Screenshot: A Weblog

I have seen the short story Wikihistory linked from a lot of places (first, I think, from Boing Boing) and finally went and read it - it's short and amusing so you should check it out too. It does a nice job playing with online conversation structures; I think that this format for this particular story lays out all of the information you want to know about this scenario in a very compact way. I do not think I would have wanted a longer-form version of the story. I definitely like the use of the "n00b" as a justification for dialog explaining what ought to be common knowledge about the world of the story.

One thing that did strike me was that I found the title misleading - I understand it is just a title and meant to be evocative but there was nothing that felt Wiki-like to this story and its structure or content. I found myself trying to figure out why this dialog would be specific to a forum associated with a Wiki and what the overall content of that Wiki would be and came to the conclusion that I was over thinking it and the Wiki portion was just meant to hint at the on-line nature of the interaction in the title. Or am I missing something?

Posted by Amanda at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

DailyLit is an internet service that lets takes public domain or creative commons books and will email them to you a bit each day. I tried this once several months ago with a book that I was interested in reading but wasn't sure I wanted to buy, and I really liked the enforced progress on making my way through the book. I only realized today that they provide a ton of books in a number of different genres. I am tempted to try to work my way through Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights on Woman this way, as it is rather embarrassing that I have never read it. But I might work my way through their science fiction collection first.....

Posted by Amanda at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If you know me at all, you will not be shocked that I have a bit of a "completeness" compulsion, particularly when it comes to reading. In its most innocuous form, I cannot leave a book unfinished or skip/skim over parts of it, even if it is nonfiction. This includes the introduction, appendices, and footnote material. The idea of putting a book down because you are bored with it, or only reading the "relevant" chapters just makes no sense. This is why my "currently reading" list can have the same books on it for months (or years....) at a time, as in my mind I have just picked something else up but will get back to it.

Magazines/journals have always fallen victim to the same compulsion - I have to read every article before putting it aside. As a result, while I only have a few subscriptions - mostly related to computing or science - I have ended up with a huge stack of periodicals that I have not touched because of some boring article that is bogging me down. I knew most people just skimmed through reading those articles that appealed to them, but I just couldn't do that.

I think the internet is finally starting to cure me of all of that. Sure, I have always had a list of sites that I read regularly, but it was a limited enough list that I could allow the same compulsion to apply, reading every single update and going back into the archives if I fell behind. But now that I use RSS feeds, I have subscribed to more and more feeds, some at sites with dozens of updates a day. For a couple of months, I tried to make sure i worked through all of my feeds every day and would go through the backlog on weekends to catch up.

It has become clear that one cannot read the entire internet, or even the complete set of entries from the portion of it that I keep track of. I have given in and will skim through my feed listings only clicking through on the articles that actually seem interesting. If a backlog gets too big, I'll just read what is new from the past day or two and then delete the rest. And I have realized that I am reading a selection of items from more sources, with less content that I am not really interested in, in less time than I used to spend websurfing. This surely sounds obvious, but it is a bit of a breakthrough for me.

And using this same approach I have actually started moving through my backlog of periodicals, reading maybe the first paragraph or two of most articles but stopping or skimming when I got bored. It is great - I might not read everything new that is coming out, but I am reading more than I was. If I had figured this out years ago, maybe I would have finished grad school a couple of years earlier....

Posted by Amanda at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been a fan of the online comic Narbonic for quite a while now, and was sad to see it come to a close at the end of 2006, though with the strip becoming more plot-driven, and its overall longevity, it was actually a satisfying close. If you missed the strip and want to check it out, not only are the archives all available online, but starting yesterday Garrity is re-circulating the strip to her front page starting from the beginning, adding a "Director's Cut commentary" to each one - interesting back story if you don't mind the risk of spoilers. I'm looking forward to her discussion of the first appearance of Antonio Smith, Forensic Linguist!

Posted by Amanda at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

B sends me a link to the opposite of all of those book recommender tools out there, the LibraryThing UnSuggester, which analyzes their database of people's book collections and tells you what books you shouldn't read if you like a particular book. More accurately, it tells you what books are least likely to be in the same collection with your selected book. I tried out two of my favorites from different genres, and while it was pretty accurate on its unsuggestions for Cryptonomicon, the list for Pride and Prejudice has a significant overlap with my collection, what with the Norvig AI/Lisp books, Knuth's Art of Computer Programming collection (really, a must for any library) and other computing texts. How sad....

