Blog Tour: Literary Facts with a QI Elf

I am very excited to bring to you today the last stop on the blog tour for 1,342 QI Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted! To celebrate the release of the book, Anne Miller, one of the QI Elves, has written us a list of some of her favourite literary facts, so take it away, Anne!

At QI we all have our favourite topics. One of my all-time favourite QI facts is that a baby puffin is called a puffling but I will have to wait until 2018’s Series P to lobby for a show entirely about those brilliant birds. However, I also love literary facts and in Series L, I had the chance to write a whole show about books in the form of the ‘Literature’ episode of QI.

In that episode we covered the fact that T.S. Eliot was one of the publishers to turn down George Orwell’s 1984. 1984 is also the book that people are most likely to lie about having read. There was also the fact that the phrase  ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ did not come from the Sherlock Holmes canon but instead from P.G. Wodehouse’s 1915 novel Psmith, Journalist.

This year’s QI book 1,342 QI Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted contains our favourite facts discovered in the last year. Some of my favourite literary ones include:

• Charles Dickens
 helped stop P. T. Barnum from moving Shakespeare’s house, brick by brick, to New York. 
• Pope John Paul II drew his own comic books. 
• The French for ‘airport novel’ is roman de gare, or ‘railway station 
novel’. 
• Thomas Jefferson kept a flock of geese to supply quills for his pens. 
• The Pencil Sharpener Museum in Logan, Ohio, has 3,400 pencil sharpeners. 
• Harper Lee, 
author of To Kill a Mockingbird, was an airline booking agent. 
• Woody Allen writes his film scripts on a typewriter he bought in the 1950s. 
• On a QWERTY keyboard
 a typist’s fingers cover 20 miles a day; on a Dvorak keyboard 
it’s only one mile. 
• Roald Dahl, Noël Coward, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Harry Houdini and Christopher Lee all 
worked as spies. 
• H. G. Wells was A. A. Milne’s maths teacher. 

Thank you for sharing this with us, Anne! If you're interested in finding out more about the QI Elves, you can follow them on Twitter here, and 1,342 QI Facts to Leave You Flabbergasted is out now!

Review: Ctrl, Alt; Delete: How I Grew Up Online by Emma Gannon

Name: Ctrl, Alt; Delete: How I Grew Up Online
Author: Emma Gannon
Publisher: Ebury Press
Date published: 2016
Rating: 4/5

Emma Gannon was born  in 1989, the year the World Wide Web was conceived, so she's literally grown up alongside the Internet. There've been late night chat room experiments, sexting from a Nokia and dubious webcam exchanges. And let's not forget catfishing, MSN, digital friendships and #feminism. She was basically social networking before it was a thing - and she's even made a successful career from it.

- From Goodreads.

How I Grew Up Online is an interesting discussion of difficult issues that can affect young people, such as self-image and how society today makes us very aware of how we look, especially with the media, and is written from a female perspective that shows how girls and women can be both negatively and positively affected by the online world.
I liked the sense of humour that Emma tells her stories with, when the story was not too serious in nature she made light fun of it, which I found quite entertaining. The book as a whole was not incredibly gripping in that it did not have me unable to put it down, but it was still an enjoyable read that brought forward some interesting points about intriguing topics.
I think Emma made a good point about how we have a big problem with abuse on the internet and how that makes it difficult, when people are determined to make hateful comments at you rather than become involved in a conversation, to discuss important and controversial topics, some of which she also discusses in the book, such as feminism and the difficulty in learning to be a feminist when the internet makes it difficult to make mistakes. The book also makes a good point about how, while it is not the be-all and end-all, the internet is still important and can be used for good.

Add the book on Goodreads | Author's website

My copy of this book was received from Maximum Pop Books as a prize from a giveaway.