Humiliation: Which book are you most embarrassed to admit that you have never read? Several "respectable" authors answer the question at the Ways With Words festival. (single-link Telegraph post)
posted on Jul 28, 2008 - View this thread

I know a man who once went to Sioux City, not one of the world’s leading destinations, precisely because he had never been there before. More than a decade later he still talks about the experience, from the Sergeant Floyd obelisk to the dog track of North Sioux and the meat packing plant converted to a shopping mall. The same impulse explains a non-specialist’s reading a history of Byzantine iconography or a survey of Australian wildlife. Both offer a break in daily life and an enlargement of our sense of wonder and possibility. That awareness can provide a sense of transcendence, and connection, or even the spark of divine discontent that leads people to change their lives.

Reading as Vacation, an essay by J. D. Smith and Subway Reader, pictures of people who read while using public transportation.
posted on Apr 6, 2008 - View this thread

Are people reading less? Government survey says: yes. Declines in how much and how well people read “are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement.” Also the cause of poor test scores. Steve Jobs agrees: Kindle DOA because nobody reads books anymore. WaPo says 1 in 4 persons read no books in 2006. And children didn't keep reading after they got through Harry Potter, either. So literacy's in a long slow decline.
But wait.
posted on Feb 21, 2008 - View this thread

Pages Unbound is a portal for serialized web novels, similar to web comic portals such as Buzz Comix and Top Web Comics, if not nearly as fancy. It is a new project by Tales of MU author Alexandra Erin. Note: Tales of MU and some of the novels found on Pages Unbound may be NSFW, as they contain explicit material of various sorts. MU, specifically, is concerned with LGBT issues and racism in a fantasy setting.
posted on Dec 18, 2007 - View this thread

The Page 69 Test --inspired by Marshall McLuhan's suggestion to readers for choosing a novel, a new blog, inviting authors to describe what's on page 69. One says: Not the best, but not the worst. If my pages were presidents, I’d put page 69 somewhere in the James K. Polk range.
posted on Dec 11, 2007 - View this thread

Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to change the way we read. Amazon's new e-book reader, Kindle, is not just a device, it's a service. With EVDO wireless connectivity you can download content to your Kindle any time any place. "This is not your grandfather’s e-book," said one publishing executive to the New York Times. "If these guys can’t make it work, I see no hope."
posted on Nov 18, 2007 - View this thread

Read Print. Online books, poems and short stories.
posted on Oct 29, 2007 - View this thread

The Reading Experience Database is collecting information about 'what British people read, where and when they read it, and what they thought of it' between 1450 and 1945. You can sample the database by searching for reader responses to (e.g.) Shakespeare or Dickens or Karl Marx, or to newspapers in general. It's a collaborative project, open to everyone, so why not contribute?
posted on Jul 26, 2007 - View this thread

Librarians as Enemies of Books
via the delightfully uptight Steve Mauer at BookMine.
posted on Jun 7, 2007 - View this thread

It's a sad old story but the reading of literature continues to decline. Prospero's Books - a Kansas-city used bookstore - is so desperate to thin out its collection it has started to burn books. Co-owner Tom Wayne says he is unable to sell many of his thousands of books, or even to give them away to libraries and thrift stores, so he started a pyre in protest.
posted on May 29, 2007 - View this thread

New Notions 5 Reading Challenge "Not long ago, I was challenged to rethink some notions I had previously held near and dear to my heart. Wrestling with the issue and trying to make it fit within my worldview made me abandon some antiquated (for me) ideas and adopt new ones. It was that occurrence that led me to think up the New Notions 5 Reading Challenge."
posted on May 5, 2007 - View this thread

Modern Thai fiction, in English et plus en français.
posted on Mar 26, 2007 - View this thread

"Welcome to the Archive of the Now. The Archive of the Now is an online and print repository of recordings, printed texts and manuscripts, focussing on innovative contemporary poetry being written or performed in Britain. It is part of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing, at Brunel University in west London, UK. At present, the Archive consists of readings by 65 UK-based poets. This number will continue to grow, and includes newly commissioned, recently acquired and historical recordings."
posted on Oct 22, 2006 - View this thread

Banned Books Week -- 25th anniversary year. How to deal with a challenge, what you can do generally, and of course, lists, and more lists. Captain Underpants is a more recent entry, i notice.
posted on Sep 25, 2006 - View this thread

Choose a (public domain) book and Daily Lit will e-mail it to you bit-by-bit every day. Finally, War and Peace delivered to your inbox in only 675 bite-sized pieces. [via LH]
posted on Sep 14, 2006 - View this thread

Gender differences in literary taste - The Guardian (inter alia) has been reporting two English professors' studies of reading habits and feelings about books by gender. Others (newest to oldest): most revelatory books by reader gender (for men), (for women), author gender by reader gender. The methodology may not be unassailable but the findings are interesting and plausible. [viaduct vianochicken]
Sidenote: I did a little research following a comment on MR and reached a non-obvious conclusion: women hate Akira Kurosawa (check out those charts; for comparison). Theories welcome.
posted on Apr 10, 2006 - View this thread

