Book nerds and children’s literature nostalgics alike were treated today when Twitter exploded with the trending topic #failedchildrensbooktitles. Plenty of “failed titles” took the raunchy road—can it ever be helped on the internet?—while others proved good old fashioned humor still has a place online. Some of my non-offensive favorites (with their twittering creators in parenthesis):

Ramona Quimby, age 38 (@ the_games_afoot)

Furious George (@ swagner1031)

Little House on Stolen Land (@ kitchenartist)

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Mercury Poisoning (@ Fletcherism73)

Horton Hears The Who (@ NilsAParker)

The Bailout Tree (@ markolivas)

Punch the Bunny (@ manningtheship)

Nobody Else Poops (@ diablocody)

Where the Wild Things Eat You (@ bmerritt)

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Bertrand Russell  (@joshuacmurphy)

And on that note, if you haven’t yet watched this clip of Will Arnett reading from Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, you’re in for another children’s classics take-two treat.

Source: Twitter

So you’re stuck in the hospital, preparing for or recovering from this or that procedure—what books do you bring along to keep yourself busy? Canadian author Alberto Manguel tackles the question in the new issue of Geist, describing his careful process for selecting hospital reading during a couple of recent stays.

During his first trip to the hospital, Manguel decides against a number of genres, including recent fiction ("too risky because unproven") and biographies ("too crowded: hooked to a tangle of drips, I found other people's presence annoying"). Ultimately, he opts for “the equivalent of comfort food, something I’d once enjoyed and could endlessly and effortlessly revisit,” he writes. “I asked my friend to bring me my two volumes of Don Quixote.”

Because I’ve kept going back to it ever since my adolescence, I knew I wasn’t going to be tripped by the surprises of its plot; and since it’s a book that I could read just for the pleasure of its invention, without having to delve into its erudite conundrums, I could allow myself to drift peacefully away in the story’s flow, in the wake of the noble knight and his faithful sidekick. To my first high school reading of Don Quixote, guided by Professor Isaias Lerner, I have added many other readings over the years, undertaken in all sorts of places and moods. To those I can now add a medicinal Don Quixote, both a balm and a consolation.

Approaching his second hospital stay, Manguel works out a formula of sorts to assure a “companionable variety” of books, drawing from each of four categories: “a miscellany,” “a meditative work,” “a book to make me smile,” and “a collection of poetry.” It's a lovely way to approach a down-time reading list, though I might have to add a fifth category: "trashy mystery novel."

Source: Geist 

Ever feel like you’re trapped in the city, exiled from your natural home in the wilds, longing for some deeper connection with nature? Yeah, me too. That’s why I’ve been enjoying Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s new book, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness (Little, Brown), which encourages us to attune ourselves to the wildlife that exists even in our paved and mowed urban landscapes. Haupt uses crows as a spirit-guide into the natural world, which goes against her instincts because a) she has a clear aversion to too much “woo-woo” talk and a hesitance to anthropomorphize, b) she sees the abundance of crows as an indicator of ecological imbalance, and c) as she states flat-out in the opening line, “Crows are not my favorite bird.”

Nonetheless, Haupt is irresistibly drawn to crows as she shakes off something that sounds like not just urban ennui but clinical depression. Getting herself out of her funk, she begins to explore her nearby Seattle environs with the expertise of an experienced birder, the sharp eye of an all-around naturalist, and the literary mind of a probing essayist:

When we allow ourselves to think of nature as something out there, we become prey to complacency. If nature is somewhere else, then what we do here doesn’t really matter. Jennifer Price writes in Flight Maps, her eloquent critique of romanticized nature, that modern Americans use an idea of Nature Out There to ignore our ravenous uses of natural resources. “If I don’t think of a Volvo as nature, then can’t I buy and drive it to Nature without thinking very hard about how I use, alter, destroy, and consume nature?” In my urban ecosystem, I drive around a corner and a crow leaps into flight from the grassy parking strip. We startle each other. If nature is Out There, she asks, then what am I?

