Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe My rating: 5 of 5 stars No idea why it took me so long to get around to reading this. It felt good to read something that portrayed slavery in the United States where the slaves were both treated as property and subhuman. Books like Gone With the Wind treat…
The Painted Bird by Jerzy KosiÅ„ski My rating: 4 of 5 stars I chose to read this book for Banned Books Week 2013. A quote from that September 14th blog post: In tenth grade, this book was assigned to us. It was the most difficult book I had read to that point, but it was…
Apparently September 17th is Constitution Day. This is the day in 1787 when the document was signed. (July 4th is for the Declaration of Independence.) Schools receiving Federal funding are supposed to spend part of the day teaching about the Constitution. I wonder how many people have a copy of it? If you have an…
Additional thinking about Compiled List of Challenged Books 2008-2012 made me copy Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009 and do the same markup as indicated below. Those I have already read are in bold. That appears to be fourteen. Those already on my to-read list are in underlined. That appears to be eight. Those I just have no interest or failed…
Comments on my Banned Books Week 2013 post yesterday via Facebook made me wonder which of the books recently challenged according the American Library Association’s data I have actually read or plan on reading. So I compiled the 2008-2102 top 10 challenged books for 2008 through 2012 (five years) and sorted and de-duplicated the list.…
Censorship is alive and well in the United States. Someone will object to something in any book. But it takes amazing gall to prevent others from reading what one does not like. Banned Books Week this year, 2013, is September 22-28. I just received my copy of The Painted Bird a few days ago. I plan to…
Dorothy And the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was more a series of short stories from starting point of Dorothy acquiring new friends, the Wizard, and a series of unfortunate events. They travel from realm to realm encountering strange peoples. Definitely a Baum book. My favorite…
My main page on quotes is Quotes to Make You Think. Additional ones can be found under the Quotes tag. Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. ― Franz Kafka No one can drive us crazy unless we…
Better Answers & How I Learned to Defrag My Brain first posts this video on Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Then it moves on to talking about Johnson’s blog post The Spark File. (Doesn’t Getting Things Done have something similar?) We have outgrown our ability to remember everything that…