Sudden capricious friendship with secondhand books -- a lovely little tribute to quiet expansive pleasures by Virginia Woolf. Where do used books find you? [via the ever-marvelous wood s lot]
posted on Mar 30, 2006 - View this thread

What to read. A list of lists for book recommendations, includes a compiled "Great Books" Lists with a World Literature list and lots more.
posted on Mar 20, 2006 - View this thread

LibraryThing. Like Flickr for your books.
posted on Sep 14, 2005 - View this thread

In those days, he could do no wrong. In the Sixties, he was the man who published Catch-22, Portnoy's Complaint and Hemingway's A Moveable Feast; he put John Lennon's doodles into cold print, launched the careers of John Fowles and Gabriel García Márquez, looked after Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut and later, in the early 1980s, was the godfatherly mentor of Amis fils, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. He was equally adept at commissioning inspired non-fictions such as The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris's zoological inspection of human behaviour.
The Independent profiles Tom Maschler, publisher, founder of the Booker Prize. (via Bookslut)
posted on Mar 17, 2005 - View this thread

How to Read and Digest a Book.
posted on Feb 25, 2005 - View this thread

eScholarship Editions. Like ebooks? Want something free, nonfiction,"scholarly", publicly accessible, and more recent than Gutenberg ? (Lately I'm on an Ancient History kick.) My problem with this "eScholarship" site is they try to make it hard to download a whole ebook to read offline. For one of those, for people who are interested in 20th-century political history-cum-theory that's never had much to do with any U.S. election, today I'm recommending the Platform.
posted on Dec 27, 2004 - View this thread

"This site contains more than 10,000 eBooks formatted for reading on your Palm, PocketPC, Zaurus, Rocketbook, eBookWise-1150, or Symbian cellphone." So if you have a PDA and especially if you're into the classics, you no longer have to settle for lame video games on your cell phone or inconvenient newspapers for your downtime entertainment.
posted on Dec 20, 2004 - View this thread

"Libraries are rich, deep, resources for preserving cultural heritage and indispensable resources for the communities they serve.” OCLC, a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization, has compiled a list of the top 1000 titles owned or licensed by its 50,000+ member libraries. There are sublists by subject, a cross listing with a banned books list, and some fun facts, including the supremely annoying one that the highest listed living author is Jim Davis of Garfield fame (#18).
posted on Nov 30, 2004 - View this thread

Fascism in America? It Can't Happen Here is a masterful satire in which a popular, dimwitted politician rises to dictatorial power on the backs of radio evangelists, opponents of urban, yacht-owning, college professor liberalism, common people, and the Rotary Club. America is pushed into a manufactured war by all-powerful corporate interests, liberties are restricted in the name of national emergency, and all is coordinated by a behind-the-scenes political maestro sometimes called "the brain." Sound familiar? It's nothing new: the book was written by Sinclair Lewis in 1935.
posted on Nov 29, 2004 - View this thread

Opening Hooks. You're in the bookstore, browsing the shelves for... something. You don't know what, exactly, you're looking for but you'll recognize it when you see it. Picking a book at random you open to the first page and begin to read. Two hours later you're home in bed with a mug of sweet tea, still reading.
posted on Aug 29, 2004 - View this thread

A free, blogger-read version of Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture is being produced. The book is released under a Creative Commons license which allows non-commercial derivative works to be created from it. (Some chapters are already available.) This is great - I think it would be a fine thing if more people produced audio versions of open-licensed or public domain works in this manner. (From boingboing)
posted on Mar 27, 2004 - View this thread

10 Books to Feed the Imagination. Just in time for World Book Day, Lady Georgia Byng offers her favorite tomes for sparking a child's fancy. The usual suspects are here (Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman) with a couple of welcome surprises (Yann Martel and Jostein Gaarder). But tell me, MeFites ... which others did she miss?
posted on Mar 3, 2004 - View this thread

Why Books Will Always Be With Us... along with almost everything else. Umberto Eco goes all encyclopedic on us (but in a nice way!) summing up (and reopening) the themes of a lifetime of reading, writing and watching. Though I'm sure what he says about the Web and electronic media will be picked to bits here, I'd say that would be a perfect vindication of this extraordinary exercise in common sense. [Via Arts & Letters Daily.]
posted on Nov 26, 2003 - View this thread

Starting today, every word (33 million) in ALL the books (270,000) sold at Amazon.com can now be searched word for word. File this under technologies used to implement more sales and better service to the end user aka marketing at work for you.
posted on Oct 23, 2003 - View this thread

Books Go To War Between 1943 and 1947, the Council on Books in Wartime published 1322 small-format books (4 in. x 5.75 in. — designed to fit easily into the pockets of service uniforms) for distribution to United States service personnel. These books were unabridged volumes spanning a variety of topics: popular fiction, humor, classic literature, music, psychology, war stories, etc. Because the books were distributed only to overseas troops, and printed on cheap paper (intended to be read, passed around, and discarded), they've become hard-to-find, the subject of museum exhibits and, in the case of the rarer titles, the object of collectors' desire.
posted on Jul 25, 2003 - View this thread

