1 April The lighter side of history: the 1960's: The Book-Writing Machine: What Was the First Novel Written on a Word Processor? 2 April see worldswidweb.com 3 April 3 April The Guardian's Books You Can't Live Without: The Top 100 is only available online in a bare-bones form linked-to here. Those who dislike Dante's Divine Comedy or Cervantes's Don Quixote might want to take note, as neither of those works make this list. Many popular favorites do, however—not even the most inspired of choices. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien Jane Eyre - Charlotte BrontÎ Harry Potter series - J K Rowling To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee The Bible Wuthering Heights - Emily BrontÎ Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman Great Expectations - Charles Dickens Little Women - Louisa M Alcott Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy Catch-22 - Joseph Heller Complete Works of William Shakespeare Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier The Hobbit - J R R Tolkien Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger Middlemarch - George Eliot Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald Bleak House - Charles Dickens War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy David Copperfield - Charles Dickens Chronicles of Narnia - C S Lewis Emma - Jane Austen Persuasion - Jane Austen The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C S Lewis The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de BerniËres Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden Winnie the Pooh - A A Milne Animal Farm - George Orwell The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel GarcÌa M·rquez A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins Anne of Green Gables - L M Montgomery Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood Lord of the Flies - William Golding Atonement - Ian McEwan Life of Pi - Yann Martel Dune - Frank Herbert Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens Brave New World - Aldous Huxley The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel GarcÌa M·rquez Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov The Secret History - Donna Tartt The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas On the Road - Jack Kerouac Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie= Moby-Dick - Herman Melville Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens Dracula - Bram Stoker The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson Ulysses - James Joyce The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome Germinal - …mile Zola Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray Possession - A S Byatt A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell The Color Purple - Alice Walker The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry Charlotte's Web - E B White The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-ExupÈry The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks Watership Down - Richard Adams A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute [1950] The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas Hamlet - William Shakespeare Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl Les MisÈrables - Victor Hugo 4 April 4 April The "great books" list created by the Toronto daily, the Globe and Mail, is better than the Guardian's. Unfortunately it is no longer online, though a discussion about the list is (Martin Levin on the Greatest Books Series). Levin edited the list in collaboration with Charlotte Gray, AndrÈ Alexis, A L Kennedy, and Alberto Manguel. Besides Manguel, quite a few acclaimed writers contributed articles, including Mary Beard, Colm TÛibÌn, and Jane Smiley. Access to an academic database provided me with .pdf copies of most of the articles, the two that were mysteriously missing from what's supposed to be a complete archive thankfully turning up at the Internet Archive, but only after I had found broken links to the old pages. As this project took the form of a series of short articles, they are not ranked. Note that the list as shown here has 53 entries (not 50) because the Odyssey and the Iliad were discussed together, in a single article, as were the three "Theban plays." The two entries that seem to have incomplete titles came from the Internet Archive. I can only surmise that the online versions of the articles didn't include the complete titles as seen here for the other 48 items. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain: In This First Entry of Our New Series, Mark Levin Goes Rafting Down the Mississippi With Huck and Jim In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust: AndrÈ Alexis Remembers Things Past On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: Michael Ruse Takes a Short Trip Through Our Long Evolution The Divine Comedy, by Dante: It May Begin in Hell, Alberto Manguel Says, but Dante's Masterpiece Is Finally Entirely Heavenly Strictly Platonic: The Republic, by Plato: Simon Blackburn Makes the Case Knightly Virtue: Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes: Edith Grossman Makes the Case ReJoyce: Ulysses, by James Joyce: Michael Groden Makes the Case Kapital Crimes: Francis Wheen Makes the Case Still Good for the Soul: The Confessions of St. Augustine: Randy Boyagoda Makes the Case Prince Among Men: The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli: Michael Ignatieff Makes the Case Gatsby? It Really Is Great: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: William Kowalski Makes the Case Beneath the Surface: Middlemarch, by George Eliot: Keith Oatley Makes the Case Health, Wealth and Wisdom: The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith: James Buchan Makes the Case Perchance to Dream...: The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud: Jeffrey Moussaieff Makes the Case Swift's Satyricon: Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift: Victoria Glendinning Makes the Case Macondo Magic: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia M·arquez: Ilan Stavans Makes the Cazes Madness and Insight: King Lear, by William Shakespeare: A. L. Kennedy Makes the Case Can and Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant: Susan Neiman Makes the Case We're Persuaded: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen: Joan Thomas Makes the Case Homer, Sweet Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey by 'Homer': Mary Beard Makes the Case Grand and Inquisitive: The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Joseph Frank Makes