The Mountaineer Reading Room

Here’s a little video describing WorldCat’s nice citation tool.  You’ll need to set up a free account with them, but it’s worth the effort.  Visit the RHS Library Citations page for more help.

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“Fiction is a simulation that runs on the software of our minds.”
Keith Oatley and his colleagues at the University of Toronto have performed some research that delves into an interesting question: Why read books?  Well, it appears that there’s now some scientific evidence that fiction–more so than other forms of reading–helps one learn to better [...]

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Tracy Warner, longtime editorial page editor of the Wenatchee World, offers some thoughtful commentary on a recent book challenge in Leavenworth, Washington.  A parent felt the the book Alice on Her Way contains an inappropriate level of sexual content and should not have been available for circulation in a middle school library.  In what can [...]

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I became cool in the summer of 1984. At least, that’s what I thought. I had an excellent 1981 Chevy Citation to drive around, a pair of vans and an enviable mullet (historical note: the word “mullet” did not exist for another 15 years or so–at the time the haircut was known as [...]

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Science fiction author and visionary human Arthur C. Clarke died last week, just a couple days after I finished off his (and Stephen Baxter’s) Firstborn–the third and last installment of the Time Odyssey series. While I haven’t read all of his work, for years his books and stories have served as a reliable [...]

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At last, the recognition he really deserves.
Jorge Luis Borges is a difficult writer to classify, which, of course, makes him all the more interesting. How best to describe him? Perhaps as an “Anglo-Argentine classicist-inspired fantasy writer with magical realist and science fiction tendencies.” Now Noam Cohen adds cyberpunk and Web 2.0 [...]

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According to a recent article in the New York Times , a new report released by the National Endowment for the Arts finds that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all. Check out the summary of [...]

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Check out this week’s cover story in Newsweek Magazine. Can the Amazon Kindle–and other devices like it–replace the printed book? Are people ready to upgrade from a familiar 500-year-old technology that has served civilization well?
I’m looking forward to trying it out.

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Yesterday I wandered through the literature (!) section at Costco and saw a large stack of the aforementioned new book by Sherman Alexie. Submitting to the Costco business model of the impulse purchase, I picked up a copy, planning to read it over the next few days. However, once I got started, I [...]

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I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list of books to buy ASAP.
Check out the reviews of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian on Amazon.com.
Or, listen to an interview with Sherman Alexie on NPR.
Want more? Check out his official Web site.

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