Fortnightly Footnotes: Something New

Free audiobooks for Spotify subscribers, how to find first edition books, a poll to vote for next week's content, and more

Image by Kevin Laminto on Unsplash

Happy Friday everyone,

So as you can tell from the title I’ve decided to switch up the formatting of these Friday posts. From now on, Friday Footnotes is being replaced with Fortnightly Footnotes, which you (as you’ve undoubtedly surmised) will receive in your inbox every two weeks. On the Fridays between the Footnote posts I intend to publish something based on your vote in the poll at the bottom of each Fortnightly Footnote post.

I still plan on posting some bonus content on the occasional Tuesday as well.

Why the change? Well, for one thing this new publishing schedule is more conducive to my ever-shrinking amount of free time. But it’s also for you: voting for the kind of content you’d like to read let’s me gauge what readers want most while giving you some autonomy over the content you receive. Let me know what you think about this new format in the comments.

And now, here’s this week’s F¹o²r³t⁴n⁵i⁶g⁷h⁸t⁹l¹⁰y¹¹ Footnotes:

1. 📚: I recently finished The Temple of Dawn, the third book in The Sea of Fertility tetrology by Yukio Mishima. Honda, who was a periphery character in Spring Snow and a secondary character in Runaway Horses, finally takes center stage in the third book, where he is now a successful middle-aged attorney settling a corporate dispute in Siam (now Thailand). The first half of the book is part travelogue/part rumination on the theory of reincarnation—and to be honest it was basically white noise to me. The second half, however, is essentially Mishima writing in Philip Roth mode, as Honda obsesses over the body of a 19-year-old Thai princess and does everything in his power to see her naked—and it’s far more interesting.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ✰ ✰

2. 📰: I’m a new subscriber to

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

and enjoyed this post about the wives of Tom Wolfe, George Orwell, and Jorge Luis Borges and the helpful roles they played behind the scene.

3. 🎧: Spotify appears to be planning on providing subscribers with free audiobooks. This could be a power play against Audible’s grip on the audiobook market, or maybe Spotify wants to add more value to its services since the recent price hike. Or maybe both are true. In either case, I’m all for it.

4. 🎧: Open book repository Project Gutenberg has utilized A.I. to convert thousands of its books into audiobooks. Although a part of me isn’t thrilled with the idea of robots taking away narration jobs from real people, the truth is that there are so many books that would simply never become audiobooks because of production costs vs relative market value otherwise.

5. 🎞️—>📚: Here’s an interesting art project on hellomattstevens.com in which popular movies are re-imagined as vintage fiction book covers. Check it out here.

6. 📰: Attention book collectors—this Book Riot article on how to find first edition books is useful for us bibliophiles who want to build up our personal libraries.

7. 📰: And here’s another Book Riot article worth sharing with a really cool graphic that shows the number 1 rated books around the world according to country. And the number 1 book in the US isn’t what I thought it was going to be.

8. 📷: Bookshelf porn: I hope I’m able to afford/fit something like this into a home office at some point in the future. Really cool bookcase.

9. 📱: This isn’t exactly related to literature at all. I just thought it was the funniest ventriloquist act I’ve ever seen. And that’s not a sentence I thought I’d ever write either.

10. ✒️: Austin Kleon shows us how he makes his mini “zines” in this YouTube video:

11. 🗳️: Enough about what I like—let’s talk about what you’d like to see in your inbox next week.