Usually you see a railway map from a local or regional perspective because it’s meant to show how you get from point A to point B. As an experiment, Zhaoxu Sui mapped major railways worldwide. It’s not comprehensive but still interesting to think about, in case you’re trying to get to China from Europe by train.
You can grab the full PDF version here.
Like many folks who were introduced to the writings of Leo Tolstoy through his novel War and Peace, I was, and remain, ambivalent about the Russian author. I found War and Peace a bit of a slog. However, I found Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich much more approachable. I recently ran across the fascinating recording below that was made at the author’s home in Yasnaya Polyana on October 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year later. In the remarkable series of recordings Tolstoy reads a passage from his book, Wise Thoughts for Every Day, in four languages: English, German, French and Russian. Tolstoy apparently translated the passage himself. The English version sounds a bit stilted. The words are hard to make out in the recording, but he says:
That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?
To celebrate 75 years of the National Book Awards, the National Book Foundation has launched the Summer Reading Adventure for adults 18 and older “to lean into the nostalgic, prize-filled fun of summer reading.”
Reading activities include visiting a local bookstore or library and asking for a recommendation; re-reading a favorite book from childhood; listening to an audiobook; reading a book in an unfamiliar genre; attending a literary event in person or online; and more.
Participants who complete any of the activities will be entered to win books, hats, ice cream, reusable water bottles, and more. Participants who complete all the activities will be entered to win the grand prize–a trip to New York to the National Book Awards ceremony November 20 with airfare, hotel, and two tickets included. Everyone who submits the Adventure online or via mail by August 31 will receive Bookshop.org and Libro.fm discount codes.
Information is available online in English, Spanish, and Mandarin as well as available in person at some New York Public Library branches in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The Foundation will share participants’ adventures on its social platforms, with most of the action on Instagram @nationalbookfoundation.
I’m hoping to get to see the manuscript treasures including Abraham Lincoln’s handwritten draft of the Gettysburg Address, a map from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and lyrics from The Sound of Music are among more than 120 items in the new Library of Congress exhibition Collecting Memories.
Opening June 13 as the inaugural exhibition in the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery in Washington, DC and on view through December 2025, Collecting Memories will explore how cultures preserve memory, including the role of the Library in preserving collective memories representing entire societies, important moments in history and individual lives.
The new gallery is devoted to ongoing exhibitions that showcase treasures from across the national library’s collections. It’s the first major component of a multiyear plan, known as A Library for You, to create a new visitor experience with new galleries, exhibitions and interactive spaces.
Highlights include:
“The stories told by these items still inspire and amaze, decades or even centuries after they were created,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who made a transformational lead gift of $10 million to support the visitor experience project, added: “I think it’s important to preserve America’s treasures because the human brain still operates more effectively when it sees something for real.”
I have been planning a road trip in Canada and was curious about First Nations food and restaurants. As things tend to go on the interwebs, what I did find was a great post about Native American restaurants around the U.S.. So if you’re planning a road trip check out this story about Native American restaurants on the Sweet Grass Trading website.
Folks who were fans of James S.A. Corey’s (aka authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck ) The Expanse, and Sci-Fi aficionados in general, can read the first chapter of an upcoming blockbuster titled Mercy of the Gods at the Polygon website.
Residents of Majorca want to end tourism to the island and re-establish control of their homeland.
“Quozl” was painted for the 1988 Alan Dean Foster novel of the same name. The novel tells the comical tale of the Quozl, rabbit-eared aliens who land on Earth to establish a settlement or “Fist Burrow.” The Quozle, like rabbits, reproduce at an alarming rate and have been forced to travel from their overcrowded home plant of Quozlene to colonize other planets…Quozl shows the moment in which a group of these aliens explore the dwelling of a typical Earthling family.
The image reproduced on the paperback book jacket stretches across the spine, so that the right-hand portion of the painting receives prominence as the front cover.
This is for all of you podcast fanatics and animal lovers.
If your household is anything like mine most evening include the question : “What are we going to watch ?” After becoming cord cutters, the question seems to come up more regularly than in the days of cable television when the shows and movies were spoonfed. An excellent new website offers simple solutions to the problem with listings for hundreds of vetted films and television shows.
A Good Movie to Watch offers a large and growing collection of movie and TV show recommendations curated by humans, not algorithms. Everything on this website will have at least a 70% user score (7/10 on IMDb for example), combined with a 70% critic approval score (on Rotten Tomatoes). “Every streaming service, every genre, every mood. Our team of experts meticulously pick the best for you, with new recommendations coming in all the time.”
