Booksology Rebecca and I discussed this on the latest episode of our new podcast, Zero to Well-Read. We looked at a bunch of notable books from this year for a slightly different purpose. Rather than list the best books of the year, we tried to identify the books that we think are most likely to stick around. I’ll spoil it modestly, but the list will run out quickly.
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A personal tribute to Tom Stoppard
I try not to double this newsletter with Book Riot’s flagship newsletter. But I wrote yesterday about my own love for Tom Stoppard’s work, and I kept rereading him in the days after news of his death broke (Arcadia, everyone. Arcadia). So here’s a short thank you for those who may not have understood. Because if I were to do it again, I would be losing one of the greats.
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I didn’t know what I was there for. In 1997, I was in London for a week and one of my English professors suggested I go see this play by someone he really liked. I didn’t know anything about modern theater (and still really don’t). But I was a 20-year-old English major, and going to see a play about A.E. Huisman and Oscar Wilde seemed very much like “I’m an English major in London.”
came out from invention of love It involves at least two things. The first was my favorite living playwright. The second question is this one. “Is this what it would have been like to see a Shakespeare play in 1599?”
Tom Stoppard passed away this weekend at the age of 88. The only personal elegy that I can express here is my personal elegy as an uneducated person about contemporary theater, and I am by no means a Stoppard scholar. But I remain a fan. For me, it’s very simple. Tom Stoppard expressed exactly what I wanted to hear in spoken word. With a seemingly extraterrestrial erudition, a keen intellect, an insatiable curiosity, and a complete adoration of ideas and the people who have them, he brought play to the serious and intimacy to the intimidating (not paying to see them is a great regret in my life as a culture consumer). coast of utopia The whole thing: the whole day, costing several hundred dollars per ticket).
Bettors can write great obituaries. Some people gave interesting interviews. For those of you who don’t know Stoppard from Stop Sign, I can offer you a clip from the film adaptation of his rise to fame. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. If you’re still as fascinated and disturbed by this work as I am, then he was probably your favorite living playwright, even if you didn’t know it.