the Case Time Never Wasted: T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems,1909-1962: Fraser Sutherland Makes the Case Unsweet and Lo: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov: Laura Penny Makes the Case Words Beyond Worth: The Koran: Mona Siddiqui Makes the Case In Darkest Dickens: Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens: John Sutherland Makes the Case The Subject Is Itself: Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges: Dennis Duffy Makes the Case History's Father: The Histories, by Herodotus: Tom Holland Makes the Case Tale of a Whale Is a Whale of a Tale: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville: Adam Sol Makes the Case Madame Bovary, C'Est Tout le Monde: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: Mark Frutkin Makes the Case A Modernist for the Ages: The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka: Sam Solecki Makes the Case A (Very) Good Book: The King James Bible: Donald Harman Akenson Makes the Case. Principia Mathematica [Dan Falk] The Collected Poems of W B Yeats [Rex Murphy] And the World Goes 'Round: Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, by Galileo Galilei: Dava Sobel Makes the Case When Thebans Fall Out: The Theban Trilogy by Sophocles [Peter Stothard] India's Epic: The Mahabharata, Attributed to Vyasa: Wendy Doniger Makes the Case Go Read Alice, I Think She'll Know: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll: Ian Stewart Makes the Case On Human (De)nature: The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Clifford Orwin Makes the Case What Did He Know? Plenty: Essays, by Michel de Montaigne: Philippe Desan Makes the Case A Devil of a Book: Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: James M. Skidmore Makes the Case Outspoken Silence: Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson: Tim Flannery Makes the Case A Man for All Reasons: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: Chris Scott Makes the Case The Story-Master: Stories of Anton Chekhov: Claire Berlinski Makes the Case Epic of Epics: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy: Donna Tussing Orwin Makes the Case Feminism's First Manifesto: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft: Charlotte Gray Makes the Case Sexy, Salty, Sometimes Sad: The Decameron: Konrad Eisenbichler Makes the Case Great Play Here: No Waiting: Waiting for Godot,by Samuel Beckett: Keith Garebian Makes the Case A Japanese Dickens: The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki: Jane Smiley Makes the Case Most Enlightening: L'EncyclopÈdie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert: AndrÈ Alexis Makes the Case A Lady for All Seasons: The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James: Colm TÛibÌn Makes the Case 5 April Harvard Book Store's list of the staff's "favorite books of all time" is one of the few ranked "great books" list, created much like album lists in popular music: each participant submitted a list in order of preference, then all of the books listed were transferred to a single list, their position determined by how highly they ranked in the individual lists. Presumably, a first-place finish gave a book a certain number of points, a second-place finish a slightly-smaller number, and so on; the description does not go into such detail. Nor is there a list of which staff members participated. Similar collective ranked lists were put together by Raymond Queneau, in 1950's France, and more recently by the Norwegian Book Club and by J Peder Zane. All of them are part of this project. Since this list appears to be "born online" (like Kevin Hill's Great Books List and the anonymous World Canonical Texts site), I'm just providing a link to its home page. Harvard Book Store Top 100 Books 6 April Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers, 23rd (and, apparently, final) edition [1990], features a list of 101 Significant Books, A Short List of Books to Read on Vacation, A Short List of Books to Read Before Entering College, and A Short List of Books to Read After Retirement. We're only interested here in the first list, and not just because I'm young enough to remember how my 18-years-old self would've reacted to being given the second list. These Good Reading books seem surprisingly rare. For example, here in Georgia three public libraries have copies of the 23rd edition, three others have copies of the 22nd [1985], and the University of Georgia has no copies of any edition. For the purposes of this project, the final version of the Significant Books list is used. According to the list introductions found in both the 22nd and 23rd editions, the list of Significant Books was included in the first edition of Good Reading, in 1934, and has been revised "several times." The list is a good one, though it's perhaps the (best) worst example of the listmakers not bothering to list actual books in a list of books and, furthermore, having non-book entries that are incredibly vague (yes, Robert Frost did write poems, thanks). The only book included in the 22nd edition not found in the 23rd edition's list below is Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Zola, Beauvoir, Borges, M·rquez, and Woolf were added in the 23rd. [In 2014, I found a copy of the 21st edition, from which we learn of the items added to the 22nd, as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Spinoza's Ethics, Dickinson, Nietzsche's Will to Power, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Ellison's Invisible Man, Proust, and Yeats are not found in the earlier book. However, the items that appear in the 21st but not the 22nd are more numerous: Aristotle - Politics; Herodotus - History; Marcus Aurelius - Meditations; Cellini - Autobiography; Franklin - Autobiography; Pepys - Diary; Butler - The Way of All Flesh; Maupassant - Short Stories; Wordsworth; Huxley - Brave New World; Lewis - Arrowsmith; Sandburg - Lincoln; Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath; and Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class. A couple authors's selections were changed: Dickens's David Copperfield replaced Grand Expectations; while Lawrence's Women in Love replaced Sons and Lovers] Aeschylus, The Oresteia Aesop, Fables Aristophanes, Comedies Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics The Bible Confucius, The Analects Euripides, Dramas Homer, Iliad Homer, Odyssey Lao-Tzu, The Way and Its Power Lucretius, On the Nature of Things Plato, Republic Plato, Symposium Plutarch, Parallel Lives Sophocles, The