Daily Thoughts 1/6/2010

Affiche Encre L. Marquet 1892

Daily Thoughts 1/6/2010

On the train to work, I read some more of In the First Circle. It is an excellent reminder of why there is no good reason to be in prison. It reminds us of the want of female company by men in prison and the endless boredom and drabness of prison life combined with the constant surveillance. What is interesting and different about this prison is that many of the men are engineers trying to design electrical systems, torpedos, and other inventions. There is a certain irony in the prisoners trying to develop a device to identify voices over the telephone. It is one of the better qualities of the book.

I have been working more on identifying authors websites in Westchester. I have three pages of links right now. There are some interesting authors, Rosemary Wells who writes childrens books, Esmeralda Santiago, and Jonathan Tropper all have interesting author websites.

I checked my Google Webmaster Tools to see who was visiting my blog. These are four sites that seemed interesting about books.

Bookish Ruthhttp://www.bookishruth.com/

Imaginary Landshttp://imaginarylands.wordpress.com/

The Book Smugglershttp://thebooksmugglers.com/

Literary Nobodyhttp://www.literarynobody.com/

I spent some time weeding the 800s today. I am moving ahead of the person who is putting in the new security devices in the 800s. Sometimes when you look through the older books, you find things which are charming. Some of the histories of childrens books are fascinating. One of my favorite books is The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner and John Tenniel. The annotations add little bits of philosophy throughout the book. I also took a few minutes to look at Beyond the Wild Wood The World of Kenneth Grahame Author of the Wind in The Willows by Peter Green. It had many photographs from the Victorian english countryside. I sometimes think that authors like Beatrix Potter have greater lasting value than the more adult classics.