Source: Little, Brown

The people at the Second Pass are looking for a fight. They've named ten books they want "fired from the canon." Who gets kicked to the curb? Not a lightweight among them: Faulkner, García Márquez, Kerouac, Dos Passos, Franzen...

The creators of the blacklist explain themselves:

If you’re looking for reading suggestions in bulk, you’re spoiled for choice ... but a problem arises: Such guides are presumably meant to save readers time by pointing them in the right direction, but the guides themselves amount to several months or years of reading. The books they recommend add up to several lifetimes. What starts as an attempt to save hours ends as a commitment to more hours than you probably have.

Have a look for yourself. It's a fun read, and if these people can be trusted, it may just change your life. Sort of.

Source: Second Pass 

Image by  austinevan , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book Angela’s Ashes, was Daniel Radosh’s high school English teacher. After McCourt died last week, Radosh—himself an author of the book Rapture Ready—wrote a funny and beautiful eulogy to his former teacher on his blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Beyond the practical lessons I learned in Frank McCourt's class, I'll always remember him as a model for how to be cynical without being jaded and sarcastic without being inhumane. I'm pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife, but he had to believe that there is an immortality in living so that your words and actions transform the world around you in ways that will continue to reverberate forever. No one with so much life in him can ever truly die. And if there were an afterlife, I can guarantee you that somewhere right now, Frank McCourt would be mightily pissed off that he's not around for what's sure to be a hell of a wake.

Radosh was kind enough to sit down with Utne Reader last year to talk about Christian rock music that doesn’t suck.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

Source: Radosh.net

Image by  David Shankbone , licensed under  Creative Commons .  

“If the Beatles hadn’t broken up, what would their 1970s albums have sounded like?” asks  David L. Ulin in the 2009 music issue of the Believer. “I’ve been asking myself this question off and on since I was a teenager.” There’s no answer, of course, so he invented one.

Any invented record has to make sense as a Beatles album, to reflect the amalgam the band was, the formulas on which they relied. For all their innovations, the Beatles were formulaic as well, building albums that had a standard architecture (one or two songs from George, a balance of John and Paul, and a quick dash of Ringo). You can’t forget that when considering what they might have done.

After taking readers on a tour of post-breakup Beatle solo albums, Ulin fashions four hypothetical Beatles albums. Here’s one:

Too Many People

SIDE ONE

Imagine (John)
Crippled Inside (John)
It Don’t Come Easy (Ringo, cowritten with George)
Teddy Boy (Paul)
All Things Must Pass (George)
Another Day (Paul)

 SIDE TWO

Too Many People (Paul)
Jealous Guy (John)
Gimme Some Truth (John)
Awaiting on You All (George)
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey (Paul)
Monkberry Moon Delight (Paul)

We needed to hear this hypothetical blockbuster, so we brought it to life over at imeem. Enjoy:

Image by Chamko Rani, licensed under Creative Commons.

You're a foreign journalist locked up in a notorious Iranian prison facing espionage charges, how do you pass the time? You ask your interrogators for their reading suggestions, of course! That's what Iason Athanasiadis did, and now that he's back on the outside he's assembled a list of his interrogators' recommendations and published them at Global Post. Here's an excerpt:

Westoxification, Jalal al-e Ahmad, 1962: A recurring point of reference for my jailers, this is the pre-eminent philosophical work on which the cultural wars that followed the Iranian Revolution were conducted.

The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Frances Stonor Saunders: Highly recommended by my interrogators as the definitive account of how the West funded leftist and right-wing intellectuals during the Cold War seeking to dissuade them from succumbing to the lure of Communism.

