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The weather is heating up, and we’ve gathered up the coolest bookish, geeky, and crafty links for you! This week offered the opportunity to get sorted into the newest wizarding school houses as well as explore the online Prince museum.

All Things Bookish

Here’s a fantastic new essay by Cheryl Strayed.

These books show the unfortunate side effects of superpowers.

Invite your friends to a silent reading party.

Enjoy these YA novels this summer.

All Things Geeky

Sonic the Hedgehog is a metaphor for the internet.

Are superhero movies the new Westerns?

Dive into the Prince online museum.

Sort yourself into the new American wizarding school houses.

All Things Crafty

Try out some of these organizational tips.

 Craft a paper mushroom!

 The Fourth of July might be over, but you can still whip up this patriotic poke cake.

I'm waiting to see if something outlandish happens before the end of the Republican National Convention. Not violence in the streets—but a political spectacle of the type that used to run the engine of national elections in this country. Because, you see, Virginia, there actually used to be interesting presidential nominating conventions in America, not merely pre-fabricated media opportunities for candidates with canned messages.

Since their inception in the early 1830s, national conventions were intended to be expressions of our collective psyche and temperament. Sure, most candidates were picked in smoky back rooms, but the will of the people was felt as a force to be reckoned with. Back then, up to 90% (in some cases) of eligible voters actually went to the polls.

And conventions were the nexus of their hopes, dreams, fears, and passions.

Suzanne asks if the inmates are going to get second dinner like hobbits, Leanne and Angie reference both To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hunger Games as things heat up at Litchfield, and Red reads aloud from Bird by Bird – a book that her nemesis Judy King is seen reading earlier in the season. To celebrate the end of our Orange is the New Black marathon, here are the books we spotted the inmates and guards of Litchfield reading in episodes nine through thirteen.

We love Orange is the New Black, and the ladies of Litchfield love reading just as much as we do. Rather than make you squint and pause watching to see all the books they're reading, we rounded them all up in a two-part series for you.

In Episode One of the newest season of Orange is the New Black, Yoga Jones sings Nick Hornby’s praises, sharing with Chapman how much she loved High Fidelity. To celebrate the return of our favorite Netflix drama, we at Quirk books are reading along with the Litchfield inmates. Here’s a dive into the books we spotted in the first four episodes. 

Funny Girl by Nick Hornby

Robert Ludlum’s super spy Jason Bourne has had an interesting career. Though Ludlum only wrote three Bourne novels before his death, his successor Eric Van Lustbader has written nine additional stories. The novels were so popular that in 2002 a film version of the first book was made staring Matt Damon. Though the first film did not bring in huge numbers at the box office, it eventually found success on home video. This launched an incredibly lucrative film franchise with two more films starring Bourne. After a brief hiatus for The Bourne Legacy in which Jeremy Renner played a new character, Matt Damon has decided to return for the fifth installment of the film series. We at Quirk are such huge Bourne fans, we thought it might be fun to see how the super spy would fare against some other well-known literary spies.

Okay, so summer classes sound like a bore. Why be in school when you can lounge by the pool? You have your gen eds, like mathematics, English, and science. But what about those summer electives? Go on, branch out. Summer can absolutely include learning, and the very best teachers are the ones from literature.