The Stacks
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A different kind of immortality…
Today we learned the sad news that Anne Rice died yesterday, Saturday, December 11, 2021, at the age of 80.
Although she wrote over 30 novels, for us here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, as we’re sure it is for many fans, Anne Rice meant The Vampire Chronicles trilogy – Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned.
A Bookish Memento Mori
So I've started referring to one particular shelf here at Butterflies & Aliens North as my memento mori in books. Sounds better than "I have this growing collection of funny books about death that started with this one book of cartoons about unpleasant ways to die that still makes me laugh out loud every time I read it"...
But, really, there is much truth in both those statements.
Happy Towel Day!
One of the earliest books we bonded over here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library was Douglas Adams’ profoundly comic and comically profound trilogy in (at least) four parts, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and we have definitely known where our towels are ever since.
In memoriam: Katherine Barber, 1959-2021
The Butterflies & Aliens Library was saddened to hear of the death of Katherine Barber, founding editor of the Oxford Canadian Dictionary and Canada’s “Word Lady,” on April 24, 2021, of cancer. She was 61.
Shuttle: The World’s First Spaceship
I’ve had people critique my love of print books as “just nostalgia.” Setting aside for the moment all the archival, psychological, and other reasons why print still holds a prime place in literary culture, what exactly is wrong with nostalgia as a reason for keeping books around.
To wit, my copy of Shuttle: The World’s First Spaceship by Robert M. Powers, published in May 1980 by Warner Books, eleven months before the maiden flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia, on Mission STS-1, on April 12, 1981.
Happy Birthday to the Bard of Avon!
It’s been a busy few weeks here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library and, yeah, we haven’t managed to post as much as we would have liked, but what’s done is done. Though we’ve seen better days, we definitely couldn’t let this day go by without at least a tip of the virtual quill to the Sweet Swan of Avon, the National Poet of England, the Immortal Bard… William Shakespeare!
In memoriam: Jack Whyte, 1940-2021
Rest in peace, Jack…
