Tag Archives: books

Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Can a photograph be true or false? It’s a a thought-provoking  interview with filmmaker Errol Morris. And if you want to improve your website’s credibility, and who doesn’t,  check out How to Improve Your Website Trust Factor.

  • The Ultimate History Project. “In recent years, an academic job crisis has led many highly trained historians to leave their profession.  The Ultimate History Project draws on the skills of many of these scholars, providing them with an opportunity to publish and promote their scholarship.  The Ultimate History Project also encourages faculty members to write for the general public and it provides a forum for academically trained historians to work alongside avid genealogists, independent historians, and collectors, enabling them all to collaborate and learn from one another.” [Thanks to Francie King of History Keep for alerting me to this item.]
  • Dead Again. “Two decades ago, the Book Review ran an essay, “The End of Books,” in which the novelist Robert Coover questioned whether print could survive the age of “video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks, and in particular out in the humming digitalized precincts of avant-garde computer hackers, cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks.” Was the book as “dead as God”? …Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.”
  • Hints for Memoir Writers from Woody Allen. “A few months ago, I pulled a page from Bloomberg Businessweek. The article was called, “The Woody Allen School of Productivity” and the author was John Lopez. The premise was that there are valuable lessons in examining a career that has been as successful as Woody Allen’s. Between 1965 and 2012, 47 years, Allen has directed 43 films. Just about one a year…John Lopez researched Allen and came up with eight points. I’ve turned five of these into tips for memoir writers. With thanks to Lopez for this inspiration.”
  • The Last Pictures: A Time-Capsule of Humanity in 100 Images Sent into Space for Eternity. “Inspired by cave paintings, Sagan’s Golden Record, and nuclear waste warning signs, MIT artist-in-residence Trevor Paglen set out to create a collection of 100 images, commissioned by public art organization Creative Time, to be etched onto an ultra-archival, golden silicon disc and sent into orbit onboard the Echostar XVI satellite this month — at once a time-capsule of the present and a message to the future.”
  • How to Improve Your Website Trust Factor. “Is your website harming the trust and credibility of your business? Are people worried or put off when they visit you online? Could your site be working against you rather than working as a business asset? I’m sad to say that this is more common than we would like…The GOOD news is, a lot of the problem areas that cause mistrust or unease in your visitors are easy to fix. Check out these factors and see if improvements can be made in your own site:”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup, if you swoon over typography, you’ll want to take a look at Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili.  It’s a feast for the eyes.  And for a more mindful approach to living, be sure to read A Primer on Full-Screen Living.

  • What is Narrative Therapy? ” Narrative therapy starts with the understanding that everybody’s life is multi-storied to an almost infinite degree.  If I were to sit down with you, and you were to talk non-stop 24 hours a day for 30 days about different things that have happened to you in your life, you would only have just begun to scratch the surface of all the stories associated with your life.  That’s because  stories are much more than events themselves.  They are perspectives, ways of making meaning about the situations we encounter.”
  • Book Review: Patrick Nathan on Boarded Windows. “The act of remembering — on a literal level it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it… What you’re remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now. […] The more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes. The more it becomes about you and the less about what actually happened.”
  • Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili. “For more than three decades, graphic designer Louise Fili* has been producing some of the most consistently exquisite typography, frequently hand-drawn and building upon thoughtfully curated vintage sources. In her decade as art director for Pantheon Books, she created nearly two thousand book jackets, each with remarkable attention to detail.”
  • Boost Your Freelance Brand 100 Percent with Your Expert Status. “To build a lucrative freelancing career, it isn’t enough to have the best skills out there, despite what these reality television shows may indicate. But you do absolutely have to be an expert: you need to be the person that advises your client so that they get the result they want, not the project they asked for.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
  • This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It). “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
  • Book Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price. “When is a book a book, and when is it something more? What is it that matters about books, and where is that meaning made? Why, and how, do we value books? And how has the meaning of books changed: what did books mean in an era experiencing the rapid rise of print, and what do they mean to us now as we shift into the digital age? These are all questions raised by Leah Price’s engaging and incisive How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.”
  • A Primer on Full-Screen Living. “What’s full-screen living? It’s a life where we allow one thing to take up the entirety of our attention — going into full-screen mode, like a video on your computer — while allowing everything else to fade into the background. Let’s take a look.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup I seem to have been intrigued by disappearing things. There’s Disappearing Ink Book, ideal for the procrastinator. Endangered Languages, an online resource to record languages in danger of disappearing. And  Vanishing Languages, a National Geographic site containing some frightening statistics on the weekly disappearance of languages.

