In non-HP book news, Oprah has chosen Cormac McCarthy's The Road for her next book. I haven't read it but I have read some of his work -- this strikes me as an unusual choice for her.

I find this very unusual, what with the eating of babies and other nastiness.

(white fonted for spoiler and general ickiness)

My blog on Gristmill is going to get a special section.

The editor does not like the title "No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming" on grounds that most people won't know what a hair shirt is or why you would not want to wear one.

The point the title should convey is that we can solve global warming without requiring moving to a peasant hut or slaughtering rabbits or chopping wood. Ideally it should be short, snappy and smartass.

Any thoughts would be appreaciated.

I find the word "yurt" funny. Something like, "Fixing Global Warming: Why you don't have to live in a yurt", maybe? That's a bit long.

Solving Global Warming without Raising a Sweat?

Riffing off Ginger:

"No Sweat Solutions to Global Warming"?

"No Sweat Solutions to Global Warming"

I like it. Nice play on "no sweat"="easy" and "no sweat"="not too warm".

OK - think I'll go with that. Thanks Ginger, and thanks everyone.

Huh. Lifehacker had a list of sites for free books today, and one of the comments included a link to goodreads.com which looks like a good companion to LibraryThing. It's what you've read and what you'd like to read.

OK, fine...pancakes.

Amanda McKittrick Ros, offering posthumous hope to badfic writers everywhere:

-------------------------------

Nick Page, author of In Search of the World's Worst Writers, rated Ros the worst of the worst. He says that "For Amanda, eyes are 'piercing orbs', legs are 'bony supports', people do not blush, they are 'touched by the hot hand of bewilderment.'"

Aldous Huxley wrote that "In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented.... This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing needlework:

She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.

Her novel Delina Delaney begins:

Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

Page comments: "I first read this sentence nearly three years ago. Since then, I have read it once a week in an increasingly desperate search for meaning. But I still don't understand it."

The Oxford literary group the Inklings, which included such luminaries as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, held competitions to see who could read Ros' work for the longest length of time while keeping a straight face.

A poet as well as a novelist, Ros wrote Poems of Puncture and Fumes of Formation. The latter contains "Visiting Westminster Abbey," which opens:

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.

As of 2004, none of her works are in print. Her books are rare and first editions command prices of $300 to $800 in the used-book market. Belfast Central Library holds an archive of her papers, and the Queen's University of Belfast has some volumes by Ros in the stacks.

It's perfectly reasonable to spend the hour-and-a-bit before I need to get ready to go out to Goth Night adding more books to my LibraryThing, right?