Footnotes, January 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.

Remember how Stacey Abrams, the political activist from Georgia who helped Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win in 2020, is also a romance novelist called Selena Montgomery? Remember how she also ensured senate wins for the contested seats in her home state in January? This tweet sums up it all up for us.
Meanwhile, War Horse author Michael Morpurgo is caught up in the endless British culture skirmishes that the tabloids invent and then feed upon, because he didn’t put Iago in one of his children’s books. Right-wing Brits are almost as bad as right-wing Americans.
There’s a long-running debate – inside our head, at least – on whether the world is enduring a Pax Russiana or in fact a Pax Russica. Either way, it’s one or the other, right? And there’s a new book on this unpleasant reality that you should take a look at: AMERICAN KOMPROMAT by Craig Unger.
To our knowledge, no one has put Bernie on a book cover yet, so we did (above).
Did you know that before Andy Warhol was Andy Warhol, he was Andrew Warhol? Who illustrated a cookbook? It came out in 1961 and the Scotland National Galleries has a copy. It looks … unappetising … is all we’ll say (but we wish we had a copy).
Some former spokespersons for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign are using the most illiterate real-life Zoom backgrounds imaginable.
Ursula K. Le Guin is appearing on a US postage stamp soon! Hooray!
Game of Thrones miiiiiiiiiiggghhtt be completed this year. Who knows, though?
This short video of Umberto Eco walking through his extensive library to find that one book is quite mesmerising.
Re-watch Amanda Gorman’s incredible reading, at the Biden-Harris inauguration, of her poem “The Hill We Climb”, and learn about the two books she has coming out later this year, right here.