On a lighter note you might want to check out Top Punctuation Howlers.

  • Disappearing Ink Book. “For less voracious readers and those with busy lives, finishing a book can be an elusive task continually pushed to the bottom of to-do lists, right along with reorganizing a closet and learning French. A small Argentinean publisher, Eterna Cadencia, has found a way to combat this: They created an ink that begins to fade away after only two months of interaction with light and air.”
  • India’s paper trail runs for centuries. “Hundreds of years before the colonizers came, Indians were counting, sorting and filing with a precision that the British could only hope to envy. They went deh-be-dehi, or village-by-village, he [Mohammed Irfann] said in the mellifluous Persian of the Moghul Empire, and they made meticulous lists of everything from castes to trees. Dr. Irfann, archivist in the Oriental Division of the Indian National Archives, understands how monumental a task that was. He is near the end of more than 25 years of work cataloging a trove of 137,000 Moghul documents, known as the Inayat Jang Collection.”
  • Endangered Languages. “…an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat.”
  • Top Punctuation Howlers – The Comma. “What’s so great about the comma? It clears away ambiguity, confusion, and on occasion steers us away from cannibalism. For example: Martha finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.
  • Vanishing Languages. “One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?”
  • “I Am Allergic to Abstraction” by Carlo Rotella. “What does it mean to explore the world through stories? Martin Eiermann sat down with scholar and writer Carlo Rotella to talk about vivid characters, Bostonian accents, and the future of suburbia.”
  • 11 Ways to Bore the Boots Off Your Readers. “I’ve collected the 11 most common mistakes bloggers make that bore the hell out of their readers. And of course, if you prefer to engage, entertain, and entice your readers … just turn these around, and make your content really work.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup check out the animated talk 5 Things Every Presenter Should Know About People. If you make presentations, I highly recommend it.  And for something creative and fun, be sure to watch Publisher Creates Inspirational Book Sculpture Video.

  • 10 Important Life Lessons We Learned from Children’s Books. “This week, one of our favorite children’s book authors and illustrators of all time, Chris Van Allsburg, turned 63. Allsburg’s books were formative literature for us as children, so to celebrate the author’s birthday, we were inspired to think about all the life lessons we learned from children’s books — both picture books and early chapter books — that still stick with us.”
  • 8 Things You Should Include In Your Terms of Service Agreement. “If you’ve been a solo freelancer for any significant stretch of time, you’ve probably learned the hard way that a work project can go horribly wrong. They turn out to be life lessons in the long run, but there are ways to protect yourself.”
  • The Life Biographic: An Interview with Hermione Lee. “Acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee talks about life-writing as a scholarly and literary pursuit: the fictions and facts that make up written lives, rules that can be broken, conventions that change and motives that remain the same.”
  • Participatory Archives: Moving Beyond Description. “Last week, the Library of Congress Archives Forum hosted a talk by Kate Theimer of the popular blog ArchivesNext…Theimer spoke on the subject of participatory archives, highlighting the ways that archives can use crowdsourcing projects to increase user engagement and understanding, while also enhancing the information and resources that they provide.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

If you’re a memoir writer, you’ll find some gems in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. My favorite, Just enough about me, is a charming first-person account of an 80-year-old woman’s experience at writing her self-published memoir. And don’t miss The meaning of memoir. The author argues that memoirs are still of importance in today’s Facebook  and Twitter universe.

