Quickly: Links I Love

I keep running across articles this week that have me frantically adding to my TBR. It's such a great time of year for Internet writing. Here are some of the things that caught my eye this week. I share them here to both remind myself of them and to make sure you saw them too.

The Millions Year in Reading is perhaps my favorite end of the year round up, and this year seems especially good. Yelena Akhtiorskaya's entry achieved the rare trifecta. After I finished, I tracked down copies of both books she mentions, neither of which I had ever heard of, The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf and Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Victor Shklovsky, via my library and moved her debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase up my TBR. It was recently named a 2014 New York Times Notable Book, and I'm even more excited to read it now. It was already one of my favorite covers of the year, even though I try to wait to evaluate covers after I've read the book. Great cover art is wonderful--but if it doesn't fit the book, it's not worth it.

Elena Ferrante seems to be everywhere. The third novel in her Naples series (a fourth will be translated into English and published next fall), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is showing up on seemingly every Best of 2014 list (including the New York Times Notables.) It was enough to finally push me into starting the series, so I was excited to snatch up its first book, My Brilliant Friend for Kindle for only $2.99. Then I read the New York Times article about her mysterious identity: "Behind Feminist Potboilers, a Secret Identity." (Also: fantastic article title. While I respect (and begrudgingly admire her secrecy), I do hope she has left instruction for revealing her identity upon her death (or at some point.)

Curtis Sittenfeld, my future bff (she just doesn't know it yet--and I mean that in a totally non-creepy way), wrote a fabulous piece about Twitter. She's one of my favorite tweeters, and this sentence nails exactly what I love about Twitter--and why I turn to it at moments of national crisis and breaking news: "Twitter makes you like people you don’t know, and Facebook makes you dislike people you do."

As an affiliate, I receive a small commission when you make a purchase through any of the above links. Thank you for helping to support my book habits that bring more content to this blog!