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The Kindle is finally back in stock at Amazon. The flood gates are open. Watch the promo video for more information on the device. I’ve now ordered a Kindle twice and canceled my order prior to shipment, both times after waiting more that 4 weeks. I was really close to a delivery on one of [...]
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First of all, congratulations to Doris Lessing. I’ve never read her work before but I’ve been thinking about starting a series of blog posts where I read all of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature and write about the experience. Have any of you read Doris Lessing? Any thoughts on what book I should start [...]
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This one goes out to the folks who read “Against the Day” with me. It’s the best review of the novel I have read to date, exposing the great faults and the dizzying underlying talent at the same time. It comes as little surprise that a review this well-written wasn’t written anytime near the books [...]
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The article is here: In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will [...]
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David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous†is a well-written exploration of the various “geographies of knowledge†and how our maps of this knowledge are changing as our tools and computational processing improve. If you are a data wonk, organization freak, or just somebody intrigued by how the classification of massive amounts of data, this is a [...]
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Sputnik Sweetheart is an excellent introduction to Haruki Murakami for those wishing to test the water before jumping into something like “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle†(still undoubtedly the best). Here we have all the themes that we’ve come to know in Murakami: unrequited love, parallel universes, a disappearing heroine, fractured selves, dream states, water wells, and [...]
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While reading the April 2007 issue of Harper’s I came across an excerpt of an interview [subscription required] between Tom LeClair, professor of English at University of Cincinnati, and William Gaddis, the famous author. LECLAIR: How do the novels get to be so long, if they don’t start out with mass in mind? GADDIS: If [...]
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Actually the title is “Strange English Language” a poem by Dr. Gerald Nolst Trenite (1870-1946). Great poem on the screwed up-ness of how english words are pronounced. heh, it made me chuckle so I thought I would share it with a wider audience. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, [...]
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I have always thought that Lucius Shepard writes like a G. G. Marquez. You have a very distinct and clear idea of the characters and the setting. You can almost smell the sweltering heat of the dying Louisiana town where the story takes place. And just like many of Marquez’ works, there is a lot [...]
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I posted an essay by George Orwell that talked about the craft of writing and how simplicity should be strived for. Here is a related essay also about the craft of writing, in this case written by Kurt Vonnegut. He echoes many of the same thoughts raised by Orwell. http://www.harmonize.com/probe/aids/manual/style.htm Keep it simple. Keep it [...]
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