Footnotes, December 2021: 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.

Anne Rice, author of Interview With the Vampire, has died aged 80. Read Rolling Stone’s fascinating extended interview with the bestselling gothic novelist, from 1995.
‘I believe that writing also has to show what can be otherwise.’ Watch Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize lecture.
Still have your copies of your kid’s Harry Potter books? We hope so. A first edition recently sold for $471,000 in the US at auction – a world record for a 20th century work of fiction.
The first review of Yewande Omotoso’s new novel An Unusual Grief is in – and we’re excited.
Depressingly, Siya Kolisi’s book Rise, one of the fastest selling books in the country since its release in September, is still not available in local libraries.
Even more depressingly, former president Jacob Zuma’s ‘tell-all’ book Jacob Zuma Speaks has sold out, receiving over 2,000 pre-orders, according to his daughter, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla. Sales of the book will go towards paying Zuma’s legal fees.
As the end of the year approaches, it’s time to get your literary affairs in order. Take a leaf of of the book of a former high school student in Minnesota, who sent a $100 bill to the school library last week – 64 years after losing a book. Or, in Illinois, the repentant patron returned a book he had taken out 49 years earlier.
If you’re feeling daunted at the mere thought of a new year’s resolution, take heart from the story of this 104-year-old woman, from a small village in India, who has recently learnt to read.
If December is your downtime, here are some recommended reads – the 40 favourite books of Ernest Hemingway.
Free ebooks your thing? These are the books that will be coming into the public domain in 2022.
Is Superman Circumcised? A study of the superhero’s Jewish influences ‘beat off stiff competition’ to come first in this year’s Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year.
Singer-songwriter John Legend has branched out into book publishing, ‘to build platforms for diverse voices that deserve to be heard’.
HarperCollins has confirmed it will no longer publish a planned book by Chris Cuomo, who was fired by CNN recently, amid an inquiry into his efforts to aid his brother, Andrew Cuomo, the former Governor of New York, during a sexual harassment scandal.
PEN International, the largest worldwide writers’ organisation, is celebrating its centennial this year.