Odyssey Online

…in The New York Review of Books Tim Parks takes up the eternal question of why a book may speak to one reader, and then doesn’t to the next. While summer reading (final exams still pending) may seem to be an eternity away, consider this a first summer reading salvo in library blogging!

…not a great deal of blogging this month about it being National Poetry Month, and with the end of the semester drawing close maybe not all that much time for recreational reading, but, soon? So with that in mind a quick overview of some of the new collections of poetry in our Browsing Collection:

• Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China Qingping Wang, editor ; Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt, translation co-editors
• Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability Edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen
• Everyday People by Albert Goldbarth
• Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys by D. A. Powell
• Me and Nina: Poems by Monica A. Hand
• In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys by Campbell McGrath
• Varamo by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews
• The Last Usable Hour by Deborah Landau
• Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems by Tess Gallagher
• The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment by Anne Waldman
• Vanishing-line: Poems by Jeffrey Yang
• Touch: Poems by Henri Cole

…the actual chemistry behind the intoxicating aroma of old books is explicated in an Atlantic Magazine video. In this space we’ve chronicled writers like John Updike, and Sven Birkerts, and William Hazlitt, and Anne Fadiman on the physicality of books and what that means to the reading experience…graceful and persuasive writers all now seasoned and served with a little science…

April is the cruel month, for busy bloggers, but leave the blog and write pen on paper and you’ll find: handwriting everywhere you look! The Arts Collaborative and the SLU Libraries have just kicked off a handwritten documents end of April week, and, that’s poetry!  Reporting on this will follow, and then a summer of reading blogging!

Google matters. Google matters because a lot of people use it, Google matters because it is an important and useful research tool.  Atlantic Magazine has published a time line of Google co-creator Larry Page’s first year as the company’s CEO (succeeding Eric Schmidt).  You’ll note it was an up and down year…

…back to poetry (April is poetry month!) after this short Google update…

…a lengthy essay/contemplation on the thesaurus written by Peter Mark Roget. When was the last time you thought about a thesaurus?  Apparently the original Roget thought creating one to be a exercise in spirituality, an exercise in bringing order to the universe.  Of course while thesaurus-speak can be justifiably sneered at, good Saxon based synonyms for management speak might be a reason to keep a thesaurus on the shelves (cyber or otherwise).  Read Roget’s piece and decide…