#  Blog 

 



       ![Blog Header](/sites/g/files/omnuum3096/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/80books/files/blog.png?itok=17cj5n-L) 

 

 



 

 



  [### The Blog before the Book

 ](/blog/epilogue-81st-book) August 29, 2020 

 With the book now in print, I've closed the blog, which has been superseded by the new and improved chapters based on the original daily entries. Just for a nostalgic look back to the summer of 2020, and a foretaste of the book, you'll still see here a... 

 

 

   [### August 14: Judith Schalansky, "Atlas of Remote Islands"

 ](/blog/august-14-judith-schalansky-atlas-remote-islands) August 14, 2020 

 As we’ve seen this week, island-based writers have often drawn connections with islands elsewhere, imaginatively crossing vast differences of time and space. Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands (2009) goes so far as literally to draw an entire... 

 

 

   [### August 3: Songs of the Aztec Nobility

 ](/blog/august-3-mexico-songs-aztec-nobility) August 03, 2020 

 This week, we head northward to Mexico and Guatemala, where indigenous cultures continue to have a major presence. Some nine million people speak one of the many indigenous languages, chiefly Nahuatl or one of twenty-one Mayan languages, often with many... 

 

 

   [### June 22: The Hebrew Bible

 ](/blog/june-22-israelpalestine-hebrew-bible) June 22, 2020 

 The issues of imperial conquest and colonial rule that we’ve explored in sub-Saharan Africa have deep histories farther north as well. Throughout the past four millennia, the region of Israel/Palestine has seen particularly fraught conflicts between – and... 

 

 

   [### May 11: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

 ](/blog/may-11-london-virginia-woolf-mrs-dalloway-1925) May 11, 2020 

 After making his round-the-world wager with his friends at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg strides to his home at 7 Saville Row, several blocks away, to collect some clothes and his newly hired servant Jean Passepartout. Halfway there, he crosses the route...