Odd Book Titles

Vote for the oddest book title of the year at TheBookseller.com.

Candidates include I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen and Solving Cheese Problems.


Photo courtesy of *nomad* (Flickr)

Smell Like...an Old Book!

Here's a perfume called "In the Library."

Can't Get Enough Harry?

Then read this transcript of JK Rowling's Q & A session with Harry P fans at Carnegie Hall. You'll learn about Dumbledore's romantic past, Hagrid's 22 or no children, an alternative Weasley family without Arthur, and much more.

(From The Leaky Cauldron)

Virtual Library

Here is a piece of digital art by Yann Serandour called "Ma bibliotheque virtuelle" (sorry I'm missing all the accent marks). Why am I posting it? It just looks cool.

Anyone have links to sites that mix art with libraries?

Lusting for Literature | Summer Break Reads Courtesy of Book Lust 101

Compiled by Joyce Hansen, MLIS

Has your self-imposed ban on leisure reading finally been lifted now that summer's here? Give your weary, weary brain a rest with these suggestions, bibliophiles. Thanks to Nancy Pearl's Book Lust 101 class, winter quarter, for this list of some of their all-time favorite books and writers, and use the comments section to add your own treasured must reads.

1. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
4. Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
5. Upstate by Kalisha Buckhanon
6. The Bebb series (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, and Treasure Hunt) by Frederick Buechner
7. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
8. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
9. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
10. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
11. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
12. Murder inMesopotamiaby Agatha Christie
13. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
14. The Girl I Left Behind by Shusaku Endo
15. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
16. Independence Day by Richard Ford
17. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
19. Naked in Baghdad by Ann Garrels
20. Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht
21. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer
22. Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
23. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
24. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
25. A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel
26. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
27. Biggest Elvis by P.F. Kluge
28. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
29. The Girls by Lori Lansen
30. Absolutely, Positively Not by David LaRochelle (YA)
31. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
32. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
33. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
34. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
35. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
36. Beloved by Toni Morrison
37. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
38. Never in a Hurry:Essays on People and Places by Naomi Shihab Nye
39. The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience by Celeste Olalquiaga
40. The Loved One by Catherine Palmer
41. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
42. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
43. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
44. Empire Falls by Richard Russo
45. Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman by Alice Steinbach
46. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
47. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing by Michael T Taussig
48. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
49. Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
50. Night by Elie Wiesel
51. I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolff
    

Anything by Walter Mosley
Anything by Alice Munro
Anything by Ruth Reichl
Anything by Nora Roberts
Anything by John Steinbeck
Anything by Anne Tyler
Anything by Eudora Welty
Anything by P.G. Wodehouse

Almost a book a week for a year here, iSchoolers. Lordy, I'm on cloud nine!

People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading. -- Logan Pearsall Smith

Book , Music & Movie Junkie | Whatsis iSuggestions

The library is a salvation for my practically non-existence media budget. The other day I picked up a CD and as I listened the first thing I thought was: Holy crap! Heard It on the X by Los Super Seven is theA and B the C of D. Released in 2005, it features a variety of Texas singers, (Delbert McClinton, Joe Ely, Freddy Fender, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown among others ), paying tribute to a Mexican radio station of the 30's -- 50's, (the station is a fascinating story in itself). I wouldn't be surprised if you have this already.

I just finished a book called Little Money Street by Fernanda Eberstadt, published by Knopf in 2006. It's about Gypsy musicians in the South of France bordering on Spain. Although her syntax is often tortured, I like the way the author tells as much about American consumerism as she does about the Gypsies. The Gypsies live in a very traditional society that is against education. They stay home, watch TV all day, and are constantly bombarded with advertising for junk food, which makes up most of their diet. As a result their health is terrible. They get the worst of both worlds. In America we have notions of romantic Gypsy vagabonds. White Europeans think of Gypsies, (the largest minority group in Europe), as lazy, obese welfare cheats. It's like the way Seattle people are capable of looking down on people that live in trailers in Lynnwood. If those people had their own language and culture.

