In painstakingly photographing the Dead Sea Scrolls for the purpose of making them available online, “scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, discoveries that could have significant scholarly impact.”

Salman Rushdie says he’s happy with the apology and rewrite that came of his lawsuit against Ron Evans —he was in it for the truth, not the money. In pursuing the case, he apparently made use of a British legal strategy called Declaration of Falsity:

“I hope that maybe this device of the Declaration of Falsity is another way of pursuing these matters. Instead of going for the mega bucks you simply go to court for the important thing which is to establish what’s true and what’s not. I think it’s a clearer and simpler way of dealing with this and I’m very pleased we’ve been able to use it in this way.”

OK, but can you imagine the caseload of US courts if we had such a thing? I wonder how it works.

Esteemed blogger Maud Newton makes the most interesting case yet—OK maybe the only interesting case—for republishing a lengthy text in Twitter-sized bursts:

So Paradise Lost, a sympathetic portrait of Satan, has always held a particular fascination for me. ... I’ve been wanting to do a close re-reading ... And because I want to revisit Paradise Lost as a writer — to try to understand exactly how Milton makes God’s nemesis so complex and compelling — I decided to experiment with the capsule dose.

She’s, of course, not alone. You can follow Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and William Blake.

I guess I always assumed that funds raised through those Friends of the Library sales went toward new books for the library in question. But at least one library—in Newport Beach CA—is thinking outside that particular box. They’ve recently unveiled their Sun and Sea Discovery Garden.

Here’s the sort of thing you just don’t get to see often enough: Richard Dawkins reads his hate mail. Such language! (via)

The Boston Globe lists the top ten New England literary journals, two of which (Ploughshares and Redivider) originate at Emerson College.

A few good author links for you:

Rose Tremain talks to the WSJ about “immigration, dish washing and The Road Home.”

Ed Champion recently interviewed Paul Auster for his Bat Segundo Show. (via)

And if you didn’t already see it in the forum, don’t miss Joseph O’Connor’s tribute to John McGahern, with fantastic anecdote about his own “first story.” (For more on O’Connor, read the Readerville interview.)

I’m pleased to report that Blogs.com has posted its first book-related Top 10 list—mine! I’m so happy to see books making their way into the mix that I don’t even mind them misspelling my name. Thanks for listening, Anil et al.

As the pendulum swings back, and more and more human communication is once again done in some written form, new Utopian ideals seem to be forming. As recent news of the Stupid Filter and now YouTube Comment Snob demonstrate, many are those who envision a text world where the rantings of lunatics and trolls are automatically screened out, leaving only the reasoned voices to be heard. But how do you quantify reason? In the absence of “real AI,” these entry-level filters pick on spelling, capitalization and punctuation to decide what gets through. The pros and cons are fairly obvious: Sure, it would be great if people felt they needed to take grammar and spelling seriously if they want their ideas heard, but does the absence of those skills mean the speakers are incapable of contributing valuable thoughts? And if these filters take hold, how long before “real AI” starts getting applied to everyday conversation? 

The AP reports an interesting trend on campuses nationwide: the elimination of cafeteria trays. Motivated by Earth Day celebrations and cost-cutting mandates, schools are saving thousands of gallons of water a day (and a corresponding amount of detergent) while leaving it to diners to figure out how to get their meals from the line to the table. (One positive side effect is a reduction in food waste.) The most amusing sentence in the piece: “Students will have to find another way to sled in the winter.” But perhaps that’s the answer to the unasked question: What’s to become of all those abandoned plastic trays?

Both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York magazine offer fall book previews. The Highlights:

• Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is a novel about slavery but not about race.

• Annie Proulx has written a new collection of Wyoming stories, Fine Just the Way It Is.

• John Updike has a follow-up to The Witches of Eastwick called The Widows of Eastwick. Hmm. Can’t decide whether I’m going to read that or not.

• I’m missing the Marilynne Robinson gene, so I definitely won’t be reading Home, her follow-up to Gilead. But everyone else at Readerville will, I’m guessing.

• Hannah Tinti, the editor of the nifty literary magazine One Story, has published her first novel, The Good Thief, which is being described as Dickensian and apparently involves grave-robbing, orphans, and severed hands. This is a book I am definitely reading.

• Apparently a century later we still can’t let the Titanic alone, hence Brad Matsen’s Titanic’s Last Secrets.

• Francine Prose has a new bildungsroman, Goldengrove, about a girl dealing with the death of her sister. I’m kind of intrigued by this one despite my irritation with Hunters and Gatherers.

• Two new books on Lincoln that I’m dying to read: James M. McPherson’s Tried by War and Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. Also a new bio of FDR, H. W. Brands’s Traitor to His Class.

• Wally Lamb has finally written a third novel, The Hour I First Believed. (How long has it been? I read his second novel on my honeymoon. I now have a nine-year-old.)

Monday was a big day at Readerville, and it occurs to me that, depending on how you access this weblog, you may not have heard. What happened? Our fabulous new Note:books section was quietly opened to the public after a limited private beta — and with new people now joining every day, it seems to be running smoothly! Note:books is a fantastic way to track your reading over time, and to follow the cumulative reaction to any given book. It also allows you to add notes about your recent reads to your own blog or website. There’s no place like Readerville to see what sharp readers have to say about books, and Note:books offers a whole new way to do that. So if you haven’t already, come on in, look around, and if you like what you see, remember to invite your friends.

Someone is cranky. At Slate.com, Ron Rosenbaum rants about crossword puzzle lovers:

What always gets to me is the self-congratulatory assumption on the part of puzzle people that their addiction to the useless habit somehow proves they are smarter or more literate than the rest of us. Need I suggest that those who spend time doing crossword puzzles (or sudoku)—uselessly filling empty boxes (a metaphor for some emptiness in their lives?)—could be doing something else that involves words and letters? It’s called reading.

But somehow crossword types think that their addiction to this sad form of mental self-abuse somehow makes them “literary.” Sorry: Doing puzzles reflects not an elevated literary sensibility but a degraded letter-ary sensibility, one that demonstrates an inability to find pleasure in reading. Otherwise, why choose the wan, sterile satisfactions of crosswords over the far more robust full-blooded pleasures of books?

I’m not sure why Rosenbaum thinks that doing puzzles and reading are mutually exclusive; I do the New York Times puzzle in the morning and still manage to read a book or two a week. 

If you’re among those who can hardly stand the wait for the next Neal Stephenson, Anathem, BoingBoing has an amuse bouche for you: the glossary.

If this weren’t published on The Smoking Gun, we’d be checking The Smoking Gun to see if it was true: Wisconsin woman, 20, arrested for two overdue library volumes. The library must be cracking down — she’s not the only one listed in those police documents.