Category Archives: PopCulture

Is There A "Universal" Book – Some Follow-Up

It's funny – you do a post you think will get lots of responses and then, ..not really.  But then you do a bit of a throwaway post albeit on a fairly interesting hypothetical question and you get tons of thoughtful, passionate responses.  So inspired by Cenobyte who said she was going to pose that […]

Universal Books?

Last night, while thinking about the vast publishing industry and the fact that you could never read even a fraction of the books published each year, even in a lifetime of reading,  I wondered “Are there any books that you could be sure that almost every single person who is a reader has read?”  I […]

The Impact of Having a Librarian Doing Your Reader's Advisory…

Bush's wife is a librarian for anybody who doesn't know.  (Now if she could just teach him to pronounce “eclectic”…)Oh, and I'm tagging this with “humour” but really, it's about as far from funny as it gets.  I think it was better when Bush admitted that all he read was Sports Illustrated and summaries of […]

FTRW 2007 – A Couple Last Notes on Freedom to Read Week

When I uploaded my FTRW interview to YouSendIt a couple days ago, I didn't realise they now required you to set-up an account before downloading files (boo!)  Quinn has very generously agreed to host the file for those of who who may have found this a barrier for whatever reason.  To save the file to […]

Friday Fun Link – Scribd (March 9, 2007)

Scribd is a new site attempting to be the “YouTube of documents.” It currently accepts .doc, .ppt, .txt, .pdf, .xls, .ps, .lit, .cia and .nhl file formats (just seeing if you’re paying attention on those last two!) Right now, the site seems to be a mix of pirated e-books (there’s that YouTube connection!) and documents […]

Kiss Your Keyboard and Mouse Goodbye?

This is very possibly how you will interact with your computer in the near future.  Wow.(Quinn, who has a great post today on why he blogs, found it funny that I equated the Flames 2004 run with other major milestones in my life such as graduation and marriage in my recent “About Me” post.  So […]

FTRW 2007 – Day 7 – An Overview of Canadian Book Challenges in 2006

Here's something that was posted to the Canadian Library Association mailing list this week that's a fitting way to end my week of FTRW posts: the results of the CLA’s Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom’s web survey titled “Tracking Challenged Resources in Canadian Libraries” (PDF) for the year 2006. This report doesn’t include every instance […]

"Perhaps You Will Become A Saint For A Child To Meet"

“A sappy woman sent me a letter a few years back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a lifelong northern Democrat in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt mode, a friend of the working stiffs. She was about to have a baby, not mine, and wished to know if it was a bad […]

FTRW 2007 – Day 3 – The Biggest Collection of Banned Books In The World Is Owned By…

Guess who?  I'd have guessed the FBI.  Or the Library of Congress.  Or a private collector with an interest in the area – someone like Larry Flynt.  But nope, the biggest collection of banned books is owned by the Catholic Church.  Their List of Forbidden Books is an index of books that the Church has […]

FTRW 2007 – Day 1 – Happy Freedom to Read Week! (A Challenge)

It's Freedom to Read Week and to celebrate, I'm going to do a week's worth of posts on the topic.  I know a lot of librarians, writers and others will be talking about this topic so I'm going to try to come up with some unique angles for my posts where possible.  But with that […]