Footnotes, July 2019: 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 over the last month. Browse and enjoy!

Microsoft added to the endless number of reasons why you should buy physical books and not ebooks recently, shutting down its ebook store and taking away all your digital books content in the process. There’s a good story on this, with an appropriate headline, here.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is finally being filmed – for the small screen, courtesy Netflix. Details here.
Marianne Thamm has given her take on a book that has tongues wagging, Undercover with Mandela’s Spies by Bradley D Steyn and Mark Fine. It’s ‘not just a rollicking read full of testosterone-driven skop, skiet and donner, treachery and treason, it is also about a young white man’s gradual attainment of wisdom,’ she writes. The full review is here.
A wonderful South African writer who was born in India, Ahmed Essop, passed away last month. Read Angelo Fick‘s touching obituary here.
TC Farren has written a novel, The Book of Malachi, that counts as ‘an excavation of the darkest place in our species’. Yikes. Read an excerpt here and an interview with the author here.
It’s not just writers who can win awards – publishers can, too! Congratulations to Struik Nature‘s Pippa Parker, who recently received a Special Honorary Award by the South African Academy for Science and Arts. More on her gong here.
Ever heard of Singlish? It’s the very distinctive kind of English that Singaporeans speak. Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan‘s new novel, Sarong Party Girls, is written entirely in this dialect, and the author has posted a taste of it on her Facebook page, here.
You want excerpts? We have excerpts! From Foeta Krige‘s explosive book The SABC 8 here; from Tatenda Taibu‘s cricketing memoir here, and from The Enforcers, which is about Cape Town’s deadly nightclub battlegrounds, here.
Finally, a tip of the hat to Jennifer Malec, who is diligently reviewing Ali Smith‘s ‘seasonal quartet’ novels, which are a kind of real-time fiction in, well, real time. Read her reviews of Autumn and Winter here, and her review of Spring here. Just Summer to go, then, Jen!