Maureen O’Connor, “Barnes and Noble Sets Itself Free” (The New York Times)

“Bookstores, in Mr. Daunt’s view, are fundamentally different from other retail businesses, partly because of the range and variability of the products. Under his leadership, local managers are given a free hand, meaning that the Upper West Side store may offer a shopping experience quite different from the one in Spanish Fort, Ala.”

Joel Miller, “All the Horrifying Things We Do to Books” (Miller’s Book Review)

“More recently, when Penguin UK asked readers what horrifying things people do to books, most of the answers were predictable: cracking the spine, dog earring the pages, underlining and highlighting, writing in the book, leaving in the sun, and so on.

I hadn’t considered a few of the suggestions, such as reading with sticky fingers (nasty), but some of these supposed crimes are beloved practices for me. No, I never use bacon rashers as bookmarks (something de Bury would also abhor), but I do write in my books all the time. I’ve also stained more than a few with coffee. Can’t seem to help it. One person’s atrocity is another’s attraction.”

Lucy Austen, “What Has Faith to Do with Biography?” (Current)

“Possibly there is no better model for biography than the Bible. There it is perfectly plain that a true understanding of the world is not to be gained by pretending that things are other than what they are. If there is good, let it not be exaggerated. If there are evils, let us see what they are, and if we will, let us bring to bear upon them the light of a Biblical faith, but let us not operate as though they simply did not exist and therefore need no redemption.”

Paul Grimstad, “Confessions of an Audiobook Addict” (The New Yorker)

“The audiobook’s ascent into full-blown aesthetic autonomy came with the arrival of the iPod and its MP3 file format in 2001, and, as of 2023, more than half the U.S. population has listened to an audiobook (in Sweden, they outsell hardcovers). And, although it is tempting to evaluate audiobooks against the benchmark of physical books, they are really an entirely different thing. Of course, you’re not free to casually reread, paragraph reset, glance at the index, flip the book over to scan the insipid blurbs, or all the other desultory nonlinear things we do with books. And the tempo is fixed, though not entirely; you can set the speed at quarter increments, which gives a range of choices, from the soporific lowest setting, .25x, to the caffeinated upper end, at 2x. And audiobooks are not at all the same thing as a podcast. The latter are often messy, warts-and-all conversations, with all the ‘ums,’ ‘likes,’ laughs, and snorts left in, whereas an audiobook is a polished, edited, artificial production.”