Missing My Bag

06Oct08

I forgot to bring my bag of books today and am terribly bored during times in between the fulfillment of my official tasks. Random articles from the Internet provided me a(n admittedly less satisfying) alternative:

What keeps my bag heavy.

1. The winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced by the Swedish Academy on October 9 (next Thursday)! One thing I like about the prize is that it brings the books of authors that are otherwise unavailable to the bookshops here in the Southern Philippines. That, of course, means that I have more accessible books to add to my reading list. That’s never a downside though.

2. Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate for the 2008 US Elections, never ceases to amuse me. From digital emunction I came across a link to grammarian Kitty Burns Florey’s attempt at diagramming Palin’s sentences over at Slate.com. And the verdict:

In a few short weeks, Sarah Palin has produced enough poppycock to keep parsers and diagrammers busy for a long time. In the end, though, out of her mass of verbiage in the Sean Hannity interview, Palin did manage to emit a perfectly lucid diagram-ready statement that sums up, albeit modestly, not the state of the economy that she was (more or less) talking about but the quality of her thinking:

3. Alastair Harper’s Guardian Book Blog entry led me to George Orwell’s entertaining “Bookshop Memories” from the London of the 1930s.

4. Times Online published a list of “10 Books Not To Read Before You Die” last September. Now I would have been a success if not for the fact that I’ve read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is top 3 in the list. ■

Filed under: Ephemera   |  1 Comment
Tags: Books, Bookshop Memories, Bookshops, Cebu, Death, Insurgency, Literature, My Bag, Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize for Literature, Orwell, Palin's Bad Grammar, Palin's Sentences, Sarah Palin