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So, a couple months back, I posted a long look at Riffle, the new “Pinterest for Books.”
The other day, after blowing up on Bookish I went back into Riffle and played around a bit, adding some books I’ve read in recent months, and making a few lists—all with the goal of increasing my “Influence” score.
Yes, that IS how lame I am. But an Influence Score of 6 just seemed damn pathetic. I’ve since gotten it up to 16, mainly by creating lists of books—those I want to read (based on last week’s podcast), and books that I use in the “World Tour” section of my class.1
There’s no way this will replace GoodReads for me, but it can be fun to play with. (And the site is pretty slick looking. Much nicer than that Bookish disaster, the aesthetics of which are designed to appeal to exactly no one.) Although, to be honest, I’m using these in two different ways—I track everything I’ve read and want to read on GoodReads, and am using Riffle to make fun lists of books. (Although Kaija Straumanis’s lists are much more interesting. Especially that “Open Letter Books” one.)
Anyway, I just got a message from Gina Rodriguez, the World Literature editor at Riffle, with a special invitation for readers of Three Percent. Riffle is still in Beta mode, so you need an invite to join. I have a few personal ones that I’ve sent to people, but Gina sent me this link
which will allow 100 people to join.
So if you’re interested in checking this out, click there, then follow me and check out my lists. That way my Influence Score will go up, and I won’t have to cry myself to sleep at night. (At least not every night.)
1 There are three sections to my class: a section about the craft of translation (where we read Clifford Landers’s Literary Translation: An Introduction and David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, among others), a World Tour in which students read excerpts from influential authors from around the world and present on them, and discussion of six contemporary translations resulting in the class deeming one of them “The Best Translated Book of LTS206/406” (the sexiest title I could come up with). The World Tour usually blows their mind, since today’s college students are exposed to just a sliver of a fraction of a culture’s literature, and very few are well-read in literature from more than one country in the world. They might know a lot about Shakespeare and Latin America, but have never read anything from Scandinavia. So this “World Tour” helps expose them to all the varied greatness that is out there, and helps to build a bit of a mental map of what authors have influenced others, etc., so that they can see that “world” literature constitutes a field not a series of individual authors or literatures bound by language.
Reviewed by P. T. Smith
Though far from the most convincing reason to read literature in translation, one common side effect is learning of another culture, of its history. Within that, and a stronger motivation to read, is the discovery of stories not possible within. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
Despite cries that literature is dead, dying, and self-replicating in the worst way, once in a while a book comes along to remind readers that there’s still a lot of surprise to be found on the printed page. To be. . .
Reviewed by Allison Charette
“I was small. And my village was small, I came to know that in time. But when I was small it was big for me, so big that when I had to cross it from one end to the other,. . .
Reviewed by Christopher Iacono
A few weeks after moving into a farm house in the Welsh countryside, Emilie, an expatriate from the Netherlands, starts to think about her uncle. This uncle tried to drown himself in a pond in front of the hotel where. . .
Reviewed by Kaija Straumanis
Think back to the last adventure- or action-type book you read. Wasn’t it cool? Didn’t it make you want to do things, like learn to shoot a crossbow, hack complicated information systems, travel to strange worlds, take on knife-wielding thugs,. . .
Reviewed by Owen Rowe
In Aira’s Shantytown, while we’re inside the characters’ heads for a good portion of the story, the voice we read on the page is really that of Aira himself, as he works out the plot of the book he’s writing.. . .
Reviewed by Owen Rowe
Noir is not an easy genre to define—or if it once was, that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away; as a quick guess, maybe Silver Lake, Los Angeles, 1935. When two books as different as. . .
Reviewed by Katherine Rucker
Some time ago I read this phrase: “The page is the only place in the universe God left blank for me.”
Pedro Mairal’s short novel The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is more about these blank spaces than the usual full. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
“What if even in the afterlife you have to know foreign languages? Since I have already suffered so much trying to speak Danish, make sure to assign me to the Polish zone . . .”
So reads a typical aphoristic “poem”. . .
Reviewed by Jeremy Garber
If you somehow managed to overlook the 2012 translation of Andrés Neuman’s breathtaking Traveler of the Century (and woe betide all whom continue to do so), you now have two exceptional works of fiction from the young Argentine virtuoso demanding. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
