More End-of-the-Year Lists

It’s only mid-December, so the end-of-the-year listmania continues apace, to my great delight. After the more or less standard lists, here are some that are more unusual but just as interesting.

50 Covers for 2013 from The Casual Optimist. That cover of 1984 is stunning.

Great translations published this year via Three Percent and Typographical Era.

The Millions is running a wonderful series of posts called A Year in Reading, with contributions from many amazing writers and critics.

And Brain Pickings has the usual embarrassment of riches with best book lists from many different fields: science and technology, psychology and philosophy, art and design, biographies, memoirs and history, as well as children’s, illustrated and picture books.

Happy reading!

Gallica Friday: Miss Lili & Azor

Gallica, the online search engine of the French National Library (BnF), is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Or maybe since the baguette. Gallica Friday highlights some of the fun, interesting, and curious things I found by happily clicking around Gallica.

“How Miss Lili helped her friend Azor.”

From Ecoutez-moi, a children’s book by Benjamin Rabier from 1905.

Books of the Year

I love lists, the internet loves lists, and December is the perfect month for list addicts. So here’s a roundup of best books of 2013 lists from major media outlets. My favorite is the first one, but each and every one of them suggests something new — enough to keep you reading well into 2014.

The Guardian asked writers and critics to choose the best books of 2013 (with more genre specific lists coming up.)

The FT has a very comprehensive list divided by genre.

As always, The New York Times chose 100 notable books and then the 10 best books.

The NPR‘s list is not just interesting but also very well designed.

As it usually does, The Times Literary Supplement asked writers to talk about their favorite books and what’s great is that there are quite a few translations.

And there’s more over at Slate, The Spectator, and Forbes with even more to come in the next few weeks. Do you have any favorite lists? Leave the link in the comments!

Modernism Lab

If you like modernist literature (Woolf! Joyce! Proust!), you’ll love this digital archive developed at Yale. Not only does it list many modernist texts by year with links to their online versions, it also traces the movement of several key writers from 1914 to 1926 and has a pretty informative wiki.

For instance, here’s what was happening 100 years ago in modernist land: the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time finally came out, Kafka published The Judgment, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion premiered in Vienna and then London, and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was performed in Paris in front of an outraged audience. Not a bad year all in all.

 

Children’s Books

Reading about this classic children’s books exhibit at the British Library has made me want to share some of my favorites. So here’s the first one:  Nikolai Nosov’s Neznayka — the story of light-headed Dunno/Neznayka and his group of friends, Gunky, Swifty, Bendum, Twistum and many others, who build a hot air balloon and go off on an adventure. Like most children’s books, it does have clear didactic purposes (in this case, Communist-sanctioned goals since it was written in Soviet Russia), but I can’t remember understanding it that way when I first read it as a child. It was just a very enjoyable read.

The drawings below are by A. Laptev from the Romanian edition (Aventurile lui Habarnam și ale prietenilor săi). The English translation, The Adventures of Dunno and His Friends, is available here.

Today Should Be International Mark Twain Day

Mark Twain would have been 178 years old today, says the internet, and such anniversaries are always a good reason to do a link roundup. (I wonder who keeps track of these things — is there someone, somewhere who constantly checks Wikipedia to see which anniversary is up next?) In any case, Mark Twain is one of the internet’s darlings, so there are many interesting articles, clips, photos, and archives. Here’s just a sample:

1. Mark Twain in His Times from the Department of English at the University of Virginia is an amazingly comprehensive archive. You could spend hours going through reviews, promotional materials, manuscripts, and pictures, so it’s a good thing today’s Saturday.

2. Excerpts from letters he received from his readers, chosen by Brain Pickings from Dear Mark Twain.

3. The sardonic notes he often made in the margins of his books: highlights from Open Culture and much more from the New York Times.

4. 10 Photos of him via Huffington Post.

5. And a rare film showing Twain with his family, shot by Edison in 1909, a year before the writer died:

Plus, as luck would have it, the second volume of his mammoth autobiography has recently been published, just as we’ve started making gift lists.

(Huck Finn ad from Mark Twain in His Times)

Gallica Friday: Jiu-Jitsu

Gallica, the online search engine of the French National Library (BnF), is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Or maybe since the baguette. Gallica Friday highlights some of the fun, interesting, and curious things I found by happily clicking around Gallica.

Le jiu-jitsu pratique, a textbook published in 1906 by the Paris city Police chief, Charles Péchard. It’s supposed to teach you no fewer than 100 ways to deal with a criminal, even if he’s armed. What else could you possibly need?

Thanksgiving Dog

Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1950. And many more pictures going back all the way to the 30s here.

5 Facebook Pages for Francophiles

Having followed several Facebook pages set up by French archives or history buffs for the past few years, I can say this much: they really do know how to use Facebook to attract readers and followers. And they don’t do it in any predictable way. They come up with fun contests or riddles (with no prizes), ask people to vote on their cover photos (again, just for fun), and sometimes feature discoveries made by their readers. So here are some of the best pages for Francophiles who want to learn more about French history while procrastinating on Facebook:

1. Gallica. I’ve been singing the praises of Gallica, the online catalog of the French National Library, since it was launched way back when, but it turns out that they’re also Facebook geniuses. A new amazing album will often pop up in your feed and distract you from all those pictures of babies or cats. And there’s a regular “Enigme du vendredi” feature where they ask readers to guess all kinds of things — which tends to be quite challenging but also lots of fun.

2. John D’Orbigny Immobilier. As the name suggests, this is actually a real estate agency. But the page hardly ever mentions their daily work. Instead, they have amassed an amazing array of photos. I don’t know how they do it. Clearly somebody who works there spends a lot of time scouring flea markets and the farthest corners of the internet. Would you like to see some pictures from Paris from 1870 to 1914?  Interested in Mata Hari? The 1937 Exposition? The Louvre during World War II? They seem to have everything and then some.

3. Paris Unplugged. This is the Facebook page for the website, where you’ll find more details on the photos they post and interesting vignettes on different areas of Paris and their history. That’s exactly what sets them apart: they give you a lot of context for pictures, so much so that you can probably become a tour guide just by reading what they post.

4. Ina.fr. Another official page, this time for the French National Audiovisual Institute (Ina). As you’d expect, they have a very wide range of videos, TV clips, and even old films. And they regularly highlight interesting videos you might not find on your own.

5. Archives départementales de la Manche. Much like Gallica, these Archives know how to make old pictures fun. They mostly focus on Lower Normandy, but it turns out it’s quite interesting.

Do you have any favorites? Would you add anything to this (very subjective) list?

(Photo of a bal populaire in 1914 via Gallica)

A Lego History of the Soviet Union

The moral of this Lego history of the Soviet Union for children? “Go kiss your mom.”