Congratulations. You have just been named King (or Queen) of the English Language. It’s not all glitz and glamour, but the job does have an interesting perk: you get to choose the one word you will banish from the language forever. The word you love to hate, the one that makes you cringe every time you hear someone use (or misuse) it. But will it really be that easy to decide?

Read this week’s full article at The Voice Magazine

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

Another one for the Kings of Providence file.

Fortunately, no one was injured when this enormous sinkhole opened up in a Florida family’s back yard. It’s already 50 feet deep—and still growing!

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

If you’ve ever read a Western, you’ve probably encountered the passage where X marks the spot: the scene where an uneducated character makes his “mark” on a contract (and usually needs someone to point out where to do it). For centuries, good handwriting denoted a certain refinement, a higher level of education and class. But in a world that’s embraced digital communication, is handwriting a skill that’s needed anymore?

read this week’s full article at The Voice Magazine

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

Databases aren’t the most poetic things. Their discrete pieces of information, often broken down to minimal parts, are a bit like the individual letters of the alphabet: building blocks waiting to be shaped into useful forms. Now, an entrepreneur is building a literary database of every person, place, and thing ever mentioned in a novel. But will it really encourage people to read?

read this week’s full article in The Voice Magazine

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

LOL. ROFL. YMMV. If these initialisms have you scurrying for the comfort of your Strunk and White, you’re not alone. It’s popular these days to bemoan the falling standards of written language. Literacy, punctuation, and grammar have slipped into the morass of text speak and misspelled blogs. Or have they? When it comes to the written word, holding onto the good old days is a losing battle—and one that shouldn’t even be fought.

read this week’s full article at The Voice Magazine

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

Free textbooks! Can you imagine the excitement a sign like that would cause on campus? It might seem like the stuff of fiction, but free textbooks are the latest entry on the open-source landscape—and they’re set to give the traditional market a run for its money.

read this week’s full article at The Voice Magazine

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

A mysterious monument. Whispers of a conspiracy. Grisly murders and a search for clues. It’s the stuff of darkened theatres, the type of thing we love to sit back and enjoy. But what if you could join the search—and never be quite sure how much is real and how much is pure invention? Guidestones, an interactive web thriller, lets you do exactly that.

read this week’s full article at The Voice Magazine

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

When is it okay to destroy a book? Not destroy, perhaps, but alter. To remove its cover, or mark its pages, or even tear some out. For some people, even jotting a note in the margin is literary sacrilege. But others see the stories that go beyond a book’s original shape—the magic that awaits when ink-on-paper is sculpted beyond its expected form.

read this week’s full article at The Voice Magazine

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

If you walk past a certain house in Hudson, Wisconsin, you might stop to glance at the odd wooden mailbox on the front lawn. Look closer, though, and you’ll see that it isn’t a mailbox at all. It’s a library: the first in a growing movement called the Little Free Library, and proof positive that wonderful things often come in small packages.

That tiny red schoolhouse on the lawn in Hudson began as a way to honour the memory of June A. Bol, a book lover and former teacher. As the Little Free Library site explains, June’s son, Todd Bol, “built a miniature model of a library, filled it with books for anyone to take, and placed it outside his home.” Little did he know that this small gesture would spark a movement that has spread around the world.

After seeing the positive response to his small library, Bol contacted Rick Brooks, a friend who works in the Division of Continuing Studies at the University of Wisconsin. Together they realized the potential for a network of little libraries, and embarked on a mission to “promote literacy and the love of reading by building free book exchanges worldwide.” Their goals: to “build a sense of community as we share skills, creativity and wisdom across generations” and to “build more than 2,510 libraries around the world—more than Andrew Carnegie!”

Lofty ambitions to fit into small wooden boxes, but the idea has struck such a deep chord in people that Little Free Libraries have sprouted around the globe. As Brooks told USA Today, “Little Free Libraries can be found in at least 24 states and eight countries,” including England, Germany, and Ghana. Not bad for a small idea that began just two years ago as an 18-inch box.

But what is it about the Little Free Library that touches people so deeply? In this age of e-books and apps, the sight of the unique wooden structures certainly has an appeal based on novelty. (This USA Today photo gallery offers a glimpse of just how creative some library builders can be.)