Death Plus Ten Years, Roger Cooper, 1995: Highly recommended by one of my interrogators, this is a memoir by a British man convicted of espionage in Iran in the 1980s who spent more than five years in jail and was exchanged for a number of Iranian prisoners with the British government. My interrogator told me that after reading it he was convinced Cooper had been a spy “because he exhibited an intelligence mentality.” He did not delve further into what is an “intelligence mentality,” presumably because he sought to establish the same parameter with me.

A Man, Oriana Fallaci, 1981: At the conclusion of my interrogation, I was told that I should not be so upset that it had dragged on for three weeks. “You shouldn’t be so negative about your experience,” the senior interrogator advised me. “Look at Oriana Fallaci, she spent so much time in prison. It formed her.”

Source: Global Post 

Image by Biggunben, licensed under Creative Commons.

Bikers are such quiet, conscientious people… er, not always. Comics artist Kenny Be has inked them as "Bike Monsters" in the pages of Westword. Check out his snide comic strip and see if you can spot a caricature you recognize. For more discussion on bikers versus the rest of the world, read Bennett Gordon's post about anti-social commuters.

Source: Westword

At its best, the Believer delivers essays and dialogues about fascinations you didn't know you had. I've walked through war zones and across four states and still I was surprised I made it to the end of a lengthy correspondence about walking. It helped that the correspondents—writers Will Self and Geoff Nicholson—were several kinds of hilarious. Forgive me, but what stuck with me and what I want to share with you now was Nicholson's list of similarities between walking and sex, which he created with the idea of "sexing up" his book The Lost Art of Walking. Here are his ruminations on the subject:

Essential similarities: They're both basic, simple, repetitive activities that just about everybody does, and yet they're both capable of great sophistication and elaboration. They can both be sources of fantastic pleasure, but there are times when they can both feel like hard work. They're both things that some people like to do alone, that some like to do with just one other person, and that others like to do in groups of various sizes. And some people like to wear special clothing while they're doing it. And then, essential differences: One: although I'm sure you can catch various diseases while you're walking, they're different from the sort you can catch while having sex. Two: whereas walking is the kind of activity that can be happily and legally undertaken in public with a dog...At that point I abandoned my ruminations; this seemed too flippant even by my standards.

Walk on...

Source: Believer 

“Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy,” according to Thomas Jefferson. In a letter written in 1787, and unearthed for the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, the founding father explains that traveling spreads a person’s affections too thin, causing deep dissatisfaction and idleness. Older, more mature people may be able to handle such a shock to the system, but young people should stay in their home countries where the pursuit of knowledge will be less “obstructed by foreign objects.”

Jefferson writes:

The glare of pomp and pleasure is analogous to the motion of the blood—it absorbs all their affection and attention, they are torn from it as from the only good in this world, and return to their home as to a place of exile and condemnation. Their eyes are forever turned back to the object they have lost, and its recollection poisons the residue of their lives.

Source:  Lapham’s Quarterly  

Mitch Schneider was getting rid of a “sweet, ten-speed thrasher” road bike, and he decided to make hopeful riders work for it—by having them write “in exactly 20 words why you are the most-deserving candidate for my road bike, and what you plan to use it for.”

He shares a handful of responses—some goofy, some earnest—in the new issue of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, a lively, thoughtful journal that features bike-inspired essays, poetry, reviews, conversations, and more (the article is not available online). Here’s some of the “pure road poetry” that Schneider received:

I done could like this bike to fetch stuff fer me and my wench to cook our vittles real good. –O'Connell

Twenty words is hardly enough to explain how much commuting, cruising, and possibly crashing would happen if it were mine. –David P.

Help I am in need of a bike for Pops! Please help him escape loving but crazy menopausal wife. THANKS! –Sam R.

Moving from Oregon without cash for a car makes this bike an important component to my future success and happiness. –Jordan H.

stripped naked like a chop shop
and then put back together to wheel downtown
and friends in need to borrow
its no haiku, but let me know –Will B.

I would convert this bike to a fixed gear bike then learn how to perform track stands to impress friends. –Bob B.

