Learn about your favorite books and authors with The Curious Reader from Mental Floss

If you’ve ever revisited one of your all-time favorite books and wondered what the story behind getting it published was or why an author chose to go in a direction they did, you might be what Mental Floss would consider a “curious reader.” And if this does apply to you, you’re certainly in luck. A new book all about books is headed to a shelf near you, as Mental Floss is getting ready to release their new collection of book-related facts, The Curious Reader: A Literary Miscellany of Novels & Novelists.

The book is edited by the Mental Floss Editor-In-Chief, Erin McCarthy, along with the Mental Floss team, and it blesses us with little-known facts about some of the most famous books and the writers behind them. Want to know the secrets behind A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, or Little Women by Louisa May Alcott? How about The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien or Outlander by Diana Diana Gabaldon? If you’re a lover of books and don’t check out The Curious Reader, you’ll be missing out.

Look over some of the awesome pages below and see for yourself just how many interesting tidbits The Curious Reader reveals.

A book that’s a personal favorite of mine, Giovanni’s Room by the late and great James Baldwin was once so controversial, publishers told Baldwin to burn the manuscript upon reading it.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is another one near and dear to my heart as someone who grew up with a mom who absolutely adores this story. Did you know the book was published under a man’s name?

If you want to learn even more about what’s in the book, Erin McCarthy was gracious enough to share her favorite facts from The Curious Reader with Culturess below:

"1. After Mary Shelley’s husband died, she kept his heart, which she wrapped in a silk shroud.Hair jewelry and other memento mori were popular in the 1800s, but Mary Shelley took it to a whole new level. When her husband Percy was cremated, his heart didn’t burn, and it eventually made its way to Mary. I think it says a lot about their love and the grief she must have been experiencing that she took it with her pretty much everywhere. It wasn’t buried with Percy’s other remains until after Mary herself died.2. Herman Melville was obsessed with his chimney—so obsessed that he actually wrote a short story about it (it was called “I and My Chimney”).This is just the kind of weird fact I love. Maybe you know that Moby-Dick was based on a real story, or you can quote the opening line, but this is probably a fact that most people—Melville-heads aside—have never heard before. And while everyone has a favorite feature of their home, I don’t know that everyone goes the extra mile of writing an ode to that feature the way Melville did. After Moby-Dick flopped, Melville was forced to sell the house to his brother, who actually painted lines from “I and My Chimney” on the chimney itself. Bizarre and delightful all around!3. Someone—no one knows who—added a penis to one of the illustrations in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which nearly derailed its publication (and could have ruined Mark Twain’s reputation).This is just a fascinating piece of literary trivia made all the more fascinating by the fact that exactly who drew the offending appendage remains a mystery. The books that had been sent out had to be recalled and publication was delayed while they did another print run.4. Before she made it as a writer, Octavia Butler worked a number of jobs to make ends meet—including a stint as a potato chip inspector.I find this fascinating because I didn’t know “potato chip inspector” was even a job before working on this book. And frankly, potato chips seem like the last food in need of any kind of inspection, which immediately prompted a lot of questions for me: What makes a chip good or bad? What happens to the chips that don’t pass inspection? Do the inspectors get to eat them? (Then I spent a lot of time on Google looking for answers.) Beyond that, it’s inspiring to learn the lengths people will go to in pursuit of a dream—Butler was basically working jobs that didn’t require imagination so she could put all of her creativity into her writing. She would get up in the wee hours of the morning to write before she went to work and wrote herself motivational notes, including one that read “I am a Bestselling Writer. I write Bestselling Books … So Be It! See To It.” And she made it happen! What a badass.5. Shirley Jackson used to tell people she was a witch and even said that she had broken a publisher’s leg using magic.Another weird and delightful fact. Some believe this may have been a publicity tactic on Jackson’s part, and if so, it’s genius. I might even try using it."

McCarthy and her team at Mental Floss clearly put serious passion into this book, and I cannot wait to check it out! The Curious Reader: A Literary Miscellany of Novels & Novelists will be released on May 25, 2021. Pre-order it with the link here.