brainylady

Here's yet another story on the Oscar nominations, just in case you (like me) are oddly obsessed with it all: "The gods must be crazy."

The winner of the Whitbread literary award has been announced: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. The narrator of the murder-mystery story is a boy with Asperger's syndrome (a form of autism). I cringed a bit to read in the Guardian story that Haddon is "discussing a film of Curious Incident with a production company involving the star Brad Pitt." Anyway, another book for the list of must-reads.

There's lots of good reading in last weekend's Guardian Review, actually. (I've made that sound surprising, and of course it's not.) Two highlights:

1. The Guardian and Penguin Books held a contest to select new cover art (photographs) for four modern classics; one of the judges was Esther Freud (author of Hideous Kinky, great-granddaughter of Sigmund, daughter of Lucien), and she's written about the selection process: "Picture perfect". From there, you can look at the winners and runners-up.

2. Reading about editors thrills me as much as reading about good grammar. (A lot, in other words.) There's a nice long profile of Robert Silvers, tracing the evolution of the New York Review of Books, which he edits: "The writer's editor". How could I not love it? This is my kind of editor:

"There is only one story you need to know about Bob," says the writer Timothy Garton Ash. "Four o'clock on Christmas day: the family is gathered around the turkey, and the phone rings. It's Bob. 'Tim,' he says, 'How are you doing? On column six of the third galley, there's a dangling modifier.'"

(Plus I learned a new word from this article: bloviation.)

No time for knitting this week, but I'm hoping to have some time on the weekend. Happy Friday!