“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Just what the world needs (and what I need too) – another blog!I've set up a blog called The Universal, mainly as a place to link-dump stories and web sites related to the topic of online broadcasting which is a personal interest of mine (remind me to do a post about my summers selling door […]
There are lots of lists of best opening and closing lines/paragraphs of novels. But how about a list of best opening paragraphs from academic titles? (via MetaFilter which, as always, has some good discussion, other suggestions and related links) Here’s a bonus FFL – “Virus“, a fun little Flash game that’s sort of like a […]
In my recent blog survey, someone mentioned that one of their favourite parts of this blog is my book recommendations. Having just finished “The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books” by Thomas Wharton (which was beyond excellent – I'd give it my highest recommendation, especially for book lovers!), here's a list that was my submission […]
Partly inspired by the upcoming keynote speaker at the OLA SuperConference, I finally picked up “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom“, the first novel by SF author, former Torontonian, and co-editor of Boing Boing (one of the world's most popular blogs for those not in the know), Cory Doctorow. Corey R. (also a soon-to-be […]
Here's a group called “Librarians Who LibraryThing”.
Most people reading this are probably familiar with LibraryThing, a web site that allows you to easily enter and catalogue your books, see the libraries of others (including those with a similar collection to yours) and much more. But LibraryThing is not the only site in this area. Shelfari is the latest addition to the […]
Early in this blog's history, I came up with a little gimmick where I cover a bunch of miscellaneous things I've come across or want to talk about in conjunction with a holiday (search for “randomness” to see previous entries). I don't think I've done a “random” entry like this in awhile but the New […]
