Category: Books & Learning

I participate in LibraryThing’s Tuesday Thingers group–a weekly blogging exercise. This week’s question: Last week I asked what was the most popular book in your library- this week I’m going to ask about the most unpopular books you own. Do you have any unique books in your library- books only you have on LT? How [...]

I’m dragging myself kicking and screaming through this series. I am a contrarian and as such tend to revile the popular, which is my own loss in the end, of course. But as I get through the second of the trilogy I find that there is a lot less dragging, only the occasional derisive hoot, [...]

There are the following pre-prequisites for reading this book, if you wish to do so comfortably. I recommend that you take any illusion you have about being well-read, fold it, box it, and tuck it away during the use of this novel. Then brush up on your Nabokovian grammar and ironies. Finally, don’t think too [...]

I participate in LibraryThing’s Tuesday Thingers group–a weekly blogging exercise. This week’s question: Today’s Question: What’s the most popular book in your library? Have you read it? What did you think? How many users have it? What’s the most popular book you don’t have? How does a book’s popularity figure into your decisions about what [...]

I participate in LibraryThing’s Tuesday Thingers group–a weekly blogging exercise. This week’s question: Today’s question is about tags- do you tag? How do you tag? How do you feel about tagging- do you think it would be better to have standardized tags, like libraries have standardized subject headings, or do you like the individualized nature [...]

1991′s fiction Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Minor spoiler elements: I mention briefly an event that takes place 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through the story. I do not, however, mention the main shocks/twists or the outcome. – Do I feel angry or lost or just blasted like the prairie farm landscape after a dry summer [...]

*shamelessly lifted from LibraryThing forums* I don’t think I’m a particularly weep-weep reader. I don’t have a sense of the last time I cried while reading. Not that I don’t get involved. I just haven’t been of the waterworks persuasion of late. What books have made you softly (or hackingly) weep? The one that sticks [...]

Reading John Kelly’s “The Great Mortality” last week reminded me of a thought experiment that I have to go through every time I think about the Black Death. Given what we know about infectious disease and the transmission methods of plague (via flea bites; directly contagious in its pneumatic form, etc.), if you were plunked [...]

Kelly’s sweeping popular look at the cause, course and story of the Black Death doesn’t break new academic ground so much as it filters and beautifies the centuries of discoveries by plague scholars. Through evocative description and very human narrative, Kelly builds an immediacy of the horrendous experience: bursting buboes, violent, bloody vomiting and, at [...]

Confession time. When I was a child, I loved children’s fantasy, especially mid-century British stuff. Couldn’t get enough of C.S. Lewis and other writers that are less trendy these days. But the more popular kids’ books become with the near-menopausal, the more movies and spin-offs and mania there is, the less I can stand them [...]