new default category
Are you a book worm? A word-aholic? A devourer of novels? A poetry peruser? Are you big on biographies? Knowledgable about nonfiction? Passionate about prosody? Or even an academician on a mission? In short, are you a reader?
If so, then you’ve found the right place: The Times Union Books Blog: A conspiracy of smart people.
An outfit calling itself The Albany Project, which seeks to return New York State Government to its rightful owners – the people, is starting an online book club, with its first book being Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse by Seymour P. Lachman (w/ Robert Polner).
Go here for more info: http://www.thealbanyproject.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=104
The Guardian in London says the Oxford English Dictionary is looking for help. They’ve got about 40 words they don’t know the origin to, and are opening it up to the public. The article, of course, is written in England for Brits, but that doesn’t mean Americans can’t get involved. Click here for more info about the OED word hunt.
Here’s what the guardian says:
Here’s some news from the Albany Poets blog:
The sixth issue of Albany Poets’ art/lit magazine, Other, is now available. We are now in the process of getting them out to coffee shops, bookstores, and any other location that is willing to carry it. We have posted all of the poetry on the Other website.
The Books Blog is back in action for 2007. An update on my previous post: I had four books I planned to read over my vacation, but I only finished one — “On Truth” — and started another — “Religious Literacy.” It was a slow end to 2006. Oh, well.
I’ll be taking some time off for the next week or so, and I’ll of course be toting too many books for me to actually finish. This is what I’ll try to be reading:
A quick heads up: Just heard that the guests to UAlbany in the next few months are likely to include Richard Ford and Norman Mailer, among many, many others.
So this past weekend, I was picking my wife up from the Millay Colony (in Austerlitz, NY), and after we loaded up the van with her supplies, I nosed around a bit and checked out the library of books published by former residents of the artists colony and came upon Janet Desnaulniers’ “What You’ve Been Missing,” the Iowa Short Fiction Award winner from 2004. As you may know from an earlier post, it was something Desnaulnier had said when I was an undergrad in the 1980s that gave me the idea to call this blog “a conspiracy of smart people.”
Small world? Maybe it is a conspiracy…
Poet and publisher Erik Sweet weighs in with his top read of the past year: Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero
“No book I read this year made more of an impact on me than Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero, an Egyptian novel first published in 1975. This slim volume tells the story of an Egyptian woman, who due to the oppression of the individuals around her is never given a taste of true freedom. The author, Nawal El Saadawi, a writer, feminist, and physician, based the main character Firdaus on a woman she encountered at a woman’s prison in Egypt. Though brief in length, Saadawi’s novel pulls readers deep into the evolution of Firdaus, a woman penned within the confines of a world that does not value independent women.
