.

( Fifty works of English and American literature we could do without. )

If you haven't read this, go find it, it's fucking hilarious. I've had a few screams of outrage so far (dude, I was IN the York Mystery Plays--and those with eidetic memories will notice that one of these books was on my top 20 list), but it's often pretty hard to disagree with her and her coauthors' points once you've thought about them.

( ETA some random quotes I typed out to a friend the other night. )

So, my situation here is getting worse (don't ask, it's a long story and thinking about it for any length of time makes me depressed as hell; I'm actually posting this through an unsecured connection).

As of this moment, I have to eat (everything else is taken care of and noodles ramen just aren't as good the 37th time around), and I have to get some stuff for my pets.

I've got 3 books this time if anyone is interested (or if you know anyone who may be interested).

These are all numbered editions, fine in fine dustjackets (dust jackets are covered as well). I'm offering them for a little more than half of what you'll find a copy goes for, on average, using bookfinder:

John Crowley - In Other Words, $35
Lucius Shepard - Trujillo, $30
Zoran Zivkovic - Impossible Stories, $35

I'm also selling off a lot of my rare chick tracts here and there. I've got a few up for auction, and it looks like some of them won't sell (among them, a copy of the infamous "Lisa"). If anyone is interested in the books or the tracts, send me a PM.

The original application is years old; if required, I can search for it.

1. The Night In Question, Tobias Wolff
2. Crush, Richard Siken
3. The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 1, Anais Nin
4. The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
5. War: The Lethal Custom, Gwynne Dyer
6. 100%, Paul Pope
7. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
8. The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
9. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander
10. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Time's Arrow, Martin Amis
12. The Fate of Africa, Martin Meredith
13. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
14. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy
15. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
16. The Temple of the Golden Pavillon, Yukio Mishima
17. The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken
18. At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Amy Hempel
19. Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, Doris Lessing
20. Soul, and Other Stories, Andrei Platonov

Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London.

Launching in London today, the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

"This could change bookselling fundamentally," said Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings. "It's giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon ... I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that's pretty compelling."

From academics keen to purchase reproductions of rare manuscripts to wannabe novelists after a copy of their self-published novels, Blackwell believes the Espresso – a Time magazine "invention of the year" – can cater to a wide range of needs, and will be monitoring customer usage closely over the next few months as it looks to pin down pricing (likely to be around the level of traditional books) and demand. It then hopes to roll it out across its 60-store network, with its flagship Oxford branch likely to be an early recipient as well as a host of smaller, campus-based shops.

The brainchild of American publisher Jason Epstein, the Espresso was a star attraction at the London Book Fair this week, where it was on display to interested publishers. Hordes were present to watch it click and whirr into action, printing over 100 pages a minute, clamping them into place, then binding, guillotining and spitting out the (warm as toast) finished article. The quality of the paperback was beyond dispute: the text clear, unsmudged and justified, the paper thick, the jacket smart, if initially a little tacky to the touch.

Described as an "ATM for books" by its US proprietor On Demand Books, Espresso machines have already been established in the US, Canada and Australia, and in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, but the Charing Cross Road machine is the first to be set up in a UK bookstore. It cost Blackwell some $175,000, but the bookseller believes it will make this back in a year. "I do think this is going to change the book business," said Phill Jamieson, Blackwell head of marketing. "It has the potential to be the biggest change since Gutenberg and we certainly hope it will be. And it's not just for us – it gives the ability to small independent bookshops to compete with anybody."

Of course, it won't replace the care and quality of a limited printing by a small press, but still, wow.

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
Ulysses, James Joyce
Le Grand Voyage, Jorge Semprun
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses
The Third Policeman, Flann O'brien
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Dubliners, James Joyce
The Trial, Franz Kafka
Death in Venice and other stories, Thomas Mann
Molloy/Malone dies/The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Jealousy, Alain Robbe-grillet
The Plague, Albert Camus
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
Thomas the Obscure, Maurice Blanchot
The Aspern Papers, Henry James
100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

But my husband was on the computer all day (mine died a while ago and there's no $$$ to fix it or to pick up a new one).

Amazon has taken to de-listing glbt, feminist, and general sexuality books for being too "adult."

Read all about it here.

This includes such adult books as "The Well of Loneliness," and "The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians," but apparently, Laurell K. Hamilton's work is just fine.

I know there are a lot of people who are gay like me in here, so if anyone is interested, I can get a link for a face book group and a petition.

Thoughts?

I don't know if any of you live in or around Portland, OR; I think if you did, I would know by now, but maybe not. But if you do live in or around Portland, OR, you should come. On Thursday, March 19th, Rauan Klassnik and Ariana Reines will be reading at the WorkSound Gallery, 820 SE Alder St., at 7:00pm. Not only are they both fantastic, I am also fantastic, not like they are, quantitatively or qualitatively, but in the way where you know of a person and what kinds of things they like but have never met them and might like to, for a laugh, and with my collaborators I am hosting this event, which is free to attend. There may be wine, which may also be free.

( Here is how good their writings are: )

See you on the River, Phil. Thanks for everything.

Who can recommend a philosophy book that won't either bore me or piss me off? A while ago I mentioned to a friend who reads philosophy what an utter waste of time I thought it was, and she recommended A. C. Grayling. I've just started The Choice of Hercules and it's already pissing me off, for two reasons.