  • Writing Memoir, Quotes, and Books. “Working on my memoir, I’ve turned to many, many (many many, too many) books with tips on how to get started, organized, and inspired.  I also read a lot of what other authors say about the process and will share quotes here, as well.”
  • The Legend Library: A video record of our theatrical legends. “This series of exclusive video interviews is one of our most important initiatives, capturing the stories of our theatrical legends. Conducted by actor/director RH Thomson, these comprehensive interviews will preserve our [Canadian] theatrical heritage for generations to come.”
  • Just enough about me. “It was a Sunday in May, 2010, and I was two-finger-pecking at the keyboard on my computer, composing another anecdote for my memoir, which I hoped to self-publish in time for my 80th birthday in May, 2011.”
  • Milestone Memories. “I’ve been thinking about milestone’s a lot recently. Late May through early July is major milestone season for my family and me. I graduated from high school on May 28. and began my first job on June 5, which was also the day I first met the man I married a year later…Milestone moments deserve to be celebrated and commemorated. Many call for celebration in person with others. All are compelling story topics on their own merits.”
  • The meaning of memoir. “Even in an age of tweets and Facebook posts and personal websites and talk-show bookings, there are things only a memoir — a sustained written meditation on an individual experience — can do. In his introduction to “Memoirs” (1972) by W.B. Yeats, Denis Donoghue wrote that Yeats “is not given to the intrinsic pleasure of confession, he is concerned with the meaning of a life, not with its mere content.”
  • Day One Stories. “In 2011, hundreds of people across the country were asked to photograph their first day of retirement. These photos and the accompanying documentaries capture a moment of transition in a life.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Too busy for a vacation this summer? Then you may want to read The Importance of Vacations in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. If you’re not familiar with Cowbird, check out this latest web-based means of  collecting stories. And as someone who relies on my copyeditor to save me from embarrassing gaffes, I highly recommend 6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better.

  • The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood. “Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristo…In his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, he seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life. Dr. Hood was kind enough to answer a few of my questions below.”
  • Narrative Concepts. “…narrative medicine means an understanding of health and disease for humans, that is grounded in the stories humans live out in their lives and the stories that we understand about our lives which give our lives meaning and purpose…it means that illness is embedded in the stories we are performing and that are performing us.   There is a biological story about how we are organisms who are born, live, wear out, and die.   Our lives are finite.   Within that finitude, however, are multiple social stories which interact with the “how long do I have to live story”.
  • 6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better. “Linda Jay is a very experienced book editor…I asked [her]…if she would give readers some advice on one of the most important decisions a self-publisher makes: hiring a copyeditor. Here’s her reply.”
  • The Importance Of Vacations. “As an entrepreneur who has launched three businesses, I have on several occasions in the past found myself working long hours, seven days a week and forgoing vacations owing to lack of time and reduced income. As I have grown older, I realize that was a mistake.”
  • Cowbird. “…is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

For graphic designers, this Monday’s Link Roundup has two gems, The Art of the Book Cover Explained at TED and 5 (Mostly) Vintage Children’s Books by Iconic Graphic Designers.  If you’re interested in ethical wills, be sure to take a look at Things to worry about. It’s a letter by F. Scott Fitzgerald to his 11-year-old daughter. While it’s short, it’s nevertheless a wonderful example of an ethical will of sorts.

