A Momentary Taste of Being

Confessions of an E-Book Convert I've been a long-term unashamed e-book reader.  I read them on PDAs. So I'm ecstatic with the huge and lovely screen offered by my iPad.

Reading is overrated?

Apps for E-Reading

If we could all speak so clearly, with such enunciation, diction, and poise.

D.C. tops the charts. Which only goes to show that you can read and read and read, and be illiterate still. (pace Hamlet)

Modern Library's 100 Best

An Exercise in Slowing Down-- Paradise Lost in 12 hours That sounds like speeding up to me.

And if so, the reading list of Jared Lee Loughner is a matter of great interest

Malnutrition I knew once of a person who bragged that she was able to get through her entire college career taking only one course outside of the discipline she had chosen to major in.  She held a Ph. D. in one of the sciences.

What's Your Favorite Book? Easy as pie, hands down-- Ulysses .

Dogearring in the tumbril

So Many Books asks the question " Is There Such a Person as the Ideal Reader?"

A reading invitation from Fred I find myself intrigued by challenges, lists, and other guides to reading.  But I also know my own whims and vagaries sufficiently to suggest that a challenge is an invitation to defeat as I subvert myself.  So I go with the whim of the moment and read.  Not a bad approach--but neither is it a good one.  It merely is.

Last Night I discovered,  probably late, because I'm always late to the table, the Google Books app for iPad.  Because I'm not one to let a single book opportunity slip by, I immediately appropriated it and was plunged into a phantasmagoria--indeed an orgiastic richness of such proportions the English language lacks terms for it.  I plugged in and immediately began to search for pre-1923 favorites--books that should be available free.  And one of the first places I went was to an relatively obscure English author of the early part of this century--Robert Hugh Benson.  I've been a fair Benson collector for some time now.  But what I found there surpassed by wildest expectations.  In ten or so minutes of searching I found twelve books that I haven't seen in Gutenberg or any of the known sources for e-books.  In addition, there was a wealth of other material by the family--A.C. Benson, and E. F. Benson, his brothers, and other Benson, related or no...

50 Books you might want to read in 2011 I must confess that except for the Oyeyemi, this portion of the list inspires nothing like the excitement of part 2.

Favorite Author, Favorite Genre Frankly, I'm gratified at how well literature did on this poll.

Times Flow Stemmed reads Maureen Johnson and pauses to reflect. from Ms. Johnson, a list: Edna Ferber, Diana Wynne Jones, Kate Chopin, Patricia Highsmith, Miles Franklin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Lillian Hellman, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Virginia Woolf, Marianne Robinson, Lorrie Ann Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Grace Paley, Barbara Kingsolver, Mary McCarthy, Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Edwidge Danticat. And, of course, other than the obvious--that the list comprises only the 20th and 21st centuries, I would ask where are: Willa Cather, Sylvia Jewett Orne, A. S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alice Munro, Julie Orringer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Chimamanda Ngozi Adechie, Maaza Mengiste, Helen Garner and a host of others all of whom deserve a wider readership?  (Well maybe n...

First, the best romance novels of the last 50 years, and now this, a review of Reading Romance.

Tom McCarthy reads from C .

Two chapters of Franzen's Freedom For the record, I don't think he's a genius, even while I like his books--and every word out of his mouth makes me want to send him to Dafar to get a little taste of reality before he utters another syllable.  But, if the work is good, it is--I'll wait and see.