On the Web
So, it’s Banned Books Week. I’ll withhold — reluctantly — the Sarah Palin jokes.
According to the Banned Books Week site, more than 400 books were challenged in America in 2007. The top ten?
1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Banned Books Week is set aside at the end of each September as a time to reflect on the importance of the freedom to read.
The University of Memphis’ University Libraries will be getting in on the fun by staging readings from books that have been banned or challenged throughout history. The readings will be Monday (Sept. 29) through Friday (Oct. 3) from noon until 2 p.m. in the rotunda of the Ned. R. McWherter Library.
To volunteer as a reader, contact Tom Mendina at 678-4310 (e-mail tmendina at memphis.edu), or Kay Kroboth at 678-2209 (e-mail kroboth at memphis.edu).
If you’re a bookaholic, chances are it’s not just because you like stories. You probably also just love the physicality of books themselves. Those papery book smells: the crumbly mustiness of old library tomes as well as the glossy mass-produced fragrance of the new volumes lining the shelves of the local book megamarket. The way it feels to run your hands over a fancy embossed book jacket. The array of colors and shapes books come in, and the designs emblazoned on their covers and backs. Books are art.
But some creative people build on that concept, further pushing the idea of book as art — both of the folk and high variety.
After the jump is a brief roundup of book art links for your weekend perusal.
Everybody (with the exception of you, you, and maybe you) has a MySpace page these days. Or at least a Facebook account. Or LinkedIn profile. And chances are, you might be a little bored. E-stalking old classmates and exes can really only take you to a certain level of web nirvana, after all.
So if you’re looking for new pixelated playgrounds on which to play, have I got some sites for you.
• First up is GoodReads. I just jumped on this bandwagon yesterday, so I’m still getting acquainted with the interface. It seems simple enough. You create an account and add books to your virtual shelves, designate each book as read, to-be-read, or currently being read, and then assign each book a star rating. You add friends a la other social networking sites, and you can look at their shelves and compare books and ratings and get recommendations for your next read. Bonus: There’s a friend importer that automatically hooks you up with contacts from your e-mail (if your client supports it; I use Gmail, but the feature also works with Hotmail, AOL Mail, and Yahoo! Mail accounts), but you can also e-mail individual friends and either find them or invite them to get on board too.
• Then we’ve got LibraryThing, which has been around a bit longer than GoodReads, but seems to put less of an emphasis on the social networking side and more on the physical cataloging of your book collection. There are message boards and a “zeitgeist overview,” where you can see what’s being tagged the most, what’s being read the most, which books have the highest ratings, which authors are active on LibraryThing and much more.
• Finally, for those of you itching to not just see what other people think about certain books, but to get your grubby hands on those books themselves, there’s Swaptree and What’s On My Bookshelf, both of which specialize in letting users trade books (and in the case of Swaptree, music, DVDs, and video games, too). If you’re looking for a way to manage your book habit without becoming a crazy packrat who has crumbly old books stashed in every nook in your house (not that there’s anything wrong with that), a swap program might just be the thing you need. It’s like a library, only you’re required to bring in some of your own books before you can check any out.
What book-related social networking sites do YOU use?
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