Source: Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac 

Forget all of the life-of-a-writer garbage that pops up in blogs and on the shelves of Borders and Barnes & Noble, the fabulous Gay Talese leads by example. Here, in all of its eccentric glory, is a sketch of his workday:

Paris Review: How does your writing day begin?

Gay Talese: I get dressed as if I’m going to an office. I wear a tie.

PR: Cuff links?

GT: Yes. I dress as if I’m going to an office in midtown or on Wall Street or at a law firm, even though what I am really doing is going downstairs to my bunker. In the bunker there’s a little refrigerator, and I have orange juice and muffins and coffee. Then I change my clothes.

PR:  Again?

GT: That’s right. I have an ascot and sweaters. I have a scarf.

PR:  Do you like that the bunker doesn’t have windows?

GT: Yes. There are no doors, no time. It used to be a wine cellar.

PR:  How do you write?

GT: Longhand at first. Then I use the typewriter.

PR: You never write directly onto the computer?

GT: Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I want to be forced to work slowly because I don’t want to get too much on paper. By the end of the morning I might have a page, which I will pin up above my desk.

PR: Surely there must be some days in the middle of a project, when you’re really going, that you write more than a single page.

GT: No, there aren’t.

Source: Paris Review 

Image by Joyce Tenneson.  

In the latest issue of Meatpaper, Chris Ying deconstructs our love for watching men masticate curious things on television. His equation—dubbed the "unattractive men/unattractive meat narrative" or "UM/UM"—is this: “the weirder-looking you are, the weirder the food you have to eat.” He writes, rather scathingly, that UM/UM explains why “an acid-washed porcupine” like Guy Fieri is forced to scarf the slickest, homeliest burgers in the country (though he seems to dig it), while bitsy Giada De Laurentiis tucks away much tidier pieces of chicken and the occasional mini meatball. After grappling briefly with the consequences of his media equation, Ying has these final words:

In all honesty, we can’t really blame television for overfishing, or for lousy, overpriced renditions of street food in upscale restaurants. Nor can we blame TV for aspiring housewives lusting after organic home gardens and Hamptons beach houses. It’d be like blaming porn for teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. It’s all just entertainment. And at the end of the day, food television, like porn, is irrevocably and essentially unsatisfying. They keep turning us on, but we keep watching, mouths watering and agape in horror.

Source: Meatpaper

Image by sashafatcat, licensed under Creative Commons.

“ Running from Gas ,” a Pakistani lawyer runs from tear gas, Pakistan. © Emilio Morenatti.

A Show of Riveting, Diverse Photojournalism: Amazing photographs from one of the oldest photojournalism competitions in the world.

In Search of Lost Memories: Could traumatic memories be erased simply by remembering?

The Twitterless Tigers of Tamil : Twitter did not come to the aid of the estimated 20,000 killed and hundreds of thousands of displaced in Sri Lanka earlier this year.

Keeping Happy Even When Work Stinks: Somber as the mood might be, this isn’t the time to abandon the pursuit of happiness in the workplace

Your Brain Is Chaos: Have a Look!: The only thing more unsettling than reading about “neural avalanches” in your brain is watching them. Ah, brain science. Enjoy!

The Art of the Whimsical Paid Death Notice: The incredible obituary for “teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper” Nancy Hixson.

More Amazing Music Websites for Hungry Ears

Urban Gardens for All Kinds of City Lots: Finally! Garden guidance for those of us who don’t have big, sunny, plant-friendly backyards.

Staying Classy, Staying Cheap: The intrepid folks behind Fancy Fast Food give step-by-step instructions on turning White Castle, Taco Bell, and Dominoes into attractive, if not tasty, dinner party fare.

Pop songs romanticizing murder and corruption among drug cartels and federales (Mexican national police) have been a staple in Mexican culture since the '60s, writes William T. Vollmann in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.

