Tag: books
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Adventures in Logbooking
Looking at my logbook, I noticed that I recently had a string of four starred books or movies in a row, the longest streak yet. (It would have been five in a row had I seen Brooklyn before Love & Mercy, which I liked a lot but not star-liked.) 749 Typewriter Revolution, The Richard Polt…
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Not Fine: On Library Amnesty
Chicago Public Library is embarking on a fine amnesty drive this month. The last one seemed to work really well for everyone: The library reported receiving 101,301 overdue items, valued at about $2 million, and waived $641,820 worth of fines. The late materials ranged from items only a few weeks overdue to one book that…
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The Shepherd’s Life
Really enjoyed James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life: Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, a memoir of a sheep farmer told season by season. I followed his Twitter account for a while and enjoyed the seeming simplicity the stream of sheep pics depicted. Reading this memoir, however, disabused me of any assumptions I’d made about the life…
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Fates and Furies
“Like that, all at once, Mathilde grew up over Aurelie’s skin.” That sentence pretty much summed up Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies for me. It’s a book highly concerned with facade, which is often portrayed by the characters’ skin — the metaphorical skin Mathilde grows over her childhood self, and even the actual skin on Lotto’s face, which…
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The Typewriter: A Graphic History
Janine Vongool’s The Typewriter: A Graphic History of the Beloved Machine is a gorgeous compendium of ads, photographs, and other artwork depicting typewriters and related ephemera from their invention in the late 1860s to the 1980s, when personal computers began to supersede their analog ancestors. In other words: straight-up typewriter porn. Some interesting tidbits: The Name Charles Weller, a…
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Herbert Hoover in the White House
By nature of their office presidents generally believe the press corps is working against them, but there is little question that in Washington in 1932 reporters and editors had a lively antipathy for Hoover, a disdain unmatched by any successor until the next Quaker to occupy the White House—Richard Nixon, some forty years later. From…
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The Typewriter Revolution
I discovered, located at my local library, checked out, and read Richard Polt’s The Typewriter’s Revolution within about two days. And wouldn’t you know it, now all I want to do is use my typewriter. Reading this beautiful book—nay, merely getting a few pages in—inspired me to uncover the IBM Selectric I that I inherited from my grandma…
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The Hunt for Vulcan
I’ve never forgotten the scene in Men in Black, when Jay (Will Smith) and Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) are sitting on a bench facing the New York City skyline. Jay has gotten a brief but shocking glimpse of the secret alien world Kay is trying to recruit him into, one that few people know about.…
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The Martian
I conducted an experiment with The Martian. Too many times I’ve read a book before seeing its movie version and have come out of the theater disappointed they didn’t show this or showed too much of that, and above all that I knew what was going to happen. Seems the conventional wisdom is that you…
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Step Aside, Pops
Kate Beaton’s first collection of Hark! A Vagrant comics gave us bizarro world takes on Tesla, Susan B. Anthony, Lord Byron, Batman, and my favorite, Open Mic Night at the French Revolution. Her new collection, gleefully titled Step Aside, Pops, gives us the Founding Fathers at the mall, Tennyson, Greek mythology, Ida B. Wells, Jane Austen remixes, the Beatniks,…
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We Don’t Need Roads
Caseen Gaines, author of Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon, leads this year’s deluge of commentary honoring the Back to the Future trilogy’s 30th anniversary with a wide-ranging and lovingly crafted retrospective on the development, production, and long afterlife of the 1985 time-travel classic. Built upon extensive interviews with cast, crew, studio executives,…
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Perish Then Publish
Breaking news: A new story (that’s actually an old, unfinished manuscript) from a revered (dead or feeble) author has been unearthed and prepared for publication this year. The title is Go Set A Watchm—I mean The Story of Kullervo by J.R.R. Tolkien. What’s with all this unfinished stuff being published posthumously? There’s probably a good…
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The Meaning of the Library
A few interesting tidbits from The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (ed. Alice Crawford)… In “The Renaissance Library and the Challenge of Print” by Andrew Pettegree, we learn the library was not always a hushed, solemn place: The Renaissance library was a noisy place—a place for conversation and display, rather than for study and contemplation.…
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Refer Madness: Pole Stars
Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk. Summer is finally (almost, sorta) here. “Bees they’ll buzz / Kids’ll blow dandelion fuzz…” The AC is on at the library, but at the ref desk it’s still a bit muggy. The perfect time for this patron question: Do you have…
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H is for Hawk
David Fincher’s Gone Girl opens gazing upon the back of Amy’s blond head. Her husband Nick, in voice-over: “The primal questions of a marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?” I thought of this while reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, when Macdonald’s gaze tried…