Footnotes, December 2020: 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.

Here’s one for your 2020 bingo card: brilliant spec fic author Ursula K. Le Guin (RIP) has been solicited on social media to become an Instagram influencer for … leggings. To echo the Le Guin’s account’s response, “Oh social media”.
Freshly-minted author Steve McGowan – his memoir, Six Years with al-Qaeda, is turning into a best seller in South Africa – answers twenty questions about his life, times and favourites in this poll.
Mary Trump is writing a new book! This time on ‘America’s National Trauma’. Hmmm… we predict a doorstopper longer than Barak Obama’s 700-pager.
Author Maaza Mengiste, who just missed out on the Booker Prize this year for her novel The Shadow King, nonetheless received 2020’s best email, when she learned she had won The Hooky Booker, created by readers in an Oxfordshire village that still has a working brewery.
After disappearing without a trace, the South Africa Sunday Times Literary Awards <a href=”https://twitter.com/BooksLIVESA/status/1333714900468846594″>appear to be back! This is good news, even though they should’ve clued us in on what was happening, né.
Erm, they found books worth £2.5m – including first editions of Galileo and Isaac Newton (!!!!) – under a house in Romania. It’s all apparently related to
the Clamparu crime group. You’ve heard of the Clamparu crime group, haven’t you? Very literary crime group, that.
What has COVID-19 lockdown been like in the tonier parts of Cape Town, South Africa? Byron Loker presents his observations.
Finally, here are the best books of the year, scientifically compiled by one of the algorithms that rules the world. (And here’s a non-algorithmic list of two, if you like novels: see the aforementioned The Shadow King, plus Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet.)