Theban Plays Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War Vergil, Aeneid The Arabian Nights Bacon, Essays Boccaccio, Il Decameron Cervantes, Don Quixote Chaucer, Canterbury Tales Dante, Divine Comedy Machiavelli, The Prince Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur Muhammad, Koran Montaigne, Essays More, Utopia Omar Khayy·m, The Rub·iy·t Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel Shakespeare, Complete Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress Burns, Poems Defoe, Robinson Crusoe Descartes, Discourse on Method Donne, Poems Fielding, Tom Jones Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Hamilton et al., Federalist Papers Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding Malthus, Principle of Population Milton, Paradise Lost MoliËre, Comedies Paine, The Rights of Man Rousseau, The Social Contract Smith, The Wealth of Nations Spinoza, Ethics Sterne, Tristram Shandy Swift, Gulliver's Travels Voltaire, Candide Austen, Pride and Prejudice Balzac, EugÈnie Grandet Browning (Robert), Poems Byron, Poems Chekhov, Plays Darwin, The Origin of Species Dickens, David Copperfield Dickinson, Poems Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov Eliot, Middlemarch Emerson, Essays Flaubert, Madame Bovary Goethe, Faust Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter Hugo, Les MisËrables Ibsen, Dramas Keats, Poems Marx, Capital Melville, Moby Dick Nietzsche, The Will to Power Poe, Short Stories Shelley, Poems Stendhal, The Red and the Black Thackeray, Vanity Fair Thoreau, Walden Tolstoi, War and Peace Twain, Huckleberry Finn Whitman, Leaves of Grass Wordsworth, Poems Zola, Germinal Beauvoir, The Second Sex Borges, Labyrinths Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity Eliot, Poems and Plays Ellison, Invisible Man Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury Frazer, The New Golden Bough Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis Frost, Poems GarcÌa M·rquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises James, The Ambassadors Joyce, Ulysses Lawrence, Women in Love Mann, The Magic Mountain O'Neill, Plays Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Shaw, Plays Woolf, To the Lighthouse Yeats, Poems 7 April I've noted previously what I call the "pre-death" lists of music albums that, given their length, have been presented as books: Tom Moon's 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die [2008] and 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die [2005], edited by Robert Dimery and featuring the contributions of 91 critics. Dimery's introduction to that book does not indicate at all how the list was determined. And, as noted here previously, it's marred by a few glaring problems, most of all a British bias that allows a host of mediocre albums into the list (The La's, The Auteurs - New Wave, Elastica, The Charlatans - Tellin' Stories, Ash - 1977--you get the picture) and a tendency to include commercially-successful artists that have already been forgotten by their biggest fans. The other books in the "die" series I've read or skimmed (Books and Movies) are superior. They've also done "Songs" and "Classical Recordings" books, the latter compensating partially for implicit genre restrictions at work with the "Albums" book. Another book-as-album-list, Zagat's Music Guide: 1,000 Top Albums of All Time [2003], thankfully provides information on its compiling process. Sadly, we might prefer they hadn't. Drawing upon the contributions of "over 10,600 participants," the coordinator of this project, Pat Blashill, calculated numerical scores on a scale of 0 to 30 in the four following areas: Overall, Songwriting, Musicianship, and Production. Fair enough for a general review system. But this is a one-off gig for Zagat. Most of the albums discussed in the book of course rank highly on that 30-point scale. Without lower-ranked albums to compare high-scoring albums to, these numbers are rendered largely useless. Presumably the participants gave scores, followed by Blashill averaging those scores; but, again, we don't know for sure. The survey provides a list of "most popular albums" without telling us how that popularity was determined. The no. 1 in that list is Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, but the no. 1 in the Overall category is Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. Indeed, it's the only album to receive a 30 score in Overall, whereas Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks receives a 30 in Songwriting, both Kind of Blue and The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Electric Ladyland receive a 30 in Musicianship, and three albums get a 29 in Production: Peter Gabriel's Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and The Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The difference between the "popular" list and the Overall list suggests that more of the participants voted for the inclusion of Born to Run than Kind of Blue, but that those Born to Run supporters gave the album scores not as high as those given to Kind of Blue by those who voted to include that album. But that's just a guess. 8 April see worldswideweb.com 9 April see worldswideweb.com 10 April see worldswideweb.com 11 April see worldswideweb.com 12 April In 2007-2009, especially throughout 2008, Bradford Cox made available on the Deerhunter blog an extraordinary amount of music relative to proper Deerhunter and Atlas Sound releases. This music, free of charge, will eventually play a pivotal role in historical accounts of the transition in music playback from discs to online streaming, alongside the phenomenon of "sharity" blogging, Radiohead's controversial "name your own price" scheme for their album In Rainbows, and the resurgence of the music video via You Tube. This bulk of material was the perfect response to what David Lowery would later call the "free culture": give those downloading your music illicitly even more free music to listen to, thus pronounce your independence from those who claim to like an art for which they can't be bothered to spend a few dollars. A show of strength draws suckers in. About the music, though.... In short, 2008 was Bradford Cox's year. The first Atlas Sound album intrigued those of us who found Cryptogams to be uneven and unconvincing. Microcastle/ Weird Era Continued followed later that year and defined the Deerhunter sound heard since: Cox's voice no longer hidden and distorted, but rather presented clearly, either unadorned or enlarged via reverb, double-tracking, etc.; sticking