Friday, July 21, 2006

A Little Friday Fun

Something fun to play with this Friday evening a literature map. Enter the name of a favorite author and you get a sort of floating mobile of other authors you might like. It seems I've seen this before, but lost it and now have found it again and I am glad. And here I must apologize because I bookmarked the map site page a few days ago and now I cannot remember whose blog I found it on. I entered Virginia Woolf as my author and got back a bunch of authors I read and love like Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich, A.S. Byatt, Italo Calvino, and Jane Austen. Funny enough, James Joyce comes up too as does Doris Lessing. There are several authors I haven't read that I need to get to--dare I reveal who they are for fear of virtual finger shaking and accusations of "How can you consider yourself a reader when you've never read Nabokov?" There, I've gone and done it anyway. He's the biggie, the others, Joseph Heller, Don Delillo, EL Doctorow, don't feel so bad to admit to. Nabokov hurt though. When I put in Proust it is even worse because most of the authors that come up I have never heard of. Who is Ingeborg Bachmann? Andrzej Stasiuk? Joana Chmielewska? Maybe the best thing about this literature map is finding no end of new authors that might be worth a try. Have fun playing!