First, it seems to be all about men--I was willing to cut him some pronoun slack when he was describing historical figures and their ideas, but not when he's talking generally; as Douglas Hofstadter points out in his brilliant essay 'The Slippery Slope of Sexism', when Grayling writes about 'men' and 'he' and 'his', with the occasional 'human', it's impossible to tell whether he's actually talking about people or men, and thus is unnecessarily confusing, particularly for women, who don't know if we're actually being addressed or described or not.

Second, he's kind of inverting the rhetorical device I complained about in an earlier byc post--instead of 'no one could possibly think x', it's 'everyone surely believes x' or 'no one would question x'--wait a minute, I might, or I can imagine someone might; I'm not prepared to follow the rest of your logic if you begin with that counterfactual.

So--can anyone suggest a philosophy book that is not prone to these two drawbacks, and actually says something that might be worth knowing?

I didn't respond to that "top 5 books you've read in the past 6 months" challenge because I decided I hadn't read anything exciting enough to mention. But here! At last! I've read a few books that are worth reviewing.

I really enjoyed John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In. I could extol the virtues of the book, but I think I'll just quote a one star review I found on amazon.co.uk:

"Poor, nasty, brutish, but sadly not short.... as Thomas Hobbes might have said, if he'd had the same misfortune as me and had read this book---or at least the first 190 pages, which were enough to convince me that I hated it. It's a relentless piece of gritty, depressing social realism with serial killing and teenage incontinence thrown in just for good measure, disguised as a vampire novel. If you like 'Buffy', or Bram Stoker's Dracula, or Anne Rice, or Stefanie [sic] Meyer, this book is not for you. If, on the other hand, you like relentless violence and nihilistic despair, you might get something out of this. I am utterly perplexed to read that this book has been a best seller in Sweden. This confirms all my prejudices about the gloomy morbidity of the Swedes, based on the bleaker films of Ingmar Bergman and the dismal, if powerful plays of Strindberg."

That's right, it's social realism with teenage incontinence and vampires! (For some reason a majority of people who posted negative reviews "only read to page 190." ?!)I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially just after reading Twilight--which, to my surprise, I also liked (though not quite in the same way--the relentless descriptions of Edward Cullen's "perfection" sort of dampen [no pun intended] the text). The translation read very smoothly, although how faithful it was to Lindqvist's original text I don't know.

Right now I'm reading a book of Blake Morrison's poetry called The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper. Take, for example, the conclusion of Shed Load:

The whole country shelters in a blackout
where summer should have been, the great stormclouds
with their flares and megaphones keeping us within,

their heavy convoy rumbling in escort through lacy
hedgerows
which shiver, bow and curtsy at the passing show
of armoury, the wodge of depression,

which moves inside us as we scan the horizon
for a lit crack, a resting-point, a break between lines
or carriages, a stop-off for the driven soul.

I just finished reading "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. I enjoyed it. It was engagingly written, the characters were sharply-drawn, and you cared about what happened to them. The plot was plausible, frighteningly so.
A few points I didn't like:
Some of the characters (especially the DHS agents) bordered on caricature.
Although I realize that it was written for the YA market, I found "Don't trust anyone over 25" pandering.
Emma Goldman? REALLY?

And ONE quibble; NO ONE in SF calls it "THE" BART; it's just BART.

-x-posted to thebookyoucrew -

Not much to offer, but I do have a few that I'm willing to part with at the moment.

First, Conversation Hearts by John Crowley. Printed by Subterranean Press, 2008.

I know we have a few fans of his here. This is the numbered Subterranean printing. It is number 54 of 250. Fine in a fine dust jacket; signed by the author. I see copies of this going for between 50 and 60 dollars, so I'm going to offer it for 40.

Second, Black Glass by John Shirley. Printed by Elder Signs Press, 2008.

The so called "lost cyberpunk novel." This is one of only 50 hardcover copies printed, number 38. Fine in a fine dust jacket; signed by the author. I see this going for 50 dollars starting price, so, again, I'll offer this for 40 dollars.

Third and last, Walpuski's Typewriter by Frank Darabont. Cemetery Dance Publications, 2005.

This is a special one: one of the 52 lettered editions printed. It is UU, fine in a fine dust jacket and fine tray case. Signed by both the author as well as illustrator Bernie Wrightson. There are copies of this sucker going for at minimum, 240 dollars. While it may be worth that much, I doubt I'll ever get that for it, so I'm setting the starting price for this at, let's say, 150 dollars. I may be amenable to lowering the price depending on what the offer is.

That's all I've got in that regard. If anyone in here (or lurkers) are interested, send me a private message.

On a sadder note, Edd Cartier died last year and I didn't even notice until recently.

 Where should I start? Where should I end? Poetry, novels, short stories, plays, non-fiction, whatever.

top 5 books you've read in the past 6 months

mine:

asylum piece- anna kavan
the silent twins- marjorie wallace (nonfiction, about the gibbons sisters)
veronica- mary gaitskill
the gentle order of girls and boys- dao strom
the gates of janus- memoirs of ian brady

Dod and Davie - J.K. Annand
War Music - Christopher Logue
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For - Alison Bechdel
Death in Venice and Other Stories - Thomas Mann
The Ballad of the Sad Café - Carson McCullers
The Drones Omnibus - P.G. Wodehouse
Claudine at School - Colette
Dom Casmurro - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Cider With Rosie - Laurie Lee
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse
The Tin Drum - Günter Grass
The Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories - Roald Dahl
The Educated Imagination - Northrop Frye
Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov
The Birds and Other Plays - Aristophanes
The Way by Swann's - Marcel Proust (Lynda Davis mangled the title)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Under Milkwood - Dylan Thomas

All books not written in English were read (and reread) in translation.