  • Aging Survivors Can’t Forget. [Podcast] “Many of the estimated 200,000 living Holocaust survivors face a new trauma in their final years, as they are overwhelmed by terrible memories they’ve successfully contained for 70 years…Reporter Karen Brown introduces us to survivors and their family members .., as well as social workers and specialists working with them, to find out more about this painful last chapter in a survivor’s life, and about what can be done to help them.” [ Thanks to Stephen Albert of Lifetime Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
  • Five Reasons Why Your Life Will Improve By Writing Memoir. “Sue William Silverman is an award-winning memoir author, a writing teacher in the MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the author of Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. In today’s post, Silverman presents five reasons why writing a memoir will improve our lives! Enjoy!”
  • Crazy Talk: The Do-What-You-Love Guide. “I am not someone who likes to give career advice, or teach people to be online entrepreneurs. So I’m not going to do that here. I’ll just tell you this: it’s possible. Yes, it absolutely is possible. And I’ll share what I’ve learned, in small snippets of goodness, about doing what you love.”
  • Determining if a sentimental item is clutter or a treasure. “If you’re storing sentimental items in cardboard boxes in your basement or attic or garage, it’s a pretty good sign the items are clutter and not treasures…Plus, you can’t see your items or appreciate them through the walls of a box in a corner of a room beneath boxes of holiday decorations…As you’re sorting through your sentimental items to determine what is a treasure and what is clutter, ask yourself:”
  • The Art of the Book Cover Explained at TED. [Video] “Give this one a minute to get going, to get beyond the schtick. And then you’ll enter the world of Chip Kidd, associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers for many famous books. As he will tell you, his job comes down to asking: What do stories look like, and how can he give them a face, if not write a short visual haiku for them?”
  • Things to worry about. “In 1933, renowned author F. Scott Fitzgerald ended a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Scottie, with a list of things to worry about, not worry about, and simply think about. It read as follows.”
  • 5 (Mostly) Vintage Children’s Books by Iconic Graphic Designers. “As a lover of children’s books, I have a particularly soft spot for little-known gems by well-known creators. After two rounds of excavating obscure children’s books by famous authors of literature for grown-ups and icons of the art world, here are five wonderful vintage children’s books by some of history’s most celebrated graphic designers.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Don’t miss Reflections in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup. It’s a powerful reminder that behind every aged face there was once a younger self with dreams and ambitions. If you’re a serious blogger,  you’ll find some practical wisdom in 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging.

  • Robert Caro’s Big Dig. “Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms.”
  • Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love. “…when you are facing the unknown, they only way to know anything for sure is to act. When you are dealing with uncertainty — and whether you are going to make any money from your passion at this point is definitely an uncertainty — you act. You don’t think about what might happen, or try to predict the outcome, or plan for every contingency. You take a small step toward making it a reality, and you see what happens.”
  • Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now. “We need a new playbook,” says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. “The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true.” The Start-Up of You, written by Casnocha and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is that playbook. It argues that we can no longer expect to find a job, instead we must make our jobs. As Hoffman says, we have to “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs, it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”
  • Reflections. A poignant reconstructed portrait series  where  older people gaze into a mirror at a reflection of their  younger selves . Created  by photographer Tom Husey.
  • Social media self-promotion scheme draws authors including Margaret Atwood. “As bookshops teeter and publishers sway in the shifting landscape of the digital age, authors are being urged to go out and find their own readers by a new $20m (£12.5m) fund that will pay them a dollar for every book sold. With early adopters including Margaret Atwood and FlashForward author Robert Sawyer – who claimed the scheme would have added $20,000 to his income from audio over the past two years – the fund is being launched by digital audiobook site Audible at the London Book Fair this weekend.”
  • Book Design: Choosing Your Paragraphing Style. “Anyone who wants to do their own book design can spend some very worthwhile time studying books that are old. I mean really old, like going all the way back to the beginning of printed books. Early on, I found these books and the book typography that’s used in them very stimulating when thinking about how I wanted the books I was working on to look.”
  • 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging. “Ever since I started in business, I’ve always loved Seth Godin. He’s a brilliant marketer and a great writer. In fact, he runs one of the most popular blogs…And while many people view him as “America’s greatest marketer,” there is a lot to learn from him about blogging.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

This Monday’s Link Roundup can start your week off with a good chuckle. Check out Fumblerules of Grammar. Fans of William Safire won’t be disappointed. And for another delightful distraction, hop on over to Whimsical Photographic Abstractions of the Joy of Reading.