to the Rock-band set-up, though taking breaks for slower, no-drums numbers; and resorting excessively to common pop-song structures. But that Atlas Sound album, Let the Blind Lead Those Who See but Cannot Feel, presented a bolder vision: home recording for the new millennium, updating the older "low fi" model of Sebadoh and Beck. The songs made available on the blog, mostly Atlas Sound, also took this approach, eluding the divide between "noise" and songs that had hampered Cryptograms. Given the many comparisons made by critics and listeners to the Shoegazer artists of the late 1980's-early '90's, we could also say that this early era of Atlas Sound presented a confluence of the Shoegazer sound with the home-recording aesthetic. The presentation of previously-unreleased music on the Deerhunter blog began on July 20, 2007 with a Deerhunter demo, 'Unrequited', followed the next day by a Lockett Pundt track 'These Years...', but only excerpts of both, due to difficulties with file-sharing sites (another foreshadowing of music-industry controversies to come); the full version of the former was posted on 1 August with 'Solar Ropes', the latter on 3 August. The Atlas Sound material began on July 29 and continued as such (for today's post, we go through 2007): 29 July: 'White Tea; 'Stoned' 1 August: 'Porto'; 'Monochromatic'; 'Solar Ropes' 4 August: The Brian Foote E P (consisting of 'Where I Come Home From', 'Tame All the Lions (Valet Remixed by Atlas Sound)', 'How Do I Look?', and 'Child Support') 5 August: 'Twilight at Carbon Lake' (an Atlas Sound track but noted to be a demo for what would become 'Microcastle/ Weird Era Continued') 9 August: 'So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)' [Everly Brothers cover]; 'Beginning to See the Light' [Velvet Underground cover] 13 August: 'Pure UnEvil' [Liars cover]; 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' [Neil Young cover] 21 August: 'Line Drawing' (1998 recording posted the same day as an excerpt from an Atlas Sound concert at Eyedrum in 2005, apparently broadcast on W R E K, the Georgia Institute of Technology radio station)
5 September: Three Elegies in Sound: 'Take to the Wind (For Samuel Beckett)'; 'Always Tired (For Betty Harris)'; 'Puppy in the Window (For Bo Diddley)' 21 September: 'Oliver'
14 October: 'Sunday Night in Chicago' 15 October: 'Difference BT' (two versions); 'Borrowed Nostalgia' 17 October: 'Unicorn Rainbow Odyssey' [Mark Sultan cover] (apparently a new version of an older track of unknown provenance); 'Remembered By'; 'Words From the Wall'; 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Version 2)'--"removed a lot of the reverb and atmospherics" 24 October: 'From a Youth Hostel in Prague'; 'Unrequited II' 26 October: Altitude Sickness (an E P consisting of three covers of Doo Wop songs: 'Come Softly' [the Fleetwoods]; 'You're So Fine' [the Falcons]; and 'You Belong to Me' [the Duprees])
12 November: 'A B C Glasgow' 27 November: 'Cobwebs' 29 November: 'When They Talk' 30 November: 'Malmö'
2 December: 'Walks Backward' (1997 recording) 3 December: 'Words From the Wall (Version II); 'Words From the Wall (Electric)'; 'Basement Memory' (made from samples of Talking Heads' 'This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)'); 'I'll Be Your Mirror' [Velvet Underground cover] 12 December: Holiday E P # 1 (consisting of 'Children's Choir Rehearsal', 'Requiem for All the Lonely Teenagers With Passed Out Moms', and '10th Grade Concept Map') 15 December: Weekend E P ('Friday Night We Took Acid and Laid on Matt's Bedroom Floor Staring at His Ceiling Fan While His Parents Watched T.V. Downstairs', 'Saturday Night We Went Swimming and There Was a Light in the Water', and 'Sunday Evening We Relaxed in Our Rooms and Called Each Other on the Phone'--note that this E P, more than 28 minutes long, qualifies to be an album) 17 December: 'Christian Names' 18 December: 'Ivy Belk' 30 December: 'Camcorder'; 'Disposable Camera' (first 'Virtual 7 Inch')
A second Lockett Pundt track, 'Whiteout', was posted on 1 August 2007; a track credited to Bradford and Lockett, 'Quad', was posted on 8 August 2007; a second Cox/ Pundt track, 'Urbana Library of Electronic Music', was posted on 6 October 2007. Lockett Pundt's cover of the Roy Orbison song 'Bayou Blue' was posted on 10 August 2007, and his cover of the Amps's 'Bragging Party' was posted on 15 August 2007. On 15 October 2007, Pundt began using the moniker Lotus Plaza for a track, 'Sunday Night in Atlanta', followed on 12 November by 'Hamburg' and on 4 December by 'What Grows?'. Three Microcastle demos were posted on 15 September 2007, not credited to Atlas Sound, so presumably like 'Unrequited' they count as Deerhunter tracks: 'Calvary Scars', 'Green Jacket', and 'Activa'. On 2 November 1997 the Atlas Sound remix of an Arthur Russell track was posted:  'Answers Me (Arthur Russell Remix)'.  13 April The Media Preservation Initiative at Indiana University Bloomington--the kind of endeavor those interested in the history of music, cinema, television, radio, and photography should learn about. If it's broke, fix it. 14 April The Atlas Sound tracks posted on the Deerhunter blog in 2008 and 2009, by the end of which Bradford Cox was no longer using the site to present new music regularly. The online-only Atlas Sound oeuvre reached its peak early in 2008, especially with 'Children's Hospital'. Many of the links to the tracks are now broken, but I assume you can find them via Soul Seek or similar programs. 1 January: 'New Years Day' 12 January: 'Brother (You Don't Have to Lay Down Your Guns' [recorded 1983!]; 'Children's Hospital (Screaming in the Face of Death #2)'--not sure what Screaming in the Face of Death #1 is 14 January: 'Lost and Found (For A O)' 18 January: Two Covers: 'Oh It's Such a Shame' [Jay Reatard cover]; 'Unchained Melody' [Righteous Brothers cover] 21 January: 'Without Headlights'; 'Middle School Instrumental' (Virtual 7" No. 2) 22 January: Spring Hall Convert 4-Track Demos: 'Spring Hall Sketch (October 1998)'; 'Oh Drama (Spring Hall Outro 1999)' 23 January: Healing Music: 'Dog Named Apollo' 5 February: Orange Ohms Glow E P ('Orange Ohms Glow'; 'Activation'; 'Hunting Quail'; 'Coriander'; 'Humidity'; 'Valley of the Saroos' [Joe Meek cover]) 10 February: 'Cloves' 12 February: Recent Bedroom Demos ('Recent Bedroom (Jan. 2007 Version)'; 'Recent Bedroom First Sketch 2004'; 'Recent Bedroom Jul. 2006') 29 February: Winter Vacation: 'Winter Vacation (First Version)'; 'Winter Vacation (Second Version)'; 'Winter Vacation (Remix)' 27 March: 'Sea