Notes in the Margin Weblog

About an hour ago I took down the old pages of the Notes in the Margin Web site and uploaded an all-new, streamlined version.

For now, the Fiction Notes page is sparse, with no linked reviews for many of the books listed. I apologize for that. I’ll be catching up with the fiction reviews bit by bit over the next several weeks.

The Nonfiction Notes page, however, is complete.

The redesigned site contains a lot of new material and is the first major update since Notes in the Margin went on hiatus in 2005 when I returned to school full time.

If you’re interested in an explanation about why I changed the site design, the long story is that our household has now gone All Macs All the Time. I created the earlier version of the site with a couple of programs specific to the Windows platform. This switch didn’t matter much when I was not adding new material because of school, but now that I’ve been able to start adding some new reviews (even though I’m still a full-time student), I had to find some Mac software that would make that process as painless and quick as possible. I finally decided on a program that would allow me to redesign the entire site. I had originally hoped to redo the whole site before taking down the old version and uploading the new, but redoing everything was a long and tedious process. If I had waited until I finished the entire site, the new material I wanted to add would itself be old before it ever saw the light of day. Therefore, I decided to upload the new site even though I haven’t yet finished catching up with all the fiction reviews.

I apologize for the inconvenience and hope you’ll be able to find something of interest in the new material.

Please let me know what you think of the new site design.

Sometime recently (probably over the U.S. Memorial Day weekend) Notes in the Margin went over 1,000,000 views. Since I have no idea who the 1,000,000th viewer was, I’ll thank everybody who has visited over the years since this Web site was born.

Send all your friends. . .

I have now enabled comments for new posts. When I created this blog I did not enable comments because I did not have the time to moderate them. I still don’t really have the time, but I’m interested in the conversation.

Since comments are moderated, it may be a (short) while before you see your comment here. Only appropriately relevant comments will be approved. Please, no offensive language or personal attacks.

Let’s see where the conversation takes us. . .

Troubled book world is going for novel ideas - Los Angeles Times

As Book Expo America, the nation’s largest annual book convention, opens today in Los Angeles, innovation — some would say desperation — will be the main order of business. More than 2,000 exhibitors from every facet of the publishing world, nearly 1,000 authors and more than 25,000 people will be gathering at the L.A. Convention Center this weekend to discuss the state of an industry that’s at a critical crossroads.

A south Alabama town that was the inspiration for the setting in Harper Lee’s book “To Kill a Mockingbird” is finding itself as the backdrop for a real-life legal case involving allegations of racism at school. The parents of several black junior high school students have filed a discrimination lawsuit claiming their children are subject to racial slurs and punished more harshly than white students at Monroeville Junior High School. The lawsuit says black students at the county’s only public junior high have been called slurs such as the “N-word,” “filthy trash” and “black monkey.” Their parents also say classes are segregated, with most black students being kept out of advanced placement and honors courses. The action, originally filed in August, was revived this week by the American Civil Liberties Union in U.S. Southern District Court on behalf of nine students. “I just feel like every student should have the right to a decent education regardless of race, creed or color,” Catherine Kim, an attorney for the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, added, “There are policies and practices that serve to criminalize youth and push them out of classes — primarily children of color,”
http://www.blackvoices.com/newsarticle/_a/racism-at-alabama-high-school/20080527121409990001

Source: Public Education Network Weekly NewsBlast

In ‘Bright Shiny Morning,’ James Frey Presents Little Pieces of Los Angeles in His Way - New York Times

New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin writes about James Frey’s new novel:

He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time.

He wrote a big book. He wrote about a city. Los Angeles. He made up a lot of characters, high low rich poor lucky not, every kind, the book threw them together. It was random but smart.

Yes, this is that James Frey, the one who published a memoir called A Million Little Pieces and was later vilified in the press and in front of millions of viewers on the Oprah show for making much of it up.

This time he’s made it all up and rightly called it fiction.