Well, the From The Stacks Reading Challenge has really motivated me to sit down and do some serious reading.

Just as a refresher on this challenge: we were to choose five books from our “to be read” pile and read them between 01 November and 30 January.

I’ve actually already finished all five of the books I chose. They were, luckily for me, all great in their way.

Here’s a brief overview of them:

• Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers: This book is the one that had the biggest impact on me. Set in India in the first half of the 20th century, it combines the story of three characters (Roop, Satya, and Sardarji) and the story of India moving toward independence. For a long time after I finished it my head was full of the characters, the events, the structure . . . everything. It’s hard to believe that this was a debut novel; it certainly deserved to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Now I want to read more work by her.

• Anita Brookner’s Falling Slowly: This contemporary novel tells the story of two sisters as they live their unremarkable quiet lives in London. That doesn’t sound like much, but it was riveting. I’d never read Anita Brookner before, but when I finished reading this book I wanted to run out and buy everything of hers. I later read somewhere that she’s been compared to Jane Austen (who is my all-time favourite author). Interestingly, she alluded to The Odd Women, another book I read for this challenge, and some of the issues the books examine were similar.

• Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen: This novel follows the lives of several characters in North Dakota starting in the Dirty Thirties and ending decades later. It’s told from multiple perspectives, a technique that can be distracting but which in this case was handled so skilfully that it was seamless and definitely added to the appeal of the story. The book examines, in part, the unhappiness that can be experienced in relationships (whether the relationship is parent-child, extended family, lovers, or other). I was captivated by this book from the first chapter to the last.

• George Gissing’s The Odd Women: this novel traces the stories of five women in 19th century England—some struggling in various ways to survive despite poverty, some resolutely fighting for women to have an expanded role in society. The nature of love and marriage is also examined. I enjoyed this book despite its unrelentingly serious, even earnest, tone.

• Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: I’ve never found Evelyn Waugh as funny as everyone else seems to, but in a low-key way I did enjoy this send-up of journalists set in the early 20th century.

Because there’s still some time left in the challenge, I think I’ll see if I can’t reduce my stack of unread books a little more. Here’s my new list:

• Laterna Magika by Ven Begamudre
• The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke
• I’m Frankie Sterne by Dave Margoshes
• Jazz by Toni Morrison
• The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker

Posted by Amy as Readers & Reading at 1:41 AM EST

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If you’d like to know what your name looks like in hieroglyphs, check out the page titled Your Name in Hieroglyphs.

The site is bilingual; the first language you’ll encounter will be French. But look on the right hand column or into the next paragraph for the English translation.

You could try writing a few lines of poetry using this device–it could give a whole new meaning to the result.

Via OpticalPoptitude.com.

Posted by Amy as Fun Stuff, Writing Systems at 1:04 AM EST

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Via SF Signal.

Posted by Amy as Fun Stuff at 4:46 AM EST

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Last night the winners of the 2006 Saskatchewan Book Awards were announced.

Here are a few of the winners:

• Poetry Book of the Year: Daniel Scott Tysdal for Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method
• Book of the Year and Regina Book Award: Michael Trussler for Encounters
• Prix du Livre Francais: Martine Noel-Maw for Amelia Et Les Papillons

For a complete list of winners click here.

Bravo, everyone!

Posted by Amy as Awards at 7:27 AM EST

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Lauren at LMNOP has an entertaining post called America’s Most Fonted: The 7 Worst Fonts.

As you can imagine, this is a list of fonts that really bother her (along with her analysis of the kind of people most likely to use them—such as “middle-aged ex-cheerleaders trying to hold on to the magic of the good old days”).

The fonts range from Comic Sans MS to Kristen ITC.

Check this out to see which font Lauren thinks is most likely to be used by Martha Steward, Brad Pitt, and others.

Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.

Posted by Amy as Fun Stuff at 1:05 AM EST

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For people who are fans of both books and cats, here’s a site to visit: the Literary-Cat Homepage.

As its creator explains, “This is a site dedicated to cats in Art and Literature, myth and legend.”

