Have you ever lied about read­ing a book? Well, if so, you’re hard­ly alone. Accord­ing to The Guardian, 65% of peo­ple polled in a sur­vey admit­ted to hav­ing made such a lie. And what books did they claim to have read? George Orwell’s 1984 ranked #1. Then the order went some­thing like this: Tol­stoy’s War and Peace, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Bible. 

I was remind­ed today that 1984 was first pub­lished 60 years ago. You can get the 60th anniver­sary edi­tion here, or you can always down­load a free, high qual­i­ty audio book from Archive.org. And, for more free audio books, vis­it our large col­lec­tion.

Fol­low us on Twit­ter here…

Here’s a handy way to weath­er the reces­sion with your intel­lect and pock­et book intact…

In this very down econ­o­my, you can keep feed­ing your read­ing habit by book swap­ping. Yes, that’s right, book swap­ping. What goes on here is fair­ly straight­for­ward. You give away books that you’ve already read. In exchange, you get books that you want to read. And the cost (aside from ship­ping fees) is zero. Plus you’ll save more than a few trees.

On the web, you’ll find two major online book swap­ping ser­vices. The first is PaperBackSwap.com. The sec­ond is Book­Mooch. You can learn more about each ser­vice (respec­tive­ly) here and here.

We not­ed last week that New York­er writer Adam Gop­nik has just released a new book, Angels and Ages, which exam­ines the unique stamp that Dar­win and Lin­coln placed on our mod­ern times. Thanks to The New York Times, you can now read the first chap­ter of Gop­nik’s book for free. It will give you a feel for his writ­ing, which nev­er dis­ap­points. As a quick aside, I should men­tion that the Times has a sec­tion called First Chap­ters. It gives you free access to the first pages of many new and impor­tant books. A good resource to keep your eye on.

Sad news. John Updike, one of the most pro­lif­ic authors of the last half cen­tu­ry, has died at the age of 76. The cause was appar­ent­ly lung can­cer. Get the obit here.

In Novem­ber, Updike pub­lished The Wid­ows of East­wick, a sequel to The Witch­es of East­wick, the best­seller he wrote back in 1984. On his book tour, he stopped in for an inter­view with Michael Kras­ny, here in San Fran­cis­co, and they cov­ered a wide range of issues — witch­es, sex, squir­rels, oak trees, Rab­bit Angstrom, his most famous char­ac­ter and how he died, and more. You can lis­ten here.

Added Con­tent:

As you prob­a­bly know, Updike was a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor to The New York­er mag­a­zine since 1954. Today, they’re high­light­ing a few of his pieces, includ­ing a 1960 reportage on Ted Williams’ last game, a short sto­ry called Here Come the Maples (1976), and a 2006 essay called Late Works, which looks at writ­ers and artists con­fronting the end.

You can read oth­er archives of Updike con­tent at The Atlantic, The New York Review Of Books, and The New Repub­lic. (Thanks to the Dai­ly Dish for point­ing these out.)

Also, for good mea­sure, we’re adding a lengthy clip from 2006, which fea­tures Updike read­ing from his post 9–11 book, The Ter­ror­ist: A Nov­el.