Pig out: UK agency effectively calls three little pigs racist

UK “cultural sensitivity” reaches a new low: A government agency denied an award to a book based on the story of the three little pigs called Three Little Cowboy Builders because it “raises cultural issues,” specifically toward Muslims.
The details of the trial seem almost like parody, with the judges saying things like this: “Is it [...]

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Read Lolita and get smart

Here’s an interesting guide to reading: Books That Make You Dumb. Virgil Griffith has made a graph of based on the 10 most popular books listed for Facebook at certain universities. The basic equation that he uses is Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores.
Much of this is predictable: For instance, Lolita, 100 Years [...]

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Total Plot Inertia

One of my favorite pastimes is reading hilarious reviews of bad products, and one of the best I’ve come across in a long time is this review of the tenth book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This is especially classic:
Part of what really makes Mr. Jordan’s worlds so unique are the wonderful characters [...]

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Amazon.com acquires a copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard

Anyone wanting to know more about J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard should check out Amazon’s page on the copy they bought at Sotheby’s. Stories aside, the book itself is actually quite beautiful.

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Could you open a public library today?

I came across this article while searching for more information on the Amazon entry. Stephen Dubner thinks that book publishers would have a major problem with someone trying to start a library today.

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Read a Book for Free on Amazon

I suppose I’m not really helping copyright law or anything by posting this, but the Tiltboys have an interesting article on how to read an entire book for free on Amazon by using the “Search Inside” feature.

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Borges: Prophet of the Book

The New York Times has a fascinating article about Borges and how his stories may have predicted many events in the history of the book that are now a part of our everyday lives. For instance, Wikipedia is similar to the project described in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and plans to create a completely digitized [...]

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Redroom.com

I only recently discovered LibraryThing; now there’s also Redroom.com, which allows you to have discussions about books and ideas with some of your favorite authors. It seems that social networking sites for bookworms are becoming more common than ever. Redroom currently has around 150 writers who contribute to the site, including Salman Rushdie and Amy Tan [...]

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Love Among the Bookshelves

Last night, my wife and I decided to take advantage of the unusually warm weather by visiting Myopic Books in Chicago’s Wicker Park, a favorite haunt for both of us in the wild days before our marriage. (We had originally started in the direction of nearby Quimby’s, but, finding it empty, we made our way to the old standby.)
As [...]

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Trends in logo design.

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