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Tag Archives: books

Bas-Lag weirder than previously believed

Sunday, September 23, 2007

(Updated with more evidence below) Ok, that reads like a headline from The Onion… but I just came upon a passage in The Scar that seems to suggest that Miéville’s world is flat. Here it is, from page 166 of the Del Rey mass market paperback edition: The seasons were only points of view—matters of [...]

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More annotations: The Dragon Waiting

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Hot on the heels of the Riddley Walker annotations project I found a couple of months ago, the extraordinary Zarf1 has produced a monumental cross-indexed reference for John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting. Like the Riddley Walker project, if you haven’t read the book don’t read the annotations. In this case you won’t spoil yourself [...]

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Scribblings

Friday, September 7, 2007

People who write in library books deserve to be stabbed with their pencils. On the other hand, while it makes reading the original much harder, a certain kind of annotation is guaranteed to add comic relief to the driest of academic prose. And indeed, Dutch translations of tricky idiomatic phrases such as “a preliminary stab [...]

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Nederlandstalige LibraryThing

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Just back from ESSLLI, about which more coming soon… Catching up on two weeks of news I find that LibraryThing has added a bunch of Dutch cataloguing sources. De NRC Handelsblad heeft een stukje daarover, of je kunt direct naar LibraryThing.nl. Wees voorzichtig, het is wel verslavend…

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Riddley Walker online

Monday, July 30, 2007

Riddley Walker is a good contender for my all-time favourite novel. It’s a post-apocalyptic story told in the first person, with altered spelling and reinterpreted expressions and the rhythms of oral history to match. The language is at first intimidating, and it’s a testament to Russell Hoban’s writing that you get caught up in the [...]

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Friends list on LibraryThing

Friday, July 20, 2007

LibraryThing has split the ‘watchlist’ option into two: ‘interesting libraries’ and ‘friends’. So if anyone I actually know is using it, drop me a friend request. As you might have guessed, my LT name is tikitu. (I don’t, as a general rule, do social networking. But I’m genuinely interested in the books people I know [...]

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Shady dealing

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Night Shade Books is having a half-price sale to clear room for incoming stock. There’s a four-book minimum order and I’m broke (the last couple of posts should make clear why), but if anyone wants to go part shares and pony up the cash I’ve got my eye on a couple of titles. Stefan, I’m [...]

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The Book of Kells

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

There’s one other recent acquisition that’s so cool it gets its own separate post. Last Friday at the Boekenmarkt Spui I bought a beautiful photo-reproduction of (large parts of) the Book of Kells. I’ve put a few amateurish photographs below the fold (they’re fairly large images), and the wikipedia page has lots of more professional [...]

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Recent acquisitions

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

It’s been a long while since I gloated, and I’ve accumulated a lot to gloat about. In fact, it’s been so long that I’ve read a fair few of ‘em, so some of the following will be capsule reviews as well as the usual stories of how I wandered on a whim into a bookstore [...]

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BLDGBOOK

Saturday, May 26, 2007

The super-cool architecture blog BLDGBLOG will be publishing a book! (The bad news is, not until spring 2009.) Congratulations to Geoff, and everyone else should use the time to wander over and check out his archives — by the time the book appears, you’ll know you need it. Some favourites of mine: 1, 2, 3, [...]

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