This is a clever web site cre­at­ed by the folks at the New Zealand Book Coun­cil. The site cre­ates a repli­ca of a PC desk­top envi­ron­ment, and, with­in the fold­ers, you’ll find texts that can be read on the sly.

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As I write, the most emailed arti­cle on The New York Times offers a few reflec­tions on Peter Box­al­l’s book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The Times piece makes a cou­ple of log­i­cal points: First, there’s no time to waste if you hope to read every book on the list. Read­ing a book per month, you’ll get through 1000 books in a mere 83 years. So you had bet­ter get start­ed now. Sec­ond, this “best of” list is bound to be con­tro­ver­sial. (Do you real­ly need to read Anne Rice’s “Inter­view With the Vam­pire” before it’s lights out?) The 1001 books on Box­al­l’s list can be pre­viewed here. The book itself, which runs 960 pages, is obvi­ous­ly more than a raw list. Each entry is accom­pa­nied by an “author­i­ta­tive yet opin­ion­at­ed crit­i­cal essay describ­ing the impor­tance and influ­ence of the work in ques­tion.” And also there’s appar­ent­ly some nice illus­tra­tions. If you’re a bib­lio­phile, it’s worth a look.

For more great books, see the col­lec­tion of Life Chang­ing Books cre­at­ed by our read­ers.

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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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