Bulletin Board
Through my biking friend (he bikes, not me), I learn of the Sioux Falls Green Project blog. It looks like it’s being done by the summer interns but let’s hope it doesn’t come to an end when they leave.
Check out MIT OpenCourseWare, where the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers hundreds of previously taught classes for free. While the courses aren’t for credit, those of us who would love to go to college forever could care less as long as the course is of interest. The problem? Just in history, literature and foreign literature alone there is so much to choose from and so little time. (Major hat tip to Ex Libris.)
The presenters and schedule have been announced for this year’s South Dakota Festival of Books, to be held in Deadwood Oct. 1-4.
Blog Headline(s) of the Week
Difficult choice: B&N offers free thingy to people with one of those whatchamacallits or Associated Press claims to have discovered magic anti-news-copying beans. (Weekly top contender MobyLives is taking August off, to my dismay.)
Bookish Linkage
San Francisco’s Green Apple Books — perhaps my favorite book store ever — in the entire world — is engaged in a 10-day literary smackdown of the Book v. the Kindle.
I’m jealous of this woman’s library history.
If you’re still looking for “summer reads,” National Geographic Traveler has 50 Books of Summer selected from its Ultimate Travel Library.
As noted in an earlier post, the 13 titles on this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist have been announced. I have not read any but it does raise something that bothers me about a lot of prestigious book awards: a book that even isn’t published yet is on the list and, in fact, is currently seen as the favorite.
Meanwhile, The Guardian‘s book blog is taking nominations for the Not the Booker Prize Prize.
Fifty reasons to love your local library. (Via.)
As for “best of” lists, here’s Ursula K. Le Guin’s thoughts: “It seems to me that an award, a ‘best of,’ in literature, doesn’t serve literature at all. It serves to supply commercial booksellers with a readymade commodity, and lazy-minded readers and teachers with a readymade choice.” (Via.)
Nonbookish Linkage
A modern must-have: an internet crap detector. (Via.)
Proof again why you should always wear a bike helmet.
So that’s why we’re obese.
My house … is a library with living-rooms attached.
Bernard Berenson, Sketch For A Self Portrait
