Odyssey Online

…the last three days confirm that spring has sprung, and what is more spring-like than the return of the green leaves to the trees!  Yippee!  While spending a perhaps drowsy Saturday afternoon on down time, perhaps some books about trees to further get into the spirit of the season?

• Trees, Truffles, and Beasts: How Forests Function by Chris Maser, Andrew W. Claridge, and James M. Trappe
• Trees: A Visual Guide by Tony Rodd and Jennifer Stackhouse
• The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston
• Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest by Joan Maloof
• The Complete Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs Edited by Ernie Wasson

The last one is a reference book , of course, but if it rains Sunday you can consult that in either ODY or Launders…we have two copies!

…okay, it’s Thursday, but with Spring Break upon us (yah!) what better time to get in the recreational reading that so often goes by the wayside during the semester. And what better reading, than contemplating the very medium through which so much of university work is still done: books. Collected here is a sampling of books about books in our happening Browsing Collection–our recreational reading collection shelved just outside Special Collections, near the Word Studio and computer labs. I haven’t read all of these, but they constitute the newest titles we have on stuff bibliographical:

• Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde by Thomas Wright
• The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett
• Books for Sale: The Advertising and Promotion of Print Since the Fifteenth Century Eds. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote
• The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Danton
• Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts by David Pearson
• Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
• Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania by Karin Littau

All very new, and, having read the Danton, that text is excellent.  With these books in hand Odyssey Online is going to take a week or so break, be back in Middle-March!

…Odyssey Online’s editorial team (me) is having a day devoted to shot transmissions, pulled teeth (literally), and stranded spring break college students. Amidst the chaos, there is the blustery just- slightly-evocative-of-spring day all around us, which, in an effort to calm myself, brings me to the thought of books about country life in cold places, places like St. Lawrence County. Spring nearby?

• Living North Country: Essays on Life and Landscapes in Northern New York Edited by Natalia Singer and Neal Burdick
• The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir Of Living Off the Grid by Baron Wormser
• Here at Eagle Pond by Donald Hall
• A Stone Bridge North: Reflections in a New Life by Kate Maloy
• Epicurean Simplicity by Stephanie Mills
• Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life by John Ivanko and Lisa Kirvist

…Google Buzz is certainly proving to be an interesting bee. It is Google’s social networking software that is built right into G-mail. This merging has been called Simple Genius and a Facebook killer (more on the killer stuff here).  However, no sooner did buzz leave the hive that it was discovered to have serious privacy problems, serious vulnerability to hackers…these issues chronicled here, here, and here.  My advice? Leave Google buzz until spring and read instead:

• Spring Without Bees: How Colony Collapse Disorder Has Endangered Our Food Supply by Bill McKibbon
• Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism by Jurgen Tautz
• A Keeper of Bees: Notes on Hive and Home by Allison Wallace
• Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World by Holley Bishop

…with Valentine’s Day Sunday you had to see this one coming from Odyssey Online.  Without further ado, and like a box of chocolates, here is an assortment of collections and volumes of love poetry:

• Sappho Translated by Mary Barnard
• Elegies II: Tibullus Translated by Paul Murgatroyd
• Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr
• Granted by Mary Szybist
• Loose Woman: Poems by Sandra Cisneros
• The Love Poems of James Laughlin by James Laughlin
• The Love Poems of May Swenson by May Swenson
• Portable Kisses: Love Poems by Tess Gallagher
• Theater of the Night by Alberto Rios
• View from the Middle Way: Poems by Thomas Centolella
• Surrealist Love Poems Edited by Mary Ann Caws
• Love Songs of Man’y oshu Translated by Ian Hideo Levy

…given the recent cold (and given I have a head-cold perhaps a’coming…) it’s a good time to be inside reading. Readers here (namely sniffling me) has just discovered the poet Heather McHugh.  To put is succinctly, she’s good, worth a read, try these:

• Eyeshot
• The Father of Predicaments
• Hinge and Sign: Poems 1968-1993
• Upgraded to Serious
  

…J. D. Salinger died January 27th, at 91. He is, of course, the author of Catcher in the Rye, a book that simply put should be read by everyone in their late teens.  Here is a sampling of the critical work we have on Salinger:

• With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger Edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller
• Catcher in the Rye: New Essays Edited by J.P. Steed
• In Cold Fear: Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character by Pamela Hunt Steinle
• J.D. Salinger Revisited by Warren French
• J.D. Salinger Edited by Harold Bloom

The Guardian has published a “round-up” of online commentary and reactions to the man’s death…

Robert B. Parker died January 18th.  Parker was a crime fiction writer who authored 60 books, and is best known for the Spenser series–a Private-I series set in Boston that became a perfect stage for Parker’s crisp descriptive prose, his sense of humor, his wonderful ear for dialog.  He apparently died while at his desk, at work upon another Spenser novel.    The Canton Free Library has an excellent collection of books by Parker, and we have this sampling in ODY:

• Early Autumn
• Perchance to Dream
• Potshot
• Death in Paradise
• Shrink Rap
• Back Story

Perchance to Dream is a Philip Marlowe story…Parker took a one chapter fragment of a manuscript left by Raymond Chandler, and developed out a complete plot. Parker was a great admirer of Chandler, and so, with Parker in mind, some other recommendations on Chandler and kindred-crime-writer-spirits:

• Stories and Early Novels by Raymond Chandler
• Later Novels and Other Writings by Raymond Chandler
• Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly
• Crime Novels: American Noir of the 30’s and 40’s
• The Right Madness by James Crumley
• Morse’s Greatest Mystery and Other Stories by Colin Dexter
• Crime Stories and Other Writings Dashiell Hammett
• Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith by Patricia Highsmith
• When the Women Come Out to Dance: Stories by Elmore Leonard
• The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense Ed. Joyce Carol Oates
• Amsterdam Cop Stories by Janwillem van de Wetering
• Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem van de Wetering
• Exit Wound by John Westermann

…to suggest a baker’s dozen.  Parker left several finished manuscripts that have yet to be published, so we haven’t quite read the last of the man’s work, and anything on this list would be a great mid-winters read, even if prompted by somewhat melancholy circumstances…

…in the reference area of ODY there are eight new beautiful white-as-bone art deco iMacs.  Brand new, ready for any Apple-leaning researcher who happens by and are first in line. These are networked machines sporting all the things you’d expect with a Mac, plus Photoshop and both Firefox and Safari.

And after a morning on the Mac, why not read about the company from which these beauties sprung.  We have a number of books in the collection on Apple, and on the implications of the technologies they’ve produced and so successfully marketed:

• The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, Coolness by Seven Levy
• The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman
• iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith
• West of Eden: the End of Innocence at Apple Computer by Frank Rose
• iPod Therefore I am: Thinking Inside the White Box by Dylan Jones

Happy new year! Couple of quick thing, with the new year spinning out stories from the past…just before Christmas the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Federal Government is having a tough time finding specialists who can fight ongoing cyberwars.  With the ongoing situation in Iran making news and furious blogging, I’d point to a list of new titles in our collection on Iran that was posted here to Odyssey Online last summer.

…also the Boston Globe reported on the most popular searches in Google...