Modern Library's 100 Best

James Reel originally took issue [ The Merchant-Ivory Connection & Who's Stuffing The Ballot Box ] with the titles selected for inclusion in The Modern Library's list of "the best" novels published in English this century when the list came out back in 1998. Perhaps you did, too. Now there are new developments. First, you get to decide in a new round of voting whether you agree with the publisher's choices for "the best" nonfiction of the century. And Reel's been poking around again, this time coming up with a reality check on the original list in The Haute 100 & The HotBot 25.

Voice Of The Shuttle, Zuzu & Beyond

Voice of the Shuttle. It sounds so innocent, so wholesome, so evocative of good straightforward rocketry or weaving, depending upon your primary chrono reference. But literature, if it is literature, is never what it seems at first glance. It is subversive, murky, marginal, essential. The Voice of the Shuttle, a good gray academic site -- at first glance -- is in actuality an excellent point of departure for a few turns in the web's sometimes startling literary labyrinth. Let's give it a whirl.

Update!  Our first stop is the Internet Poetry Archive, where we are greeted by a top page both innocuous and stylish, featuring portraits of poets. We read a poem, Personal Helicon, then hear the poet read it. It takes a few minutes for the sound file to download, but it's worth the wait to hear the poet give voice to his own words -- a richer interpretation than we gave the same words as we read them in silence. Listening to the poet recite is extravagantly pleasing and we'll come back for more. This time out, however, we return to VoS to sample another link.

Literary Resources: Twentieth Century British and Irish is part of the larger Literary Resources on the Net, another meta-resource for bibliophiles, this one maintained by Jack Lynch at The University of Pennsylvania. We find ourselves snared in a maze of interconnections and are happy about it. And since we had good luck with poets on our first try, we choose from Lynch's list a link to T.S. Eliot. Very nice site, good stop; but we're restless. We back button our way to VoS again, where we scroll down its tasty list until our attention is caught by two more single-author sites, those devoted to Kathy Acker and Thomas Pynchon. [ These three single-author sites and others are annotated on Page 2 of this section. ] VoS is a web, indeed, and one well worth exploring at your leisure.

Update!  It's big! It's wonderful! It's...moved! The celebrated Zuzu's Petals Literary Resource has yet another new address. Zuzu's, as you doubtless know, is a treasure house of articles, information and links for book lovers and a longtime favorite of Virtual Ink. Fall by Zuzu's new digs when you have a moment, but don't forget your way back here. What we lack in sheer mass we make up for in attitude.

BookWire advertises itself as "the first place to look," and for those of us addicted to the word they're pretty close to the mark. The site is not only voluminous but well organized: it's nicely indexed and searchable, for starters, and its welcome page, while not flashy, is very easy to use. In short, this is a web site that works. One of our favorite destinations here (despite the fact that it may require some patience to succeed in making a connection to linked texts) is the BookWire Reading Room, a collection of links to a large and eclectic collection of full-text fiction and nonfiction available free for the reading or downloading on the Internet.

Whose heart has strayed so far into right field that he or she can not love the ALA? It's a grand organization, and at the moment it seems hell-bent on showing what librarians can do when they sink their teeth into new territory like cyberspace. The ALA site is large and various and, while not quite so easy to navigate as it might be, still full of good red meat for book lovers. Absolutely indispensable is Booklist, a publication that for decades now has been keeping savvy readers as up-to-the-minute as the vagaries of print and post would allow. Now Booklist is on the World Wide Web. It's a perfect match of content and vehicle.

Update! We described Books In Chains as a treasure-heaped storehouse for readers and bibliomaniacs when we first reviewed it more than two years ago. It has done nothing but grow and make itself more useful since then (even though the last update appears to have been done in 1997). Links (as in chain, see?) are nicely organized in categories and subcategories, and there's a link to compiler Scott Rettberg's new site at The Mining Company, which he now updates more often than he does trusty old BIC.

   MORE:  A Book Lover's Portmanteau, Page 2

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