On my 1998 “sabbatical,” I read about 25 or so books. Among them were the collected works of the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, one of that country’s great literary lions whose rather old-world style and eccentric areas of expertise led to some fascinating novels — What’s Bred in the Bone being a particular favorite of mine [...]
In late August, I had bought Timothy Pychyl’s e-book The Procrastinator’s Digest via Xlibris for use with Adobe Digital Editions. (I subscribe to Pychyl’s iProcrastinate podcast.) However, trying to get Adobe Digital Editions set up and registered on my MacBook was a pain, and then my credit card number was stolen suspiciously close to the [...]
Tagged kindleI can’t remember how I ran across Markson’s novel This Is Not A Novel, but I found it so fascinating an experiment that I scooped up and read his other novels that followed the same disconnected yet mosaic-like form. Colin Marshall has written an appreciation of Markson, who recently died, that takes in all of [...]
Economic downturn hitting public libraries. Also, library fines. Another popularly focused article on the digital dark age; it proposes using open-source rather than proprietary file formats. The best suit for your body type. Proto-scholar learns the hard way to ask the right people for process advice. No one would blame her for feeling angry and [...]
Tagged digitization, libraries, Marginal Revolution, Proto-scholarNarrative and novels as models for social relations and as simulations of economic approaches. First in a series of BBC4 radio programs on what the novelist’s imagination can offer sociological research on place. Settings: the rural idyll, the city, and the suburb. “Once you’ve restricted yourself to information that turns up in Google searches, you [...]