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Thursday, January 23, 2025

How We Misread The Great Gatsby, by Sarah Churchwell, New Statesman

If Fitzgerald would have been delighted to know that Gatsby would one day be acclaimed as an American masterpiece, he would probably find our hackneyed ideas about it disappointing. “I want to write something new,” Fitzgerald famously told Perkins when he started thinking about Gatsby, “something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” Most readers readily appreciate that Gatsby is extraordinary, beautiful and simple, while many scholars have mapped Gatsby’s modernism to show how new it was. Its intricate patterns can be harder to discern, however – especially beneath a century of accumulated cliché. Gatsby has not been set in amber, which might at least have reflected its rich and lambent peculiarity, so much as shrink-wrapped in plastic and slapped with stock labels.

Here’s Why So Many Books Now Have Colorful Edges, by Brianna Bell, Reader's Digest

Swipe through social media, and you’ll likely come across a content creator holding an exclusive-looking book, the ends of its pages spray-painted a striking color or stenciled with wild designs. “Go ahead,” it seems to scream, “judge a book by its cover.”

How Singapore Is Embracing Edible Insects, by Carolyn Beasley, National Geographic

“It tastes like sunflower seeds,” says Hoo Ee Ming, owner of the Grains & Leaf hawker stall in the basement of Singapore’s Golden Mile Food Centre, casually tossing a cricket in his mouth as if it were popcorn. Perched on a stool, I’m staring into a plastic container filled with the dried, deceased crickets, which Ming buys already de-legged, coated in salted egg flavouring.

Having grown up in a Western culture, the thought of sprinkling creepy crawlies on my salad isn’t exactly making my mouth water. But I gingerly pop a tiny cricket between my teeth. Nothing bad happens; there’s a satisfying crunch and the saltiness of the seasoning.

Why In The World Does This Creepy Fork Exist?, by Margaret Eby, Food & Wine

At first glance it looks like an ordinary fork — stainless steel, about seven inches long. You know, a fork. But when you look closer, you will notice that it is a fork with six tines, which is an unholy number. It is caught in the uncanny valley between fork and comb. It’s like seeing a clam with teeth.

The Gorgeous Inertia Of The Earth By Adrian Duncan Review – The Meaning Of Beauty, by Keiran Goddard, The Guardian

In its moral and philosophical sincerity, Duncan’s writing has more in common with authors such as Knut Hamsun or Peter Handke than with much modern fiction. It has been some time since I read something so serious, so solemn and so still. But in the turning world, such stillness is precisely the point. And as Bernadette writes in an early letter to Molloy: “When did we stop believing in the life within motionless things?”

The Grammar Of Angels By Edward Wilson-Lee Review – Spellbound, by Dennis Duncan, The Guardian

Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. “He wins one on,” as the Victorian essayist Walter Pater put it, his life having “some touch of sweetness in it”. An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels.