The Written Nerd

Just a reminder for the book nerds of New York: in celebration of World Book Day or Book & Lovers Day, today from 5 to 8 is the impromptu World Book Party is happening at the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. I'll be working at the bookstore, but if you're free, show up with a book to swap, and make a friend. Speaking of book nerds coming together, I'm launching a new little experiment in social networking. I've now joined three book sites: Shelfari , Goodreads , and LibraryThing . If you want to befriend me, you can find me as "booknerdnyc" on all three sites. I've loaded up just the books I've read this year (Shelfari has more, as I've been a member there longer). I'm weighing my impressions of all three sites for a future writeup here. And it's also good practice for me to start keeping better track of what I've read. I plan to seriously start doing some book reviewing around here pretty soon. And I'd also li...

Good ol' Max Magee at the Millions has a bit about American reading habits surveys ; a new one from polling firm Harris has found that ninety percent of Americans read at least one book last year, and over a third of those polled read 10 books or more . I'd be tempted to crow triumphantly about these numbers, but at this point it seems every survey on reading habits comes to totally different conclusions, so what do they really mean? As Max asks, "Can anything be made of these surveys other than that they are a little silly?" Still it means the nay-sayers are no more right than anybody else... (Note to self: beware of developing a catchphrase for those you disagree with. Snarks and nay-sayers may come to have the same knee-jerk resonance as feminazis or the liberal media. As I tend to mistrust anyone who uses the phrase "those people", I may need to acknowledge that there are many of diverse opinions who do not always share my own knee-jerk optimism, an...