Man sentenced to read "To Kill A Mockingbird." For spitting at a cop and disorderly conduct, a PA man is jailed and required to read and write a report on Harper Lee's classic. What other books might be fit punishment for certain crimes? (via Obscurestore)
posted on Jul 16, 2003 - View this thread

Potter anyone? Harry Potter fever has started.... Some individual or group of individuals managed to walk off with 7680 copies of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" Reuters has an article here mentioned that the books are worth about 130500 pounds. MSNBC is behind the times with their stolen article and are reporting ~$1.68 Million.
posted on Jun 17, 2003 - View this thread

Did you know that George Eliot's Middlemarch is posted online in its entirety? As is Madam Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Don Quixote. ClassicReader.com contains 769 books and 1041 short stories by 211 authors. (via Bookfilter.)
posted on Apr 8, 2003 - View this thread

It was winter -- that is, about the second week in November --and great gusts were rattling at the windows... So begins Sheridan LeFanu's Uncle Silas, one of the good, meaty reads proposed by your friendly Litrix editor. Ah books... [More inside]
posted on Mar 14, 2003 - View this thread

Top readers in America. Do you read anything other than metafilter? [via aldaily.com]
posted on Mar 11, 2003 - View this thread

Visual Relationships at Amazon.com - Here's an interesting visual implementation of the Amazon API. It's almost like flipping through books on the shelf. What's next? A 3D bookstore rendered on the Quake engine?
posted on Mar 3, 2003 - View this thread

Steampunk (alternate) is surging. With the recent works of China Mieville (and his creation of New Crobuzon) and Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials) and Alan Moore, inspired by the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, there is a new growing fascination with this genre typified by Victorian Anachronism, an alternate history in which technology is overwrought and fantastic. Think Leonardo's machines (though not Victorian), Victorian Robots (prev. mefi thread), The Babbage Engine. 19th Century Science.
posted on Aug 6, 2002 - View this thread

Readerville is a community of readers. The site is supported, probably not very extravagantly, by book sales. It describes itself as "The social life of the mind".
posted on May 8, 2002 - View this thread

Good Riddance to Oprah's Book Club, and Her Literary Amateurism Norah Vincent says Oprah's opinion in matters of literary taste is amateurish to say the least and she presumed where she should not have, and wouldn't want her sticker on his/hers book either.
Just for fun adds People who dislike Oprah's Book Club dislike it for the same reason that they dislike Barnes & Noble. The fact that the two do a brisk business isn't accidental, and the two represent the same pernicious homogenization of American life that makes existential despair all but unavoidable.
Pompous?
posted on Apr 12, 2002 - View this thread

2 hours of Playstation vs. 2 hours with a good Book If true, (big if given source) life as a parent just got more complicted. Maybe our children's toys really do need to be "smart" .
posted on Mar 19, 2002 - View this thread

So in the spirit of this New Yorker Talk of the Town piece on different city's choosing books for everyone to read, what book would you like to make everyone in YOUR city read? And, what city would that be?
posted on Mar 6, 2002 - View this thread

Book-A-Minute SF/F--- Their "minute" is so spot-on a review for those books I've read that I'm off to find some books I haven't, just on this site's odd say-so.
posted on Feb 17, 2002 - View this thread

"But at some point along the path to discovery, the reader confronts his or her reading mortality. There's only so much time. And there are so many great books." I must come to grips with this myself, even as I anxiously await the inaugural book club discussion. I must admit, though, that people like this [NYT link] make me feel my own "reading mortality" more acutely. (I wish I could read that much so quickly...)
posted on Dec 25, 2001 - View this thread

Young Philadelphia man refused access to UA flight because of his reading material... This story just made my blood boil. Of all the stupid things... Ack! I just can't type straight! I don't have all the information... there's going to be another side to this... but if this is anywhere _near_ accurate, I hope some heads roll.

[via Evhead, via Dan Gillmor]
posted on Oct 19, 2001 - View this thread

Bisclavret is part of a book I'm reading, "Les Lais de Marie de France." [Modern and original French versions, side-by-side]. Also the tragedy Suréna [French link], by Pierre Corneille, and for a reading group, Genesis from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, as a literary, not religious, text. Last week the group read The Dead from James Joyce's "The Dubliners" and before that Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." What are you reading?
posted on Sep 8, 2001 - View this thread

Culture as Culprit. Myron Magnet is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare, which George W. Bush has called the most influential book -- aside from the Bible -- that he's ever read. Is poverty in American less an economic matter than a cultural one?
posted on Apr 6, 2001 - View this thread

Celebrate banned books week by reading something good. This is my favorite often-banned book, what's yours?
posted on Sep 28, 2000 - View this thread

Jeez, these people need to get a clue. Children should be encouraged to read anything they want, and as much as they please. So what if Harry Potter books have wizards and witches in them? Even kids can tell fact from fiction...when are the adults going to figure that out?
posted on Oct 13, 1999 - View this thread