Tag Archives: books + libraries

libricide

Today I started Libricide : The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. This led me to think a lot about all of the work I’ve done with libraries building their collections from unneeded donations to partner libraries.

Over the past 11 years, I’ve personally sent over 75,000 volumes (hard to be precise without access to my stats, I suspect the number is much higher) to libraries rebuilding after financial disasters, natural disasters, or regime changes. Almost every volume crossed my desk or passed through my hands.

I’ve sent books to every single continent, including a volume to Antarctica via Jack Child, a faculty member who traveled there every few years on a research project.

No wonder I could never maintain a manicure more than a few days…

Making the world safe for literature

“British Author’s Visa Ordeal Is One for the Books”

Halted en route to a West Coast lecture tour, Ian McEwan, an acclaimed British novelist who lunched last fall with first lady Laura Bush, was denied entry into the United States for 36 hours this week.

McEwan, who has won nearly every major British literary prize and whose best-selling novel “Atonement” won a National Book Critics Circle Award, finally landed in Seattle on Wednesday evening, just 90 minutes before he was scheduled to address 2,500 people packed into a downtown auditorium.

Looking relieved and exhausted, he began his speech by thanking the Department of Homeland Security “for protecting the American public from British novelists.”

He also detailed the literary expertise that Homeland Security officials brought to the three interrogations they put him through. McEwan said one official wanted to know: “What kind of novels do you write: fiction or nonfiction?”

[read the rest of the article, it does indeed get sillier]

Buy this book, or else!

You may think you have more important things to do than read, but you’re wrong. And those things are certainly not nearly as interesting as Matt Rossi’s new book, which I’m going to harrass you about endlessly until you buy it. Pre-order Things That Never Were right now. Or at least click the link and check out the groovy cover. You know you want a copy.

Did you know Matt and I went to school together? We didn’t know each other then, but I do recognize him from the coffee shop. Clearly we weren’t meant to know each other then – the fate of the planet probably depended on it.

Did you know that Matt is the heir to the Silly String fortune?

Did you know that Matt created Batgrl and I in a secret lab in Rhode Island?

Did you know Matt was one of the original Bugaloos?

You didn’t know these things? You really need to order his book!

recently read and highly recommended:

Ariel Gore’s Atlas of the Human Heart. Heartbreaking, depressing, funny as hell – in equal measures, sometimes all at the same time.

Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. I read a bunch of reviews that compared this one, unfavorably, to his earlier work Fast Food Nation. I found this to be a worthy follow-up and suspect that it’s the lack of humor in this book that left the critics wanting. It’s much easier to wax poetically wacky about a machine that shoots french fries than about migrant workers in California, outrageous prison terms for medical marijuana possession, or the absurdities of the Meese commissions pornography witchhunts. That doesn’t make the book any less compelling, in fact I sacrificed a lot of sleep while reading it. I don’t know which of his works I’d prounounce “the best”, I thought each stands on it’s own merits.

Schlosser is talking Wednesday night at Politics and Prose, by the way. Let me know if you’re going. (And Jonathan Schell will be there reading from Unconquered World on Tuesday night, incidentally).

Also last week was Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons, Lynn Peril’s dissection of the cult of femininity. (Here’s a tip girls: no matter what the manufacturer told you, never douche with Lysol. Eeeesh).

everything old is new again

I’ve isolated some of the problems I had with Neil Gaiman’s book, American Gods. Throughout the whole book I pictured the hero, Shadow, as Tony Curtis, his deceased wife as Susan Strasberg, and Wednesday as Burgess Meredith. It took me quite a while to realize I was even doing it. Once I came to that realization, it didn’t take long to figure out why. I was relating the book to a decades old movie with a strikingly similar plot. In The Manitou the Manitous of the old religions and the Manitous of the new technologies have a show-down in an icy alternative universe. Poor Tony Curtis, who heretofore thought he was only a magician and con-man finds himself playing the role of savior of the world, or at least of Susan Strasberg, who has sprouted a 4,000 year old Medicine Man from her back. Okay, so I’m not saying The Manitou was a good movie, as it most assuredly was not. In fact, it’s Bad in that delightfully mindbending way that makes it hard to describe. Unfortunately, reading American Gods makes me want to fish the tape out and watch the damn thing again.

As for American Gods, I think it could most definitely have benefited from another draft to craft some of the clunkier sections. The heavy-handed foreshadowing could have been fine-tuned too, so that maybe the ending could have been smoother, or at least made less of a dull thud. Nonetheless, it was nice escapism.

spicy suction cups

Just wanted to say “spicy suction cups.”