Random interesting tangential links

You know what happens when you change jobs, your mother visits, and you're wrapped up in a two-weekend literary seminar, with a writing workshop in between? You fall behind on your essential reading, aka The Onion, that's what. I won't even mention The Daily Show ... but let's just say I found the writer's strike to be uncomfortably convenient. So I missed, until I found it today on a library blog, this hilarious story. Turns out it's part of an Onion theme -- a search for this story found a bunch of others, like this one. (And it led me to the home page of my favorite Onion columnist, Jean Teasdale, but that's a whole different thing. Sorry about the music.) Also loyal reader Matt T. sends along this blog. Being so successfully profiled on a blog is ... unsettling to say the least.

Excellent library links of the day

vintage library cardToday's recommended read is a blog post (take that all you blog haters) about a librarian's wedding and their excellent themed wedding invitations. I'll have to nose around the Internets some more and find the online group for old library equipment fetishists -- I love the old catalogue cabinets and check-out cards and all that stuff. One of the things I love about my new job at the FKCC Library is we stamp books the old-fashioned way. (We also scan them with a bar code reader, no worries.) But this way you know when it's due. And on the celebrity side of breaking library news, the Hollywood Reporter reports that Emilio Estevez is set to star in a movie called "The Public," which he wrote -- it's described as "a social drama set in a public library."

Today's recommended read

motherboard.pngOK, it's not about books. But it's about reading and information and it's an interesting topic -- a book review from the Washington Post, of a book called "Against the Machine," a rant against the Internet and how Kids Today communicate. The reviewer is a former software engineer who wrote a book called "Close to the Machine" so perhaps she was destined to dislike the book. And as a blogger and avid reader of stuff on screen, I also dislike this guy's central thesis. Especially from a guy who posed as a commenter on his own blog. Fundamentally, I just don't get why this is an either/or question -- yes, the Web is full of crap (as is printed matter). But there's so much good stuff out there, so much of which was inaccessible or couldn't even have existed before.

Weekend read

queen.jpgLooking at a publisher's catalogue of upcoming titles, I was interested in one by a writer named Kate Summerscale. Her new book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, is about a Victorian detective who became a model for a lot of great literary detectives. But the catalogue also referred to her previous book, The Queen of Whale Cay. That sounded interesting, so I looked it up. The story was REALLY interesting, about a classic 20th century eccentric, Marion "Joe" Carstairs, an heiress to the Standard Oil Fortune who became a very successful motorboat racer -- and very out-of-the-closet lesbian -- in the 1920s, then retreated to an island in the Bahamas as public opinion turned against her. Even better, it turned out that the Key West library had the book on the shelf. So on Wednesday evening, I stopped by and got it. It's a small book (literally), and a quick read.

Turns out Summerscale used to work for the British paper the Daily Telegraph, which is famous for its hilarious and outrageously candid obituaries, which is how she learned about Carstairs. When I heard that, I decided to check out the Telegraph online just to see if they had these great obits every day. Of course there are a limited number of Carstairs types out there -- but the Telegraph does the best it can with its material, and the obit editor has a pretty entertaining blog.

What to read?

I never actually have this problem -- I have the opposite one -- but I hear people sometimes wonder what they should read. The wonderful Anne Rice at the Key West Library has compiled a list of various "Best of 2007" lists. I love these lists, even if I've compiled my own "to read" lists that are longer than several lifetimes. A good resource and worth bookmarking. One of my favorite online reads, Slate, also has a list of winter reading recommendations from various writers. And the National Book Critics Circle recently posted its Winter List of Good Reads.

(A note on library nomenclature: The library at the corner of Fleming and Elizabeth streets is, in all accuracy, the May Hill Russell branch of the Monroe County Library system. However everyone in town refers to it as the Key West library so I will, too. But if you live here you should know we're part of a countywide library system and the other branches are all worth checking out -- I'm especially fond of the Islamorada, aka Helen Wadley, branch on Upper Matecumbe.)