Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- The Bookless Library (“Clinging to an outdated vision of libraries is in fact the best recipe for making them look hopelessly obsolescent to the men and women who control their budgets[.]”)
Worthwhile Reading about Aurora
- One More Massacre (“The truth is made worse by the reality that no one—really no one—anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life.”)
- The body count (“I will hear conspiracy theories from those who fear the government, I will hear about the need to raise a militia, and I will hear nothing about how 9,484 corpses in a year has helped anything. That is a high price to pay. What depresses me is that half of my fellow countrymen are prepared to pay it.”)
- “Guns Don’t Kill” (“We just have to face the facts: Americans, unlike Englishmen and Canadians, are murderous by nature. The ready availability of assault weapons has nothing to do with it.”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Bookish Linkage
- Books that changed science forever (via)
- The art of the unfinished read
- The continuing life of science fiction
- The Library of America has created an online companion to its forthcoming two-volume boxed set, American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s.
- Why can’t I remember what I’ve read?
- World Literature Today has launched a blog (via)
- Taiwanese author Huang Fan’s Zero and Other Fictions won the 2012 Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award.
- The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson was voted the Least Credible History Book in Print at History News Network. Interestingly, second place went to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
- Michael Connelly’s The Fifth Witness, part of his Lincoln Lawyer series, won the second annual Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. And for the second year in a row I’ve read none of the three finalists.
Nonbookish Linkage
- What Space Smells Like
- Would you stand directly under an exploding nuclear weapon?
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation has joined with other groups to form the Internet Defense League or, as EFF calls it, a “Bat Signal for the Internet.”
- Has Osama bin Laden been reincarnated?
- Boring bucket lists are nothing to die for
- The Walton family — heirs to the Walmart fortune — now hold as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined. (via)
Realize that life, not stuff, is what matters. Objects are just objects — if you lose them, if they get stolen or destroyed … it’s not a big deal. They’re just objects — not your life.
Leo Babauta, “Love Life, Not Stuff
