Odyssey Online

While at this writing Finals Week everyone in the SLU Community is far too busy with the reading at hand to be sampling the odd book, or the book oddly recommended, it will soon be holiday reading season.  Still dazed perhaps from the considerable chill that late December weather has brought I’m turning to two intriguing book lists that late December Internet wandering brought to my attention.  The first is The Best Food Books of 2013 compiled by Corby Kummer for Atlantic Magazine.  The list includes suggestions such as Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way by Tanya Bastinich Manuali, The Book of Schmaltz: Love Song to a Forgotten Fat by Michael Ruhlman, and Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving by Kevin West. An absolutely appetizing range of books–the other suggestions really turns a page from food and is Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Reading List, Books of 2013.  In keeping with EFF’s mission, this list includes titles like Coding Freedom by Gabriella Coleman, This Machine Kills Secrets by Andy Greenberg, and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov. Important and challenging reading, but relevant to anyone who spends any time online.

Admittedly not all of this books grace the shelves of ODY or Launders, but once our short Christmas break is done they could be garnered via Interlibrary Loan, or perhaps found at one of our neighboring libraries in the North Country Library System.  Safe travels and happy reading to all…

The Editors of Atlantic Magazine have compiled a list of the books they read last year and recommend. These are not necessarily 2012-2013 published books…there are some classics here that the editors got around to reading in the year past. It’s a good list, wide ranging in topic and in genre.  Lots of good suggestions for holiday book…

In Wired Magazine Joshua David Stein argues that the Internet is dissolving the letter E.  Not a shocking argument insofar as the English language is constantly evolving (“selfie” is the newest addition to the OED),

and texts like Across the Pond : an Englishman’s View of America by Terry Eagleton, The Cambridge History of the English Language (6 volumes!), or The English Language: Structure and Development by Stanley Hussey will document the elasticity of English. Stein argues there is an economic imperative imperiling, he quotes Flickr’s creator: “‘Being E-free,” agrees Esther Dyson, a venture capitalist and an early investor in Flickr, “distinguishes you from the run-of-the-mill vowel-infested world.’” Between E and capitalism is a “vowel-infested world.” Today has taken on Miltonian overtones…