What is a book? What can it be? How should we read? Who should be reading? These are all questions that are addressed in this edition of the Weekly, which should certainly appeal to the bibliophiles, although perhaps not those of a more conservative bent.
In the leading review article, we look at the impact of not just ebooks, but new "apps", which allow readers to interact with the text in entirely new ways, from flicking to a family tree of the Tudors and Yorkists in Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall, to throwing tarts at the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. As I said while standing in the midnight queue for the last Harry Potter - well if it gets people excited about reading, that's great.
But there's a time and a place, and a text, for each sort of reading, and we consider a different approach with writer Patrick Kingsley, also in the review section. First came "slow food", now it's "slow reading" - really disappearing into a book and savouring every word, just like I used to do as a child when my mother was calling me to help with the washing up.
There's even more about books: in Texas of all places they're now sentencing offenders to read books as an alternative to prison, and our leader considers the changing world of publishing, concluding that
There's still plenty of space, however, for more traditional news, and it's been a bad week around the world for weather. The paper leads with the devastating floods in Pakistan, where there's great concern about the slow response of the authorities, particularly relative to that of hardline religious groups. In Russia, meanwhile, a heatwave has helped huge wildfires take hold, while also cutting a greate swathe from the expected wheat harvest, and in Niger drought has left 80% of the population in serious danger of hunger - even though there's plenty of food in the markets.
But looking for good environmental news, some was found in a Scottish field, with the discovery of tadpole shrimps, creatures that haven't essential changed in 200m years, giving them the oldest pedigree of any known animal. And on the science pages we look into cordgrass and wiregrass - two tough inhabitants of the Lousiana coastal marshes. How they're able to stand up to, and recover from, the BP Deepwater oil spill, will be a major factor in its longterm impact.
And looking to a different sort of preservation, we have a profile of Farida Mohammad Ali, an unlike torchbearer for the ancient Iraqi art of maqam, in which a singer, like a proponent of jazz, emphasises improvisation within an established framework.
I hope that you enjoy this edition: do feel free to leave any thoughts about it in the comments.
Quote of the week: Rwandan presidential candidate Alvera Mukabaramba on the incumbent and rival: "Beating [Paul] Kagame is almost impossible. He has done so well for this country, rebuilding it from scratch after putting an end to the bloodiest page in our history."
Fact of the week: The groups coming together to form UN Women, the new agency starting in New York in January, have a total of 284 staff. Unicef now has 7,200, UNDP 3,300 and UNAids 900.
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