Sad but true: with nearly 5 million Americans drawing unemployment aid, it's becoming increasingly likely that you, dear reader, may have less discretionary income to spend on books than you might have a few years ago.

However, that doesn't mean you should have to go without poetry. Many forward-thinking small presses out there have decided to ( Read more... )

One of my New Year's traditions (at least since 2004) is to take a little time to crunch the numbers on the books I read the previous year, as well as to announce a few highlights. (Past years' results: 2007; 2006; 2005; 2004.)

As for this year, I read a total of 51 books, which is about average for me, although down a bit from last year's 58. ( Read more... )

Just a quick heads-up for any of you interested in what I've been reading lately: the 2008 books-log page, which had been languishing for the last few months, is now up-to-date. I'm mostly not writing capsule reviews this year—just too much other stuff going on —but if you just want a raw list of the 47 books I've read so far this year, well, it's ( Read more... )

Katie Salen: "Born into a world where concepts like copyright, mastery, civic engagement, and participation are seamlessly negotiated and redefined across highly personalized networks ... today's kids are crafting learning identities for themselves-- hybrid identities --that seemingly reject previously distinct modes of being. Writer, designer, ( Read more... )

So I've been kicking around a variety of books for that "New Novel" course I'll be teaching this fall, and some things are finally beginning to fall into place.

I'm definitely going with Patrik Ourednik's Europeana (2005) as my "experimental-form" novel; it not only pushes the boundaries of what could be considered a novel (in a way that will be ( Read more... )

So those of you who read my Facebook news-feed know that I've accepted an offer to teach two writing courses at Boston University this fall, loosely themed around the topic of "The New Novel."

This is a topic I can have some fun with, obviously, and I quickly decided that a good course on the New Novel should endeavor to include the following ( Read more... )

Down to the final fifteen of the 100 Book Challenge!

• 
  As long as we're coming out of the graphic design shelf, we might as well move into Beautiful Evidence, by design critic Edward Tufte
  [I panned this book a bit when I first read it, believing it to re-hash some of the material from Tufte's earlier books. However, that also makes it the easiest ( Read more... )

Thirty books left to go in the 100 Book Challenge!

Last time I left off on the cusp of "comics," so let's proceed into that realm. I'm fortunate that a lot of the comics I want to bring are actually in comics form, in long-boxes under my bed, and are thus exempt from the purge. But in terms of "trade paperbacks," let's see.

• 
  Watchmen, by Alan ( Read more... )

Moving on with the 100 Book Challenge, we come to the "essays" area. I don't have a huge selection here, but these would be my picks:

• 
  I Remember, by Joe Brainard
  [Perhaps the simplest organizing principle for a memoir ever: a sequence of sentences, each of which begin with the words "I remember." Yet somehow it works.]
  
• 
  The Size of Thoughts, by ( Read more... )

Still in the process of [at least theoretically] culling my book collection down to 100 key books. Moving on down the shelf takes us through Drama—my drama selection is pretty patchy and under-appreciated; I'm not sure that any of the scattering of volumes I have would be worth including in the final 100. If I had a good volume of Shakespeare's ( Read more... )