You Suck, A Love Story by Christopher Moore, HarperCollins 2007. In this fast-paced romp, Jody and Tommy, two teenage vampires, attempt to make their way in San Francisco, a challenge when you've only been doing the whole vampire thing for only a couple of months. There are all these rules, including: only feed from the terminally ill or weak, no food or drink, and you can't see your parents any more--at least not during the day. On top of that, many are hot on your trail. The two set out to accomplish what any on-the-ball vampire might do in the course of a normal day, er, night--locate someone who can keep them safe from vampire killers and find them an apartment. After bumping into the two newbies in Walgreens, Abby Normal, a goth teen, becomes their self-appointed minion after crushing on Tommy and then chases the vampire lifestyle herself. Moore takes what would normally be a bleak, horror story plot and transforms it, giving the colorful characters lots of amusing twists to work out. You Suck made for a quick and entertaining spring break read.

The "365 Days Project" is a site chock-full of mostly outsider, novelty, and oddball recordings -- made available for the public to download in MP3 format. I almost peed my pants. Click on the link to the days February 16-28, and that gets you 1970s (80s?) Christian aerobics, Pat Boone pushing Amway and William Shatner singing his heart out on Rocket Man, among others. Laugh yourself silly at the written commentary and the visuals: photos, graphics, album covers, sheet music, etc. Here are a few others......

047 Cathi Stout - Hips and Abdomen
049 Virginia Rogers - Thanks for the Memories, "Bear" Bryant
050 Cambodian Funk Yodeler - Unknown Title
051 Dick Clark - Open Letter to the Older Generation

*052 The DeZurik (Cackle) Sisters - Intro/Old Dan Tucker/Whipperwill Song
056 Wizz-o (Chris Palestis) - Don't You Want Me/I Love Rock and Roll
057 Buddy Max - Uncle Mistletoe
059 Richard Dawson - Apples and Oranges

*Highly Recommended--The Cackle Sisters can make their yodeling sound like chickens! Not to miss!

The "365 Days Project" is linked to ubu.com, another choice stop. From the site: Ubu.com is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. Here you'll find cinema shorts, MP3 interviews with the likes of Marcel Duchamp, and other intriguing installations.

Have you heard: MARY HARTMAN MARY HARTMAN is out on DVD!!! MH2-a-thon, baby!

That's it for now. Sayonara.

Joyce Hansen, MLIS
Silverfish Editor, '06-'07

Me, at 18 mos., with my books

Paperbacks, The Arty Kind

Rachel Whiteread. (British, born 1963). Untitled (Paperbacks). 1997. Plaster and steel, Overall 14' 9 1/8" x 15' 9" x 20' 8 3/4" (450 x 480 x 632 cm). Gift of Agnes Gund and Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds. © 2007 Rachel Whiteread

Email from Amy Donahue, MLIS, 3/20/07: "I've been in New York City and...I'm attaching a couple of pictures that I just took this weekend of an installment that I saw at the Museum of Modern Art. It's kind of cool, if it can make it in? :)? Thanks, and good luck with all of this!? The Silverfish rules."

~Amy


You bet your sweet artist in residence it can make it in! Thanks, Amy! Below is more info on the piece and the artist. The show runs until April 6--you still have time to jet there and back in time for class Monday.

Publication excerpt
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 346

Untitled (Paperbacks) is a room-sized installation that feels empty but isn't quite: on all four walls hang rows of long white objects that look like shelves but are not, for they are plaster, not wood, and their surfaces are uneven, and vacant. These regularly spaced tiers suggest a library without books, yet books were here, and their traces remain. Whiteread made these objects by casting shelves of paperbacks, whose slightly differing sizes account for the plaster's uneven surfaces. Look closely, too, and you may see a residue of paper embedded in the casts, the edges of the pages caught as the plaster dried.

Whiteread specializes in the sculptural reversal that makes a solid object speak less of its own material presence than of objects that are no longer present, yet maintain a ghostly presence in their absence. The early work of this British artist comprised castings of everyday furniture—mattress, table, bathtub—in mediums from resin to concrete. She next addressed architecture, as in Untitled (Room) (1993), a plaster work also in the Museum's collection: here empty space becomes an opaque cube marked on its outside by the lines of a room's windows and door. Her more recent outdoor Holocaust memorial in Vienna is another room, once lined with books, which left their marks on the outside of a sealed block, symbolizing the lives and the culture lost to Nazi persecution. Untitled (Paperbacks), by contrast, is a library you can enter. Although there is nothing to read in it, it is filled with the knowledge, ideas, and memories contained in books, even if you must bring those associations with you into this serene, but haunted, place.

