Diary of a Book Nerd

2015-03-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina Sankovitch chronicles the year that she spends reading a book a day to help her process her oldest sister's death. Since her sister's death several years prior Nina feels as if she has been both stuck in the tragedy of her sister's death and running away from it. In this year, Nina makes some very

2015-03-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

2015 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction Longlist The UnAmericans Molly Antopol (W. W. Norton & Company) Amazon | Indie Bound Ruby Cynthia Bond (Hogarth) Amazon | Indie Bound Black Moon Kenneth Calhoun (Hogarth) Amazon | Indie Bound Redeployment Phil Klay (Penguin Press) Amazon | Indie Bound Ride

2015-03-16T08:58:00.001-07:00

Wikimedia v. NSA The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on March 10 filed a complaint against the National Security Agency (NSA) to challenge its interception of millions of text-based international communications (and likely many domestic ones as well) via fiber-optic cables running throughout the United States. They claim that the government's actions both go beyond the few limits

2015-03-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

PEN on the ALA Youth Media Awards Miranda Paul on the PENAmerica blog has highlighted the diverse nature of the winners of the American Library Association's Youth media awards. According to Paul the winning books covered non-majority narratives (covering issues typically avoided in children's literature such as race, gender, and sexuality) and included a variety of formats such as

2015-03-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

Did Tolstoy Lie? Can Happy Stories Be Interesting? Rachel Kadish reveals the answer in her book, Tolstoy Lied. In the book, Tracy Farber, a young American literature professor in New York, explores this idea and searches for her own unique happy ending. According to Tracy, Tolstoy lied. His theory that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own

2015-03-12T16:19:00.001-07:00

Technology and Libraries: Can Technology Enhance Libraries or Will It Make Them Obsolete? In the world of books, libraries have always held an important place. I've clearly commented on their importance repeatedly in my previous posts, but it seems like more and more these questions about the role of libraries in the future are popping up in the media. This recent article on

2015-03-11T17:47:00.000-07:00

Barron's Insulting Blunder Barron's in the seventh edition of its AP European History prep book made a shocking error. In a table meant to explain different political ideologies to students, Clarence Thomas' name was placed in the same box as that of the Klu Klux Klan as examples of more conservative view points that tended towards Reactionary or Facist. The fact that this

2015-03-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist Announced! Today the longlist for the 20th annual Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction was announced. This award which was organized in reaction to the lack of women authors considered for the Booker Prize despite women authoring significantly more new titles than men awards 30,000 pounds to one woman annually who the committee has determined to

2015-03-08T20:55:00.000-07:00

In Celebration of International Women's Day Here are Encyclopedia Britannica's 10 Women Who Changed Literature: Anna Akhmatova Jane Austen Colette Zora Neale Hurston Emily Dickinson Alice Munro Toni Morrison Sappho Murasaki Shikibu Virginia Woolf

2015-03-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

The Power of Naming Literature and the arts and humanities in general have always faced the question of significance. Today many people ask what is their value in an increasingly technology-based, math and science focused global world. Sam Sacks' article in the New Yorker provides one answer. While the value of the arts is too big of a topic to ever really be captured in one

2015-03-06T12:18:00.001-08:00