Houston Great Books

Poems from four decades by an author who was uprooted in the struggle against apartheid.

Jo Nesbo’s thriller takes us back to World War II and the German occupation of his native country. Also, new books by Sue Grafton, Charles Todd and Qiu Xiaolong.

Before radio and TV dethroned the book, social reformers warned about reading too much, not too little.

Unlike Miss Skattergoods, Detective Oakwood did not have a large glass of gin to keep him occupied as he waited in the woods.

With targets as big as Mount Everest, reality TV, disaster movies and commercialization at the top of the world, you’d think …

With targets as big as Mount Everest, reality TV, disaster movies and commercialization at the top of the world, you’d think …

I’ve seen the future of sex, and its name is Robot as in humanoids designed and programmed to satisfy our every psychological …

Laura Archera Huxley, the widow of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, who worked to preserve his legacy for nearly half a …

A book of fairy tales created, handwritten and illustrated by J.K. Rowling sold for nearly $4 million at auction Thursday.

If you read Stacy Cordery’s excellent new biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, you will gaze at Mount Rushmore and Theodore …

With targets as big as Mount Everest, reality TV, disaster movies and commercialization at the top of the world, you’d think …

A secondary text literacy would also emerge as new skill sets of on-line navigation, selection and discovery are directed back to print assimilation. Such a reflexive interaction could grow, and not diminish, the role of print. Likewise increasing levels of skillful comprehension, as required of quick, compressed and nuanced screen presentation, can also be reflexed to print.

Walter Ong suggested a that a secondary orality (augmented by television) could arise within the context of text literacy. Such layering could also be continued to visualize a secondary text literacy (augmented by personal computer screen) emerged in a context of tertiary orality (augmented by cellular telephone).

***primary, secondary, tertiary

Radiohead’s experiment with a tip jar bought in an estimated profit of some $10 million in a week—supposedly an average of $8 donated per downloa…

So when will “protected” e-books created with Adobe software be readable in, say, Mobipocket?
The Tower of e-Babel, all those …

Here’s a challenge for The New Yorker. Can its contributors write up e-libraries without droning on about how we’ll always need paper books? Is e…

My sister is a teacher who’d faint if she had to deal with such e-book joys as Digital Rights Management and the Tower of eBabel.

Dorothy…

I bought a silver-colored Sony Reader at a local Borders last month and am enjoying an E Ink screen with higher contrast than the old model’s. Bu…

Best-selling suspense novelist Barry Eisler is a CIA alum trained in a small arms, interrogation and manipulation. Just the guy to fathom power s…

Norman Mailer and e-books–what an unlikely mix of words. The image I most associate with Mailer, who died this morning at 84, is neither the fe…

With Rupert Murdoch open to a mainly ad-supported Wall Street Journal, might some HarperCollins’ books eventually carry advertising?

The …

Can a funny-looking green and white gizmo with rabbit ears foment an e-book revolution in developing countries and maybe the United States as wel…

Here is why I see promise in the $100 laptop (yes, prices will eventually fall that low) as an e-book machine regardless of current flaws:
–…

Yikes! Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader will be just as ugly as a prototype hinted–like a prop from an old sci-fi horror flick. But I appreciate the …