Burial' 14 April: 'April 13' 23 April: 'Bored Dub'; 'No Longer' (Virtual 7" No. 3) 24 April: Atlas Sound Covers Two Songs for My Dad E P: 'I'm So Lonesome (I Could Cry)'; 'Blue Moon 27 April: 'Tired Congregation'; 'The Time I Spent With Nico (Quiet)'; 'The Time I Spent With Nico (Loud)' 30 April: 'Cold and Golden' 5 May: Things I'll Miss E P: ('My Car'; 'My Room'; 'My Bed'; 'Recording Acoustic Demos'; 'Marietta') 23 May: 'Galaxy Cruisers (For A C)' 11 June: 'A Lullaby From the Netherlands' 12 June: 'Balcony'; 'Canal' (Amsterdam MIDI Virtual 7") 16 August: 'Holiday'; 'S S C' (Virtual 7" No. 4); Only Guitars Now: Guitar One; Guitar Two; Guitar Three 7 October: Coffin Trick 9 October: 'Maybe Logic'; 'Airedales' (Virtual 7") 23 October: Two Halloween Dances: 'Danse Infernale'; 'Danse Macabre 2009: 19 March: 'Solo, or The Square'; 'Memorial Corridor' (Virtual 7" No. 6) 22 March: 'Level 2' 21 April: 'Springtime Instrumental'; 'Time Warp' (Virtual 7" No. 7) 12 August: 'Walk a Thin Line' [Fleetwood Mac cover] 11 November: 'Doctor'; 'The Screens' (Virtual 7" No.7)--actually No. 8 10 Short Tape Experiments, an Atlas Sound/ Broadcast collaboration, was posted May 23 2008. On January 23 2008, the Deerhunter collection of "demos and home recordings," Fluorescent Grey Demos and Out-Takes, was posted; followed on January 25 by Cryptograms Mixtape. On April 8, the Deerhunter track 'Unused Vocal Take From Microcastle Sessions' was posted. A video of 'Winter Never Stops (Acoustic)', a live performance by Deerhunter, was posted May 3. Another video, and another live track, 'Improv Session June 2 08', a collaboration between Deerhunter and Grrrnd Zero, was posted June 3. A Deerhunter track, given the confusing title 'Game of Diamonds (Atlas Sound Demo)' was posted July 10. On January 28 2008, 'Dog Years', the first Ghetto Cross [Cole Alexander of the Black Lips and Cox] is posted. On February 29 2008, the Lotus Plaza track 'Dot Gain' was posted, and a Lotus Plaza performance at Eyedrum on 22 September 2009 was posted the next day; another live performance at Eyedrum, on 11 December 2009, was similarly posted the next day. 15 April Not included in the list of music e-zines found in the 7 January post because of its particular focus, nonetheless the Second Disc will definitely be of interest to anyone crazy enough to read this blog. 16 April 16 April The Telegraph's list is closer to the Globe and Mail's in its decent coverage of Western literature, but also compares to the Guardian's in its inclusion of modern popular favorites. Some of those recent best sellers do not belong on a "great books" lists. Indeed, this list shows clearly the unfortunate side of publications getting into the business of collectively constructing lists of books: as with lists of music albums, an excess of recent entries distract from "all-time" coverage purportedly offered by the lists. The Telegraph's 110 entries include several series, thus the expanded total number of books. Arranged into categories as seen here, the introduction and the annotations for each entry are available at the link below. At this point in the project, two difficulties in numbering the items bear some consideration. First, if a literary work deemed to be a novella (or, more rarely, a novelette)--that is, it has been published as a book itself--was originally published in a periodical, it is numbered. Such is the case with Kafka's Metamorphosis. The same rule applies if it was originally published as part of a short-story collection, such as John Updike's Rabbit Remembered. However, that work has not been published as a monograph, so it is not numbered, as seen below. Of course, a short-story collection can be numbered if it consists entirely, or almost entirely, of previously-unpublished stories; either way, this list only includes Rabbit Remembered, not the collection, Licks of Love, in which it was published. Second, most books in a series of novels are numbered separately; the exceptions so far have been The Lord of the Rings, which apparently was published as three works for financial reasons. The others are His Dark Materials and The Book of the New Sun; the latter usually is referred to as a tetralogy of novels, which have been published as a single work, and also are said to form a series with another novel and an essay collection, while the former is often discussed as a single work. The Chronicles of Narnia, on the other hand, though several of the novels were written simultaneously, and it is often sold as a boxed set, is more often discussed as a series of works; more important for this project, the first novel of the series (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) is often included in "great books" lists as a distinct work--or, as we've seen in one peculiar case, alongside the series as a whole. CLASSICS The Iliad and The Odyssey Homer The Barchester Chronicles Anthony Trollope Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift Jane Eyre Charlotte Bront War and Peace Tolstoy David Copperfield Charles Dickens Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert Middlemarch George Eliot POETRY Sonnets Shakespeare Divine Comedy Dante Canterbury Tales Chaucer The Prelude William Wordsworth Odes John Keats The Waste Land T S Eliot Paradise Lost John Milton Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake Collected Poems W B Yeats Collected Poems Ted Hughes LITERARY FICTION The Portrait of a Lady Henry James ¿ la Recherche du Temps Perd Proust Ulysses James Joyce For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway Sword of Honour trilogy Evelyn Waugh The Ballad of Peckham RyeMuriel Spark Rabbit series John Updike One Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel GarcÌa M·rquez Beloved Toni Morrison The Human Stain Philip Roth ROMANTIC FICTION Rebecca Daphne du Maurier Le Morte d'Arthur Thomas Malory Les Liaisons Dangereuses Choderlos de Laclos I, Claudius Robert Graves Alexander Trilogy Mary Renault Master and Commander Patrick O'Brian Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell Dr Zhivago Boris Pasternak Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy The Plantagenet Saga Jean Plaidy CHILDREN'S BOOKS Swallows and Amazons Arthur Ransome The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C S Lewis The Lord of the Rings J R R Tolkien His Dark Materials Philip Pullman Babar Jean de Brunhoff The Railway Children E Nesbit Winnie-the-Pooh A A Milne Harry Potter J K Rowling The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson SCI-FI Frankenstein Mary