Posted by Amanda at 1:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe this is done a lot and it's the first time I've run into it, but I love the idea of liveblogging a book as you read it, and defective yeti is doiing a brilliant job with Moby-Dick. Just a couple of weeks ago he came up against the infamous "whale chapter":

"Cetology" has the narrator giving an impromptu lecture on the nature of the whale, grouping the beasts into fourteen categories and offering lengthy descriptions of each. Here, Melville uses a literary technique known as OMG BORING! In some other context I might have found this engrossing, but here it's like, "Dude, you got your marine biology lecture in my adventure story!"

I, too, forced my way through this novel, feeling that it was a missing piece of my education by never having read it. I tackled it over the summer while I was in college, taking it to work with me and reading a chapter or two a day during lunch while I sat outside eating cheese sandwiches and escaping the basement computer lab I was spending all of my time in.

Thinking about what books I might do this with, I have totally stalled out on my efforts to read the Federalist Papers cover to cover. But, the sane side of me says that this is a project that probably needs to sit a few dozen items down the to-do list.

Posted by Amanda at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If I could afford to add any more books to my to-read list, I would pick up a copy of Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, reviewed here by The New Yorker [via Arts & Letters Daily] Tracing the history of modern academia and its traditions forward from their roots in 18th century Germany (including the ancient roots of faculty balking at oversight and bureaucratic instrusion, such as early requirements that faculty publically list what courses they are taking in a course catalog), Clark uses the idea of charisma to talk about the sources of authority and tradition in the classroom:

The organizations that became the first Western universities, schools that sprang up in Paris and Bologna, were in part an outgrowth of ecclesiastical institutions, and their teachers asserted their authority by sitting, like bishops, in thrones—which is why we still refer to professorships as chairs—and speaking in a prescribed way, about approved texts. “The lecture, like the sermon, had a liturgical cast and aura,” Clark writes. “One must be authorized to perform the rite, and must do it in an authorized manner. Only then does the chair convey genuine charisma to the lecturer.”

I think we all know how religion has played a role in granting academics authority - you don't have to go back to the German Middle Ages but can look at the history of America's oldest colleges as well. I find it intriguing to look at the specific impact this has had on how modern education works, though. For example, the review mentions an old alternative to the lecture - the disputation, "in which a respondent affirmed the thesis under discussion and an opponent attempted to refute it". As the review notes, this is now seen in dissertation and thesis defenses. As a student, I think it would be interesting to understand the roots of this seemingly adversarial structure; in the course of the many reports and defenses I have given, I've never seen a faculty member verbalize that the antagonist role they adopt is part of a different type of pedagogical tool. I, in fact, hope that students do read this book. It sounds like it could do them as well as faculty some good in thinking about why we do things the way we do.

Clarke's main thesis is about how the shift towards researched-focused universities occured, and he seems in the end to have come up with a fairly insipring description of academic revolution. At the very least read the review - and make sure you get far enough through to encounter some of the great anecdotes about how academia used to be and probably my favorite quote from the whole review:

In an even more radical break with the past, professors began to be appointed on the basis of merit.

Posted by Amanda at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the case of the $2.13 million comma, misplaced punctuation in a contract will allow one of the parties to withdraw earlier than intended, as the contract-cancelation clause was inadvertently attached to the entire contract, and not just a restricted time period [via Language Log]. It's a lovely example for use in any course where the instructor might want to justify grammar "counting". I think it also illustrates the value of practicing the skill of proofreading.

Posted by Amanda at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This weblogger describes their job, book interior designer, and describes the number of things that it makes perfect sense someone has to do when producing a book, and yet which I never really thought about as part of the process. It's not just choosing the font, as they note, but layout and material issues that have to balance attractiveness and readability with the financial considerations of publishing the book. For example, they are told how many pages the book will have (based on non-design considerations), and then have to find the best way to put the book into that many pages. There's also an interesting bit on the picking of a font for a book. If you like the entry, definitely check out the archives, as there are other goodies about designing books in there.

Posted by Amanda at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've added the Language Log to my daily websurf this week and am enjoying it thoroughly. If you wish you knew more about the picky details of writing, or if you just enjoy discussions/dissections of real-world writing, check it out. There are also lots of fun entries about the entrance of new words into our lexicon, including a recent one about "meh". Also worth scanning for are their opinions about "fake" profanity.

