I stayed up later than usual yesterday night reading the final pages of Sarah Waters' latest novel, The Little Stranger, and it's been sticking in my head with the kind of persistence that usually signals an impending blog post. I've been a fan of Waters' books for years, starting with her first novel Tipping the […]
Someone’s clearly been reading my mind. Dracula, one of my current obsessions, meets Twitter-fiction, another of my current obsessions, over at Real-Time Dracula, a “reimagining/modernization/condensation of the classic horror novel Dracula in the Web 2.0 medium.” I don’t quite agree with all of the characterization (e.g. Lucy’s use of OMG giggly teen txtspeak!!!1!), but I […]
For the most part, I love Google Maps. I use it all the time when I want to find out where the nearest (fill in the blank) is, and I've put together a lot of practical maps for my own use: public transit in New London, yarn stores in all the towns I've visited, opera […]
…but it is rather silly, in its own way. Consider: First there was the Facebook Hamlet, at McSweeney's. Then there was the Facebook Aeneid ("Dido changed her relationship status to Married. Aeneas changed his relationship status to It's Complicated.") and the Facebook Pride and Prejudice.* And the college class that reenacted Romeo and Juliet on […]
It's a dark and stormy night in New England, with rain dripping on the roof. The cat I've been cat-sitting is curled up, snoring, in her favorite warm spot by the baseboard heater. I feel disinclined to post about anything intellectual. Instead, I've been cooking (salt-cured salmon, spinach with sesame seeds), and wondering what's gone […]
Via several of my Twitter contacts: The Times Online has developed Book Scraper, a literary text analysis tool with 126 books in its database so far, from the 16th through the early 20th centuries. You can look at word clouds and lists of unique and particularly long words for each text (check out the long […]
I've blogged previously about characters from TV shows (most notably Battlestar Galactica) showing up on Twitter. And it's not just BSG: just recently I started watching AMC's Mad Men, twittered about it, and shortly thereafter got a notification that "Peggy Olson is now following you on Twitter." It turns out that the twittering Mad Men […]
For those of you who grew up reading John Bellairs' eerie yet oddly cozy YA novels, in which young heroes and heroines face supernatural terrors amid the Victorian houses in their quiet Midwestern towns, I highly recommend Bellairsia, a fairly comprehensive Bellairs bibliography and biography site. I especially like the map portion of the site […]
On the recommendation of Mike from vitia (hi, Mike!), I've been reading John Crowley's indescribable sort-of-fantasy, sort-of-alternate-history Aegypt Cycle. It's a series of novels about, among other things, a historian who becomes convinced that behind the tantalizing fragments of Renaissance mysticism that he keeps stumbling over, there lies "more than one history of the world." […]
This is what happens when I decide that, after unpacking my books but before shelving them, I ought to rethink my entire organizational system. I kind of like the effect, actually. Except for the whole “can’t walk across the living room” thing. I doubt these photos will win any book pile contests at LibraryThing, but […]