Book & Music Junkie | Whatsis iSuggestions

By Joyce Hansen, MLIS

Salutations. It took just four measly minutes to yank down the Xmas lights from the front porch last week, yet I experienced a rush of accomplishment that got me thinking. As I roll to the end of my time here, this is the small corner I have come to sometimes occupy—a person who prizes polishing off tiny, non-school tasks. Because there is hardly any time for laundry, QFC or scrambling eggs, these little bursts of short-term satisfaction allow me to slog through papers, tedious readings, the cat throwing up, the car breaking down, etc. For that I am mighty grateful.

Anyway, I’ve come across some nice stuff so put aside that research paper. Here are a few whatsis suggestions…

MUSIC

The Gothic Archies / THE TRAGIC TREASURY: Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events. 2006. Nonesuch Records. www.nonesuch.com/thegothicarchies. Shake up your music cache with this compilation of witty, miserable songs, most of which originally showed up within the audio versions of the Lemony Snicket books. Lemony Snicket not only writes wondrous strange children’s books, he plays the accordion. Along with Snicket, The Gothic Archies are singer/songwriter Stephin Merritt and John Woo on electric sitar. The songs are short in length and lyrics included. Sing along! The music is jaunty, and, sometimes vaguely reminiscent of 80s pop songs with their angst-filled chords and gloomy singers (hello, Morrissey). The chorus from the song Scream and Run Away:

When you see Count Olaf, count to zero;
Then scream and run away
Scream, scream, scream and run away
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run
or die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die,
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run,
or die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die

Hee-larry-us!

Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass whipped Cream & Other Delights Re-Whipped. 2006. Shout! Factory. www.shoutfactory.com. Listen to this remixed classic and even scrubbing out the red-sauce encrusted oven is pure mirth! The cover says it all: Once upon a time, there was a badass with a horn, a babe in whipped cream and a bunch of songs that became American classics. Now, 40 years later, Herb Alpert is back with new solos mixed in alongside even newer grooves by some of the most innovative artists around. Rewhipped indeed.

BOOKS

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby. 2006. Believer Books. It’s possible you and Hornby are in the same boat. This is the predicament: “a hilarious and true account of one man’s struggle with the monthly tide of the books he’s bought and the books he’s been meaning to read” (from the book jacket). The comic writer keeps a monthly journal for 14 months that includes lists of books he’s purchased and books he’s actually read for each month.

From the book: “Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic flute v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper vs. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See?”

Because I’ve only finished half of it(!), I can’t say if it’s all-the-way-through noteworthy, but there’s remarkable consistency in this and his other books, and because of that I’m going to go ahead and say, pick it up: it’s smart and entertaining.

Arboretum by David Byrne. 2006. McSweeney’s Books. www.davidbyrne.com. www.mcsweeneys.net. How do we perceive information? What associations with that info does our ever-churning brain create? Byrne’s compiled an intriguing book of his tree diagram drawings which he describes as “faux science, automatic writing, self-analysis, satire and maybe even a serious attempt at finding connections where none were thought to exist.” Byrne, legendary former lead singer and co-founder of the music group Talking Heads, has spent much of his life exploring stories, and started

Alternate Universes, 2002

these drawings as instructions to himself: “draw an evolutionary tree on pleasure,” mental maps of imaginary territory. Paragraphs explain some of the drawings. Byrne cites Lawrence Weschler and his book, Everything That Rises: A Book of convergences as some of what makes him consider connections beyond the obvious. Byrne: “(Weschler) asks if the similarities in the branching structures of neurons, trees and genealogies mean that we have a predisposition towards making things fit these structures.” What stories do we tell ourselves? No commitment to reading straight through—open it and step in anywhere.

That’s all, folks!

Joyce Hansen is the editor of the Silverfish and a 2nd year. She really didn't mean to leave the Xmas lights up so long. Really. Her cat, Debbie, fights crime.

Book Review: Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
by Cass R. Sunstein, Oxford University Press, 273 p.


Reviewed by Sheri Boggs, MLIS

Even if the subject – the aggregation of the world’s information – didn’t hook me, the cover of Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge would have. A simple red background with the black silhouette of a thickly-branched tree, the cover image looks remarkably like the neural circuitry of the brain; the visual suggestion is one of networks, connections, expansion and growth.

