Reading

Last Week's Links

Literary Links

BookLooks, RatedBooks, and Other Unprofessional Book “Review” Sites to Know: Book Censorship News, January 10, 2025 “One of the trends we’ll see in book censorship over 2025 is the increased use of unprofessional, politically-driven book review websites like BookLooks to make decisions in professional library and educational settings,” writes Kelly Jensen for Book Riot.  I […]

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history “From deciphering burnt Roman scrolls to reading crumbling cuneiform tablets, neural networks could give researchers more data than they’ve had in centuries.” As ominous as the threat of generative AI replacing writers is, there are some kinds of things that AI can be legitimately

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Discussion

2025: Another Year of Unplanned Reading

Just about a year ago I wrote what Notes in the Margin would be up to during 2024. Now, I’m happy with the way last year’s reading turned out, particularly how I ended the year with a sense of accomplishment rather than anxiety and disappointment. Therefore, I’m going to use the same approach to reading

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Interior of a spaceship with a metallic robot looking at a hologram of a human. Text: National Science Fiction Day

Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from “Star Trek”

Here in the U.S. today is national science fiction day, observed annually in honor of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who was born on January 2, 1920. I didn’t read science fiction as a teenager or young adult. To the best of my recollection, I discovered science fiction through television rather than books. My introduction

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Year's Best Books

Bloggers List the Best Books They Read in 2024

When I posted about all the Best Books of 2024 by editors, publishers, and critics, Davida The Chocolate Lady wrote that she hated such lists and would much rather see lists of books that other book bloggers liked throughout the year. I immediately smacked myself on the forehead and shouted to the empty living room, “Of

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Year's Best Books

Miscellaneous 2024 Round-Ups

Here’s the last gasp of the Best Books of 2024 theme. 10 Beloved Authors We Lost in 2024 Tertulia profiles 10 authors who died during 2024 and recommends one representative book for each. The 50 Biggest Literary Stories of 2024 From Literary Hub. These were the most-borrowed books from public libraries in 2024 NPR compiled

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Background: 3 stacked, closed books; open notebook with pen on top. Text: 2024 My Year in Reading and Blogging

2024: My Year in Reading and Blogging

Goodreads has spoken. Here are my reading statistics for 2024. Pages read: 14,887 Books read: 41 Average book length: 363 pages Average book rating: 3.5 Shortest book: Lord of the Flies, 189 pages Longest book: The Covenant of Water, 724 pages What the Statistics Don’t Cover Irrespective of numbers, I had what I consider a

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Year's Best Books

More Best Books of 2024 Lists

Electric Lit’s Best Novels of 2024 “Here are Electric Lit’s Top 5 novels of 2024, followed by the best novels of the year.” Public Picks 2024 This is NOT your ordinary list. I guarantee you’ll find something here that interests you that isn’t included on all the other “best books of 2024” lists. This list

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Discussion

I’m Signing Up for the 2025 Discussion Challenge

Full disclosure: I signed up for the 2024 Discussion Challenge and did a miserable job at it.  In evaluating my year of blogging in 2024, I realized that I actually did more discussion than I thought, but I didn’t specifically frame and label much of it as discussion. However, lately I’ve been thinking, more than

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

Update on Comments Glitch  The cause of the problem has been traced to Jetpack. Jetpack support has informed me that “this is an issue that our development team is aware of and working to resolve. It will likely be fixed in the next version of Jetpack in early January.” So that’s where we are. In

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