In "The Book Collection that Devoured My Life" Luc Sante ponders the obsession of book collecting (it strikes a bit close to home for me as well) and concludes:
"Many books are screwy, a great many are dull, some are irredeemable, and there are way too many of them, probably, in the world. I hate all [...]

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The Bookinist had to have been built with me in mind. If only it had some built-in plumbing, and perhaps a coffee reservoir…

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Perhaps because I don’t follow the genre(s) involved closely, though I do read quite a bit in them, I had never paid attention to the term “Slipstream” until now. Via Bryan Alexander come two great links that inform me I’ve been reading quite a lot of Slipstream titles without even knowing it. First, a slipstream [...]

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I am stretched too thin. I can’t think. It’s time to wean and weed. I follow many more blogs, sites, and publications than are listed in my always outdated sidebar and it’s become too much. I don’t have time for it and I don’t think I’m getting much intellectual return from most of them.
So over [...]

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Not long ago, I attempted to mimic some cooking as it is done in a number of relatively recent novels. I began, foolishly, with several recipes from Günter Grass’s Nobel Prize-provoking “The Flounder,” the epic allegory of German history told through the endlessly repeated parable of an evil fish, a gullible man, a virtuous woman, [...]

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Some current schedules for online/email reading groups!
Literary Fiction Lovers

Group Home
Info Pages

May - The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
June - Snow Flower & the Secret Fan (Lisa See)
July - The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
August - Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai)

Big Fat Books
Group Home
Info Pages

Apr.-Jun. - The Glass Bead Game (Hermann Hesse)
Alternate - Buddenbrocks (Thomas Mann)

Jul.-Sep. - Middlemarch [...]

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JforJames sez:
Sometimes when faced with difficult or complex poetry, the detective’s words to Jake Gittes at the end of the movie Chinatown come to mind: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Amen.

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Scott McLemee of Crooked Timber has a “real” blog now: Quick Study. Right now I have little time for reading things that aren’t directly related to work, but Quick Study is going on the shortlist.

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Yet another story on the death of the book… My sagging bookshelves and the joy that can be seen on the faces of bookstore cashiers when I walk through the door attest to my own love for books. When I see a story like this I always assume that it’s another of those stories wrongly [...]

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“A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing…”
Read more from Zadie Smith’s look at literature’s ‘legacy of failure’…

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I’m about 1/3 of the way through Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer and I’m already comfortable recommending it. The subtitle “A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” is apt– you don’t have to be (or wish to be) a writer to get a lot out [...]

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Bookslut reports that NPR is asking authors about their buttonhole books, “the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby.” I have a small menagerie of books that fit this cateogry, the ones I have bought– some many times– for others. Not coincidentally, they are also the kind that can cause a real strain [...]

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