The Browser - Books Away

On Sundays, Browser readers receive a special edition with puzzles, poems, books, charts, music and more - plus selections from our decade-plus archive of the finest writing on the internet. Here's a taste of this week's edition.

Interview Of The Week

Sophie Roell On Books

Sophie Roell is the co-founder and editor of Five Books, which, as you doubtless already know, is the best thing to have happened to reading since the invention of moveable type. Five Books began life as a section of The Browser in 2009 before taking wing in 2011 as an independent website and newsletter where authors and experts talk about their favourite books.

Authors and topics discussed in Sophie's conversation with Uri Bram, publisher and CEO of The Browser, include Jerry Coyne, Lev Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Eka Kurniawan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Orlando Figes, history, geopolitics, dog food, body language ... All human life is there. Read the whole thing. It's a delight.

A few extracts:  

Sophie on her reading habits: "Some books I really read properly word for word and some I just skim and everywhere in between. So I’ve certainly read – I’ve certainly skimmed and looked at – about seven books a week and I’ve been doing this for at more than a decade, so you do the math"

Sophie on long books: "You can read a thousand-page history book quite quickly because you are saying to yourself, 'I want to find out what this book is arguing or what it’s saying'. It’s not like reading a novel where you have to read every word to get into the story and enjoy it. History books are about extracting information and finding out what the argument is. You can read a thousand-page history book in a couple of days because you’re not reading every word"

Sophie on Five Books: "We do interviews about books. People recommend books, but they also explain what is important about them, what is significant ... When people write about books, they write in the third person, they use all these weird words. Whereas in conversation, they say just: I absolutely love this book! And that’s actually what you want to know"

Again, read the whole thing

Chart Of The Week

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Everything correlates with everything else: it is all a matter of degree. In the social sciences, the last resort of a desperate researcher is often to claim a meaningful correlation between the phenomenon under investigation and the local weather. This chart, based on a survey of almost 300 recent academic papers, finds prevailing levels of rainfall being used to part-explain almost every human activity from employing servants (bottom right) to breastfeeding babies (top centre)

Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Sylvia Bishop, Assistant Publisher; Jodi Ettenberg, Associate Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director

Editorial comments and letters to the editor: editor@thebrowser.com‌‌ | Technical issues and support requests: support@thebrowser.com‌‌ | Or write at any time to the publisher: uri@thebrowser.com

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