How could I not join a bookclub of super friendly people who let my bbq share their table and who are reading Persepolis and Blankets…AND who have a club initiation where you slam a can of Four Loco (like Sparks)? Right?
Bookclub member Michael made and was wearing this shirt. Buy it for $20.
There it is. Infinite Jest by DFW. I’ve tried and failed at reading it more than once. Probably, you have to. So join the online reading group Infinite Summer, and we’ll power through it together, footnote by footnote. One of the guides includes a very funny Matthew Baldwin, of Defective Yeti. Join me!
OH man, Things to Read, Drinks to Drinks just turned into Buy a Book, Have a Beer. If you spend $30 at Powell’s between 3-6pm M-F you get a Powell’s pint glass and a coupon for $1.25 beer at local Bridgeport Brewery. Which, I’ll have you know, is a stumble from Powell’s and has outdoor seating in the sun. Which, I’ll continue to have you know, means I’ll be reading in the sun with a beer, a lot.
Joy, oh joy. Thanks to Kirsten, who suggested we collect as many as possible. Agreed, except my book budget isn’t that big.
Good thing there’s a happy hour for library card holders, too.
I saw an ad for Mine Magazine in Real Simple and went to sign up immediately. It’s so, so close to being brilliant. And yet it’s not. Not because they are lacking in potentially cool articles, but because they don’t personalize it enough and it’s made from regurgitating past issues, the latter of which would be ok if the information was highly tailored to me. But, like a bad date, they don’t ask enough questions about me.
If they really wanted me to feel attended to, they would ask for my feedback on each article and continue tailoring my choices for my future magazines. Pandora does this for music, and Netflix does it for suggested movies in your queue. Why can’t publishers do it for our e-magazines? (more…)
Doesn’t this ad just seem wrong? How do you think most of those dead writers would feel about being stuffed into a Kindle? I imagine some would be all about new forms of communication, but Poe doesn’t strike me as one of them. Jane Austen would be a deft Twitterer (tweeter, whatever), for example (too bad someone who doesn’t use it has nabbed @JaneAusten). I find her obnoxious, but you know she’d give Perez Hilton (@perezhilton) a run for his money.
But Edgar Allan Poe, I don’t think he’d want anything to do with new fangled techmrology. Redo the ad with Jane, Amazon.
To end a day of ransom notes over book bags, I just had to give you this. Some of my best loved books already look this way, especially the cookbooks. It also brings to mind that old college joke of learning by osmosis when napping on your books at the library (or campus gardens). $29 at DesignBloom, a quirky little internationally stocked site.
Also, new tag alert! How did I get this far without a tag for ideas about reading?
Weird. I picked up a new book recently, so we’ll get back to Things to Read, Drinks to Drink soon.