Shelley Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne The Time Machine H.G. Wells Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1984 George Orwell The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham Foundation Isaac Asimov 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick Neuromancer William Gibson CRIME The Talented Mr. Ripley Patricia Highsmith The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett The Complete Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le CarrÈ Red Dragon Thomas Harris Murder on the Orient Express Agatha Christie The Murders in the Rue Morgue Edgar Allan Poe The Woman in White Wilkie Collins Killshot Elmore Leonard BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD Das Kapital Karl Marx The Rights of Man Thomas Paine The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville On War Carl von Clausewitz The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli Leviathan Thomas Hobbes On the Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin L'EncyclopÈdie Diderot, et al BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [1974] Robert M. Pirsig Jonathan Livingston Seagull Richard Bach The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf How to Cook Delia Smith A Year in Provence Peter Mayle A Child Called 'It' Dave Pelzer Eats, Shoots and Leaves Lynne Truss Schott's Original Miscellany Ben Schott HISTORY The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Winston Churchill A History of the Crusades Steven Runciman The Histories Herodotus The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides Seven Pillars of Wisdom T E Lawrence The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle A People's Tragedy Orlando Figes Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution Simon Schama The Origins of the Second World War A J P Taylor LIVES Confessions St. Augustine Lives of the Caesars Suetonius Lives of the Artists Giorgio Vasari If This is a Man Primo Levi Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Siegfried Sassoon Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey A Life of Charlotte BrontÎ Elizabeth Gaskell Good-Bye to All That Robert Graves The Life of Dr Johnson Boswell Diaries Alan Clark 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library 17 April The post of 16 February noted the site, The Greatest Books, which includes among its lists the winners of various literature awards, such as the Costa Award or the National Book Award. While, as argued there, a list of the best book for each year of a certain period of time hardly counts as a list of the "greatest books" of that period (how do we not know that, say, a poll of individuals who regularly decide such awards would result in the "greatest" books mostly being from a few years, or even one year?) another set of similar lists that would provide deeper historical perspective is that of defunct awards. Wikipedia has a great page for one of these, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Indeed, this award's winners, if not limited to children's literature, would constitute a "great books" list because the awards granted a given year were not limited to books published that year. Though gone for more than three decades now, this award justifiably still possesses a definite allure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll_Shelf_Award 18 April At this point we only know the numbering of the first-fourth of Neil Young's Official Release Series (the name given reissues of previously-released items reissue as part of his Archives, as compared to, so far, the Performance Series). Given the complexity of his discography, I couldn't help but devise my own numbering of his official releases to date with those four as a base, plus some wishful thinking on my part: namely, that the soundtrack for Journey Through the Past, despite not being reissued with the first-fourth albums, will finally get a digital release. The film was included in the first Archives boxed set. However, it was not released individually, which already suggests my notion of including the films in the Official Release tally is doomed to failure. Neil, there's still time to rectify this! Neil Young Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere After the Gold Rush Harvest* Journey Through the Past: Original Soundtrack Recordings Journey Through the Past [film] Time Fades Away On the Beach Tonight's the Night* Zuma American Stars n' Bars Comes a Time Rust Never Sleeps [album] Live Rust Rust Never Sleeps [film] Hawks and Doves Re-ac-tor Human Highway Live in Berlin Trans Solo Trans Everbody's Rockin' Old Ways Landing on Water Life This Note's for You Eldorado Freedom* Freedom: A Live Acoustic Concert film Ragged Glory Arc-Weld [album] Weld [film] Harvest Moon Unplugged [album] Unplugged [film] Sleeps With Angels The Complex Sessions Mirror Ball Dead Man Broken Arrow Year of the Horse [album] Year of the Horse [film] Silver and Gold [album] Silver and Gold [film] Road Rock, Vol. 1: Friends and Relatives Red Rocks Live Are You Passionate? Greendale [film] Greendale [album] Greendale [concert film] Greendale [documentary] Prarie Wind Heart of Gold Living With War Living With War: "In the Beginning" Chrome Dreams II Trunk Show Fork in the Road Le Noise Journeys Americana Psychedelic Pill Studio albums (or albums with only one live track--marked with an asterik): 33 Concert albums that are also major albums: 3 (Time Fades Away, Rust Never Sleeps, and Life)--though both Rust Never Sleeps and Life have two studio tracks Concert albums: 5 (Live Rust, Arc-Weld, Unplugged, Year of the Horse, Road Rock Vol. 1) Minor albums: 3 (Journey Through the Past: Original Soundtrack Recordings, Eldorado, and Living With War: "In the Beginning")--though generally referred to as an E P, Eldorado is of L P length Concert films: 14 Films: 4 (Journey Through the Past, Human Highway, Greendale, and the Greendale documentary); also Young, under his filmic pseudonym Bernard Shakey, directed C S N Y Déjà Vu, though that release of course goes under a different artist name (as does Long May You Run by the Stills-Young Band, but often included in Young discographies) 19 April Another site of "great books" lists, still online though it appears to have been defunct since 2004, is the Booklist Center. It's especially useful for those seeking lists grouped by genre. If you go to its General Lists, you'll see that it has a transcription of the 100 Significant Books from the 22nd edition of Good Reading. As noted in the 6 April post, I'm going to get copies of both of those books, and perhaps earlier editions, to ensure that all the necessary details of that list are included here. 20 April The National Great Books Curriculum Academic Community bases its resources and recommendations on the Great Books of the Western World series co-edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. Of most interest to this project is the essay, 'A Brief History of the Great Books Idea', by Tim Lacy. Similar to the W B Carnochan essay, it takes the reader farther into the Twentieth Century, especially Charles W Eliot's Harvard Classics series, Adler's work, and the pioneering "great books" curricula at Columbia, St. John's, and the University of Chicago. 