Posted by Amanda at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Eggcorn Database is a really fun resource - I'd particularly recommend it to students trying to improve their writing or writing instructors, but I suspect that everyone is guilty of one of the confusions on the list. In a nutshell, an eggcorn is a word which is frequently used in place of the correct word, usually in the context of a set phrase, for example: "veil of tears" instead of "vale of tears" or "do to the fact" instead of "due to the fact". I agree with Bitch Ph.D. (where I found the link) that these confusions could probably be avoided by reading more, and reading more widely. That said, given the number of reputable sources that are starting to include these errors, it's nice to have a place that is collecting some of the more common ones. As an instructor, I see errors like this all the time, and I think students would gain a lot from browsing the collection and self-checking if thtey're familiar with the correct phrasings of these common lingistic constructions.

Posted by Amanda at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This has been around for a while, but a browse around The Invisible Library is always fun. They're creeping up on having 3000 fictional books - that is, books that only exist within the world of other pieces of fiction - listed. I wonder if there are any meta-invisible books - books which only exist within the story of invisible books?

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ah - I saw Cheeky Prof do this and it looked fun. Which of the National Education Association's Top 100 Books for Kids according to parents and teachers (as compared to according to kids) have you read? I've read the ones in bold:

Continue reading "Top Children's Lit" »

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is about as crazy as the academic year can get, but the good news is that I've got my tickets to go see Star Wars, the night after grades are due. In the meantime, there are a couple of items that have been coming through the BookPeople mailing list that I want to make note of:

Online book Educating the Net Generation looks like its worth a skim, though I think there can be value in understanding how students interact with technology and yet not having to entirely give in to all of their preferences. There may be a preference for multimedia experiences, but I question the assumption that they are always desirable. Time spent on preparing a video- and audio-enhanced presentation is time that can't be spent on other types of classroom preparation.

Publishers' Bindings Online is a beautiful collection of bookbindings from the 1800's and eary 1900's. I want to browse this more fully later. I love the subject/theme index.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

For reference, there's a really nice reference sheet on the public domain in the United States available as a pdf at the Cornell Copyright Information Center. I particularly like that, in addition to describing what the relevant term is for different types of works, it spells out what is currently in the public domain for each type of work.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love how Project Gutenberg doesn't just archive classics and popular books. They're also making an effort to save the obscure and niche items, like the recent addition, The Complete Book of Cheese, a 1955 work by Robert Carlton Brown, and a good reference for uses of cheese, trivia about unusual cheeses, and all of your cheese-themed poetry needs.

Ode to Cheese

God of the country, bless today Thy cheese,
For which we give Thee thanks on bended knees.
Let them be fat or light, with onions blent,
Shallots, brine, pepper, honey; whether scent
Of sheep or fields is in them, in the yard
Let them, good Lord, at dawn be beaten hard.
And let their edges take on silvery shades
Under the moist red hands of dairymaids;
And, round and greenish, let them go to town
Weighing the shepherd's folding mantle down;
Whether from Parma or from Jura heights,
Kneaded by august hands of Carmelites,
Stamped with the mitre of a proud abbess.
Flowered with the perfumes of the grass of Bresse,
From hollow Holland, from the Vosges, from Brie,
From Roquefort, Gorgonzola, Italy!
Bless them, good Lord! Bless Stilton's royal fare,
Red Cheshire, and the tearful cream Gruyere.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From last weekend's NYT book review section,
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/books/review/22MILLERL.html?ex=1250827200&en=aae860e4df8eec62&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland">Why Teachers Love Depressing Books spoke direrctly to my own childhood reading experiences. Reviewing Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up by Barbara Feinberg, which talks about imagination in children's literature, it says:

Only a reader as attuned to realism as Feinberg could have puzzled out so nuanced a defense of imagination in children's lives. She sees the memoirlike problem novels as symptoms of ''the drastic fall from grace that the imagination has suffered in popular understanding'' and her generation's insistence on ''making our children wake from the dream of their childhoods.'' Adults, she suspects, secretly resent the sheltered, enchanted world children inhabit and under the pretext of preparing them for life's inevitable difficulties, want to rub their noses in traumas they may never actually experience and often aren't yet able to comprehend. All the better to turn them into miniature grown-ups, little troupers girded to face a world where they have no one to count on but themselves.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you read many professional book reviews, you'll recognize the phenomena described as "reviewese" in this article on the cliches of book reviews. While useful shorthand, things can get out of hand:

The "x meets y" construction is an invaluable way of summarising a book whose disparate elements might call for lengthier description. Another is to talk of an author's progeny -- he or she could be the bastard offspring, or bizarre lovechild, conceived in a crack house by the union of Marcel Proust and Jeanette Winterson. Yet another is the culinary image: take Tobias Smollett, stew him in his own juice, reduce, mix in some finely chopped Poe, season with Patti Smith and serve with late Henry James.

