Books require a different sort of communion with one’s subject than the Internet. They foster a different sort of memory — more tactile, more participatory. . . . For literary works, books are still, and most likely always will be, indispensable.

In the Los Angeles Times Beau Friedlander, editor of AirAmerica.com, weighs in on the debate over whether the Internet is supplanting printed books. Tangentially, he also addresses the question of whether the Internet is making us dumber; his answer seems to be that books and the Internet provide us with different kinds of information that are useful in different situations.

Ultimately, Friedlander quotes Markos Moulitsas Zuñiga, founder of the political website the Daily Kos:

Google makes it possible to learn anything, near instantaneously. Like natural selection, there are species that adapt to the changing environment around them and thrive, and others die off.

Some books are so well-known that almost no one actually reads them. They have had so much influence that we ‘know’ them merely by living in the world they have helped create. And yet, as the distinguished poet, novelist and critic Jay Parini demonstrates in ‘Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America,’ there’s a lot to learn by giving them another (or a first) look.

The Seattle Times reviews Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America by Jay Parini.

Michael Crichton, the author of the blockbuster science-fiction novels ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘The Andromeda Strain’ and ‘State of Fear,’ has died. He was 66.

After discussing both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s favorite books, Meacham concludes:

McCain and Obama are so different in so many ways, but they do share one thing: a kind of tragic sensibility. Judging from the books they cite as most important, they embrace hope but recognize the reality that life is unlikely to conform to our wishes.

Will knowing about each candidate’s favorite books influence how you vote next Tuesday?

• In Appreciation of Tony Hillerman, The Christian Science Monitor
• bestselling mystery author provided insight into the native people and culture of the Southwest, Los Angeles Times

The Associated Press has reported the death of novelist Tony Hillerman,”whose lyrical, authentic and compelling mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest blazed innovative trails in the American detective story,” according to New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio.

Barack Obama and John McCain don’t agree on much, but they apparently agree on this:

They’re fierce political opponents, but it turns out that the presidential candidates do agree on a literary matter: Each man picks Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as a favorite.

“I wish I’d never written it,” prize-winning author Annie Proulx says of her most famous story, “Brokeback Mountain,” which was made into a popular movie.

Now Proulx, age 73, who “has often criticized the literary establishment for knowing nothing about what goes on in America outside its cities,” is ready to move from the Wyoming land that has figured prominently in much of her work.

As a follow-up to several previous posts about the recent announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Motoko Rich, writing from the Frankfurt Book Fair, explains why most Americans had never heard of the winner:

Although there are exceptions among the big publishing houses, the editors from the United States are generally more likely to bid on other hyped American or British titles than to look for new literature in the international halls.

According to Chad W. Post, the director of Open Letter, a new press based at the University of Rochester that focuses exclusively on books in translation, 330 works of foreign literature — or a little more than 2 percent of the estimated total of 15,000 titles released — have been published in the United States so far this year.

A week before the Nobel Prize announcement, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the organization that awards the Nobel Prize, explained why the prize did not go to an American:

‘The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,’ Mr. Engdahl said in an interview with The Associated Press. ‘They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.’

One French publisher told Rich, “American publishers are depriving the American readership of the cultural diversity through translation to which they are entitled.”

French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the Nobel Prize for literature Thursday. If most Americans have never heard of this accomplished author of more than 30 novels, essays and story collections, perhaps it’s because there is so little emphasis on international books in the U.S. publishing world.

The reason why most Americans had never heard of the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature is that only about 3% of the books published in the U.S. are works that have been translated.

To remedy that situation, this piece ends with a list of some of the best foreign authors compiled by David Kipen, director of Literature and National Reading Initiatives at the National Endowment for the Arts.