21 April The Learning Channel aired a program, Great Books, intermittently in the years, 1993-2002. More recently, that channel has turned its attention to the illiterate. But seriously.... I'm entirely indebted to the author, or authors, of the Wikipedia page for this information, though the page for this series at the Internet Movie Database, plus information about video-cassette and D V D versions of the programs available for sale, confirm that the Wikipedia list is complete. 22 April Any Decent Music?--its title really needing that question mark in order not to seem completely depressing--is another "meta" site with a slight explanation of how it determines the numerical scores it gives. Here's the answer to their self-asked question ("What's that A D M rating all about?") on the About page: "It's not a straight average, i e the total ratings divided by the number of reviews. We have a formula that is weighted to take into account the number of reviews an album receives, which gives an advantage to albums receiving more reviews. So an album which receives five 8/10 reviews will have a lower rating than an album with 25 8/10 reviews, which seems right to us. And an album would need more than 30 8/10 reviews to get a straight ADM rating of 8.0 (although it could achieve that rating with a range of 10/10, 9/10, 8/10, 7/10 etc reviews). All clear? Good." Yes, it's clearer than Album of the Year and Best Ever Albums. Though I wonder how they could justify not giving an album a score of 8.0 if it has received 20 such reviews. Nevermind. Unfortunately, they repeat this newly-common Web-only mistake of deciding an exact numerical score (in increments of 1/10--say, a 8.0 or 7.5--pace Pitchfork, whose writers we can only hope originally took that approach as a sly self-parody, but sadly they were probably extremely serious) for reviews that did not give a numerical score. Since I'm severely rebuking the sites that engage in this practice, let's consider just how ridiculous it is. A reviewer at, say, the B B C goes to the trouble of writing a review, a few paragraphs in length: nothing special, given that he probably got the album free of charge. Nonetheless, it suggests engagement with the music, and the challenge of writing about music. Then, another non-reviewer reads the review, decides that it suggests a numerical score 6.0 or 5.8 out of 10. What inspires this non-reviewer other than anti-intellectual, money-grubbing (or perhaps just attention-seeking) arrogance? At least in the past "meta" reviewers of reviews, in order to provide a quick take for readers on the go, would say that a certain reviewer gave a positive or negative assessment. That approach is still not worthy of the original review. It works best if the reviewer uses an even-numbered system (a score out of four, as with Roger Ebert's four-star system, giving him an easy way to say which movies got a "thumb up" (3 or 4 stars) or "thumb down" (1 or 2 stars)). Either way, it's at least not offensive or dumb. Perhaps the creators of these sites would say in their defense that most of the sites they're compiling do give numerical scores, especially those online; some sites even imitate Pitchfork's tenths nonsense. Perhaps someday an academic will study this phenomenon: for example, have newspapers and magazines switched to giving numerical scores in response to the proliferation of e zines doing so? Will documentation surface from these companies' archival records showing that editors chose to give numerical scores based on the felt need to compete with Pitchfork and others? Ultimately, Album of the Year, Any Decent Music?, and Best Ever Albums pale in comparison to the archival behemoth Acclaimed Music, whose author, Henrik Franzon, is incredibly thorough. He's been at it much longer, is not trying to make cheap money like the other sites, and acknowledges the importance of another site, Rocklist, which as I've noted before at this blog is an excellent source of lists from a goodly variety of publications. 23 April Susan Wise Bauer and Jesse Wise, authors of The Well-Trained Mind, a guide to "classical education" for children, have made a "great books" list for high-school students, which like the lists for college-level programs is divided into the customary four years. Though we're not including syllabi lists in our project, they're worthy of review, especially to learn of works not otherwise found in the all-time lists. Great Books: A Defense and the (Inevitable) List 24 April The Great Books List [2007] and World Canonical Texts [2011] are two online-only lists of great books. Both of these lists suggest that the easy self-publishing made possible by internet technology is no threat to the quality of publishing or education. The latter list is the only "great books" list to be truly non-Western; if any bias is evident, it is toward Classical Chinese and Muslim authors. It also uses the word, canonical, in a relatively-strict sense of the word, with a strong emphasis on religious and philosophical texts. It is the fourth-longest list to used in this project, after Clifton Fadiman's, Philip Ward's, and Harold Bloom's. The former is closer to the lists we've seen so far; being fairly extensive, it offers plenty of items not found on the other lists. I've been working on the transcription of the Canonical list for some time now. The other I just recently came across. 25 April Another site of user-generated lists, Ranker, has its list of The Greatest Albums of All Time. 26 April The free previously-unreleased material made available via the Deerhunter/ Atlas Sound blog, having slowed down in the latter half of 2009, came to an end in 2010. First, a lone track.... 