My stuff: Animals, birds, books, Colin Morgan, cute stuff, Doctor Who, Eoin Macken, food, feminism, Merlin, music, nature, poetry, science fiction, silliness, Star Trek, and occasional deep thoughts.
I want to find the person who made this sign and hug him/her until she/he squeaks.
(Source: stardustinthetardis)
To all quail lovers!
If you ever come across a book called That Quail, Robert, buy it at once!
It is a charming memoir about a rescued quail egg that unexpectedly hatched, and the little quail became a beloved pet. It has exquisite line drawings of the bird in her surroundings.
It was published in the 1960s and has no doubt been out of print for ages, but if you are fortunate, you may find a used copy. My husband spotted it in a used bookstore a few years ago and gave it to me as a birthday gift. It is a treasure.
I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don’t anymore. That’s not to say I don’t listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I’m no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl - warmer, more nuanced, less shrill - and I make it a point to listen to my ears. Also, I’ve rediscovered the pleasures of looking at the art work on record jackets. Thumbnail images are pretty weak substitutes. In fact, they suck.
But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn’t aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version. Hidden inside the sleeve of a new record, like a Cracker Jack prize, is a little card with a code on it that let’s you download the digital files of the songs, often in a lossless format, from the record company. So I no longer have to choose between the superior sound and packaging of vinyl and the superior mobility of digital. When I’m near my turntable, I spin the platter. When I’m not, I fire up the MP3s.
Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow.
There’s a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.
(via ayjay)
This book review page will help you find good resources and steer clear of bad ones.
My top 3 recommendations are:
“Wicca for Beginners” by Thea Sabin (will give you a solid grounding in Wiccan theory)
“Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner” by Scott Cunningham (a step-by-step guide…
I’d like to chime in and recommend Modern Wicca by Michael Howard as an interesting anecdotal history of Wicca by someone who knew many of the early practitioners when he was a young man and they were getting on in years.
(Source: yoursweetpoison)
Feeling low this morning—
—so I opened up The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf on my Kindle and read it over breakfast. When did the Squire’s Tales series become my comfort reading? :D Thank you, Gerald Morris.
Someone look at the cover of this book and tell me that isn’t Rupert Giles with a mouse on his shoulder. For realz.
A tribute to these books that says everything I would want to say about them.
Unlike this blogger, however, I started reading YW in my late teens, when only the first two or three books had been published. I’m forty-five and I’ve bought the last half-dozen of the series in hardback, as soon as they came out: They’re just that good.
Classicist Mary Beard knows how to write a review that is brutal but also calm and fair. (Thanks to tree-and-leaf for the link!)
Reader, be warned. Skip the first 200 pages and start this book at chapter six, “The Renaissance”.
Once every eleven years, Earth’s most senior wizards stage an event called “The Invitational” – a gathering of hot young wizardly talent from all over the world at which the Seniors judge which of their younger colleagues will be in the forefront of the next generation’s battle against every…
So, like a better, smarter version of Goblet of Fire? *g*
A database of mystery novels featuring clerical or monastic detectives, with annotations and recommendations.
PSA
Do not read the Dinner Party chapter of A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold while eating, as danger of choking may ensue from laughter.
This has been a Public Service Announcement.
What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he’s a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan, about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya because they’re just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, and slap it on a male character, and suddenly we get the protagonist of one of the most serious, most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the last decade.
Why secondhand bookstores (and libraries!) smell good
Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.
Finally, an explanation!
(Source: kleir)
According to another friend, people who work in bookstores have a new name for Larsson’s book, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” They call it “The Girl Who Pays Our Salaries.
A short review of a new book, “Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Art, and Life”, by Judith Dupre.
