Reading & Writing

To celebrate National Banned Books week, I’ll be featuring a different banned book each dady I remember to update. My favorite banned books site is the Online Books Page Banned Books Online site, though ALA has a nice one too. I’ll start off with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, banned at one time by South Africa’s apartheid regime and required reading this year for incoming Cornell freshmen. Of course, everyone here remembers that Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster… By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once … Continue reading National Banned Books Week

I love sites which try to draw in the knowledge of experts from around the web and present it in a useful way. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy about the internet. Canonical Tomes is trying to compile a list of canonical books in any topic. Users can submit book titles and vote on currently listed titles. If this flourishes, it could be a very nice resource, though it will need many more entries and voting experts than it currently has to beat out checking out the reviews, sales rank, and other information Amazon has on their site. [via … Continue reading Cataloging the Canon

On the other side of the musical spectrum, the internet buzz has kicked in that a Tolkien based ballet, The Silmaril is in the works at the Butler Ballet and Symphony Orchestra, “based on the timeless love story of Beren and Luthien”. I could really see this working – it’s a story with modern interest (being Tolkien and all) but with very classic feel. And the write-up of the project suggests that it’s being done by people who “get” Tolkien. I’m intruiged. [via Ghost in the Machine]

While it’s not as exciting as my friend who managed to buy a many-hundred-dollar-valued autographed book for a couple of bucks recently, I had what I think was a very cool used book experience yesterday. I spotted a copy of Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind on the $1 rack outside the local used book store, which I’ve been curious to skim. Well, it was on the cheap rack because there are notes scattered through the margins of the book, but they’re tidy notes, so I decided to buy it anyway. However, on closer examination, the book was labelled as having … Continue reading Mann’s AI Thoughts

Is your book collection getting out of control? I certainly have the occasional fantasy of organizing and databasing up my books, and do keep them in a roughly thematic ordering. If you want to get really obsessive, though, this site will help you determine the first three Dewey decimal digits of your books, which I would think would be plenty for any home library. It’s also fun to browse aroundthis really impressive classification structure for all of human knowledge. And it is pleasing to see computer science linked with information and general reference, rather than with technology, though it is … Continue reading Personal Dewey Coding

Oooo! Want to run a book store? Just enter the Win Ownership of While Away Books essay contest and you might become the new owner of an Oregon used bookstore. Oh yeah, on top of the essay, you’ll have to send in a $250 entry fee. There are days when running a book store sounds like a great next step, though I suspect that my picture of what the job entails involves an unrealistic degree of sitting around reading. And I’d go about aquiring a store in a less sketchy manner. [via Metafilter]

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but when I receive an e-mail like the following, I have to assume that the writer is fishing for a homework assignment rather than actually showing interest: I’ve read your review on Wicked online, and I was wondering have you ever done a in depth character analysis on any of the characters in Wicked by Gregory Maguire? If you have, do you think you can send me a copy, because I am very interested in reading it. I found the novel very fascinating. Thank You. I mean, really – let’s … Continue reading Unsubtle Solicitation

A nice little tool to make all of the content in eBooks more accessible, SearcheBooks does basic searching over online eBooks. And it’s not just books that are getting put on-line as they move into the public domain. The Choral Public Domain Library catalogs thousands of sheet music scores available free on-line. Note, however, that not all of the music is truly in the public domain; many, for example, are freely available for religious use only. [via BookPeople]