i’ve got all these big thick profundities … er … books … lumping around my room … blaming me for not lifting, opening, and reading … in time, monster boy, in time …

and i’ve got a few smaller ones i’ve started … and tehy turn out to be no less profound:

nick piombino’s just-released fait accompli … what does it mean to read a book that was a blog that was (a least in part) a journal … ? … it means yr reading a book that was a blog that was a journal …and it seems to be working

gene luen yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese … the first gn to be nominated for the nba … and the first to win the ala’s printz award …

mamet’s translation of chekhov’s Uncle Vanya … because of the interesting things louis malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street did to my brain

joseph massey’s teeny tiny November Graph

i don’t think my also-current reading of Building Online Communities with phpBB 2 counts as much of a profundity … but i am figuring out some useful stuff about my discussion boards

given bob’s disappointment with not being able to see my book covers, i’ve looked into the matter & found this function which shows them … the page just looks a bit clunkier because it includes blanks for books whose covers are not available … and you have to move from page to page …  so just click here … if it only shows the list, click on the "Cover View" button at the upper left .

how cool … my book covers in one place … it adds up to … undeniable proof … of … what?

tell me in comments, please

the following video has brief moments that may bother some of my more gentle readers … you know who you are … please take precautions

Link: YouTube - William Shakespeare - Brief and Naughty!.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry

so here’s pynchon’s new one in the mail today … reminds me to list for no reason all the big books i’m holding back … for lack of time …

1) Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon
2) The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia - Michael Gray
3) The Complete Essays of Montaigne - Donald M. Frame
4) William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism - Robert Richardson
5) Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
6) Edgar Lee Masters - Herbert K. Russell

& i was thinking i might need to declare a web-free day each week … a day for no computer things but only for reading reading reading schoolwork or otherwise

The National Book Foundation presents the 2006 awards:

Young People’s Literature
M.T. Anderson
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)

Poetry
Nathaniel Mackey
Splay Anthem (New Directions)

Nonfiction
Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)

Fiction
Richard Powers
The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Meg Rosoff: adult books for teenagers | Top 10s | Guardian Unlimited Books … some fresh titles … go to the link for comment on each …

1. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
2. Maus by Art Spiegelman
3. Casino Royale and Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
4. Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl
5. The Sword in the Stone by TH White
6. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
7. Perfume by Patrick Suskind
8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
9. Longitude by Dava Sobel
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Link: Cover stories | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books.

Five leading designers explain how they re-covered their favourite novels for the 60th anniversary of Penguin Classics

via Poetry Hut Blog

how could i have missed Banned Books Week?

well it happened mostly while i was out … out and away …

so i’ll make up for it by listing … as memory allows it … books that have been banned in my sphere of influence … i mean, books that i would have read or taught but was kept from it by someone else or by what i thought someone else might say :

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley
In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Flight to Canada by Ismael Reed
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
Fade by Robert Cormier

most of these were teaching objections … some were reading objections … i’ve read all of them now … except the Baldwin … fell through the cracks …

is this all from the distant past? no … one is quite recent … and still stings a bit

update: on the other hand … i’m grateful for the support of colleagues, department, administrators, parents, and students in the teaching of:

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner