The wis­dom of crowds con­cept works for writ­ing soft­ware. (Think open source.) But does it work for writ­ing nov­els? That’s what Pen­guin and De Mon­fort Uni­ver­si­ty (in the UK) want­ed to fig­ure out when they launched an exper­i­ment in Feb­ru­ary 2007 called “A Mil­lion Lit­tle Pen­guins.” Over the course of five weeks, rough­ly 1500 writ­ers draft­ed a col­lab­o­ra­tive nov­el using wiki soft­ware (the same one used by Wikipedia), and you can now view the com­plet­ed man­u­script here. So far the reviews are not over­whelm­ing. Accord­ing to one observ­er, “it’s inco­her­ent. You might get some­thing sim­i­lar if you took a stack of super­mar­ket check­out line pot­boil­ers and some Mad Libs and threw them in a blender.” And then there’s this pithy ver­dict by the snarky blog, Gawk­er: “The text itself is ter­ri­ble.” Ouch. But maybe some­one who is less reflex­ive­ly dis­mis­sive will have a dif­fer­ent view, though I would­n’t bet on it. Have a read here. Also see De Mont­fort’s post mortem of the project here.

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Last week, Junot Diaz land­ed the Pulitzer Prize for fic­tion with his debut nov­el, The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao. The book, which Diaz took 11 years to write, also won the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Award for best nov­el of 2007. Below, we have Diaz speak­ing last year about his prize win­ning book at Google. (Get more Google author talks here.) You can also catch his inter­view on NPR’s Fresh air (iTunes — Feed — Stream here).

Pen­guin is pre­sent­ing six sto­ries, by six authors, over six weeks, in a series called We Tell Sto­ries. And they’re using the web to tell these sto­ries in orig­i­nal ways. One sto­ry, The 21 Steps, gets told over Google Maps — an approach that scores points for cre­ativ­i­ty, but also tires a lit­tle quick­ly. You can access all six sto­ries here. Also check out our exten­sive col­lec­tion of free audio­books here.

via Boing­Bo­ing

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Get the “ulti­mate read­ing list,” accord­ing to the Tele­graph. The book­list (access here) ranges from “clas­sics and sci-fi to poet­ry, biogra­phies and books that changed the world.” And while you’re at it, check out this list of life-chang­ing books cre­at­ed by our very own read­ers.

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As a New York­er liv­ing rather per­ma­nent­ly in sun­ny Cal­i­for­nia, I feel some­what oblig­ed to men­tion this: New York Mag­a­zine has pulled togeth­er a list of “26 works of lap­idary New York­i­tude” — that is, high­ly lit­er­ary books that obsess over the great city. On the list, you’ll find works by Nor­man Mail­er, Bernard Mala­mud, Don Delil­lo, Woody Allen, and beyond. You can snag the full list here.

via Kottke.org

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