Posted by Amanda at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are lots of theme guides to Pittsburgh focusing on bridges, rivers, etc., and I've never given them much thought, but this review of The Steps of Pittsburgh actually caught my eye and I'm intrigued. Rivers, railroads, and many of the usual topics of theme guides are pretty easy to spot once you know they're there, and frankly many cities have these features. But the staircases along the sidewalks and hills of the cities (over 700 of them - and yes, that's more than San Francisco) are unusual and hidden, and from the images in the article lead to some very cool photos.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the holidays, a few sites announced the works which came into the public domain in various countries. In many countries, works by those who died in 1933 are just entering the public domain and you can check Wikipedia's entry for 1933 for a partial list. (As a side note, I had never looked at their entries for specific years, and they seem quite good.) Lessig passes on in his blog some of the more prominent names entering the public domain in Canada (including Turing, Stalin, and Hank Williams...), while pointing out that in the US it will be 15 years until any more published works enter the public domain.

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I commented last time I posted on Amazon's "Search the Book" feature, noting that they are in effect making some books' entire content freely available, if you're willing to do the work to get it.
I closed with saying:

Frankly, the more I think about it, the more surprised I am that any publishers went along with this.

One thing that's confusing me. The first article from the Author's Guild says that Amazon "sets a limit that permits a user to see no more than about 20% of a particular work". I tested, and you can only view "Inside the Book" page images if you sign in as a registered user. But are they really tracking this information on their own servers? Or are they just using cookies and hoping we don't clear our cache?

A search on "whale" brought me to the 168-page novel Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, with 81 references to the word "whale". After viewing about 28 pages of the book, I was told that I reached "the monthly page-view limit" for the book. Deleting my cookies and logging back in didn't help. So they're obviously doing something of the sort. Seems like it could get expensive.

As a final note, whatever my intuition about long-term usefulness of the service, particularly for non-fiction, after their first week of offering the tool, Amazon showed a 9% increase of sales of searchable books compared to those not participating.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think that Amazon has finally come through with the next on-line bookstore killer app. They've extended their book searching to include a "Search Inside the Book" feature which returns books which contain your search phrase somewhere in the text, along with a page image of the page in question and two pages on either side of that page. They only provide the service for selected books who have approved this useage, but it's a great idea. They've been trying to give browsers "flip through the book" capabilities by giving excerpt pages, but for non-fiction, this is the type of browsing people really do in bookstores.

I am curious how many books they'll be able to continue to sign up into the program. If it really increases sales for the books that sign up, it could happen. On the down side, if you type in the right search phrases, you can get Amazon to give you the page images for basically an entire book. I tried the query "neural networks", and they linked to a $62.95 book called Applying Neural Networks: A Practical Guide which had given permission to be used in "search inside". Because you can view not just pages with the search term on it, but also adjacent pages up to two away, they offered me links to page views of pages 1 through 71 inclusive, picking up again to give pages 77 through 129, then pages 132 through 148, at which point I gave up checking page runs. In total, they directly linked to 222 of the 303 pages in the book as having the search term on it. And one can easily fill in gaps by taking a page adjacent to the gap, picking a search term from that page, and searching on it. In other words, if you're willing to do a little work, you can get the entire text of any "search inside" book off of Amazon.

Now, it's probably not worth it for a regular reader. But if you're a college student being asked to buy an expensive textbook, and you only intend to refer to it for the main figures or equations (and isn't that the case for a lot of technical textbooks...), this would be a very tempting alternative. You don't have to rely on a library reserve copy - you can just sit in your room and pull up Amazon to look at that page with the algorithm you need on it. If it's really key, you can save it and print it for later.

Frankly, the more I think about it, the more surprised I am that any publishers went along with this.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, Project Gutenberg posted its 10,000th freely-available book onto the internet, reaching its longtime goal! I've been following their progress for a couple of years, and this past year finally got involved as a Distributed Proofreader, using their simple web interface to proofread OCR'd texts. The On-line Books Page (a portal indexing free books on the internet from a variety of sources including but not limited to PG) has a small article about this on their site. I love this project, and with over thirty years of history, I think they have a good change of reaching a million titles on-line someday. I intend to continue helping out, and if you're at all interested in their project, I'd suggest you consider lending a hand too!

