Happy Birthday, Milton

From the NYT:
Celebrating John Milton’s 400th Birthday,” a festival including music, drama, art exhibitions and special events, will open on Saturday at 8 p.m. with a costume ball at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, 135 Broadway, at Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; tickets, $40, $20 for students and 65+. On Sunday at 2 p.m. a [...]

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson will be speaking at Central library in a few weeks. I’m so excited! I recently finished her newest novel, Home, companion to the 2005 Pulitzer-winning Gilead, one of my favorite books. 
                         
Home didn’t quite live up to my (sky high) expectations – it’s not [...]

“Must we burn Babar?”

Remember Babar, the French elephant in the green suit? 
Here is is, striding merrily across the screen…
I’d forgotten all about him until I ran across a recent article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Apparently, Babar has been criticized since before I was born for justifying or promoting colonization. I read the books when I was little and [...]

Hurry up, Mr. Postman

Just caved and bought 2 books on Amazon. But they weren’t exactly impulse buys, cause I’ve been thinking of getting them.

I usually don’t go for these sassy sort of girl-guides, but I saw this one at the library the other day and really like it’s style and the content I paged through. It has sections [...]

More on Palin banning books

From The New York Times today: 
The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.
“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John [...]

Great Artist, or Mere Illustrator?

I share Maurice Sendak’s contempt for the question about someone being a great artist or a mere illustrator. Someone can be a bad illustrator, just as someone can be a bad writer, but I don’t think there is such a thing as “mere illustration”. Great illustration enriches the book, adding humor or emotion not found in [...]

Sarah Palin Hates Freedom

I’ve been hearing lots of rumors lately about an incident in ‘96 when Palin allegedly tried to ban select books from the Wasilla, Alaska library and have the librarian fired.
Palin twice asked about removing books from the library, but in an ABC article, she says it was a rhetorical question. 
Right. 
As a USA Today article says, a list of [...]

Lauren Conrad/The Hills suddenly has talent galore

Because she’s the star of a ridiculous “reality” TV show, and apparently a fashion designer, she thinks she’s a writer, too.
She’s writing a three-book YA series for HarperCollins, which will be based on her experience as a teen-turned-star.
Puke.

Meyer ends Twilight Saga after leak

Stephanie Meyer, author of “The Twilight Saga” YA vampire books, has put the last one “on hold indefinitely” since parts of the draft were leaked online.  
An unnamed publishing exec in the Wall Street Journal article makes a good point that music artists don’t scrap their projects when songs are leaked or downloaded illegally via the internet. [...]

Pillars of the Earth, Finally Over

 
Well, I finished it, all 900-some pages. Did I end up liking it more than when I first started? Not really, no. Which is especially disappointing because I love historical novels and am interested in monastic life, church architecture, and religion in general. The one aspect that bugged me the most was that anything to [...]