Here’s what it’s like to be an audiobook narrator.

I wouldn’t exactly call Gaudy Night an “overlooked” novel but that doesn’t mean I will turn up my nose at this appreciation of Gaudy Night and its heroine, my favorite character in all of literature, Harriet Vane.

So here’s the thing about My Favorite Murder. (Disclosure, I am not a true crime person so I do not have any motive to defend MFM except that many of my friends adore it.)

What to buy the children in your life this holiday season. There is so much truth in this post, especially the part about how children love office supplies.

WELP this is a horrifying article about the TV show Almost Family and how traumatizing it is for people who have actually found themselves in the sit this com purports to represent.

Petition to rename the Iron Age the Flax Age.

So a private equity firm has bought up the dot-org registry, which means that .org at the end of a website will no longer mean nonprofit. Eat the fuckin rich.

Courttia Newland talks about ways that white women demean and harass black men, largely depending on the stereotype of hypersexual black masculinity.

“When you order something from Amazon and you’ve worked inside Amazon, you wonder, ‘Hey, is ordering my package going to be the demise of somebody?’” On the (un)safety practices at Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses. A reminder that if you can avoid shopping at Amazon, it’s good to avoid it. They are very evil over there.

Government policy penalize disabled people for working or getting married.

This is a really amazing podcast, and I admire and respect Joey Clift so much for doing this. Native comedian Joey Clift was asked onto a podcast to talk about gross stereotypes of Native Americans in a video game. On Thanksgiving. He called the podcast hosts out on this.

I’m reliably in love with “these books are overlooked” lists, so I adore this Lithub round-up of the best overlooked books of the decade.

“In his fiction, marriage is a force intended to control women; in life, he acted as though marriage was intended to trap men.” On marriage and domestic companionship in Wilkie Collins’s life and fiction.

Some thoughts on how major African literary prizes are contributing to the work of canon formation. (This reminded me v much of Toni Morrison saying that canon building is empire building. Phew.)

Alejandro Zambra on learning English and writing for translation.

Black film critics are facing backlash for criticisms of Queen and Slim. Andre Wheeler talks to Clarkisha Kent and Angelica Jade Bastién about the phenomenon.

And that’s it for now! Have a wonderful weekend, and fill up your Christmas lists with the NPR Book Concierge recommendations!

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In an interview with The New Yorker, Zambra says this:

Those tests have multiple “authors,” but when we were kids we thought there was only one, a single God-dictator-author, who knew all the right answers and hid them. While I was writing the book, I thought a lot about how those exercises were, in a way, the opposite of literature. They teach you to put stories in order, for example, following some kind of fixed structure—from the abstract to the concrete, chronologically, from the general to the particular.

This all sounds very somber, and Multiple Choice is anything but. If there can be good, un-cynical parodies of dictatorships, Multiple Choice is one, and in a reading week where my brain was 90% blank terror for the future of our democracy and only about 10% available for processing words in books, it was a lighthearted read that didn’t feel like a cop-out from what’s happening in the world right now. Zambra is kidding on the round, because while dictatorships are absurd, their absurdity is a rhetorical disguise for the very real oppression they’re trying to get you to overlook.

For instance, the fourth section asks you to choose which sentences may be eliminated from a paragraph without damaging the meaning of what’s being said. Zambra launches into the story of a good man who didn’t mean any harm: Sure, the narrator acknowledges that he hated gay people and knew about the torture and disappearances, but so did everyone, didn’t they? And he was still fundamentally a good guy. Not a villain. One of the answer options lets you eliminate all the sentences that mention specific crimes, leaving only this:

(1) I was his friend, I was his pal. I knew him. And it’s not true what they say about him. Some things, sure, but not all of it. I care about what they say, it hurts. It’s as if they were talking about me.

(12) Whatever they may say of him, it’s easy enough to badmouth him now that he’s dead. But I would like you all to know that my friend isn’t all that dead, because he still has me, come what may. I’ll always defend him. Always, buddy–always.

TOO REAL, n’est-ce pas?

A government-controlled structure like the standardized test forces you to choose between a finite set of options, of which zero might make sense — but getting it right (for the government’s definition of “right”) will shape your future and the possibilities that will be open to you. I tried not to apply Multiple Choice too literally to America’s situation, even though I feel real damn dire. But one thing I took away from it, as I read headline after headline in supposedly liberal newspapers that refused to identify Steve Bannon as a white nationalist and anti-Semite, is that the words we use over the next four years are going to be everything. We can’t back away from the truth, no matter how ugly it is.

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