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have no comment on this entry from Everything Once, My Big Fat Greek Blinding, except to say that it has nothing to do with the movie its title spoofs off of, but is rather a hilarious contemplation of the reality of Greek mythology. Trust me - just go read it.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is always striking to me that a two-week vacation from the internet results in a much higher number of books actually getting read, particularly for having been on a "working vacation". Among other things, I re-read the Harry Potter series to date in preparation for the release of the 5th book. They were all good on re-reading, though the 3rd book suffered a bit for knowing the underlying mysteries. I think it might be the weakest of the series. It was certainly the transition from lighter children's fare to the darker tone of Goblet of Fire, which is clearly intended for slightly older children.

I'm now very interested to see how the 5th book plays out. The book has clearly been set up to begin a defense (or offense?) against Voldemort despite the reluctance of the official wizarding government. I am hopeful, given Rowling's breaking of the standard fantasy divisions of pure good and pure evil with the character of Snape, that she'll give us a more Tolkien-esque depth of conflict between the Hogwarts-based heroes and a non-evil wizard government with a disagreement about the best course of action rather than simply being a tool of evil.

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Prompted by the call over at pamie.com for donations of books to the underfunded Oakland Public Library, and the latent frustration at all of the books I own that I know I'll never get around to reading, I did a spring cleaning of my shelves and have two bags of books packed up to take to the local Friends of the Library group, who will pick out what they can put on their shelves and what they'll sell in their annual Book Sale. So my shelves are clearer, my unread book list is a bit smaller, and donating the books is even easier than haggling with the local used bookstore. Wheee!

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I can imagine a number of uses for this search tool I just found which lets you search not just the titles but also the text of every book in the Project Gutenberg collection. Go to the "Preferences" page to activate boolean searching.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been meaning to volunteer with Project Gutenberg for a couple of years, but I finally signed up to help proofread scanned and OCR'd texts. The Distributed Proofreading project makes it very easy. Sign up, read over the proofreading guidelines document, and then you can view page scans and the OCR'd text side by side in their web browser tool and edit the text to make any necessary corrections. They manage to coordinate the proofreading of between 500 and 1500 pages a day. It's a very easy process, and a single page isn't too time consuming, so think about signing up yourself!

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you liked Lessig's much-linked NYTimes editorial Protecting Mickey Mouse at Art's Expense from a couple of weeks ago, or perhaps just noticed today's Foxtrot, you might want to check out Lessig's FAQ on the proposed Eric Eldred Act, which suggests requiring a tax be paid by copyright holders who wish to extend their copyright beyond some term (say, 50 years), thus allowing Disney to pay to keep Steamboat Willie out of the public domain (which they presumably believe still has monetary value) while allowing other less profitable works to become available on a reasonable schedule. The FAQ also fills in some of the details of what rules any copyright compromise needs to fit, such as the requirements of the Berne Treaty.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I suspect all my readers have already seen the ruling this week in Eldred v. Ashcroft - if you haven't, pretty much everything you might want to read about it is collected at Lessig's homepage with some interesting personal comments in his blog there as well. It seems like a worthwhile time to remind people who are bothered by the ruling and current copyright law in general that, on top of trying to change the law, the on-line book community is doing a lot to show the desire for and power of freely available public domain works - and they're always looking for donations of person-hours or money. The Online Books Page has a long list of ways to get involved, as well as being a wonderful portal into the collections of freely available books on the web. Project Gutenberg is also a good place to explore, and they're looking for volunteers for tasks as simple as proofreading. It's a positive thing you can do for the worldwide community while showing a demand for new works to enter the public domain. Perhaps it can act as another piece in the puzzle of convincing Congress to get their heads on straight.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To wrap up Banned Books Week, I just thought I'd point out some of the excellent works which ended up on the list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1999-2000, the most recent list I've seen published:

• The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier (#4)


• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (#6)


• Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling (#7)


• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (#13)


• The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson (#21)


• A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle (#22)


• In the Night Kitchen, Maurice Sendak (#25)


• Anastasia Krupnik series, Lois Lowry (#29)


• Blubber, Judy Blume (#32)


• Julie of the Wolves, Jean Craighead George (#38)


• The Pigman, Paul Zindel (#44)


• A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein (#51)


• Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Judy Blume (#62)


• The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende (#67)


• Summer of My German Soldier, Bette Greene (#89)

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To celebrate National Banned Books week, I'll be featuring a different banned book each dady I remember to update. My favorite banned books site is the Online Books Page Banned Books Online site, though ALA has a nice one too. I'll start off with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, banned at one time by South Africa's apartheid regime and required reading this year for incoming Cornell freshmen. Of course, everyone here remembers that Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster...

