the young German soldier Werner. Mark Ruffalo plays the girl’s father Daniel LeBlanc, who builds her a model of Paris to teach her how to navigate the streets of the city, and the inimitable Hugh Laurie stars as her beloved grand-uncle Etienne LeBlanc. You can check out a teaser here: https://www.netflix.com/title/81083008.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.