The Press

Book Pages Returning to NC Newspaper

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The Greensboro News-Record dropped it’s book pages a while back, probably following the lead of other newspapers. No doubt the decision was made by a secret cabal of news editors and producers who hate independent thinkers and truly want to crush reading throughout the country, at least reading outside the approved list. But readers still live in Greensboro. This editorial explains some of the popular demand that brought the book pages back to the newspaper.

More than 150 book clubs are affiliated with the Greensboro Public Library and dozens more operate on their own in dens and living rooms throughout the Triad.

Greensboro’s One City, One Book initiative ranks among the most successful community “read-ins” in the country.

The Barnes & Noble store in Friendly Center is one of the chain’s highest-volume stores in the Southeast.

I doubt this will become a trend. Everyone knows people who read newspapers don’t read or care about books.

Bookselling

Vote for Your Favorite Book

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The National Book Award wants you vote for the best of six award winning choices.

  1. The Stories of John Cheever
  2. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
  3. The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
  4. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
  5. Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
  6. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

I won’t tell you who was winning when I voted, but I will say it was the one I picked.

Fiction

Reason for Reading Dan Brown?

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Adam Gopnik says maybe the reason so many want to read Dan Brown’s books is their niceness. Ancient conspiracies, secrets which must be kept in the dark, crazies with bad skin, and safe plots with modern conclusions. Gopnik writes:

Much of it is bogus, to be sure—though modern Masonry borrowed some oogah-boogah from the Egyptian past, it was an Enlightenment club, whose greatest product was “The Magic Flute,” and which was about as sinister, and secretly controlled about as many governments, as the Royal Order of Raccoons in “The Honeymooners.” But Brown is having fun. And the book is full of activities; there’s more to do with a pencil and safety scissors than in any Highlights for Children.

Uncategorized

My weekend as an honorary German

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It was a strenuous, exhausting, yet enjoyable weekend. It’s going to be a fairly strenuous week too, by my standards. I have to prepare for my departure for Minot (the Høstfest Scandinavian festival, if you’re a new reader) on Monday. On Thursday I have to help the guys load a van for that event, and on Saturday I help a friend move.

(By the way, Phil will be gone next week too. Both of us will try to post as opportunities present themselves, but frequency will be down.)

Another Viking and I drove down to New Ulm on Saturday evening. The weather was unseasonably warm, and remained that way through the event. We were given a room in an old hotel which is now operating as a sort of arts center. As latecomers, we had to take a room on the third floor, where the air conditioner’s writ did not run, but opening a window helped a little. We slept on army cots, and I actually slept pretty well, since I’d prudently stayed up late the night before in order to give myself a sleep deficit.

There was a shower downstairs, and I (up early) was the first to snag it after the Roman who’d been sleeping in the room got up and went to breakfast. The shower, as it turned out, was cold. I endured it like a Cherusci (that was my tribe).

Afterwards, the Roman informed me (with a smile) that the shower did have hot water—“Just not for the first guy.”

And they wonder why everybody wants to massacre them. Continue reading My weekend as an honorary German →

Uncategorized

Weekend report, video edition

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Here’s a YouTube video of our battle this weekend. I’m in the main section of the barbarian army, the one that comes up from the mid-left with Arminius himself, but I was standing on the opposite side, so it’s pretty hard to make me out. I think I caught a glimpse of me once. I was wearing a white tunic.

The clip is almost ten minutes long.

Authors, Fiction

Happy Birthday to H.G.Wells

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Today in 1866, H.G. Wells, who said, “I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea,” who said, “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race,” was born. Wells had little imagination for submarines and also for hell. He said, “Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.” I suppose he was returning his eyewitness report from hell when we said that. Otherwise, how could he know?

For his birthday, here’s a collection of book covers for War of the Worlds.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture