On the day he turned thirty-eight,
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne retired from public life to the tower of the
Château de Montaigne, there to spend the next ten years composing an
assay of his life's experience. That his mind might thrive, he turned the tower into a
"Solitarium" and its top floor into a sumptuous
library, lining its round walls with some 1,500
books. Even the roof beams were made to bear his thoughts: on them he inscribed 46 quotations,
here collected and translated.
posted by Iridic
on Oct 11, 2012 -
22 comments
An “Infinite Jest” atlas. The Infinite Atlas Project is an independent research and art project seeking to identify, place and describe every possible location in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The project includes:
Infinite Map- a cartographic infographic poster identifying 250 of the most interesting locations from the novel.
Infinite Boston-a ruminative travelogue and photographic tour of key locations in and around Boston, Massachusetts.
[Previously]
posted by Fizz
on Sep 7, 2012 -
24 comments
What I wrote was unquestionably fiction — was fantasy. Among Others has magic and fairies. But I was writing fantasy about a science fiction reader who had a lot of the same things happen to her that happened to me. It’s set at the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, and it’s about a fifteen year old just when I was fifteen, and from a family like mine and in the time and place and context where I was. I was using a lot of my own experience and memories. But this is Mori, not me, and she lives in a world where magic is real. Jo Walton, who as editor for tor.com
revisisted the Hugos 1953-2000, now has one of her own, taking home
the 2012 Best Novel Award for
Among Others. Other winners include
Kij Johnson for her Novella
The Man who Bridged the Mist (excerpt) and io9 regular
Charlie Jane Anders for her novellete
Six Months, Three Days. The Best Graphic Story award went to the webcomic
Digger by
Ursula Vernon. E Lily Yu took home the Bets New Writer award (technically not a Hugo) and was also nominated for her short story
The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees. A couple of TV shows you have heard of also got awards. Links to many of the nominated stories
here.
posted by Artw
on Sep 3, 2012 -
51 comments
The secret allure of the spoiler. Think you don’t want to know the ending? Think again "Is there a greater cultural sin than a good story spoiled? The accepted modern posture is that knowing too much beforehand about the plot of a novel, a play, a movie, even a TV series, ruins the magic of experiencing it for the first time — renders it damaged goods, not worth one’s time or money.[..]
It’s a given: Everyone hates spoilers. Except when they don’t. Two researchers in the psychology department of the University of California at San Diego recently decided to test whether we really hate spoilers, or just like to say we do. What they found surprised them: The majority of people apparently like having a story spoiled for them. In fact, we may enjoy spoiled stories even more than the unspoiled versions. Is it true? Do we secretly crave predigested plots the way some foodies sneak Big Macs when no one’s looking?"
Pdf link to study. [more inside]
posted by nooneyouknow
on Aug 29, 2012 -
171 comments
Nina Bawden, writer of novels for adults and children, born in 1925, died on 22nd August 2012. “As a child, Nina said, she had felt wicked because the children in the books she read were all so good, and she was one of the first writers for children to create characters who could be jealous, selfish and bad-tempered” (
Guardian obituary).
[more inside]
posted by paduasoy
on Aug 27, 2012 -
10 comments
Cynthia Ozick on Henry James: The Lesson of the Master: ...in earlier days I felt I had been betrayed by Henry James. I was like the youthful writer in “The Lesson of the Master” who believed in the Master’s call to live immaculately, unspoiled by what we mean when we say “life”—relationship, family mess, distraction, exhaustion, anxiety, above all disappointment.
posted by shivohum
on Aug 21, 2012 -
7 comments
Citizen science refers to science conducted by average persons, e.g., people who are not full- or part-time professional scientists but nevertheless have a keen interest in scientific inquiry.
Citizen Science Center is a resource for books, papers, discussions, and project listings related to citizen science that aims to convince you to get your hands dirty and do science now.
posted by netbros
on Aug 14, 2012 -
11 comments
We are so steeped in the tradition of railways as a single line cutting through the wilderness. But [...] there is a tradition you can tap into that completely inverts what has become the cliché, and focuses instead on branching lines, on sidings, on reversibility and on the breaching of timetables—and you end up with a notion of rails that can be an ineffable symbol of potentiality. I liked the idea of trying to honour that alternative tradition.
But that's all post-facto to the basic gag—and it is a gag—of someone shouting "there she blows!" and it's a mole, not a whale.
BoingBoing interviews China Mieville on his new book, Railsea.
[more inside]
posted by rebent
on Aug 9, 2012 -
53 comments
By late May, more than ten million copies of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy, an erotic romance series about the sexual exploits of a domineering billionaire and an inexperienced coed, had been sold in the United States, all within six weeks of the books’ publication here. This apparently unprecedented achievement occurred without the benefit of a publicity campaign, formal reviews, or Oprah’s blessing, owing to a reputation established, as one industry analyst put it, “totally through word of mouth.” [
Grey Area: How ‘Fifty Shades’ Dominated the Market]
posted by vidur
on Jul 30, 2012 -
101 comments
"The
French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project uses database technology to map the trade of the Société Typographique de
Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794. As the STN sold the works of other publishers alongside its own editions, their archives can be considered a representative source for studying the history of the book trade and dissemination of ideas in the late Enlightenment."
[more inside]
posted by Marauding Ennui
on Jul 17, 2012 -
5 comments
Bullying & Goodreads: "Little more than a week ago, a website aimed at naming and shaming so-called
Goodreads [A kind of facebook for bibliophiles.] ‘bullies’ suddenly appeared online – called, appropriately enough,
Stop the GR Bullies. Run by four concerned ‘
readers and bloggers’ writing anonymously under the handles Athena, Peter Pan, Johnny Be Good and Stitch, the site thus far seems bent on punishing the creators of snide, snarky and negative book reviews by posting their handles, real names, locations and photos in one place, together with a warning about their supposed ‘level of toxicity’ and some (ironically) snide, snarky and negative commentary about them as people. There’s a lot here to unpack, but before I get started on why this is a horrifically bad idea, let’s start with some basic context."
posted by Fizz
on Jul 11, 2012 -
178 comments
"I still buy books faster than I can read them. But this feels completely normal. How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life." Julian Barnes reflects on his
life as a bibliophile, the disappearance of secondhand bookshops and the precarious survival of the physical book.
posted by verstegan
on Jun 30, 2012 -
89 comments
