Read ‘The Giving Tree’ as usual. When the boy comes hustling for a house, switch to this.

I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly. I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing. Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s, a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.

Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community. […] Bookshop will support indies in two ways: • 10% of sales on Bookshop.org support participating independent bookstores in an overall earnings pool that is evenly divided and distributed to stores every six months. • Stores that are affiliates, who sell books online using Bookshop (by sharing links their Bookshop link on social media, email newsletters, or on their websites) will earn 25% commission directly on any sales they generate, without having to do the work of keeping inventory, picking, packing, shipping or handling complaints and returns.

Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it. Please buy paper books.

A crowdsourced travel guide for libraries

Don't want your books anymore? Somebody else does. Here's all you need to know about how to donate your books to prisons.

Free public domain audiobooks. Read by volunteers from around the world.

An Amazon.com Wishlist by Erica Joy (@ericajoy) with books about black America. Added to GoodReads here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3519627-matthew-mcvickar?shelf=erica-joy-woke-list&view=table

Kept books as of end-of-2015. Most are pretty good.

‘Every artist deals with critics differently—Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead, for example. But the rule is to avoid direct contact. Not for John Warner, debut novelist, who decided to seek out the man behind his worst review.’

"He was condemned to death for telling the ancient Greeks things they didn't want to hear, but his views on consumerism and trial by media are just as relevant today."

"I’m afraid of what the systematic harnessing of communities will result in." Specifically, he's afraid that it will result in a) fans wasting their time and money and b) the artist being relegated to the sidelines while context and 'engagement' take over. Valid fears if you ask me, and exactly the sort of the thing that Matt LeMay outlines in the MBV post 'Living in the Age of Art vs Content' (http://www.mbvmusic.com/2010/10/19/living-in-the-age-of-art-vs-content/26911).

Basically: It's sometimes amateurish, and there's troubling misogyny, but is that so bad? I say, and I think this is what Kevin is getting at, is that the age-old paradigm of adults worrying about young minds being influenced by media is a bit more complicated -- I think more than a new idea being introduced and etched onto a young mind by 'Twilight', the more likely circumstance is that the ideas therein subtly reinforce existing ideas that the child is already exposed to.

What will call these new forms, these non-books, these "texts"? Hmm, that could work.

Simply a collection of beautiful book covers.

A great profile of the author, who wrote "No Country for Old Men". "At its root, McCarthy's fiction arises from the tragedy of all wild creatures, of whatever is begotten, born, and dies, the tragedy of autonomous life in a world increasingly circumscribed by a rage for order and captivity. More than merely human. It is the tragedy of warm blood itself, of blood and time."

On the "cognitive surplus" we're going through, and how interesting and valuable all this new engagement and experimentation with technology is.

"Throw down a challenge." The articles bullet-points the book's suggested tactics.

"These are things I find abandoned in books or stuffed on the book cart at the jail where I volunteer."

From the US National Library of Medicine, a huge collection of free, public-domain images from anatomical atlases. A great wealth of material. Wish it were designed better and that the books were all scanned rather than some photographed.

This is delicious. Don't miss the eye fish or the larval horse. Or the tennis ball or the library entrance.

The story behind why the O'Reilly books have animal engravings on them.

"It is my mission to correctly re-shelve books to the appropriate section of the bookstore." Putting pseudo-scientific books about religion in the Religion section. Or Religious Fiction section. Or New Age section.

"What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book." Aaron Swartz is at it again!