Getting the Hang of Twitter

I have to confess that I thought Twitter was a bit silly when I first signed up for it (I can’t remember exactly when that was, though it seems a while ago now). In the first year or so, I hardly used it at all. While I could see the point for people [...]

Literary Movies

With Fall and the new school year, also comes the Serious Movie Season (yay!!). Get out your handkerchiefs! All these look rather promising
Here’s the first trailer for Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones on Apple.com (hasn’t Peter Jackson got thin!).
The Time Traveller’s Wife opens this week. I adored this book and [...]

Extend the Discussion with Blogs

As I wrote in an earlier post, if I had to choose one Web 2.0 tool to use to enhance my classroom practice, it would be the Blog. Today, I’m giving a presentation on Blogging for some of my colleagues at the college, which has led me to put some of my thoughts into [...]

Of Romance, Ferrets and Plagiarism

Apparently the Romance readers and writers blogs were abuzz some time ago with news that one of the hottest writers in their genre had been caught with her pants down (so-to-speak) having stolen word-for-word material from a non-fiction article about ferrets. Ferrets? You may well ask. The author of the ferret article [...]

Match It for Pratchett

Science fiction and fantasy fans were shocked by Terry Pratchett’s announcement recently that he’s suffering from a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s.
Many of us have been touched personally by this disease. As we age, more and more of us will have to face it ourselves, or watch as people we love [...]

Love, let us be true to one another

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (or Philip Larkin meets Virginia Woolf)
Note: it’s really impossible to write anything with insight about this book without at least implied spoilers, so if you don’t want even a hint of the outcome, do not read any further.
I can’t decide whether this is a Postmodern novel about the death of [...]

Seen Reading

Have you ever craned your neck to see what another person is reading? Seen Reading takes that impulse a step or two further. Here is her modus operandi:
1. I see you reading.
2. I guesstimate where you are in the book.
3. I trip on over to the bookstore and make a note of [...]