More than 140 characters on recent reading

First of all, I did finish Elif Batuman's The Possessed and I intend to review it for Solares Hill so no review type copy here except to say that I liked it very very much and give it an A. Or four out of five stars if that's the system I wind up going to, which I might. Maybe even four and a half. After finishing that I started on Neil Gaiman's American Gods ... and started following the One Book One Twitter experiment on Twitter. I'm not going to go into the reasons I resisted then finally caved to Twitter -- David Carr does that far better than I in this piece from the New York Times. I don't think it will supersede Facebook in my online life -- most of my friends and family are on Facebook; I hardly know anyone who Twitters. I signed up for a bunch of book-related feeds and will use it for local stuff. (Hey Key West Citizen -- it's great you guys have a Twitter feed and all, but I think the point of Twitter is that you post to it occasionally -- as of this writing the most recent post is 11 days old -- that's not very, um, newsy.) I am starting to get the protocols, with feeds and hashmarks etc. though I still feel like a blundering ignoramus in danger of making an online fool of myself. But I can see its appeal and think it might even be a good exercise for someone like me, who has a tendency to think I must be up on all things all the time. That's impossible on Twitter and good thing, too -- so you just check in, see what others are saying and maybe follow a couple interesting links.

As far as a reading/literary experience goes ... well, it's not a coherent conversation of any kind, that's for sure. More like dropping into a big cocktail party where you don't know anyone but everyone's pretty friendly, and eavesdropping and engaging in a couple quick exchanges. Is that edifying? I'm not sure. It's kind of fun. I can't say I've gotten any big insights into the book from any of the posts that I've read. But I'm grateful to the people who made this happen because 1) they finally got me to read American Gods and 2) now I finally have a rudimentary understanding of Twitter.

I can see that for others, including Neil Gaiman, Twitter is an important part of their lives. I don't know that it will ever become an important part of mine. And I really would like to resist Yet Another Online Timewaster. But it's been an interesting introduction.

The bird pictured here, in case anyone was wondering and didn't already know, is a Northern Mockingbird, Florida's state bird and the primary twitterer of local environs. Recently, many people I know have been complaining about this bird twittering outside their windows early in the morning. Personally I don't mind that but don't like it when they divebomb you because they think you're too close to their nests.

The other March Madness

Yes, yes, it's not like Wolf Hall needs more accolades -- Man Booker Prize, National Book Critics Circle, overall winner in the megalist put together by the Williamsburg Public Library -- but still, I was delighted to see it triumph in The Morning News' extremely entertaining and often enlightening Tournament of Books. I'd seen references to the Tournament for the last couple years but hadn't bothered to investigate -- but this year book reviewing/covering goddess Laura Miller of Salon gave it a push so of course I had to check it out. Though I was sorry to see my man John Wray go down to book club favorite The Help in the first round, I was still psyched that Wolf Hall made it all the way through -- and reading the finals when it was a real back and forth against Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, I felt actual suspense. Nice job, folks.

Random cool book-related stuff from the web

Couple things that washed up onto my screen this morning: MobyLives, a book blog that's been on a two-year hiatus, according to the daily Shelf Awareness email -- looks like a fun and interesting compendium of litry stuff. It's the newest addition to our list of links and it doesn't take long to read back through the archives of its current incarnation. Maybe it's because I'm from Massachusetts but I particularly appreciated the blog's inaugural post. 

The Guardian runs the results of a funny contest to recast books in bestseller genres (chick lit, fantasy etc.).

You have a little more than a day to decide whether this year is the year you'll write a novel in November -- those wacky folks at National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) are at it again -- 50,000 words, no one says they have to be great art -- organized on the web with local get-togethers. More details at their website; we're working on hosting a write-a-thon at the college library; watch here for details.

This isn't really a web thing but if you've never been to the Miami Bookfair and you're in the South Florida region and you like books -- you should go. The number of writers who show up and talk is unbelievable and the street fair is like something out of a dream. Get details at their website and get yourself to Miami the weekend of Nov. 15-16.

Littoral Gets Critical (or Critical Gets Littoral)

Must be synchronicity -- or is that serendipity? -- but just a day after I point out how cool the National Book Critics Circle's blog Critical Mass is, they go and link to Littoral, the most excellent of local literary blogs (or national literary blogs for that matter). The specific item that caught their interest was Arlo Haskell's interview with Barry Unsworth, historical novelist and one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar. Since taking on this blog and making it his own, Arlo's really classing up the joint.

Radio saved the literary star?

Amid all the mourning for disappearing book coverage in newspapers, Publishers Weekly reports some good news: NPR is increasing its books coverage. (That's 100.5 on your FM dial in Key West, most of the time, or anytime on the web from a station of your choice -- I like the NPR books podcast they put out every couple of days which collects a bunch of their books stories -- reviews, interviews, features -- it's free and you can subscribe on iTunes then pop them right onto your computer and/or iPod.) I found this story about NPR, by the way, on Critical Mass, the excellent National Book Critics Circle blog. Don't know if anyone but me uses my blog's blogroll as a handy way to check in on various book and literary sites but some of them are fun. And today I added a new one, PhiloBiblos, the blog of a young and, judging from his blog, extremely smart librarian up in Massachusetts. Found that one through my new addiction, LibraryThing.