Books Book of the month: "Red Sparrow" In which I praise the book RED SPARROW, and do the opposite with the film RED SPARROW.
Book of the month Book of the month: "Voltaire Almighty" In which I praise Roger Pearson's most readable Voltaire biography.
Books Through a "River of Ink" "River of Ink", the debut novel of Brit Paul M.M. Cooper, is a marvel. I'd not heard of the man until he did his Reddit AMA a few months back,
Books How copyright destroys the bookmarket Copyright, in essence, seems like a good thing. But when it comes to books, a new study shows that copyright seems to have drastically curbed availability of books authored during the middle of
Books The Opening Paragraphs of D.T. Max’s Life of David Foster Wallace It’s almost four years since David Foster Wallace took his own life. Next week, a new, definitive biography by D.T. Max will come out. The Millions has the opening paragraphs. Read
Books Does reading make you a better person? Reading is a solitary pleasure, but what exactly does it do to you as a human being? Make you better, worse, same? Salon has an article up about the topic and I’ll
amazon Amazon Kindle for the rest of the world but not for me So Amazon has announced the availability of their e-book reader Kindle for, among other countries, Germany and Austria. The reader may be pre-ordered on Amazon.com, and will be shipped after October 19th.
Books The Google Trap Went and saw a discussion at the Thalia-bookshop here in Vienna about a new book by an Austrian journalist titled “Die Google Falle” (The Google Trap). Unfortunately, it was the worst panel discussion
Books Overdue I just found out that three books I thought I’d have to return to the specialty library in a week, will not be due until the 8th of January. Which really kind
Books Chuck and Choke I recently finished reading “Choke” by author Chuck Palahniuk. And while I do suspect that Palahniuk’s mind is a scary thing, I liked it almost as much as “Diary”. Now “Diary”, that
Books On projects Well, so we didn’t win the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize with the Messages from the Lost Continent. It still was great to be shortlisted. Congratulations to the winners. On another note, I’
Books The Brothers Lionheart When we were young, my parents always made sure we had enough books to read. One of the most read authors back then was Astrid Lindgren, whose books always were a lot more
Books Oh Rejoice! Fantastic news just won’t quit: Messages from the Lost Continent, the book I helped write under the guidance of the ingenious speaking aardvark Horst has been shortlisted for the 2007 Blooker Price
Books Introducing the Book Found this on the Thingology weblog. Hilarious! Update: So this one is gone. But fear not, for I have found it on MySpace video as well.
Books The Torch online Ever since reading Elias Canetti’s wonderful autobiography “The Torch in my Ear”, I’d wanted to get my hands on an edition of Karl Kraus’s self-published paper “Die Fackel” (The Torch)
advice Vonnegut's Creative Writing 101 I stumbled upon this in the preface to Kurt Vonnegut’s collection of short stories named “Bagombo Snuff Box”. I think they’re fantastic: Use the time of a total stranger in such
Books LibraryThing mobile Well, since everyone and their Grandma are pushing towards content on mobile phones, it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise that LibraryThing, everybody’s favourite online library and cataloguing service, can now
Books Pssst - LibraryThing keeps getting better I’ve written about LibraryThing a couple of times already, and somehow I just can’t stop. In case you’re still unfamiliar with the service, the basic premise is that it gives
Bible On books on trains On the trainride to and fro Graz I noticed, as always on trains, quite a bit about the reading patterns of some people. There was this one girl on the ride to Graz,
Books LibraryThing in realtime Check out this page where you can see the books being added to LibraryThing, greatest online library service on the web (where else, right?), in realtime. As Tim Spalding puts it in his
Books Lem dead The namesake of my late alter ego and overall best science-fiction author of his time, Stanislaw Lem, died today at the age of 85. Which is sad, but I’m not really good
bibliophil.org Bibliophil and LibraryThing I stumbled across two sites yesterday which do exactly what I have been looking for for a long time: they let you enter the books you own into a database. Don’t ask