Bulletin Board
- I came across a website yesterday that prompts me to launch a reading challenge and related blog. Full details forthcoming shortly.
Blog Headlines of the Week
- New planet compared to disposable coffee cup
- Irritating Side Effect of Cocaine Vaccine: It Causes Users to Take 10 Times as Much Cocaine as Before
Blog Line of the Week
- “The First Amendment does not guarantee you a right to be free from being mocked when you act like a toolbag.”
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Bookish Linkage
- The Books of the Century compiles by year the top ten bestsellers in fiction and nonfiction, as determined by Publishers Weekly, the main selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in 1926, and “[c]ritically acclaimed and historically significant books, as identified by consulting various critics’ and historians’ lists of important books.”
- I’m pleased to see that among 45 manly hobbies, “there couldn’t be a manlier hobby” than reading. I must admit, though, that aside from blogging, I am close to a “fail” on the other 44.
- Every Man Dies Alone, my novel of the year choice, is on the longlist for the 2010 Best Translated Book Award. Four others are (horrors!) in my TBR shelves and I’ve been eyeing three others most of last year. I am also currently reading one of the books on the honorable mention list.
- Kirkus Reviews evidently will survive. (Via.)
- Move over, Oprah, and make room for Sam. Sam’s Club is launching a national book club. The first selection is a book I’ve not heard of, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman. (Via.)
- Green Apple Books, my favorite book store in the country, lists its top sellers for 2009.
Nonbookish Linkage
- kottke.org‘s best links of 2009.
- Eleven most painfully obvious newspaper articles ever. (Via.)
Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
Albert Camus, Happy Death
Keep it up Tim – good shhtuff! Recently took in a Writing for Self-Awareness Men's Breakfast at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality. I'm looking at getting back into writing – need to re-invigorate my former experience as president of the Spanish Honor Society. Mind if I bounce some things and ideas off you?
Almost forgot – lot's of new books over the Holidays like: A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz; Beat the Reaper, Josh Bazell; Boone, Robert Morgan; The Language of God, Francis Collins; How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker; Still Alice, Lisa Genoya; A Voyage Long and Strange, Tony Horwitz; Charlatan, Pope Brock; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz,…
I read Oscar Wao shortly after it came out. I liked it but wasn't as "wowed" as the critics seemed to be. A few of the others — Horowitz, Toltz and Bazell — have been on my "maybe one of these days" lists, we keeps getting longer than my stack of "to be read" books