The oldest surviving collection of riddles assembled in English is in the Exeter Book, copied around the turn of the first millennium CE. They were part of an extended English tradition of aenigmae and trick questions in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. - The New York Times
Thorsten A. Integrity (né Shayne Bushfield) of the trivia site LearnedLeague explains what he has to consider: Is this too hard? Too easy? Is it interesting? Is it accurate? Are there other ways to answer this question? Which part should be the question and which the answer? - Slate
Ever since the prize was first mooted in the early 1990s, many have wondered whether the prize is necessary, patronising, or even fair. A common position amongst its detractors is that the prize is sexist and discriminatory. - The Conversation
"A large community of TikTok users have carved out a corner called 'BookTok'. BookTok influencers are predominantly teenagers and young women, … (and) when a book catches on among users (a common hashtag on BookTok videos is #TikTokMadeMeReadIt), the real-world results can be impressive." - Publishers Weekly
The phenomenon of self-publishing is often linked to online book production methods. However, there is a much richer history of self-publishing that goes further back than its digital counterpart. - The Conversation
A reborn FWP might enable us to confront five of the more pressing problems afflicting America today, a quintet we might think of as The Five Nobodies. - USA Today
Joseph Moncure March's The Wild Party "doesn't seem very far from our collective desire, in 2021, to lose ourselves in a throng of sympathetic strangers — but it's also in touch with the undertow that makes that impossible." - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Poet Ghulam Mohammad Bhat: "In the last 30 years I have never seen this kind of suppression. ... There is silence everywhere, as if the silence is the best cure for our present crisis." - The New York Times
Writers flirting with the Substack idea would be better seen in footballing terms: they are probably going out on loan from their existing publishers, not transferring for good. - The Guardian
"Start with Pride And Prejudice and Dickens's A Tale Of Two Cities. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope. "On January 4 you will tell me what you have read and I will test you on it." - BBC
Why? Because the powers-that-be want more foreign professionals and tech workers to settle there — and foreign professionals and tech workers don't want to learn the notoriously difficult Finnish language. - The Guardian
Every year for the past six years Hepburn Penny has organized a Battle of the Books program that sees kids between the ages of eight and 18 ditch their video games and cellphones and commit to reading 10 books over the summer holidays. - CBC
The burst in digital borrowing has helped many readers, but it has also accelerated an unsettling trend. Books, like music and movies and TV shows, are increasingly something that libraries and readers do not own but, rather, access temporarily, from corporations that do. - The New Yorker
"'I'm going to kind of make it up as I go along, but I have some starting points,' he says. Aside from the novella, it will feature short stories, literary gossip ('as long as it's not defamatory') and writing about books – and film." - The Guardian
