10 Smart, Entertaining Beach Reads

No. 1 is Alexandria, Virginia

(NEWSER) - If you think America's bookworms live in New York or San Francisco, think again. Amazon has released its list of the country's 20 most well-read cities, and they hail from such states as Michigan and Florida, reports Reuters . Top honors goes to Virginia's Alexandria, and though Berkeley and Cambridge do indeed make the top five, they're joined by Ann Arbor and Boulder. Wait til you see who's sixth: More»

This list might be enough to make your head hurt

(NEWSER) - Great books can bring great joy—and, in a few cases, great big headaches. Listverse compiles the 10 toughest reads in literature:

• Finnegans Wake, James Joyce: If you thought Joyce would ride his way onto this list compliments of Ulysses, think again. Written partially in a made-up language of mindbendingly convoluted puns, this novel is often considered unreadable.

Marc Wortman thinks Google is partly to blame

(NEWSER) - Marc Wortman has several books he keeps meaning to get to, including the recent biographies of Steve Jobs (630 pages), LBJ (736), George F. Kennan (800), and Malcolm X (608). The problem is, he has a life, too, and unless he devotes hours every day to the task, he'll never catch up with today's "big" books, he writes in the Daily Beast . Who's got time to truly read all this stuff? he wonders. Modern publishers and writers seemed to have confused intellectual weight with literal weight. More»

'Mother died today' should be 'Today, Maman died': Ryan Bloom

(NEWSER) - Albert Camus' The Stranger opens with the famous—and relatively easy to translate—"Aujourd’hui, maman est morte." It's so easy, in fact, that not a single English translation has gotten it right, writes Ryan Bloom in the New Yorker . He argues that the precise wording of the first line has major implications on the way the reader perceives the narrator and protagonist, Meursault, and finds the translations to-date syntactically and emotionally off-key. Bloom walks readers through the line's evolution: More»

Henry David Thoreau's masterpiece goes digital; Jay-Z has game, too

(NEWSER) - Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden Pond to escape the comforts of modern life; soon, you'll be able to share his experience right on your flat-screen TV. Thanks to a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Southern California is developing a video game based on Walden, Thoreau's account of his time at the pond, the Guardian reports. It's intended to be a whole new kind of video game, "in which reflection and insight play an important role in the player experience." More»