A notable professor at the University of Chicago Law School, author Cass R. Sunstein, is no stranger to the ramifications of mob mentality. He actively opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton and has written prolifically on the importance of dissent, the dangers of right wing politics in the judicial system, and how the Internet can engender insularity and “information cocoons.” In Infotopia, he celebrates the potential of the Web—how it offers us the possibility of aggregating information like never before while simultaneously facilitating the movement of information out of individual heads and out into the open where it can be accessed and utilized – before exploring the pitfalls of information overload. Sunstein cites herd-like behavior, an over-reliance on heuristics and a very human tendency to shut out information that is too complex or that challenges our most cherished beliefs as examples of what can happen in an information-saturated society.

On the other hand, he finds fault with the time-honored process of deliberation, arguing that it is possible to “blunder, and blunder badly” even when many minds are working on an issue for a considerable amount of time. The greatest potential of the Information Age, in Sunstein’s estimation, lies somewhere in the middle. There is great promise in many minds working together, as long as those minds don’t get lost in the mire of endless and circuitous deliberation.

Sunstein looks to the power of “prediction markets” as well as the popularity (and surprising accuracy) of wikis for examples of “many-minded” information aggregation at its best. Along the way he also explores the blogosphere and the importance of open source software to a fully democratic information-literate society. While Infotopia takes a hard look at the more pessimistic possibilities of knowledge produced by the masses, it ultimately places its bets on optimism, concluding that “…for society’s most important institutions, dispersed information, if elicited, is far more likely to lead to better understanding – and ultimately to more sensible decisions in both market and politics.” Erudite and far-reaching in its implications, Infotopia deserves a place in many an iSchool faculty and/or student’s towering book stack.

Sheri Boggs is a 2nd year day MLIS student. Before coming to the i-School
she was a writer and editor for the Pacific Northwest Inlander in Spokane.

Book Junkie | iSuggestions for Books & Other Whatsis Along the Way

Greetings! I trust you're having a merry new year. To help muddle through whatever else winter may have in store for us here in the Pacific NW, I’d like to offer up a selection of books (& one DVD) that I enjoyed in 2006, and hope you have time to read one or two.

Escaping the Delta. Elijah Wald. This book will change the way you listen to the blues. Although a scholarly work, it reads like a novel. The core figure is Robert Johnson, yet he remains the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. If you had asked any of Johnson’s contemporaries about him, with the exception of the very few that lived in his small part of the Delta, your questions would be met with a resounding, “Who?” This book also has a lot of information on women in the blues.

Moby Dick. Herman Melville. This was my summer project. Whew! Everyone thinks they know that this book is about the obsessed sea captain and the white whale. It is, but out of 650 pages, only about 50 pages are spent on that story. Instead, you learn everything about whales and whaling. And the language! All told from the viewpoint of a 19^th century sailor who has read all of Shakespeare and is trying to write like the immortal bard himself. You keep turning pages just to see if Melville can keep it up. And he does.

Chronicles. Bob Dylan. Bob is sort of like Starbucks these days; he seems to be everywhere. I enjoyed this book. But then again, I like Bob. He seems to write from the persona of a really smart guy pretending to be a regular Joe pretending to be a really smart guy. Tiresome part: The “fame and fortune is such a drag” song and dance. If fortune and fame is a drag, then give all your money away and go bag groceries. I mean, look, Gary Coleman did, and he became governor of California. Didn’t he? This leads us to:

Masked and Anonymous. DVD. Written by Bob Dylan and Larry Charles (Seinfeld director). Directed by Larry Charles. I think this film, which made many critics' lists of worst movies of 2003, is really misunderstood! And not just because I like Bob. Instead of putting the story into the context of Dylan's songs, I think he was trying for the magic realism style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Like most of Garcia Marquez, it takes place in a mythical South American country. John Goodman, Luke Wilson, and Bob himself play a sort of holy trinity of Bobness. Plus Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange. What's not to like?

Of Love and Other Demons. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This novella or long short story is so achingly beautiful it doesn't need to be a page or a word longer. As in many of his stories, characters seem to shift through time, so that a character struck by lightning (literally), pops up later. Dreamlike.

Well, I'm off to cram in some leisure reading for "Book Lust 101." If I come across something racy or particularly adventuresome, I'll pass it along.

Cheers,

Joyce Hansen, MLIS
Editor Silverfish,'06-'07
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