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In his review of Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library Ritchie Robertson notes that Hitler owned 16,000 books but wonders if he bothered to read any of them.

Hitler’s library is most remarkable for what it didn’t contain. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are absent, confirming the suspicion that Hitler knew them only at second hand…The other striking absence is literature. According to Oechsner, Hitler owned all the Wild West adventure stories by Karl May, all the detective fiction of Edgar Wallace, and many love stories by Hedwig Courths-Mahler (a German Barbara Cartland), but nothing that could send the imagination along unfamiliar tracks. Hitler’s mental world seems to have had no place for imagination. Instead, he relied on a naive conception of science, on which he claimed that National Socialism was based.

Do you lose consciousness when you attempt to read Jane Austen? Can’t…focus…too many…whatyoucallem…words…looking for husbands…zzz. Here’s something for your attention span: Pride and Prejudice rendered as a series of Facebook updates.

Jeanette Winterson visits the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company (It’s not the same Shakespeare and Company that’s in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, but the one in Before Sunset). The shop gives food and shelter to struggling authors who don’t mind sharing their bed with the cat. If the cat’s still there; these snapshots were taken three years ago. Sure the place needs serious vacuuming but who cares about dust mites when you’re surrounded by great literature? A-choo.