There are links to various appearances of cats in literature such as the following:

• cats in literature (e.g. Puss In Boots)
• myths and legends (including cats and witchcraft)
• cats in the poems of T.S. Eliot

There is also a link to a Yahoo! Groups site called Cats In Myths and Legends.

Via The Presurfer.

Posted by Amy as Fun Stuff at 12:16 AM EST

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I’ve learned today that there’s been an innovation is how some E-books will be presented.

According to the article Concept E-Book Has Pages, a new E-book called The Turnover has a presentation that involves, if not turning the pages, at least turning the screens.

I think if I were to read an E-book I wouldn’t care if I had something that closely resembled a paper book. Mind you, I’m not rushing out to pick up an E-book, either.

Via Hassenpfeffer.

Posted by Amy as Books at 1:09 AM EST

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If you like folk tales and fairy tales, here’s a wonderful site: Folktexts: A Library of Folktales, Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Mythology.

This site has electronic texts of various tales on numerous themes, including the following:

• fairy gifts
• longing for money or fame
• being abducted by the “little people”
• “being revived from apparent death by a graverobber”

The site also has essays on some aspects of folklore or folktales, such as “Aging and Death in Folklore” or “Censorship In Folklore.”

This is definitely a fun site—I’ll be revisiting.

Via Information Junk.

Posted by Amy as Fairy Tales/Folk Tales at 1:02 AM EST

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Donald Westlake is one of the funniest writers around today.

How can you not be amused by an author whose characters include a country singer singing the song, “If It Ain’t Fried, It Ain’t Food”? Or who gives one of his books the title The Maltese Herring?

Now Christopher Bahn has an interview with Westlake on the A.V. Club’s site. It’s certainly worth a look.

For complete info about Westlake, check out his official website.

Via Incoming Signals.

Posted by Amy as Authors, Humour at 1:54 AM EST

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Here’s a useful reference for science fiction fans: an Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections.

It’s “an index to 3,900 SF anthologies and single-author collections published before 1984, containing over 38,000 stories by 3,880 authors.”

The introduction explains its purpose as follows:

This Index is intended to be a standard reference for locating stories that have appeared in English language science fiction anthologies and collections of stories by one author. For inclusion in the Index a book has to contain at least three stories. Anthologies have to contain mainly science fiction stories, while collections have to be written by authors associated with science fiction. Also covered, although not as thoroughly, are science fiction novels re-written from three or more stories.

You can browse chronologically or by series, and you can browse both the books and the stores by author or by title.

This is an ambitious piece of work that would be a useful reference work.

Via Weblog V2.

Posted by Amy as Speculative Fiction at 2:03 AM EST

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I recently found this little meme. I couldn’t see a title, so I’ve named it and answered the questions. Here are the instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

So here’s my result:

Pascal said that most human problems stem from an inability to sit by ourselves in our rooms. But Mom’s “cure” is too drastic, while I still go too fast and without knowing where. I drive from the nursing home in her car, which I use these days, and turn up a blues album on the stereo—Damn right, somebody wails, you damn right I’ve got the blues.

How dumb the stuffed bunny hangs by a thumb-tack on the walls of my mother’s room. How bare the prairie stretches around her empty house in the late November afternoon.

This is from the essay “Queen of Clubs” in the collection Backwater Mystic Blues by Lloyd Ratzlaff.

It’s a wonderful collection that’s up for two Saskatchewan Book Awards

Via pages turned.

Posted by Amy as Memes at 4:43 AM EST

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I’ve just discovered two more upcoming Reading Challenges: the Classics Challenge and the 2007 TBR [To Be Read] Challenge.

Both of them look intriguing. With the Classics Challenge, you pick five literary classics to read between 01 January 2007 and 28 February 2007. Stay tuned for the official launch of this challenge in late December.

For the TBR Challenge, you pick 12 books that you’ve had on your list of “books you’ve been wanting to read” for 6 months or longer. Then you read one book in each month of 2007.

This sounds like fun, so I’m signing up. Here are my plans for the Classics Challenge:

• Bartholomew Fair (Ben Jonson)
• The Bostonians (Henry James)
• Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol)
• Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
• Volpone (Ben Jonson)

I haven’t figured out my list for the 2007 TBR challenge yet, but I’ll post it in my left sidebar when I do.

Via I Buy Books.

Posted by Amy as Readers & Reading at 7:36 AM EST

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Here’s an interesting initiative: Reading Books By E-mail.

The rationale behind the program is this:

if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read.

You choose a book from many different categories; the titles range from The Art of War to Pilgrim’s Progress to Little Women.

If you’re interested, click this link to sign up.

Via OpticalPoptitude.com.

Posted by Amy as Readers & Reading at 5:56 AM EST

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SF Signal has a fun question up and running: Who Are Your Favourite Literary Science Fiction Characters?

Here’s the background for the question:

Science fiction is often said to be best when the story is character-driven. That must mean there are some pretty cool characters in sf/f. So, who are your favorites?

We’re invited to submit names of characters who are human or alien, biological or not (e.g. Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey).

There are a few rules—most importantly, the name must be from a book or short story, not comics/graphic novels or movies or television.

I’ve always liked Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Posted by Amy as Readers & Reading, Speculative Fiction at 1:21 AM EST

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If you like to imagine yourself in the location where an author sets his/her work, or where that author lives, then Literary Locales is the website for you.

The site’s tagline explains that it holds “More than 1,000 picture links to places that figure in the lives and writings of famous authors.”

Here’s what the site’s builders say about its purpose:

Our task here is to collect and present those cherished by a certain kind of person, the reader curious about the birthplaces of authors, the cities and countrysides that inspire their muses, the self-created and self-revealing settings in which writers do their work–in short, those who share writers’ affinity with place. The sites themselves are sometimes simply informational; others are labors of love, testimonials to favorite authors or to favorite spots. Some consist of little more than a picture and a few lines of text; more ambitious sites treat visitors to virtual tours.

They’ve done a wonderful job. There are a wide variety of locales featured:

• Bede’s World
• Jane Austen Country
• Proust’s “Combray”
• Robinson Crusoe’s Island
• Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles
• Alice Munro’s Wingham, Ontario

They welcome suggestions for additions and ask for photos to be submitted. I would say that James Lee Burke’s Louisiana, especially New Orleans, would be a good bet, as the setting is so important in his work that it’s practically another character.

Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.

Posted by Amy as Readers & Reading at 1:31 AM EST

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Michelle at Overdue Books has come up with a new reading challenge that looks like a good plan: the From the Stacks Reading Challenge.

Here’s how it works:

If you are anything like me your stack of purchased to-be-read books is teetering over. So for this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven’t read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked by the lure of the holiday bookstore displays.

I think in my case this also means no going to the library to borrow books.

This is an excellent idea; I have a whole shelf of books that I buy and mean to read (and then get sidetracked).

The challenge actually started on 01 November; it runs until 30 January.

There are prizes, but you have to sign up in the “comments” section of the above post to qualify for them. If you visit that post, you’ll also see a spiffy button that Michelle created for participants to post on their blogs (you can see it on the left sidebar on my blog, just under the “Fight Censorship” section).

Help spread the word about this by posting about it, and also post the list of books you’re going to read.

Here are my five:

• Falling Slowly (Anita Brookner)
• What The Body Remembers (Shauna Singh Baldwin)
• Beet Queen (Louise Erdrich)
• Scoop (Evelyn Waugh)
• The Odd Women (George Gissing)

I may report back on my progress.

Via pages turned.

Posted by Amy as Readers & Reading at 1:44 AM EST

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Josh Wallaert has started a new blog: Webster’s Daily.

Its tagline reads as follows:

Found poetry from the first edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

A new definition every day.

Here’s a definition I didn’t know for the seemingly ordinary word “blink”:

Blink (n): Blink of ice, is the dazzling whiteness about the horizon, occasioned by the reflection of light from fields of ice at sea.

I’m a fan of reading about words, so I’ll be revisiting.

Posted by Amy as Blogs and Bloggers, Words at 7:25 AM EST

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I have to confess I’d never heard of xylotheks, or wooden libraries, but now I’ve discovered a website dedicated to them.

The Wooden Library at Alnarp Library defines a xylothek as follows:

a collection of simple pieces of wood specimens placed together in some kind of cupboard. In a refined form it is in the shape of “books” where you can find details from the tree inside, everything arranged as a “library” . . . . Each “book” describes a certain tree species and is made out of the actual wood (the “covers”).

This site has numerous photos and is well worth browsing.

Via Alone On a Boreal Stage.

Posted by Amy as Science & Nature, Unusual at 5:38 AM EST

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Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, and as part of the observances for this day many of us turn to literature.

The relevant literature can be found both in the usual places and elsewhere.

There are the works that deal with war, perhaps most famously Wilfred Owen’s two poems “Dulce et Decorum Est” and the “Anthem For Doomed Youth”.

But there is also writing that is not directly connected to the years of the two World Wars. This writing can range from contemporary novels to media releases. What they have in common is that they’ve been censored somewhere in the world.

Freedom of speech is one of the freedoms that we must continue to fight for because censorship is unfortunately ever-present.

Amnesty International has devised a way for bloggers to help in this fight. On John Baker’s Blog I found a wonderful link to one of their initiatives: irrepressible.info.

The premise is simple: all around the world material is being censored. Amnesty International asks that we use our blogs to undermine censorship by publishing material that is currently being censored somewhere in the world.

It’s easy to do. Bloggers put a link to a feed on their site, and irrepressible.info provides the text. Everytime you re-load the page, new material appears. Check out the box in the left sidebar for a sample.

Apparently this iniative was launched in May, but I’ve only become aware of it now.

Remembrance Day strikes me as being a particularly apt time to blog about it. So many people have died who were fighting to protect our freedoms. This is one small way to honour their sacrifices all year round and to continue the battle.

Posted by Amy as Censorship, History at 9:10 AM EST

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Here’s an interesting site: Three Centuries of Canting Songs and Slang Rhymes [1536–1896].

This material is collected by John F. Farmer. I’d never heard of canting songs, but here’s his explanation for the difference between them and slang rhymes:

In the first place, Slang is universal, whilst Cant is restricted in usage to certain classes of the community: thieves, vagrom men, and—well, their associates. One thing, indeed, both have in common; each are derived from a correct normal use of language. There, however, all similarity ends.

Slang boasts a quasi-respectability denied to Cant, though Cant is frequently more enduring, its use continuing without variation of meaning for many generations. With Slang this is the exception; present in force to-day, it is either altogether forgotten to-morrow, or has shaded off into some new meaning—a creation of chance and circumstance. Both Cant and Slang, but Slang to a more determinate degree, are mirrors in which those who look may see reflected a picture of the age, with its failings, foibles, and idiosyncrasies. They reflect the social life of the people, the mirror rarely being held to truth so faithfully—hence the present interest, and may be future value, of these songs and rhymes. For the rest the book will speak for itself.

The list of songs is varied. They range from “A Beggar I’ll Be” to “’Arry At a Political Picnic.”

Posted by Amy as History at 6:50 AM EST

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Now here’s an interesting (and unusual) project: Historical Anatomies on the Web.

The United States’ National Library of Medicine has put together a website featuring illustrations of the human body over five centuries. Here’s an excerpt from their introduction:

The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine has a rich collection of illustrated anatomical atlases dating from the 15th to the 20th century. The Historical Anatomies on the Web Project has been designed to broaden access to this collection by providing high-resolution downloadable scans of selected important images from the atlases. Atlases and images have been chosen for their historical and artistic significance by the project’s content coordinator, Michael North.

There are many, many books here with a wealth of images. Here are a few of the books that are featured:

• 1501 (Leipzig): Magnus Hundt: Antropologium de hominis dignitate, natura et proprietatibus, de elementis, partibus et membris humani corporis
• 1618 (Venice): Carlo Ruini: Anatomia del cavallo, infermit et suoi rimedii.
• 1774 (Tokyo): Johann Adam Kulmus: Kaitai shinsho
• 1754 (London): William Smellie: A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery

Fascinating stuff.

Via Boing Boing.

Posted by Amy as History, Science & Nature, Illustrations at 5:44 AM EST

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Names, like words, go in and out of fashion. As we all know, there are a lot more Ashleys and Kimberlees these days than there are Marthas and Maudes.

I thought I’d check out what thou