Nancy Klingener is Community Affairs Manager for the Monroe County Public Library in the Florida Keys. She is also Board President of the Key West Literary Seminar.
Just like the excellent library-themed wedding invitations, this comes from public librarian-turned-author Scott Douglas, who not only has a great blog but is also a contributor to McSweeney's, with this list of reasons to be -- or not to be -- a librarian. How cool is that? He's also got a book coming out soon -- if we're lucky, the publisher is sending Solares Hill a review copy and I'll get to review it there.
Titlepage.tv, the new book chat show that is available free online, made its debut today, with a show titled "All Over the Map," featuring Richard Price (who's getting raves for his new novel Lush Life but, more importantly, writes some episodes for my current DVD addiction, The Wire), Colin Harrison, Susan Choi and Charles Bock. The episodes are also available for download in iTunes format -- perfect for iPod viewing/listening on the treadmill! The show is hosted by Daniel Menaker, who was a longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, a former editor in chief at Random House and was a gracious presence on stage at this year's Key West Literary Seminar. The show also has a blog, called Loud, Please! -- now part of my own honored blogroll, to the right.
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.
OK, 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.