Through a series of intimate encounters, Vollmann explores the complicated role the baladas prohibidas, or narcocorridos, play in the lives of people in Mexico, many of whom understandably vilify corrupt authorities and uphold drug lords as idyllic figures of honor and bravery, seemingly without a sense of fear for their own lives. But recently balladas prohibidas have come under fire, and even been banned from certain Mexican radio stations and outlawed altogether in Baja California. He writes:

The policeman Carlos Pérez said that some of the most famous ballads were about Jesús Malverde, whom he called the patron saint of the narcotraffickers. He lived in Sinaloa. He was Robin Hood. He sold drugs and used the money to help the people. He was killed in a gun battle because he didn't want to give himself up. Some say he was never caught. Some say he died of old age, and others say that he is still alive. Everybody has his own story

Below are some popular narcocorridos we dug up from YouTube.

Source: Mother Jones, YouTube 

Image biy DavidDennis, licensed under Creative Commons.

The good people at the mortality-centric website Obit scan death notices in newspapers far and wide. It’s a respectable mission, especially when it turns up gems like the obituary for “teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper” Nancy Hixson. Want to know how to write an obituary? You can read the entire notice over at Obit. Don’t settle for this irresistible and inspiring taste:

(NANCY) LEE HIXSON of Danville, Ohio died at sunrise on June 30, 2009 … In addition to being a teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper, she was a board certified naturopath specializing in poisonous and medicinal plants; but she would like to point out, posthumously, that although it did occur to her, she never spiked anyone's tea. She often volunteered as an ombudsman to help disadvantaged teens find college funding and early opened her home to many children of poverty, raising several of them to successful, if unwilling, adulthood … She was the CEO of the Cuyahoga Valley Center of Outdoor Leadership Training, where she lived in a remote and tiny one-room cabin in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Despite the lack of cabin space and dining table, she often served holiday dinners to friends and relatives and could seat twenty at the bed. She lived the last twenty-three years at Winter Spring Farm near Danville where she built a private Stonehenge, and planted and helped save from extinction nearly 50 varieties of antique apple trees, many listed in A.J. Downing's famous orchard guide of 1859 … She was predeceased by her father Dwight Edward Wood of the Ohio pioneer Wood family of Byhalia, who died in the Columbus Jail having been accused of a dreadful crime … Cremation has taken place. In lieu of flowers, please pray for the Constitution of the United States. 

Onward Nancy Hixson, wherever you are.

Source: Obit 

Last year there were more than 275,000 new books published in the United States. That got Virginia Quarterly Review’s Jacob Silverman thinking: does every book deserve a review? His answer, in short, is a resounding no, which begs a better question: how does a reviewer find the books best suited to her tastes and critical talents?

The challenge for book-review outlets is to sort through the mass of unsolicited books that arrives every day, the e-mails from authors and PR reps, and the various other articles and notifications announcing the publication of new and interesting titles. Of course, the large publishing houses have an advantage in getting their books into the hands of reviewers and assigning editors, but even they struggle to get their authors the attention they very likely deserve.  With that in mind, what is the best way to connect editors and writers with the books that interest them?

And that conversation begs a better question still: who do you trust in the vast but receding world of book reviews? What publications? What critics?

“Most writers put a lot of time, heart, passion, and effort into their books,” writes Silverman. “Editors and critics should do the same when considering what and how they review.”

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review 

Fourth of July reading:

Oooh, Ahhh, Argghh: Hatin’ on Fireworks

Unsupervised Children Twirl Firecrackers on a String!

Other good stuff:

Unearthed: Spalding Gray Interviews the Dalai Lama This 1991 conversation is colored by the kind of blunt truths Gray was famous for. It's a great exploration of the fundamental tenets of Tibeten Buddhism, and it's also hilarious.

Digging the Continuous Light Christian Hits : Christian radio is becoming less, well, Christian.

Google What Do the Modern Corporation and the Christian Megachurch Have in Common?: Lots, it turns out.

