Reviews and News:
Luca Iaconi-Stewart has spent nearly a decade building a Boeing 777 out of manila folders. Why? He’s not exactly sure, but it’s amazing: “What began as a school project years ago has morphed into an oft torn apart and then rebuilt model.”
A 2008 book by a University of Toronto professor on the Allied bombing of Germany is a surprise Amazon bestseller. Its title? Fire and Fury. “It’s not my fault people can’t tell the difference between a book about Trump and a book about the bombing of Germany.”
The Swedish Academy makes nominations and deliberations for the Nobel Prize public after 50 years, and apparently Graham Greene nearly won in 1967: “Greene was supported by the committee’s chairman, Anders Osterling, who called him ‘an accomplished observer whose experience encompasses a global diversity of external environments, and above all the mysterious aspects of the inner world, human conscience, anxiety and nightmares’. Osterling had doubts, writes Kaj Schueler, about the two Latin American authors, calling Asturias ‘too narrowly limited in his revolutionary subject world’, and Borges ‘too exclusive or artificial in his ingenious miniature art’.”
David Bowie at the end.
A closer look at “man flu”: Men may actually feel worse when they get sick.
Books published in Ireland now eligible for the Man Booker.
Essay of the Day:
In The New Statesman, Nicholas Shakespeare writes about the metaphysics of fishing:
“I didn’t fall in love with fishing until I was 30. One September afternoon in Scotland, an old schoolfriend, Nick, rigged up a rod and walked me to a sluice gate near Golspie. Salmon can be kind to learners. On my third cast I hooked one. The tug on the line had the firmness of a handshake, and was a reminder of the hand in my favourite childhood legend, finning up from the riverbed to catch a sword. The passing of Arthur was the first thing I read that caused me to burst into tears.
“That five-pound handshake at the sluice gate welcomed me to a world I had previously wandered through with eyes half-closed. I began at last to understand Nick – someone I’d known since I was 12, but had not fathomed until the moment of my own induction. When he plopped his line into the unknown he was trading in mystery, or what psychologists might call a water-based religion. For Nick, I realised, the world was cast afresh each day he fished; each cast a personal prayer.
Photos: Snow in the Sahara
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Three Arrows”
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