6 January 2010: Christmas Synths Then a significant chunk of music came in the form of the Bedroom Databank series: Vol. 1 on 22 November, Vol. 2 on 23 November, Vol. 3 on 24 November, and Vol. 4 on 25 November. The last original Atlas Sound material to be posted at the blog was a selection of versions of the song 'Artificial Snow' on 22 December: 'Artificial Snow (Notown Version)'; Artificial Snow (Bedroom Version)'; Artificial Snow (Rhythm Mix)'; 'Artificial Snow (No Drums Mix)'; and 'Artificial Snow (Campfire Metallophone Version)'. 27 April 2009: The Blog /Blob is my first blog, a year-long project like this one. On that site a list of music blogs that upload entire albums of others' music is provided, both because of the essay I wrote about "sharity," as these blogs were called, and the significant amount of music I listened to that year having been obtained through such blogs. Since 2009, though, many of those sites have disappeared, largely due to legal pressures, as discussed in the roundtable discussion at the e-zine, The Awl, The Rise and Fall of the Obscure Music Download Blog. Though I miss the ease with which I could, say, hear all 12 discs of the complete works of Bernard Parmegiani, the decline of these blogs, overall, is a positive thing. The number of sites that focused on out-of-print, obscure albums of unknown legal status has always been dwarfed by the sites run by individuals simply copying C D's and giving away the music (as with that Parmegiani set), all the while speaking of the process in euphoric tones. Notice how the title and focus of that Awl article attempts to split "obscure music" sites from the larger "sharity" realm: a premature romanticization of recent history. A few other issues to consider: first, the assumption that, if an album was released once, but is not currently in print, a listener who happens to own a copy should make it available for others to listen--as if the denial of consumer demands is a problem needing any possible solution. Of course, the "sharity" bloggers don't speak of consumers, or buyers. It's all about the music, right?--until they complain, as in that Awl discussion, about the plight of users having stored hundreds or thousands of files at sites like Megaupload only to see them disappear. How many of these bloggers and their followers stop to think about the effect of obsessive listening, compared to making music? One of the men behind Mutant Sounds, generally considered to be the most prominent of "sharity" blogs, Eric Lumbleau, had his own label and his own band (Vas Deferens Organization) but is more known now for providing low-quality digital copies of others' music via large conglomerates like Google. More recently, having considered ending the site, the Mutant Sounds crew have decided only to post music from artists who have given their permission. On that note.... Second, you'll notice that, at several of the sites listed below, the bloggers are quick to say that an artist only needs to request that their music not be shared. Does this not sound familiar? You need to opt out yourself, instead of it opting in? Much like the user needs to persistently check his account settings at Facebook, Google, etc., to ensure that a modicum of privacy is maintained? These blogs, justified as they are with grandiose claims of expanding the audience for obscure music, are following the practices of shady corporations everywhere. So what sites are still active? As with any lists of blogs, this is far from definitive. Aussie Music Blog Awesome Tapes From Africa The Boogieman Will Get Ya! Buffalo Tones The Changing Same A Closet of Curiosities Die or D.I.Y.? Dr. Schluss' Garage of Psychedelic Obscurities Down Underground Dusty Psychic Hut Experimental Etc. Freedom Records L'Invitation au Suicide Lossless World Love in Spurts Meet the Music Traveler Mesmirization My Little Bubble... 9 Grey Chairs No Longer Forgotten Music Orgy in Rhythm Prof Stoned: Rare & Deleted Vinyl Q Records Rest in Bits Roots and Traces: Spurensicherung Schwebeablaut Stuck in the Past! Systems of Romance The Thing on the Doorstep Tyme-Machine We Fucking Love Music Zero G Sound In addition to the the "go legit" approach of Mutual Sounds (apparently also taken, at least partially, by Microphones in the Trees and Ongakubaka--both of these sites aided by the sad fact that many of the contemporary artists discussed there already give away their music via Bandcamp and similar sites), several other sites have switched to being reviews sites, or the creators of "sharity" blogs have started new such sites: for example, Another Sucker on the Vine birthed In a White Room; and Killed in Cars, which might still be giving away music, I can't tell, it's a mess. Several other blogs, because of the legal crackdown, have also floundered between quitting and refashioning, making a few posts here and there over the last year. 28 April Recently having disposed of several hundred issues of the Nation while trimming my collection of magazines, I made note of articles I had neglected to read, or perhaps had read but have forgotten the gist of, and "bookmarked" them at the Nation's web site. Regardless of one's political and ideological proclivities, the 'Books and the Arts' section of the Nation is nearly always excellent in its entirety. No other North American publication compares, and beyond these borders the only publication I have experienced that surpasses the Nation consistently is the London Review of Books. Here are links to some of the articles that would are pertinent to this site's "great books" project (access to some of these might be limited to subscribers): Jonathan Blitzer, A Reign Not of This World Richard Byrne, Ranters and Corantos: Renaissance Journalism Jordan Davis, A Caller of the Dove Jochen Hellbeck, The Maximalist: On Vasily Grossman Victor La Valle, Bierced Thomas Meaney, Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss Ange Mlinko, Duncan's Divagations: On Robert Duncan and H D Corey Robin, The First Counter-Revolutionary Ruth Scurr, To Curse and Fume Emily Wilson, Violent Grace: Anne Carson's An Oresteia 29 April The Internet Sacred Texts Archive features complete transcriptions of many older (read: public domain) versions of religious and philosophical works, much like those emphasized by the World Canonical Texts site, and which we'll see more of in the major "great books" lists that will be transcribed here in the coming months. For example, the I Ching, the Mahabharata, and the Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam are available to read. 30 April Continuing the links (all of which are included at The World's Wide Web) pertinent to this site's "great books" project: Old Book Illustrations.