By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics and the branches of study appertaining to that science as being built upon secure foundations, and so worthy of my consideration.

Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin. When I look back, it seems to me as if this almost miraculous change of inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the guardian angel of my life -- the last effort made by the spirit of preservation to avert the storm that was even then banging in the stars and ready to envelop me. Her victory was announced by an unusual tranquillity and gladness of soul which followed the relinquishing of my ancient and latterly tormenting studies. It was thus that I was to be taught to associate evil with their prosecution, happiness with their disregard.

It was a strong effort of the spirit of good, but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love sites which try to draw in the knowledge of experts from around the web and present it in a useful way. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy about the internet. Canonical Tomes is trying to compile a list of canonical books in any topic. Users can submit book titles and vote on currently listed titles. If this flourishes, it could be a very nice resource, though it will need many more entries and voting experts than it currently has to beat out checking out the reviews, sales rank, and other information Amazon has on their site. [via Larkfarm Weblog]

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On the other side of the musical spectrum, the internet buzz has kicked in that a Tolkien based ballet, The Silmaril is in the works at the Butler Ballet and Symphony Orchestra, "based on the timeless love story of Beren and Luthien". I could really see this working - it's a story with modern interest (being Tolkien and all) but with very classic feel. And the write-up of the project suggests that it's being done by people who "get" Tolkien. I'm intruiged. [via Ghost in the Machine]

Posted by Amanda at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While it's not as exciting as my friend who managed to buy a many-hundred-dollar-valued autographed book for a couple of bucks recently, I had what I think was a very cool used book experience yesterday. I spotted a copy of Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind on the $1 rack outside the local used book store, which I've been curious to skim. Well, it was on the cheap rack because there are notes scattered through the margins of the book, but they're tidy notes, so I decided to buy it anyway. However, on closer examination, the book was labelled as having belonged to a "W. Robert Mann", which any math major will immediately identify as the name of one of the authors of the classic Advanced Calculus by Taylor & Mann. Granted, it's plausible that multiple people would share this name, but the previous owner was also kind enough to note that the book was purchased at McIntyre's Book Shop, which is in Pittsboro, NC, not far from UNC, where Dr. Mann is listed as a professor emeriti. And the comments clearly come from someone fluent in mathematics. So, I am going to chose to believe that I'll be reading the criticisms of the man whose textbook introduced me to advanced mathematics. His very first note reads:

One of the seductive fascinations of mathematics is that every subject turns out, in the long run, to be merely a small part of something else.

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Is your book collection getting out of control? I certainly have the occasional fantasy of organizing and databasing up my books, and do keep them in a roughly thematic ordering. If you want to get really obsessive, though, this site will help you determine the first three Dewey decimal digits of your books, which I would think would be plenty for any home library. It's also fun to browse aroundthis really impressive classification structure for all of human knowledge. And it is pleasing to see computer science linked with information and general reference, rather than with technology, though it is a little surprising that it doesn't share a top level category with mathematics and other sciences.

Posted by Amanda at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Oooo! Want to run a book store? Just enter the Win Ownership of While Away Books essay contest and you might become the new owner of an Oregon used bookstore. Oh yeah, on top of the essay, you'll have to send in a $250 entry fee. There are days when running a book store sounds like a great next step, though I suspect that my picture of what the job entails involves an unrealistic degree of sitting around reading. And I'd go about aquiring a store in a less sketchy manner. [via Metafilter]

Posted by Amanda at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but when I receive an e-mail like the following, I have to assume that the writer is fishing for a homework assignment rather than actually showing interest:

I've read your review on Wicked online, and I was wondering have you ever done a in depth character analysis on any of the characters in Wicked by Gregory Maguire? If you have, do you think you can send me a copy, because I am very interested in reading it. I found the novel very fascinating. Thank You.

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A nice little tool to make all of the content in eBooks more accessible, SearcheBooks does basic searching over online eBooks. And it's not just books that are getting put on-line as they move into the public domain. The Choral Public Domain Library catalogs thousands of sheet music scores available free on-line. Note, however, that not all of the music is truly in the public domain; many, for example, are freely available for religious use only. [via BookPeople]

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)