SO busy lately—working, traveling (first to a conference and then to visit family), and remodeling the house, which, since spring has sprung, now also involves the perennial borders, courtyard, and vegetable garden!  But I am managing to keep at least one book going at a time.  On a road trip last week I enjoyed Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest: Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall; I picked this up from the library as part of my “deep reading” project (I’m still deep reading–reading everything by–Ishiguro, Shirley Hazzard, and Iris Murdoch).  I hope to review it here soon.  Also, in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday over the weekend, I’m working my way through James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (which has made me almost decide to add Shakespeare to the deep reading project–if I can find a really good annotated critical edition).  I’m still researching this possible book idea.  I just put two more fiction works on hold at the library, and I’m combing through various books on square foot gardening and building outdoor rooms.

So…what are you reading?  Do you tend to read more or less in the warmer months?

Librarian Sara Scribner on why in the digital age we still need librarians (and, I’d add, humanities professors):

An info-literate student can find the right bit of information amid the sea of irrelevance and misinformation. But any college librarian will tell you that freshman research skills are absolutely abysmal. Before they graduate from high school, students need to be able tounderstand the phenomenal number of information options at their fingertips, learn how to work with non-Google-style search queries, avoid plagiarism and judge whether the facts before them were culled by an expert in the field or tossed off by a crackpot in the basement.

As even struggling school districts manage to place computers in classrooms, it’s difficult to find a child without Internet access. But look closer at what happens when students undertake an academic task as simple as researching global warming — tens of millions of hits on Google — and it becomes clear that the so-called divide is not digital but informational. It’s not about access; it’s about agility.

Read the full essay “Saving the Google Students” at the LA Times.

I love this year’s National Poetry Month poster!  Do you?  I still have last year’s (need to get some nice poster frames for the new study, I think).  This one features the lines “We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.” from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”

I’m still thinking about how I will celebrate NPM this year.  Do you have any plans?

Do you read narrative history?  I’m talking about books like Eric Jager’s The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France or Leslie Carroll’s Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp Through the Extramarital Adeventures That Rocked the British Monarchy or Jon Meacham’s American Gospel: God, The Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. When it comes to history, I appreciate a heavily-footnoted scholarly treatment as much as the next academic, but I find narrative history more appealing.  I think it’s partly the confidence these books bestow — in reading them, you learn enough about the subject to discuss it intelligently, even if you wouldn’t presume to present a conference paper on it — and also partly it’s the sheer enjoyment of reading a true story as well-told as a good novel.

I’m considering a book project of this nature, so your input would be much appreciated at this stage.  Do you read narrative history?  How often, relative to other genres?  What do you like or not like about it?  Do you have favorite periods (Colonial America), dynasties (Tudors), regions (Japan)?  What’s more important to you: compelling story or careful source citation?  How important is the cover art, the title length, or the author’s pedigree?  Do you have a favorite author in this genre?

Do tell—and thanks!

Novelist Terrence Cheng on how writing is like being in love, right down to the rejection:

Which is why rejection, particularly in your love life, is good training for being a writer. Because your work, if it’s true, is you—the culmination and symbol of your heart, your passion, your hopes and dreams. Your work is everything you want and need to make things right in the world—it’s what sets you apart from the rest, what makes you believe that all the devotion, dedication, and the grueling brutal daily grind to produce actually means something.

Of course it means something to you, but does it mean something to anyone else? For it to mean something, you want and need that validation from the outside, just like you need someone else to know you are more than just a “nice guy.” You want someone to really know you, to trust in you, to take a risk.

Writing and love are both leaps into the unknown, acts of discipline as much as they are acts of faith. If you are not in love with writing then you shouldn’t write, because without love, you won’t be able to take it. (And I didn’t say in love with your writing—I said in love with writing. There’s a difference.)

Read the rest of his essay in Glimmer Train’s Bulletin 37.