Some self horn tooting

The last book review I wrote as editor of Solares Hill (though probably not the last book review I will write for Solares Hill) is in the current edition of Solares Hill. It's a good nonfiction read called 40 Days and 40 Nights by a fellow named Matthew Chapman. It's about the trial in Dover, Pa., over the introduction of intelligent design into high school science classes. Chapman happens to be a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, who (along with Alfred Russel Wallace) figured out natural selection and who is the demon of those who oppose teaching science in science classes. You can get my review in the Solares Hill PDF or online at The Citizen's web page, www.keysnews.com (the Solares Hill book review is posted there every week, WAAAAAAY down at the bottom of the page).Also in the Citizen and on its web page is my husband Mark Hedden's birding column, which this week happens to concern books about birding -- also the subject of a recent talk he gave at Voltaire Books. Sad to say I've only read one of the titles he discusses, The Song of the Dodo (and I agree with his assessment -- it's a great book -- so great I actually loaned it to someone who never returned it -- and bought another hardcover copy to replace it -- it's never being loaned again). Just to bring things full circle, Quammen's most recent book, also a very good read, is a biography of, you guessed it, Charles Darwin. On a totally unrelated note, as long as I'm linking to my own stuff I might as well throw in the new FKCC Library Blog post I wrote about a cool interview from the Paris Review with Key West's own Harry Mathews.

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

Today'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

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.

Can you read this?

Megan Marshall -- author of the excellent biography "The Peabody Sisters" and panelist at next year's Key West Literary Seminar -- has an interesting piece on Slate today. Marshall, who knows a thing or two about deciphering migraine-inducing handwriting (the Peabody sisters would actually use stationery twice -- writing first horizontally, then turning the paper and writing across their own writing, creating the beautiful but mind-boggling pages like the one pictured here).Marshall is commenting on the uproar over Robert Frost's notebooks as annotated by scholar Robert Faggen (who incidentally is coming to The Studios of Key West later this year). She's more sympathetic than many of the scholars who have attacked Faggen. It's an interesting insight into the hard work of literary scholarship.