Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- The Internet’s Cult of Now (“Is it possible that, as a society, we will no longer be able to remember the past and no longer envision the future, when all of our collective energies are put into imagining the now?”)
- In Which I Dare Connecticut To Come Get Me. COME AT ME, BRO. (“In summary: you are ignorant censorious tools.”)
Blog Lines of the Week
- “Trying to slog through Book 13 of ‘The Iliad’ when you are 15 is probably a pretty good approximation of what it will be like to slog through a Wednesday afternoon at the office when you are 55.”
- “In an era where everyone has a novel waiting to come out, authors are legion; it’s the reader who seems, well, dead.”
Bookish Linkage
- Misleading book titles
- In honor of it being the last day of Small Press Month (who knew?), Flavorwire gives us 12 “amazing books” published by small presses in the last year or so.
- An author discovers thousands of banned books in 793 boxes in an underground repository of the Australian National Archives (via)
- Who were the top 25 American novelists in 1929 — and how many of their names do you recognize?
Bookish Awards Linkage
- The 2012 Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist was announced (I’ve actually read two of the six).
- And what does Christopher Priest really think about the shortlist? The judges should be fired as “incompetent” and the award should be suspended for the year. John Scalzi rounds up some of the reaction — plus a comment from Priest.
- Cooking With Poo won the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.
- The Sisters Brothers won this year’s Tournament of Books.
- The Buddha in the Attic won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Nonbookish Linkage
- “A federal appeals court has reinstated a lawsuit filed by a prisoner who claimed the nutriloaf he ate in the Milwaukee County Jail was cruel and unusual punishment.”
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
