This week The Rumpus looks at what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are reading. You know, besides each other’s signs.
An author makes the difficult decision to stop working on a novel and start over with a new one. How do you know when it’s time?
So there is apparently an Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which is pretty cool. The current version seems fairly limited, however. The most obvious gap at the moment is that, while there are long, detailed entries on science fiction authors, there seems to be nothing about the books themselves. Searching on “Dune” returns entries for the film, at least three separate video games, and a board game, with no apparent notion that all these were based on something or other. There is also a category for comic books, in which a search for “Spider-Man” yields no results. The site is still in beta, so hopefully it’ll grow as time goes on.
Tuesday was the 50th anniversary of the novel Catch-22. NPR talks about why the novel still resonates today.
And finally, a video called A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work. Watch as a toddler flips through a magazine, tapping the pages, trying to figure out why the “touch screen” doesn’t respond. Readers, I think I’m getting old.
Have a great weekend!
Brian D. Buckley 
My three year old nephew is much better at Angry Birds than I am and gets around on his daddy’s iPad with ease. I’d be concerned, except his parents are also making sure he gets exposed to a lot of books as well!
The times, they are a-changin’…
I don’t know if anyone should be so concerned about children being able to use such devices at such a young age, especially since there are e-books, picture books and interactive books that can be used with iPad and such.
Doesn’t that just mean children just process information differently and wouldn’t early exposure to such things make them smarter in a way?
(though I suppose also more ADD prone…)
Personally I’m less concerned about the devices themselves, and more concerned that they might replace ordinary books, that people might lose interest in anything that doesn’t react to their touch. Not that I expect that necessarily will happen, but I can certainly imagine such a future.