To celebrate Banned Books Week, Powell’s Books found a bunch, well 33, that THE MAN doesn’t want you to read. Fight the power! Read the books!
Via static.parade.condenast.comAnd Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson: What is so offensive about a kids’ picture book about penguin parents? Welllll, those penguin parents happen to be the same sex, which, according to Wikipedia, set off the alarm of many social conservatives in the US. So much so apparently that “the American Library Association reports that And Tango Makes Three was the most challenged book of 2006, 2007, and 2008.” Wowza. Read the article at Buzzfeed ~~~~~
10 Experimental Novels That Are Worth the Effort……at least according to Emily Temple at Flavorwire. Don’t agree? She encourages you to make your own list.
The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker: This entire novel takes place over the length of an escalator ride. No, no, it’s about 140 pages of minute details, imaginings, footnotes, and lists with columns like “Subject of Thought” and “Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (in Descending Order).” There are times when the amount that Baker can focus on one tiny thing threatens to drive one mad, but in the end, the novel is a deeply moving meditation on change and life and, of course, language.
Read the article
~~~~~How Long Will It Take To Read That Book?At io9, Lauren Davis offers a chart that gives you an estimate of how long it would take the average person to read a book, or all of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones.
See the whole chart
~~~~~20 Amazing Novels You Should Read Before You Watch The Movie There’s nothing better than sinking into your comfy chair with a wonderful book and being drifted off into a whole new world, Sarah Anton writes at Lifehack. She picks a score of books “you must read before you watch the movie! Not only to know what to expect before it happens, but also to compare your vision of the character to the movie’s portrayal.”
If I Stay by Gale Foreman: For those of you who like the supernatural and have a soft side in your heart, you will love Gale Foreman’s book, If I Stay. Not only do you connect with the characters, but you also start viewing life in a whole different way… in a supernatural way. Time to let the dreams begin. Mia’s life changes drastically as she is put in a coma after a tragic car accident. While in a coma, she has an out-of-body experience where she meets various individuals. As her story moves forward, she has to decide whether or not she will stay in a coma, since she is not yet ready to let go of the people she met while in her out-of-body experience
Read the article
~~~~~The Linguistics of LOL, or The evolution of language When two friends created the site I Can Has Cheezburger? to share cat photos with funny, misspelled captions, it was a way of cheering themselves up, Britt Peterson writes in The Atlantic. They probably weren’t thinking about long-term implications.But the “cheezpeep” community is still active online, chattering away in lolspeak, its own distinctive variety of English.
lolspeak was meant to sound like the twisted language inside a cat’s brain, and has ended up resembling a down-South baby talk with some very strange characteristics…One user writes that it used to take at least 10 minutes “to read adn unnerstand” a paragraph. (“Nao, it’z almost like a sekund lanjuaje.”)
Read the article
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THIS ‘n THAT
41 Church Signs: Anyone in snow country will appreciate this one.
See them all~~~
18 People Who Didn’t Proofread, and should have
Oh-oh~~~
The BBC has announced an all-female author shortlist for its National Short Story Award — Tessa Hadley, Francesca Rhydderch, Lionel Shriver, Zadie Smith, and Rose Tremain. The five stories “tackle pivotal moments in a woman’s life from girlhood to middle age, including sex and love, death and disintegration,” the BBC reports.
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Quote of the Day
“If you can’t be a successful bum, the next best thing is a writer.”‘ ~ Arthur Clarke
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Alma Alexander
My books
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