Houston Great Books

“The Children from Previous Relationships hung up their coats, and sat at their usual table on the public bar side of the pub as Septic Barry got the first round in from Mr Edwards, the landlord . . .”

“I have said in some of my later atheist writings that I reached the conclusion about the nonexistence of God much too quickly . . .”

Laura Archera Huxley was a writer who was best known for her memoir of her years with her husband, Aldous Huxley.

With the Harry Potter series now completed, Scholastic is moving forward with what it hopes will be its follow-up blockbuster series.

A collection of notable comics is dominated by tales of woe: lonely girls, angst-ridden boys, death, drama, dysfunction.

The Book Review picks the best works from the last year.

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 …

***primary, secondary, tertiary

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).

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.

Certainly there is no simple arithmetic that requires increasing screen based learning to be directly linked to diminishing paper based learning. Or is there an arithmetic that requires that increasing formats for oral (aural/visual) communication need to be linked to diminishing formats for text literacy (print). Or will increasing screen readership and diminishing print readership necessarily relate to measures of reading comprehension overall. More likely increasing skill sets for comprehension of conceptual works will layer and accumulate and feature increasing varieties of technological mediation. This has been the norm across media history.
Reports of withering reading skills may be based on a arithmetic which delivers the wrong answer inverted.

New Line Cinema’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass had its world premiere in London Tuesday night and has already received a four-star review from The Guardian. The author and director have been under fire over the controversial religious content in Pullman’s books as well as the celluloid interpretation, which debuts here on December 7.

57.3: Percentage of review editors who believe it is ethical to assign a review to an author acquaintance. 34.4: Percentage of review editors who believe it is acceptable for a reviewer to back out of writing a review to avoid negative criticism of a book. 34.4: Percentage of review editors who believe it is unacceptable for a reviewer to back out of writing a review to avoid negative criticism…

The ghost of Norman Mailer, who died November 10, seemed to preside over the 58th annual National Book Awards, held November 14 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City’s Times Square. Indeed, this year’s gala awards ceremony was marked by the oddly appropriate combination of an unruly picketline of strikers outside the hotel and the many heartfelt tributes by NBA award-winners to Mailer’…

This week anthropolgists, international photographers, the morbidly obese, a professional medium, Ronald Reagan’s right-hand man, a Men’s Health cover model, Kim Jong-Il and the youth of America school us on the human condition: eating, dying, fornicating, learning, partying, paying, marrying, deceiving, waging war and ogling naked people.

“This isn’t as warm and fuzzy as those earlier books,” Charles Baxter comments, somewhat ruefully, about his latest novel, The Soul Thief (Pantheon, Feb.), as we eat lunch in a trendy Minneapolis restaurant above the Walker Art Center. “But these are dark times,” he insists, as we enjoy a bird’s-eye view of the city’s gleaming skyscrapers from the restaurant’s soaring wi…