Every Friday, the PQ Weekly Roundup collects the most shared links in our social media network—bookish articles, reviews, quizzes, recommendations and more—in convenient digest form.

• How does our brain manage to take all those little symbols and make sense of them? An interesting look at how we read, scientifically speaking.
• Editors have been saying it for time out of mind: “Show don’t tell.” But is this writing advice becoming obsolete, or at least, overrated?
• For all you poetry fans, we’ve got something for you! The latest volume in the Essential Poets Series, The Essential D. G. Jones, is hot off the press! Get your copy here. (And if you want to try before you buy, get a free preview here.)
• Many of us have these dreams of authorship that include sitting down at a computer and just writing for a living. But as this article says, achieving the dream of critical acclaim isn’t always enough. On being a writer in a publishing landscape that is always moving on … and still having to pay the bills.
• And finally, how is it that there are some basic vocabulary words that sound pretty much the same across all languages?

Thanks for tuning into this week’s round up. Don’t forget to stop by and say hello to us at our table at Word on the Street in Toronto this Sunday. We’re at table # 155, right behind the power plant.

Hope to see you there,