On a gloomy night in July, 1893, Bram Stoker’s mysterious Count Dracula embarked on a clandestine journey from his Transylvania home aboard the ill-fated ship Demeter. Unbeknownst to the unsuspecting crew of the Demeter, a malevolent force lay hidden in the ship’s hold—a coffin filled with the cursed soil of Dracula’s homeland, concealing the vampire lord himself.
By the time the Demeter’s ghostly silhouette loomed over the shores of Whitby, it carried with it a cargo of death. The once bustling ship had become a floating tomb, with the captain, the sole survivor, lashed to the ship’s wheel in a desperate bid to maintain control over the vessel.
You can follow Count Dracula’s frightening trip from Transylvania to England for yourself on a new interactive book map of the novel. Dracula: The Map is a project by Morgan Bishop, which plots all the locations mentioned in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Using the ‘Character Routes’ drop-down menu you can select to view an interactive map of the journeys undertaken by each of the five main characters in the novel; Count Dracula, Jonathan Harker, his fiancée Mina Murray, Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing.
The arrival of the Demeter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula serves as an important piece the vampire’s story: the ship brings death himself to England. Stoker drew inspiration for his genre-defining horror novel from his time in Whitby, and the tragic 1885 fate of the real ship Dmitry on the town’s shore.
The death and tragedy around Stoker ultimately shaped the story that became one of the most famous pieces of English literature and set the stage for the next century of vampire lore.
During the summer of 1890, Irish novelist Bram Stoker vacationed at the seaside town of Whitby in northeast England. Despite spending only a month in the town, Stoker was enthralled by his surroundings: grand mansions and hotels lined the West Cliff while remains of the seventh century Whitby Abbey towered over the East Cliff. Nearby, the cemetery at the Parish Church also served as inspiration as the story of Dracula came to life.
Stoker was also fascinated by the many ships making harbor here. He reportedly visited the Whitby Museum to explore the history of these vessels. The author reportedly asked around the harbor about shipwrecks in Whitby, notably the Dmitry, a ship that had wrecked five years earlier.
The cargo vessel Dmitry had set sail from Narva, Russia in 1885. On October 24, the Dmitry was one of two ships run ashore at Whitby by “a storm of great violence,” according to contemporary newspaper accounts. The other vessel, the Mary and Agnes, was stranded in the raging sea and a lifeboat was sent to rescue its crew.
There were some aspects of the last voyage of the Dmitry that appear to have stood out to Stoker. The Demeter originated in Varna (an anagram for Narva, where the Dmitry originated), and similarly carried “ballast of silver sand, with only a small amount of cargo—a number of great wooden boxes filled with mould.”
In the novel, Dracula took the form of a dog to make his way from the Demeter to dry land, but there was no dog reported to have been on the Dmitry. In the novel, “The very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand.”
The dog, a disguised Dracula, wrought bloodshed and death from that point forward. This dog resembled the barghest, a mythical monster often associated with Yorkshire. Spellings and specific forms of barghest vary but the dog-like being foretold of pain, disaster, or even death to all who saw it. The barghest also elicited howling from dogs in its vicinity, something Dracula protagonist Mina Murray reported took place soon after the arrival of the Demeter.
The journey maps in Dracula: The Map were all created using Knight Lab’s popular StoryMapJS format.
In the past we’ve covered lots of book vending machine stories, but this one is surreal. The Muzu publishing house in Poland created three vending machines to dispense Polish translations of Haruki Murakami’s newest novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage. These vending machines will be set up in train stations located in Warsaw, Poznan, and Wroclaw Poland. The blockbuster book first came out in Murakami’s native Japan back in April 2013. Knopf, an imprint at Penguin Random House, will release the English language version, translated by Japanese literature expert Philip Gabriel, on August 12, 2014.
The train station connection to the novel is based on the main character’s job of designing railway stations in Tokyo.
Summer has arrived early in my little corner of the Western Hemisphere and with the wilting heat my thoughts turn to the far North. Coincidentally, the world’s largest and most northern national park is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Kalaallit Nunaanni nuna eqqissisimatitaq, or Grønlands Nationalpark) occupies nearly 30% of Greenland and is larger than Tanzania. In fact, the park is larger than 166 of the world’s nations. It is the northernmost national park in the world and the second-largest by area of any second-level subdivision of any country in the world, trailing only the Qikiqtaaluk Region in Nunavut, Canada.
Founded in May, 1974 and expanded in 1988 to protect nearly a million square kilometers in the northeastern part of the island, Grønlands Nationalpark has no permanent human population. It is also the least visited national park in the world.
Travel Between The Pages 