Awful Library Books

Sometimes, at the Reference desk, a person will ask for a good book about such and such a topic. If I am feeling especially witty and the person asking the question seems to have a sense of humor, I sometimes say "We only have good books." Then I proceed to really answer the question. I may have to modify my responce as I have come across a site called Awful Library Books. Among the esoteric volumes mentioned are How to Preserve Animal and other Specimens in Clear Plastic and Knitting with Dog Hair. The real point of the site, however, is that public libraries need to weed their collections regularly, so that they don't have ten year old books about how to use a computer, etc.

Non-Fiction Books to Read Before You Die

To give the blog an energy boost, we're asking people to name non-fiction books they would recommend. As this will be a kinder, gentler poll, we'll probably expand the list to 25 books. We'd love to know which titles you'd come up with. Please leave your list in the comments.

To get things started, my 10 selections are listed below:

Gifts of the Jews—Thomas Cahill

A Short History of Nearly Everything—Bill Bryson
The Progressive Historians, by Richard Hofstadter

Blink—Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point—Malcolm Gladwell
How to Ruin Your Life—Ben Stein
1776— David McCullough
On Writing—Stephen King
You Just Don’t Understand—Deborah Tannen
The Practice of Writing—David Lodge

Ah, the literary life...

So, you want to be an author. Before you quit your day job, check out this New Yorker article to see what you’re in for. This satiric piece take the form of a memo from an overwhelmed publisher’s representative, who doesn’t quite seem to know what book you wrote, detailing what you will be expected to do to market your book.
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The note includes a strong suggestion that you start a blog and pump out 600 words a day, making sure to include numerous pictures of yourself; then you should friend everyone you ever met on you Facebook page; also, you will be participating in the publisher’s RAP (Readings by Author by Proxy) program, in which, to save money, you will do readings at bookstores close to where you live, not only for your own book but others your publisher designates. The memo is loaded with indecipherable jargon-- e.g. “We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold.”
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The piece presents a witty and insightful glimpse of the shaky state of the book publishing business today.

Emily Dickinson on Books

There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away,

Nor any coursers like a page

Of prancing poetry.


This traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of toll;

How frugal is the chariot

That bears a human soul!

And the Nobel Prize Goes to.....

The Nobel prize for literature this year goes to Herta Muller. I'll have to admit up front that I had never heard of her, but then again, some of the journalists reporting about her selection seemed unfamiliar with her writing.

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The committee that chooses the Nobel laureates in literature does not always opt for writers widely familiar in America; for instance, the list of the literature prize winners in the last ten years, include such names as Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio , Elfriede Jelinek, and Imre Kertész. It is perhaps more interesting that since 1901, when the Nobel prize for literature was first awarded, the committee has passed over such noted writers such as Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Robert Frost, Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce.

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Herta Muller was born in 1953 in a German speaking section of Romania, and a number of her books deal with life under Communist rule of Nicolae Ceausescu in that country. After years of persecution and censorship in Romania, the author moved to Germany in 1987.

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Only 5 of Ms. Muller's 20 books have been translated into English so far, but with her new celebribrity, this seems likely to change. You can check the Nassau Library System's holdings for Herta Muller by clicking on this link.

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We'd be interested to know who you think deserves a Nobel prize for literature.

NYRB Blog

Just a quick note to let people know that the New York Review of Books now has a blog. What took them so long?