I Need a New Challenge. . .

During the 6 years while I was back in grad school, the practice of reading challenges blossomed. Often I’d see a challenge that looked so interesting, but I just didn’t have time to participate.  I guess my doctoral program was itself a 6-year reading challenge. Anyway, since I finally got my degree this past summer, […]

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Introducing Wednesday Wildcard

Most of the posts on this blog are at least loosely related to the topics of literature, books, and reading. But every now and then I come across some issue, incident, or anecdote that’s just too good to pass up passing on. To indulge my desire to pontificate, I’m creating a new post category: Wednesday

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Monday Miscellany

Publishing Words: The Future of Books Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Sofie C. Brooks discusses how the rise of ebooks may change the publishing industry: What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early

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Why is it so hard to review mediocre books?

It’s easy to talk about books that are either amazingly good or blatantly bad; we usually have no trouble articulating the points that we either love or loathe. But it’s often hard to find much of anything to say about a book that we think is just so-so, mediocre, ordinary—perhaps the nicest term is unremarkable.

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Amazon.com: 2011 Best Books of the Year

Amazon.com: 2011 Best Books of the Year. Amazon has offers several lists here. The first one is “Best Books of 2011,” of which the top ten are: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes In the Garden of Beasts by

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Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2011

But wait, there’s more! In a follow-up to their earlier list of the year’s top 10 books, Publishers Weekly offers a more complete listing, separated by genre or by adult/children’s books. PW Best Books of 2011 Readers’ Poll And over here you can vote on your favorite of PW’s top 10. The choices are: The

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Monday Miscellany

We all need a little variety in our lives, so this week’s Monday Miscellany is a bit different than usual. Instead of linking to specific articles, today I’m linking to web sites that provide information for bibliophiles. Los Angeles Review of Books The LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS is now in preview mode, while our

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