1.
Confirmation that reading is really good for you...

Reading -- we're not surprised, are we? -- increases our imagination and our capacity for empathy; improves cognitive functions such as concentration, memory and sustained attention; reduces stress levels; and protects against ageing (by contributing to the bigger "cognitive reserve" that can stave off symptoms of dementia). In fact, people who are good at reading even have different brains...: "It’s worth considering what might happen to us as a species if skills like reading become less prioritised. Our capacity to interpret the world around us and understand the minds of others would surely diminish. In other words, that cosy moment with a book in your armchair isn’t just personal -- it’s a service to humanity." I knew it...



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2.
Ernest Hemingway, and taking the line of least resistance.

Could Harry C. Hindmarsh, an overbearing and unreasonable editor on the Toronto Daily Star, who became impossible to work for, "be credited with really jump-starting Hemingway’s outstanding career by driving him from the newspaper industry..."?

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3.
Elif Batuman's fascinating profile of Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman.

There are many ironies about this work. The 36-year-old Keiko, the titular protagonist, invites a weird and unappealing young man to share her flat, and her sister gets all enthusiastic about this apparent step towards normalcy... Which reminds Batuman "of a painful and half-articulated life experience of my own: specifically, the dawning realization, in my mid-thirties, that it isn't actually OK to be an unattached woman who cares too much about work. It makes other people anxious." It's extraordinary that we should still be saying this in 2025... But the other irony is that Murata had written nine books before this one; she too was 36, and had been working in a convenience store: "It's hard [in Japan] to make a living from 'pure literature' alone. Murata, who has a horror of being told how or what to write, preferred to keep working part time in a convenience store, as she had been since her student days at Tokyo's Tamagawa University... The work gave her a sense of connectedness, and a routine. She typically got up at 2 am and wrote until six, before working her shift from eight to one. Then she would write in a cafeteria until it was time to go home... 'I loved it,' she told me, in English, about the convenience store."

Asked what books had been important to her when she was a student, Murata named Albert Camus's The Stranger and Osama Dazai's No Longer Human, both of them 1940s novels about alienated outsiders: "Already in childhood, Dazai's narrator worries about being detected as a fake and expelled from humanity -- just like Murata's Keiko. When she read the novel in college, Murata told me, she thought, It's me."

Writing became an obsession for Keiko's creator around the age of ten, Batuman tells us: "She called it a church, and still talks about the process as a holy world governed by a light-filled entity she calls 'the god of novels'... Murata described junior high, when she was bullied, as particularly difficult. She had gotten through it by writing up to ten hours a day. 'As a child, many people told me to die. Maybe I was dead,' Murata said matter-of-factly. 'I survived through the power of the novel.'" I don't know which of those elements is the more extraordinary -- the threat (the kids literally used to tell their victims, "You deserve to die"), or the fact that she survived and managed to create.

Anyway, Murata's latest work seems to be developing some of the ideas in Life Ceremony. Definitely worth a look.



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4.
Another list of the 21st century's best books so far!

Literature in Spanish this time.

Again, I don't score well... I have one of these in my Purchased But Not Yet Read e-pile, and one on the Must Read list.

Another, by Mario Vargas Llosa, has now entered the MR list because the author has just died.

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5.
More recollections of Jewish family members caught up in the Nazi nightmare, this time by the author of Chris Arnade Walks the World.

Another story of the fates of antecedents, all the more fascinating because it leads us to Shanghai and Nanjing. Arnade's grandfather retained his German nationalism throughout his life, "yet he railed against the Nazi regime, which had destroyed his beloved Vaterland and murdered his brother Paul and other Arnade relatives solely for being of Jewish descent". (Nine of this family perished in concentration camps, while a tenth, though liberated, was too weak to survive.)



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6.
A reminder of the East Asian connections of Paris.

By Melanie Shi, this is a little run-down of the history and geography of the French capital as lived by those of "origine asiatique" (that "catch-all for having or appearing to have any East Asian ancestors"). When Shi comments, "Vietnamese immigrants often served as cooks for French families," and notes that "riz cantonnais" is actually a dish that these migrants invented and introduced, I was reminded of The Book of Salt by Monique T.D. Truong.