Category: Books
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The second Brighton LibTeachMeet
There’s to be a second Brighton LibTeachMeet! Melanie Davies and Joseph Norwood, aka @DreamingEntity, whose presentation at the first #btnlibtm is still talked about in the Sussex cafés and bars that the intelligensia of the profession frequent, have taken over the baton. CILIP Sussex has thrown its weight behind the venture.The TeachMeet will be on the…
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Howard Jacobson wins Man Booker
As everyone now knows, Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker with The Finkler Question. It was richly deserved and of the three of the six of the short-list I read, by far the greatest novel. The only pity is that the BBC coverage was such a shambles. They continued to interview Michael Portillo while Andrew…
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Man Booker: one down, five to go
This is a small experiment to see if it is possible, using only the public libraries I belong to, to read the six books short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize before the winner is announced. On 7 September, when the shortlist came out, I reserved them all. About thirty minutes ago I finished Andrea…
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Google and China
I was amused the other night to watch a Newsnight reporter try to demonstrate the iniquity of the Chinese government by trying to access Facebook, YouTube and Twitter from an internet cafe in the Peoples' Republic and failing. He could have carried out the same exercise in many of this country's further education colleges, with…
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A new angle on Google Books
Most of the discussion about Google Books revolves around the intellectual property issues and the implications for the future of allowing Google to seize a monopolistic position. See this debate on the BBC news site for example. I discovered on Languagelog a different slant on the question, an analysis of the quality of the metadata…
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Running books in the FT
In Saturday's Financial Times, Simon Kuper reviewed a series of books about running, that 'painful and unprofitable craze', as he describes it, including Haruki Murakami's What I talk about when I talk about running. I'm not sure how long content remains freely available on the site
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Crise de foie
I’m reading Will Self’s Liver. I avoid posting book reviews as a rule, but may do so in this case. For the moment, I must record my astonishment that Ángel Gurría-Quintana, writing the Financial Times, could get the fourth of the four stories, Birdy Num Num, so wrong. He claims it is narrated by the…
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Books as History
Through Lorcan Dempsey’s blog, I find that David Pearson, Director of the University of London Research Library Services, has published a book about books. It goes straight onto my must-read list: Books as history: the importance of books beyond their texts Pearson, David. New Castle, Delaware and London, England : Oak Knoll Press and The…
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Review: Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War
More than sixty years later, it is still ‘the war’. Its popular, anti-fascist character distinguishes the Second World War from, on the one hand, the imperialist hecatomb of 1914-18, and, on the other, from the colonial and neo-colonial adventures we have been dragged into since 1945. I was born ten years after VE Day, part…
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Librarything Local
Librarything Local is wonderful, though there seems to be a bug with the’ favorite this venue’ link. I’ve added Seaford, Lewes and the University of Sussex libraries. No Lewes bookshops are listed, yet. In the case of libraries, it would be good if there was the possiblity to link to online catalogues, or clumps of…