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, but the book was an easy sell on me: I'm quite partial to historical fiction and also
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 the last century. Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view
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 them here.
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 just quote the subtitle, which I think should be enough for you to want to read it
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. Costs? About 190€. It’s good news for anyone who likes to read and especially good news
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 I’ve ever witnessed. Here are a few points they should consider next time they hold something
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 of made my day. I know, getting all excited about a bunch of books that are not
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 one really is disturbing, and kept reminding me of Joyce Carol Oates’ “Zombie”. Don’t ask me
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’ve started a new project with a friend. It’s called Medienschelte.at, and is something of
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 than simple youth fiction. Her books brilliantly managed to capture what it’s like to be a
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 (ah, yes, it’s a pun…weblogs turned into books = blooks). With 34 entries and only 6
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), which of course gave Canetti’s book part of its title. Well, I never did get my
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 a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. Give the reader at
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 be accessed via mobile phone too. From their blog entry: The idea is simple—you get the
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 you the ability to catalogue your book collection online. The exciting part of it is that you
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, who spent the first ten minutes on the train putting on make-up, until she looked like she
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 posting LibraryHypnotismThing: I find it hypnotic, both fascinating and will-depleting at the same time. And he’s
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 at writing obituaries.
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 me why I want to do that, I just think it’s nice to have lists of
