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

• Don’t judge a book by its cover: This website lets you read the first page of a book – if you’re hooked, click the reveal button to find out the title and author.
• Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort and his son-in-law Jared Kushner both have books out. Sparks are flying. Again.
• Inside the new trending gig economy: freelancers in Nigeria, and China are writing massive amounts of … Werewolf erotica for the US market.
• Want in? Here’s a course on how to write a werewolf bestseller.
• Speed reading has a cool new moniker – ‘Bionic Reading’ – but it’s still a scam.
• A storm is brewing: the four titans of corporate publishing are suing the Internet Archive for theft and ‘mass-scale copyright infringement’.
• Crypto bros want to reimagine books through the blockchain (because of course they do).
• Also, artificial intelligence programs are generating genre fiction now.
• Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk has been accused of classism and snobbery, after saying she writes her books ‘for intelligent people’ and that ‘literature is not for idiots’.
• Best job in the world? A luxury Maldives resort is hiring a ‘barefoot bookseller’ – applications are open for those wanting to escape to an island paradise surrounded by books for a year.
• Prince Harry has finished ‘writing’ his ‘juicy’ memoir, ie his ghostwriter has, and now everyone’s waiting for the big reveal: who’s in it??
• From heroin addiction to heroine addiction: How Jane Austen saved my life.
• Our brains are mush. Leading to multiple thinkpieces on how to fall back in love with reading. Maybe this one will work.
• And when you’re done reading that, take this quiz to find out which under-the-radar book you should read next.
• ‘DRM is bad news for our technological future’ – author Cory Doctorow explains why none of his books are available on Audible (and why Amazon owes him $3,218.55).
• This just in: the anti-ebook pearl-clutchers are right – reading on paper is linked to vastly superior achievement outcomes.
• Hey, we came across this tweet by someone we probably should have heard of, but hadn’t until that moment. *shrug emoji*
• And finally, the case of the acclaimed South African novel that ‘borrows’ from Samuel Beckett.

• Find our previous Footnotes here.

Image: regularguy.eth on Unsplash

Categories Fiction International Non-fiction South Africa

Tags Footnotes