Exhuming Ayn Rand: What’s up with all the Ayn Rand love we’re seeing lately?

Strange Rugs Depict Decades of War in Afghanistan: Afghanistan's epic battle against Soviet occupation spawned an unusual genre of war story

Live, Nude Farming : Gross.

The Illuminati of the Film Downloading World: Invite-only film downloading clubs hide in the darkest, most exclusive corners of the internet.

Thirteen-Year-Old Brings Back the Walkman: Thirteen-year-old Scott Campbell recently gave up his iPod for a week, opting instead to use his dad’s clunky old Sony Walkman.

Young People Write About Mental Illness: These young writers are incredibly straightforward and honest about their experiences with childhood abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenia.

Image by  nextartist , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The new issue of Represent, a magazine by and for young people in foster care, focuses on mental illness. It makes for some pretty heavy reading—these young writers are incredibly straightforward and honest about their experiences with childhood abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenia—but it’s a vital source of voices and perspectives that are normally absent from discussions of mental illness.

Source: Represent 

The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD) will be published without an evolving list of seemingly passé entries, which includes; tulip, melon, acorn, fungus, cheetah, leopard, beaver, otter and magpie, among many others. The dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), is perpetuating a bleak world without violets, bluebells or passenger pigeons, writes Robert Michael Pyle in the July issue of Orion. But there are plenty of blackberries there (and not the kind you eat.) He writes:

On the other hand, in OJD-world you’ll have no trouble locating blogs or chatrooms. Celebrities are there, spending euros. You can check your broadband MP3 player and send attachments with bullet points, all while bungee jumping if you so desire…

OUP responded that the volume must be kept small for small hands, so when new words are added to keep up with the times, old words must come out. Sharp howls of protest arose from people who hold to the quaint belief that an essential societal good comes from young people getting to know –or at least know about—their natural surroundings.

Also on the chopping block— canary, lark, dandelion, lavender, willow, weasel, porcupine, fern, beech, sycamore, pelican, starling and stork.

Source:  Orion  (article not yet available online)

Image by  YoungLadAustin , licensed under Creative Commons.  

A mother drops off her 12-year-old daughter and her friend—with ground rules in place—at the mall in Bozeman, Montana, with three younger children in tow. Within an hour, mall security calls her back. She returns. Two police offices are waiting there to tell her that she’s going to be arrested for endangering the welfare of her children.

In “Guilty as Charged: Her biggest crime? Trusting her own parenting,” Bridget Kevane patiently recalls the details of that day and the ones that would follow, plumbing her confusion, frustration, and guilt for the readers of Brain, Child. “During the months between my arrest and the deferred prosecution agreement that my lawyer eventually worked out, I began to feel that I was being reprimanded for allowing my daughter to develop [a] sense of responsibility,” she writes. What emerges is a courageously unadorned examination of her family’s ordeal, and an opportunity to reflect on the shrinking space available for parents to simply trust their instincts.

Source: Brain, Child

The Atlantic claims your summer cocktail could benefit from gourmet ice. Are you rolling your eyes? Well, when Wayne Curtis investigated the issue, mixologist Toby Maloney clued him in: “Ice is as important to a bartender as a stove is to a chef.” He goes on to say that, “You’d never tell a chef he could have only a stove-top burner or a fryer. And I couldn’t do without at least three or four different types of ice.”

In fact, fancy ice can range in style from standard crushed ice, to chunk ice that must be chipped and shaped, to “oblong blocks that fit perfectly into a Collins glass.” Each drink, in turn, requires a different sort to suit its chilling needs. Curtis himself is clearly a convert, and performs his own experiment between a drink made with “cheater ice” and one made with the good stuff. According to him, if you’re looking for “a richer taste” and “a denser, almost velvety texture,” choose your ice wisely, friend.

Source: Atlantic 

Image by Jökull Sólberg Auðunsson, licensed under Creative Commons.