BookMarks

📖 John Updike

“My father’s tears had used up mine,” John Updike writes in “My Father’s Tears,” one of his final works of fiction in The New Yorker. Published in 2006, the story, which encapsulates much of a lifetime, is infused with details drawn from the real life of Updike’s dad. Read it here: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/YkAndv

📖 Orhan Pamuk

"Here we come to the heart of the matter: I’ve never left Istanbul – never left the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood."

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk describes his book 'Istanbul', that documents the first 22 years of his life, as half biographical, half essay. Born on 7 June 1952 in that same city, Pamuk was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature with the motivation: "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

Watch him read an excerpt from his book 'Istanbul: Memories of a City': https://bit.ly/2zf0CNV

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What happens when a society stops reading, stops questioning, and stops thinking for itself? 🔥

Fahrenheit 451 imagines a future where books are outlawed, ideas are feared, and “firemen” are tasked with burning knowledge rather than protecting it. At the centre is Guy Montag, a man who begins to question the world he has spent his life serving.

What makes the novel endure is not just its vision of censorship, but its warning about distraction, passive entertainment, and what can happen when people slowly stop engaging with the world around them.

More than 70 years later, many of the questions Bradbury raised still feel strikingly relevant, wouldn't you agree?