My favorite Sunday pastime is web surfing. It seems no matter where I start, I end up at Amazon.com.
Today it started half way through watching CBS Sunday Morning when Osgood ran a 20-minute piece on Steig Larsson, author of the Millennium Trilogy. I paused the TiVo and went to the web to read more about his relationship with Eva Gabrielsson, his domestic partner. There I saw a comment that he was the second best selling author in the world, after Khaled Hosseini, who I was forced to look up. Ah yes, The Kite Runner. Now I know who he is. Turns out he does have a new novel called A Thousand Splendid Suns released in October, 2010.
Next stop was the Best Seller List in the New York Times. It occurred to me that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, so I looked for him (in vain.) The list has nine categories, all self-explanatory except the last which is called "Graphic Books."
Graphic Books appear to be highly illustrated books that don't fit well under children's books, like the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. His second book, The Marvelous Land Of Oz, is on the best selling graphic books list. That thought that odd; he's dead. So I went Wikipedia and sure enough, he died in 1919. But I did discover that it was the second book in his ten-book canonRuth Plumly Thompson who wrote 19 Oz books, all considered to be in the canon. about Oz. There I learned about
By this time I needed a better definition of canon, so I Googled "define literary canon" which lead me to Protocanon and ultimately to Deuterocanon, and Apocrypha. Aha! I had never thought of the connection between literary canon and canonization of saints. Makes perfect sense. Along the way, I ran into the term Septuagint, or LXX. That same Protocanon Wikipedia article has a nice to know piece of trivia regarding why the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible is called LXX. (No mention of why it was called LXX instead of the Greek number οϝʹ, but I had digressed enough by then and didn't try to find out.) But there was an interesting bit of trivia associated with LXX.
"King Ptolomy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher. 'God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.'"
Well, I guess LXX means 70-ish. Still, I had to ask about which Ptolemy. Turns out he was Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the king of Ptolemaic Egypt from 283 BCE to 246 BCE and the son of the founder of the Ptolemaic kingdom. Hmm, and who was Cleopatra's (and Antony's) son? He turns out to be Ptolemy Philadelphus, too, named after his distant, but not direct, ancestor.
At this point I had about five browser tabs open that I had yet to visit. You've Won The Nobel Prize -- Wait, Don't Hang Up! and a bunch of Amazon.com links. One was to The Marvelous Land of Oz. Turns out that this is the 100th anniversary of the first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Reading the customer reviews, I saw " I just finished reading this one, a chapter each night, to my preschool age son. He loved it." So I put it on my wish list as a reminder to get the first two books for my granddaughter when she is five or six.
The other Amazon tabs? One was The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Sorry, I don't agree with Mr. Harris that scientifically determined values can replace religion. Improve it, perhaps, but for my money, I like the threat of eternal damnation. Maybe it doesn't affect me, but there are a lot of folks out there who need better self-control.
Why do I always end up at Amazon? Probably because that's where the ultimate references still point. The web has not replaced books, but it has made them more accessible in a variety of formats, including immediate download. So why is the publishing business declining? Turns out that the decline is in advertiser-supported publications. The book publishing business seems to be thriving despite the new costs of converting to digital equipment.
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