  • The Birth and Decline of a Book: Two Videos for Bibliophiles.”Why Do Old Books Smell? Produced by Abe’s Books, and drawing on research from chemists at University College, London, this video looks at the science behind the aroma of used books…When you’re done watching the video, you might want to spend time with a second clip that deals with another part of the lifecycle of the book — the birth of a book. Shot by Glen Milner at Smith-Settle Printers in Leeds, England, this short film lets you watch firsthand a book — Suzanne St Albans’ Mango and Mimosa – being made with old school printing methods. Enjoy.”
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? “In the world of digital documents, you might ask do we really need brick and mortar museums? Not quite the same as man and machine, but it is a question of digital versus “the real thing” and a topic that must be discussed among archivists today.”
  • Whimsical Photographic Abstractions of the Joy of Reading. “As a lover of books and advocate for reading, I was instantly enthralled by photographic artist Joel Robinson’s whimsical visual abstractions of the reading experience and the joy of books that capture with equal parts imagination and reverence the familiar mesmerism of getting lost in a great book, the pleasure of curiosity tickled, and the explorer’s wonder of discovering new worlds.”
  • Nostalgia As A Drug. “Nostalgia is seductive. We yearn and yearn for bygone days, when life was simpler, or more creative, or more exciting, or more…whatever. Whatever we need at the moment. Are those good old days really that much better, or is it just easier to imagine they are because we can “remember” only what we choose to?”
  • How to Open a Memoir. “I’m honored to provide a guest post by multi-published author and writing instructor Sara Mansfield Taber, whose latest memoir, Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter, has just been published by Potomac Books. I first met Sara when taking a workshop taught by her at The Writer’s Center, and I’m flattered she’s willing to share some of her wisdom here today, a post relevant to any creative writer.”
  • Fumblerules of Grammar. “Late-1979, New York Times columnist William Safire compiled a list of “Fumblerules of Grammar” — rules of writing, all of which are humorously self-contradictory — and published them in his popular column, “On Language.” Those 36 fumblerules can be seen below, along with another 18 that later featured in Safire’s book, Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup I particularly enjoyed My life story is written on my bookshelves. It reminded me once again how much the objects in our lives are touchstones to memorable stories and events. My grammarian friends will definitely want to check out Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?  It’s Slate magazine’s new television program exploring all kinds of language issues.

  • 99 Tiny Stories to Make You Think, Smile and Cry. “Sometimes the most random everyday encounters force us to stop and rethink the truths and perceptions we have ingrained in our minds.  These encounters are educationally priceless.  They spawn moments of deep thought and self-reflection that challenge the status quo and help us evolve as sensible individuals.”
  • Old Quilt Provides a Glimpse of History. “Sometimes the best genealogical finds are not in public records but in old objects — an address book, a box of surveyor’s tools, a set of military dog tags. In my case, I discovered a great deal about my family’s history buried in a box at an estate sale halfway across the country.”
  • My life story is written on my bookshelves. “After 20 years of living and reading together, we have gathered what some might call a sizable library. One problem: We don’t actually have a library to put the books in…It was time to take action…Our books show what we’ve cared about, where we’ve visited (or perhaps wished to visit) and the challenges we’ve faced. How could I give that away?”
  • In ‘Pilgrimage,’ Leibovitz Explores Portraits Without People. [PBS video]“Known for portraits of celebrities and musicians, Annie Leibovitz has given herself a new assignment: capture striking landscapes and visit the homes of iconic figures to document significant items from their past. Jeffrey Brown and Leibovitz discuss her “Pilgrimage” book and exhibition at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.”
  • Lost Malcolm X Speech Heard Again 50 Years Later. “Last semester, Brown senior Malcolm Burnley took a narrative writing course. One of the assignments was to write a fictional story based on something true — and that true event had to be found inside the university archives…Malcolm X came to speak at Brown University in Providence, R.I., on May 11, 1961. Burnley noticed that at the end of the article, there was a brief mention of another article — also from the Brown student newspaper — written by a senior named Katharine Pierce. Her article was the reason Malcolm X wanted to visit Brown.”
  • Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From? “In the first episode of Slate’s new language program Lexicon Valley, producer Mike Vuolo and On the Media co-host Bob Garfield explore the history of the terminal preposition rule, and whether there are good reasons to follow it. Lexicon Valley is a new audio program created by Mike Vuolo. In the coming weeks we’ll explore a broad array of issues surrounding language. They’ll range from linguistic pet peeves, syntax, and etymology to sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, and the death of languages.”
  • Who Owns Your Personal History? “In an era when nearly everything we do is recorded, we have less control over what we choose to remember, and perhaps more crucially, what to forget.”

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