Columbine and I have trouble discussing fiction because we speak entirely different languages and want very different things. Still, I am always interested in what he has to say.

Dulcie set this up: A LiveJournal feed for this weblog. Thanks, Dulcie!

Monkeytoe has given us our first Ulysses page assignment: through approximately page 50 by March 8. Specifically, we are reading up to the end of these lines:

Moving through the air high spars of a three master, her sails bailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

Or to the end of chapter I. More information here. I am really nervous about this; I have so many big things going on right now, but I do want to participate. I will try to keep up but not kill myself if I get behind.

Underworld. Despite my concerns, this is turning out to be one of my favorite audio books. The reader is quite good; he has a gravelly voice and he reads very slowly, with lots of pauses. It’s a good thing I like him because I am going to be listening to this one forever: I am about three hours in, which puts me somewhere around page 100. In an 800-page book.

The Valleys of the Assassins. Just a reminder that the book club discussion of this one starts in about two weeks, on March 15. Monkeytoe is leading us this month.

The Valleys of the Assassins is a nonfiction account of Stark’s journey through Persia in the 1920s 1930s. Here is some background on Stark, including some details regarding her other travels. The Complete Review reviewed Stark’s book and gave it a B+. The Radcliffe Quarterly reviewed a biography of Stark, Passionate Nomad.

From the press release:

New audiobook provider Telltale Weekly launches with DRM-free audiobooks for under a dollar.

New unabridged audiobooks are released every Friday in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. The site uses the Bitpass micropayment solution to offer recordings for as little as 25 cents and still be able to fairly compensate artists. All recordings from Telltale Weekly are DRM-free, so users may use the files on an unlimited number of computers, CD-Rs, and players for personal use.

Many of the current and future recordings offered by Telltale Weekly are of performances of texts in the public domain. These are produced with the intention of releasing them under the Creative Commons Attribution License five years or 100,000 sales after their first appearance on the site, whichever comes first. Every purchase helps to build and fund a free audiobook library, and Telltale Weekly hopes to create at least 50 such recordings each year.

So after five years, the recordings enter the public domain. I am a big fan of Project Gutenberg and a huge fan of audiobooks, so I think this is just brilliant.

This link has been making the rounds, but I saw it most recently at Boing Boing.

You might have already seen this one, but it’s a good cause so I will plug it anyway: Project Gutenberg needs proofreaders:

Distributed Proofreaders was founded in 2000 by Charles Franks to support the digitization of Public Domain books. Originally conceived to assist Project Gutenberg (PG), Distributed Proofreaders (DP) is now the main source of PG e-books. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site and as such is supported by Project Gutenberg. All our proofreaders, managers, developers and so on are volunteers.

I haven’t had time to participate, but the Usual Suspects have a team of proofreaders and the ones who have been most active report that it’s a lot of fun, especially when you get to work on an interesting book.

Well, maybe you want to start a library. From Beatrice.

According to the Literary Saloon, it’s Jewish Book Week in London: “the world’s leading festival of Jewish writing.” If you can’t make it to London, at least take a look at Next Book’s collection of reading lists that “offer guided tours of Jewish history and culture—and of world history and culture seen through the many lenses of Jewish experience. ” From Beatrice.

Terry Teachout has interesting thoughts on parallels between these two works. (He means Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer and the film version of Ghost World, just to be clear.) I am a big fan of both and I think I will have to see Ghost World again to see if I notice the same parallels. I read The Moviegoer for the second time last semester, and found it to be one of those deceptively simple little books that you could probably talk about for months without exhausting the possibilities. (But everyone else in my class hated it, so we didn’t do that.)

From Maud Newton.

The Literary Dick: a new weblog devoted to literary mysteries. Melissa, for some reason I thought this would appeal to you in particular.

A brief but thoughtful follow-up to the list of recommended books on literary criticism to which I linked the other day.

The San Francisco Chronicle reviews a new book about the Brontë sisters, by Lucasta Miller. This is apparently not so much a biography as an examination of the legends that have grown up around the sisters.

Occasionally someone at TUS will ask for literary criticism recommendations — something readable, something interesting, something to give them an idea of why so many people devote their lives to thinking and writing about books. The Reading Experience, in the context of commenting on the sorry state of literary criticism these days, offers a list of ten good starting points.

I also agree that this is a sad state of affairs:

Literary webloggers have so far focused their attention on what passes for literary “news” (a useful enough service nevertheless)

I wish I had the knowledge or the time to do more than that myself, but the best I can do is try to point you in the direction of literary weblogs that do engage in interesting commentary or criticism or discussion. In that spirit I offer you the Reading Experience’s look at the curse of the synopsis (actually, just read the whole weblog, every day), the Constant Critic’s thrice-weekly poetry reviews, Peg Alford’s weblog at Identity Theory, and the reviews at the Modern Word and the Complete Review. All good stuff.

Happening this week in San Francisco. Wired’s article focuses on the connection between the alternative print scene and publishing on the web:

While the Web was very much in evidence this past weekend at the Alternative Press Expo, a yearly gathering of independent and underground comics artists, it was clear that the Web is still nowhere near replacing print as the preferred medium for comic art.

To the contrary, the printed page still has a cachet that the Web can’t hope to match.