Alabama is getting a new magazine this month… Thicket is set to hit newsstands in mid-January, promising six issues a year. Lots of notable names in their inaugural issue and a couple of local celebs on their blog.
I’m looking forward to what they have to feature on Alabama and Birmingham. I’ll let y’all know how the first issue looks.
{via Bham Terminal}
Susan Swagler posted about the JCLC’s new “one city, one book” type program which kicks off with Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.
Festivities officially start January 14th and go all the way through April. Looks like lots of movies, group talks, road trips are on the calendar. I’m digging their plan to place 1,500 copies of the book around town for folks to pick up, read and then set loose in the wild again. Could be good fun!
According to Swagler’s post, one of the speakers at the Alabama Bound event, in April, is a scholar who wrote a paper “questioning Atticus’s heroism.” Huh? What blasphemy is this? I’m going to have to find said paper and investigate. You can bet I’ll have red markers at the ready!
Actually, I’m just glad that the JCLC has taken the time to get all this organized.
I can’t make up my mind just how big of a deal this is. To be honest, I never really dug into Wikipedia, never having enough faith in what the masses would post. But then I discovered the Bhamwiki. It was like a light bulb that suddenly turned on. I got it. Our little local wiki is exactly what the whole Wikimedia is supposed to be about. It’s a great place to look up info on local authors, books,publishers etc.
And now Google is throwing their hat in the same ring. The only difference, that I can find, between Wiki and Google is that:
1. Google will restrict entry editing to a slate of topic experts, to kick things off.
2. Google will allow these topic experts to share in the ad revenue stream generated by their entries.
Are there more differences? I’m certainly not qualified to write anything, but I’ve been a fan of Google for a while and I’m wondering why they keep spreading out into new areas, beyond their core search business. Maybe it is just to stem the people clicking from Google search links to Wikipedia, as this guy’s non-scientific test highlights.
I was lurking around the net, familiarizing myself with children’s books from the 1940’s (per one commenter’s suggestion) and I ran across an news tidbit saying the UK publishers are going to start rating children’s books. Just like the movies, though this seems more aimed at “reading level” than content. Though, surely, there is some of that too.
The age ranking will go: Early (for five years plus), Developing (7 plus) Confident (9 plus) and Fluent.
When gift buying for nephews, I always wonder which book to get. The reading abilities and tastes seem so hard to figure out at that age. Honestly. I have more faith in my local bookseller’s knowledge about what would be a good purchase, but this would seem to be a step in the right direction to help the clueless (such as myself).
