Bulletin Board
- You need to check out the library’s new digital access to popular magazines for your smartphone, laptop or desktop. I’ve been playing with it for a couple weeks and think it’s great.
Interesting Reading
- Happy New Year? You’ve got to be kidding (“The blogosphere is a handy symptom of the pervasive cognitive and educational failure of America.”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Blog Line of the Week
- “Oh, and I don’t know if you heard, but Barnes & Noble is fucked and closing down stores, and if they go, we are all kind of fucked.” (Prompted by first item in Bookish Linkage.)
Bookish Linkage
- Melville House considers the “wrong goodbye of Barnes and Noble“
- I have to agree with Jill Callison about Siouxland Libraries’ most popular books in 2012. I read only one of them but, like Jill, “I’d feel bad about that if I actually thought I’d missed some good literature. But I don’t.”
- Meanwhile, the list of the bestselling books of 2012 isn’t much better.
- It’s likely the prior two items violate one or more of the Ten Commandments of a righteous readerly life
- The Montague Bookmill, which I loved, tops the list of the top five used bookstores in New England. It has perhaps the best bookstore motto ever: “Books you don’t need at a place you can’t find.”
- Why books suck
- The finalists for the Hatchet Job of the Year award have been announced.
- Hopefully, this will spread to the U.S.: McDonald’s restaurants in England are going to distribute books instead of toys with Happy Meals.
Nonbookish Linkage
- Why there are only 100 copies of the new Bob Dylan record. The title is a hint: 50th Anniversary Collection: The Copyright Extension Collection, Volume 1.
- The Museum of the South Dakota State Historical Society is now a Smithsonian Institution Affiliate
If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.
Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten
