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Yann Martel's Crusade
Books Read in 2007
= Canadian
by Jane Austen*
by Jane Austen*
by Margery Allingham
by Margery Allingham*
by Jane Austen*
by Margery Allingham*
by Cervantes
by Zadie Smith
by P.G. Wodehouse
by Margaret Atwood 
by Edward Willett 
by J. K. Rowling
by Philip Pullman
by Philip Pullman
by Philip Pullman
by Agatha Christie*
by Don Kerr (poetry) 
by Dave Margoshes (poetry) 
by Eric Wright 
by Robert Currie (poetry) 
by Bonnie Burnard 
by Maeve Binchy*
by Confucius 
by Edith Wharton
by Jeanette Lynes (poetry) 
by Fannie Flagg *
by Maurice Sendak
by Robert B. Parker*
by Robert B. Parker*
by Gwendoline Butler*
by A. A. Fair
by Judith Krause (poetry) 
by Sylvia Legris (poetry) 
by Sylvia Legris (poetry) 
by Ray Bradbury
by Ray Bradbury
by A. S. Byatt
by Glen Sorestad* (poetry) 
by Agatha Christie*
by Laura Ingalls Wilder*
by Laura Ingalls Wilder*
by Laura Ingalls Wilder*
by Terry Jordan 
by Guy Gavriel Kay 
by Guy Gavriel Kay 
by Laura Ingalls Wilder*
by Laura Ingalls Wilder*
by Katherine Paterson
by Guy Gavriel Kay 
by Roger Moore (poetry) 
by Agatha Christie*
by Roald Dahl
by Maya Angelou
by Judy Blume
by Martha Grimes
by Shel Silverstein
by Naguib Mahfouz
by Judy Blume
by Margery Allingham
by Maeve Binchy
by Henry James
by Nikolai Gogol
by Laura Burkhart (poetry) 
by Maeve Binchy*
by Naguib Mahfouz
by Dick Francis*
by Ben Jonson
by Austin Clarke 
by Gail Bowen 
by Agatha Christie*
by Neil Gaiman
by Robert B. Parker
by Douglas Glover 
by Orson Scott Card
by Dick Francis*
by Jane Austen*
by Ben Jonson
by Terry Pratchett
by Alice Walker
by Alexander McCall Smith
by Neil Gaiman
Books Read in 2006
* = reread
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You Are 71% Tortured Genius |
 You are smart. Brilliant in fact. And while it’s a blessing, it’s also a curse. Your head is filled with everything - grand ideas, insufferable worries, and a good deal of angst. |
Posted by Amy as Fun Stuff at 9:18 AM EDT
Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Play Translated Into Modern English: language warning. Funny, though.
Posted by Amy as Humour, Shakespeare at 1:52 AM EDT
The Book of Deer (Cambridge University Library, MS. Ii.6.32) is a Gospel Book written in a hand that was current in the period c. 850-1000. The Gospel text has generally been dated to the first half of the tenth century. Of the four Gospels only the text of St John is complete. Each Gospel is prefaced by a full-page illumination. The manuscript belongs to the category of ‘Irish pocket Gospel Books’, produced for private use rather than for church services. While the manuscripts to which the Book of Deer is closest in character are all Irish, scholars have tended to argue for a Scottish origin. A number of additions were made to the manuscript, the earliest being a communion service for the sick. Additions made in the eleventh-twelfth centuries include the account of the foundation of a monastery by St Columba and St Drostan, land grants to the house, and a brieve of King David I in favour of the ‘clerics of Deer’. It is reasonable to assume that the manuscript was at Deer in Aberdeenshire when the additions were made. The fame of the manuscript rests chiefly on the additions, most of which are in Gaelic (or Middle Irish). It later belonged to Thomas Moore, bishop of Ely (d. 1714), whose library was presented to the University of Cambridge by King George I in 1715.
Via Plep.
Posted by Amy as Medieval and Old English at 1:19 AM EDT
This page comprises a list of 901 “essentialist explanations” of the form “Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z”. I have edited some entries for uniformity, clarity, or good English. The entries are grouped for convenience rather than correctness. In particular, fictional languages belonging to actual language families are grouped with their natural language relatives. New contributions are solicited, especially for American and African languages.
Here are a few examples (based on real and invented languages):
Klingon is essentially Arabic spoken by a German with a tribble caught in the back of his throat and a turtle on his head.
–Peter ClarkFrench is essentially a language that elides everything that doesn’t get out of the way fast enough, and nasalises everything else.
–Peter BleackleyPsycho-babble is essentially Minbari spoken by seekers of tax-funded grants, power-hungry psycho-totalitarians, counsellors or other unemployables while wearing a too-tight tiara.
–laserEnglish is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls.
–Bryan Maloney
Via MetaFilter
Posted by Amy as Language at 12:40 AM EDT
Diagramming Sentences: in case you’ve ever wondered how it’s done.
Posted by Amy as Grammar at 1:46 AM EDT
My favourite blogger is doing his version of lolmemecats and their many spin-offs: lolpilgrimes.
Check out the various pilgrims:
• the Summoner: “no jail for u? yive cheezburger vnto me then lolz”
• the Cook: “im in ur kicchen . . . scratchin my mormal”
• the Prioresse: “LOL vincet omnia”
Via Quotidian Hell.
Posted by Amy as Blogs and Bloggers, Humour at 1:57 AM EDT
Creative Writing Prompts: 302 suggestions for writing:
Use the creative writing prompts and creative writing ideas to create stories, poems and other creative pieces from your imagination. The writing prompts can even help you come up with creative content for blogs and blog stories.
Posted by Amy as Writing at 6:30 AM EDT
The “Rare Book Room” site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.Over the last ten years, a company called “Octavo” embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).
This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.
In particular the site contains:
1. Some of the great books in science, including books by Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Einstein, Darwin and others.
2. Most of the Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland. It also contains the First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
3. The complet copies of Poor Richard ’s Almanac by Benjaman Franklin.
4. Very rare editions: Gutenberg ’s Bible of 1455 (from the Library of Congress), Harvey’s book on the circulation of blood, Galileo ’s Siderius Nuncius, the first printing of the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta.
Posted by Amy as Books Online at 4:11 AM EDT
An obvious problem for the illustrators approaching Shakespeare was the fact that the plays were intended for theatre production, and visual representations of the work had been done through performances many times. They had to decide whether or not to ignore the theatrical aspect of the work. Many chose not to, and illustrated theatre scenes from the play, with staging and costume design from contemporary productions. Others produced portraits and book illustrations of famous actors and actresses in their most well-known roles, from David Garrick through Ellen Terry.
Via Plep.
Posted by Amy as Design/Illustrations at 1:57 AM EDT
The guiding question of our project is how contemporary informational technology can facilitate, enhance and innovate the complex cognitive and learning activities involved in reading a late medieval literary text like Boccaccio’s Decameron. We fundamentally believe that the new electronic environment and its tools enable us to revive the humanistic spirit of communal and collaboratively “playful” learning of which the Decameron itself is the utmost expression. Through a creative use of technology, our project provides the reader with an easily accessible and flexible yet well-structured wealth of information on the literary, historical and cultural context of the Decameron, thus allowing a vivid yet rigorously philological understanding of the past in which the work was conceived. At the same time, our project is meant to facilitate the creative expression of a multiplicity of perspectives which animate our contemporary readings. By reconciling in a collaborative fashion the reader’s freedom with a sound cognition of serious, scholarly achievements in the study of the Decameron, our project is also an example of how new technologies can provide an innovative pedagogical medium for a fulfilling educational experience based on a literary text that is open to a variety of cultural interests and levels of learning.
Posted by Amy as Books Online, Medieval and Old English at 3:06 AM EDT
Color Printing In The Nineteenth Century:
The nineteenth century was the turning point for technical development in color illustration. At the beginning of the century, books with color plates were hand-colored by the artist, using techniques dating back to the Renaissance. A hundred years later, the photo-reproductive techniques and the steam-driven printing press took printing out of the hands of the artist and introduced processes which would be used until the computer revolution of our day. Color Printing in the Nineteenth Century documents these changes in color printing technology by displaying some of the finest examples of books illustrated in color, published from the last quarter of the eighteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century.Among the books on exhibit are the two masterworks of the nature painter John James Audubon, The Birds of America and The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, the charming children’s books of Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane, and beautiful hand-colored botanical illustrations from The Botanical Magazine, the most famous English horticultural periodical.
Posted by Amy as Design/Illustrations at 1:19 AM EDT
A Tribute To St. Nicholas: A Magazine For Young Folks.
St. Nicholas was launched in 1873, and it appears to have been popular with readers and contributors alike:
St. Nicholas was one of the first children’s magazines that did not insist that kids learn overt, severe lessons about being good, or what happens when you are bad. Certainly both sexes were encouraged to be studious, truthful, and polite; good “manly” behavior was encouraged in boys, and “good girls” were those who were ladylike and practiced charity and patience, while children who were bad ultimately suffered the consequences and learned the error of their ways. And certainly didactic prose was not totally absent from its pages. However, these lessons was done in a more natural method than youngsters being smote by the Will of God or devoured by wild beasts.. . . .
A very long “short list” of other frequent contributors (PLEASE NOTE: The titles in parentheses are those the writer is most well known for, not necessarily stories that appeared in St. Nicholas.):
• William Cullen Bryant
• Ellis Parker Butler (”Pigs is Pigs”)
• Susan Coolidge (What Katy Did)
• Richard Harding Davis (”Gallegher,” “The Bar Sinister”)
• Emily Dickinson
• J. Frank Dobie
• Eugene Field (”The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat”)
• Edward Everett Hale (”The Man Without a Country”)
• Sarah Orne Jewett (”A White Heron”)
• Charles Kingsley (Westward Ho!)
• Sidney Lanier
• James Otis (Toby Tyler)
• John Bennett (Master Skylark)
• James Whitcomb Riley
• Cornelia Meigs (Invincible Louisa)
• Alice Hegan Rice (Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch)
• Christina Rossetti (”Who Has Seen the Wind?”)
• Ernest Thompson Seton (Wild Animals I Have Known)
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Mark Twain
• John Greenleaf Whitter
• Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House books)
• Kate Douglas Wiggin (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm)
Via Neat New Stuff On The Web This Week.
Posted by Amy as Children's Literature, Newspapers & Magazines at 7:55 AM EDT
Myths and Legends of the Sioux:
In publishing these “Myths of the Sioux,” I deem it proper to state that I am of one-fourth Sioux blood.. . . .
The stories contained in this little volume were told me by the older men and women of the Sioux, of which I made careful notes as related, knowing that, if not recorded, these fairy tales would be lost to posterity by the passing of the primitive Indian.
The notes of a song or a strain of music coming to us through the night not only give us pleasure by the melody they bring, but also give us knowledge of the character of the singer or of the instrument from which they proceed. There is something in the music which unerringly tells us of its source. I believe musicians call it the “timbre” of the sound. It is independent of, and different from, both pitch and rhythm; it is the texture of the music itself.
The “timbre” of a people’s stories tells of the qualities of that people’s heart. It is the texture of the thought, independent of its form or fashioning, which tells the quality of the mind from which it springs.
Posted by Amy as Mythology at 1:40 AM EDT
The popes had always had a library, but in the middle of the fifteenth century they began to collect books in a new way. Nicholas V decided to create a public library for “the court of Rome”–the whole world of clerics and laymen, cardinals and scholars who inhabited the papal palace and its environs. He and Sixtus IV provided the library with a suite of rooms. These were splendidly frescoed, lighted by large windows, and furnished with elaborate wooden benches to which most books were chained. And, unlike some modern patrons, the popes of the Renaissance cared about the books as well as about the buildings that housed them. They bought, borrowed, and even stole the beautiful handwritten books of the time. The papal library soon became as spectacular a work of art, in its own way, as the Sistine Chapel or Saint Peter’s. It grew rapidly; by 1455 it had 1200 books, 400 of them Greek; by 1481, a handwritten catalogue by the librarian, Platina, showed 3500 entries–by far the largest collection of books in the Western world. And it never stopped growing, thanks to bequests, purchases, and even, sometimes, military conquests.
With more than 560,000 human-edited entries, Acronym Finder is the world’s largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms. Combined with the Acronym Attic, Acronym Finder contains more than 4 million acronyms and abbreviations.
Via El Dorado County Library’s What’s Hot on The Internet This Week.
Posted by Amy as Words at 1:02 AM EDT
Vote For Your Favourite National Magazine Award-Winning Cover:
Since the very first National Magazine Awards in 1977, our judges have reviewed more than 1000 magazine covers for consideration for the coveted title of Best Magazine Cover. Nearly 200 have been nominated and the following covers have been outstanding enough to win Gold awards over the past 30 years. Now it’s your turn: Vote for your favourite National Magazine Award-winning cover.
The winner of the online vote will be announced on our website on June 15, the day of the 30th anniversary National Magazine Awards.
Posted by Amy as Awards, Design/Illustrations, Newspapers & Magazines at 1:02 AM EDT
If you’d like to check out how you’d do as a staff writer at The Economist, take The Economist Style Quiz.
If you’d like to study in advance, check out The Economist Style Guide (I especially like the section on solecisms).
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know:
The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.“The words we suggest,” says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, “are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.”
I did pretty well, but there are a few that I can never remember (e.g. ziggurat) and at least one that I guess I knew at one time, or I’d never have passed high school biology, but I’d forgotten it (gamete).
Via Mental Floss.
Posted by Amy as Words at 1:26 AM EDT
The Enemies of Books: according to this book; the enemies include fire, water, gas and heat, the book worm, other vermin, and more.
I like this opening from the chapter headed “Servants and Children”:
READER! are you married? Have you offspring, boys especially I mean, say between six and twelve years of age? Have you also a literary workshop, supplied with choice tools, some for use, some for ornament, where you pass pleasant hours? and is — ah! there’s the rub! — is there a special hand-maid, whose special duty it is to keep your den daily dusted and in order? Plead you guilty to these indictments? then am I sure of a sympathetic co-sufferer.Dust! it is all a delusion. It is not the dust that makes women anxious to invade the inmost recesses of your Sanctum
Via Plep.
Posted by Amy as Books at 1:56 AM EDT
”Celebrated Canadian Poet Don McKay Wins $50,000 Griffin Prize”:
A veteran Canadian author who has twice won the Governor General’s award for poetry was one of two recipients of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize, awarded Wednesday at a lavish ceremony in Toronto.Canadian Don McKay won for Strike/Slip, his 11th book of poetry, which was lauded by judges as a book of “patience, courage, and quiet eloquence.”
The $100,000 award, worth $50,000 each to a Canadian and an international recipient, is among the most lucrative poetry prizes in the world.
”Writer-In Exile’s Dream Has Come True”:
Barzangi has just been awarded a remarkable honour and opportunity. He’s been named Edmonton’s first official Writer-in-Exile, a writer-in-residency program for refugee writers who’ve fled war or persecution.
Posted by Amy as Authors, World Literature at 1:35 AM EDT
The books and articles listed here are resources on shyness. This list is maintained by The Shyness Institute, a non-profit research institution dedicated to research regarding shyness, social anxiety disorder, and related anxiety disorders.
Via Rebecca’s Pocket.
Posted by Amy as Readers & Reading at 3:19 AM EDT
The shortlist for the ReLit Awards has been announced.
SHORT FICTION:
1. Skids, Cathleen With (Arsenal Pulp)
2. The Virgin Spy, Krista Bridge (Douglas & McIntyre)
3. Zero Gravity, Sharon English (Porcupine’s Quill)
4. Gargoyles, Bill Gaston (Anansi)
5. The Hour of Bad Decisions, Russell Wangersky (Coteau)
6. The Coward Files, Ryan Arnold (conundrum)
7. Lanzmann and other stories, Damian Tarnopolsky (Exile)
8. Whatever Happens, Tim Conley (Insomniac)
9. Indigenous Beasts, Nathan Sellyn (Raincoast)
POETRY:
1. What You Can’t Have, Michael V. Smith (Signature)
2. Apostrophe, Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry (ECW)
3. Black, George Elliott Clarke (Polestar)
4. All the Lifters, Esther Mazakian (Signature)
5. I, Nadja, and Other Poems, Susan Elmslie (Brick)
6. Tear Down, Ali Riley (Frontenac House)
7. Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method, Daniel Scott Tysdal (Coteau)
8. The Good Bacteria, Sharon Thesen (Anansi)
9. Types of Canadian Women, K.I. Press (Gaspereau)
NOVEL:
1. Season of Iron, Sylvia Maultash Warsh (Dundurn)
2. De Niro’s Game, Rawi Hage (Anansi)
3. Suddenly the Minotaur, Marie Helene Poitras (DC Books)
4. Bow Grip, Ivan E. Coyote (Arsenal Pulp)
5. Orphans of Winter, Rob Ritchie (Seraphim)
6. All This Town Remembers, Sean Johnston (Gaspereau)
7. Miss Lamp, Chris Ewart (Coach House)
8. ManBug, George K. Ilsley (Arsenal Pulp)
9. The Mole Chronicles, Andy Brown (Insomniac)
Posted by Amy as Awards at 5:10 AM EDT