The appeal goes well beyond novelty, though, and even transcends the basic goal of increasing literacy. Not only has the Little Free Library movement created a community of individual library stewards, it has also created new bonds among neighbours who, in some cases, had never even spoken before.

And that sense of community, of positive involvement, has grown beyond sharing books. In the interview with USA Today, Brooks noted that some Wisconsin prison inmates have started building the libraries, which will find their way to local communities. There’s also a project “in the works in New Orleans to create libraries out of Hurricane Katrina debris.”

The libraries can also be a great way to share books on a particular subject. Or, near a college or university, to share textbooks you no longer need. QR codes and stickers can be placed inside the books to identify them as part of the Little Free Library network. This helps ensure that books aren’t easily resold, and that borrowers uphold the spirit behind the idea.

For those who want to get involved (whether building, borrowing, or donating), the project’s founders offer building diagrams on their site, as well as a map that tracks the location of official Little Free Libraries locations, with new ones sprouting up all the time. Brooks and Bol also encourage using green or recycled materials in your library.

To find out more, or to get involved, visit the Little Free Library site or their Facebook page.

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments

When you step into your favourite literary world, where do you go? Maybe it’s to a shire full of hobbits and wizards, or to the ominous shores of Shutter Island. But if you like to be carried away by flights of imagination, how far would you go to step through the looking glass—to experience a literary world in real life? This week we take a look at some interesting ways to blend fantasy with reality .

Perhaps the most obvious literary tourist attraction is The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a theme park that lets Potter fans immerse themselves in a life-sized Hogsmeade. Visitors can tour the Hogwarts castle, with stops ranging from the Gryffindor common room to Dumbledore’s office. Hogsmeade streets feature real-life shops such as Ollivanders, Honeydukes, and the Three Broomsticks.

That’s all very Hollywood, but if you’re looking for something a bit more realistic, step back in time to Dickens World. Located in Kent, this “multi-sensory, interactive experience” promises to truly bring Dickensian times to life, letting you “immerse yourself in the sights, sounds and smells of nineteenth-century England.”

And when they say smells, they mean it. Not that you’ll get to throw raw sewage into the streets, a common practice in real Victorian times. However, the park features chemical “smell pots,” as this New York Timesarticle explains. When heated, the pots “emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage.”

Fair warning, though. As the bittersweet tone of the article reveals, Dickens World might come closer than planned to conjuring Dickens’s tales, leaving visitors with a sense of disappointment to rival Miss Havisham’s.

If you prefer literary escapades of the outdoors type, try your hand at being Huck Finn for a day. Huck Finn’s Jubilee lets you climb greased poles, build a river raft, join in a frog jumping contest, and try your hand at whitewashing a fence—just like Mark Twain’s famous young adventurers did. For those who really want to get into character, the annual festival even includes a Huck Finn look-alike contest. All you need are overalls, a fishing pole, a general knowledge of Huck’s adventures, and “well-traveled bare feet.” Oh, and to be a boy, of course.

Prefer to strike out on your own? You won’t be the first to follow the trail of The Da Vinci Code, a feat many fans have attempted since the novel became a bestseller. In fact, the book’s success gave rise to countless da Vinci-themed guided tours, an unexpected boon for tourism boards.

Today, this Fodor’s blog will guide you from France to Scotland, with stops at the Ritz, the Louvre, and the Rosslyn Chapel. The blog post dates from 2005, so you should verify addresses and schedules before putting on your symbologist’s hat. One bit of advice that hasn’t changed: run if you spot an albino monk-assassin.

Of course, there’s no end to the literary tours you can create for yourself. Nearly every major writer has a cottage industry devoted to places that he (or his characters) has inhabited—from William Shakespeare’s haunts in Stratford-upon-Avon to a tour of Stockholm that includes the real-life building where the fictional Lisbeth Salander lived. You can even visit one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood homes or stay in a real-life hobbit house.

With a little imagination, there’s no telling what you’ll discover when you step through the looking glass.

S.D. Livingston - Books, blog, and literary oddments