News & Opinions

Our writers have been around books for a long time and are never shy to share their opinions…

Goodreads Sells Their Soul To The Devil

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I didn’t join Goodreads. Mostly because until recently I didn’t know what it was or what I would want to join for. Many authors and friends had suggested via facebook I should join, and that only made me less likely to do so, because I assumed it was another facebook game or oddity. When I … Read more

Community Lives!

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by Jas Faulkner 

litbooksJeremy is finishing a story while Kaia and I look at the clock.  We’re waiting with a dozen other classmates for the big hand to click over to the twelve and the little hand to scoot to the six.  At that point, at least for us, class is in session.

Not that anyone would notice if we were late.

After all, Jeremy is somewhere near Jackson Hole ,  I am in Nashville, Kaia is in Victoria, BC,  and the rest of our study group is scattered all over the globe. Our classroom is a digital  pocket of space and time, an online intellectual stasis chamber situated somewhere in 2009 at Yale.  Open Yale Courses  is home to English 300 Introduction to the Theory of Literature, a class that the fifteen of us watch as a group and then discuss in a private email list for the rest of the week.  It is one of the forty-five online courses Yale offers free of charge to anyone with a desire to know more.

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14 Inventions NOT Available at Aunt Em’s House

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  By Carrie Bailey Context changes things. In 1907, the concept of a clockwork man was innovative, a device before its time. In fact, Frank L. Baum created his character Tik Tok before the word “robot” was first used to describe “a machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and … Read more

Library Voyeurism: Admit It. You Do It, Too!

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by Jas Faulkner

library2welOne of the advantages of the current technology available for photo sharing is the ability to find details that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Thanks to less expensive digital imaging and social media, we have all seen recent pictures of ghosts, Big Foot, Chupacabras, Elvis, Tupac, and fiends deeply buried in our couch cushions.

Through the pictures we scan and then expand we have discovered the lost libraries of our friends, our family and our childhoods.

We all do it.  We see a picture of a book case int he background and our first impulse is to try to read the titles on the spines. Photos from my own late sixties to early seventies childhood reveals as much about my parents’ aspiration for me and my brother as it does about their thirst to continue their educations.

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Abandon Hope, Ye Seekers of Customer Service!

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by Jas Faulkner

Here’s the thing about me and customer service:  I know there are wonderful people who work the phones and chat lines.  They manage to make the experience of correcting someone else’s mess up as painless as possible.  Most of the time, I am lucky enough to get one of those hardworking people who are filling a position that is often thankless and hideously underpaid.  I love those people.  In fact, I usually send letters to call centers and compliment people who make it a point to not provide me with fodder for articles like this one.

However, there are times when I get people who have turned contrarian ineptitude into a piece of performance art that would send Diamanda Galas into a corner to weep softly and wave away a fit of the vapors so she could get back to terrifying unsuspecting music lovers.

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Little Davids Take On Amazon Giant

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So a few independent bookstores decided to sue Amazon and the major publishers who made a devil’s deal to control e-books. From the Huffington Post: “Three independent bookstores are taking Amazon and the so-called Big Six publishers (Random House, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan) to court in an attempt to level the … Read more

A Critic’s Lament

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by Jas Faulkner 

grump 1Writers occasionally go through periods when the energy is there, but nothing seems to gel.  An idea may formulate and at first it might seem like a sound investment of creative energy.  Then the harsh reality sets in that the back space key has erased nearly one thousand words in one to three hundred word increments.  No loss there.  It was all so much verbal sludge to be hosed away. Maybe the initial idea was good, but this just isn’t its time.  I know this feeling only too well.  It sums up my week in writing.

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