homefries.org

Early morning, Wednesday, 27 January Just in from Kathleen Bartholomew, Kage Baker’s sister and care giver: Kage’s doctor has informed us she has reached the end of useful treatment. The cancer has slowed, but not stopped. It has continued to spread at an unnatural speed through her brain, her lungs and – now – reappeared [...]

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I felt exactly this same way: I understood that they were just made up, that Henderson was a writer, that there weren’t any People, that nobody was going to find me and sort out my teenage angst and teach me to fly—and then again, on the other hand… by Jo Walton over at Tor.com: Lonely [...]

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Amazon Rank. ‘Nuff said. Update, 4/13: NY Times reports on the “glitch”.

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After eyeing them online, I finally handled a Kindle and talked to a couple of Kindle-owners last June. That rather undermined my defenses against buying one, and I finally broke down in August and bought one. I love it! Does it have room for improvement? Yes. The configuration of the buttons is a bit awkward. [...]

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On September 15, 2006, I ordered a special 25th anniversary edition of one of my favorite books, Little, Big by John Crowley, which was then in preparation. (I even sprang for a copy of the numbered edition, I like this book that much.) There is a theme in the book, that the farther in you [...]

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The New York article I blogged a few days ago got quite a response from Kassia Krozser at Booksquare, It’s Only The End of Rose-Colored Glasses: Noted statistician Philip Roth estimated, fifteen years ago, “…there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.” [...]

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Not to mention the future: Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind – ChronicleReview.com So let’s restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, [...]

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Fascinating article in New York Magazine, as a reader, as an editor, and as a new owner of a kindle: Have We Reached the End of Book Publishing As We Know It? Debbie Stier, Miller’s No. 2 at HarperStudio as this little imprint is called, has been collecting videos for their blog. “You want to [...]

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The Spring 2008 issue of Harvard Divinity Bulletin has a lovely essay by Marilynne Robinson, “Credo.” History up to the present moment tells us again and again that a narrow understanding of faith very readily turns to bitterness and coerciveness. There is something about certainty that makes Christianity un-Christian. Instances of this are only too [...]

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And, in a break from political videos, I should report that I finished Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn, which introduces yet another misguided, modestly dissipated youth who doesn’t know his own mind, in this case the title character. There are also three rather wonderful female characters: Lady Laura Kennedy, for whom the plot is a tragedy; [...]

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