Footnotes, January 2023: Book links from around the web

At The Reading List, we’re trainspotters when it comes to interesting book links, and here are a number that caught our eye.

Egyptians are being offered loans to buy books as inflation soars – with book prices more than doubling, some Egyptian authors say they have cut back on characters and descriptions to be more economical in their writing.
Can TikTok save books? With more than 100 billion views, #BookTok is one of TikTok’s most popular hashtags – and teens are flocking to bookshops.
Brittle Paper’s 61 Anticipated African Books of 2023.
Did you love Daisy Jones & the Six? The trailer for the movie adaptation is out!
This week is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Colette – the most beloved French writer of all time – and to mark the occasion, a new translation of her twin masterpieces has been announced.
Monuments, symbolism and reconciliation – The Boer Invasion of the Zulu Kingdom: 1837-1840 by John Laband is a book that presents the less-familiar Zulu perspective as they grappled with the existential threat of the Boer invasion.
The People Who Don’t Read Books – the Atlantic explores the smugly solipsistic tenor of this cultural moment.
If Vaporwave was a book – the covers that Lorraine Louie designed for the Vintage Contemporaries series in the 1980s were surreal, stylish, and like nothing else on the market.
A children’s classic with a refreshing lack of lessons – fifty years after its publication, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day continues to delight.
Has academia ruined literary criticism? The New Yorker investigates.
Some good news. Nearly six months after he was brutally attacked, Salman Rushdie is recovering and releasing a new novel, with the literary world rallying to his side.