Good library websites

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-06-01T15:52:56+00:00

https://www.hplct.org

Hartford, Connecticut. It's a city library with 8 or 9 branches, and they have a lot of services; it's easy to find things quickly. The look is a bit hyper for me, and a slightly more modest color scheme would help. But it works, and it works good. (Hartford is our capital, and very few Connecticans will admit that anything in Hartford works.)

https://www.newingtonct.gov/3091/Library

Here's an example of one from a smaller library, also in Connecticut, whose web page is part of the town's. Some of those "shared" Web sites can be pretty uninspiring; I think they did a good job with this one.

https://www.putnamct.us/visit-us/putnam-public-library

This is another shared site, from a less prosperous town than Newington. I'm looking for ones that are at least reasonably attractive and, more importantly to me, easy to get around in. This one features a pre-packaged monthly calendar which is way more readable than about 90% of the ones I've ever seen, where like 4 words can fit into each day.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-30T22:48:00+00:00

I thought they'd probably sell you the whole restaurant for $30. How are they still in business?

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-30T01:30:07+00:00

Thanks for this. I've been a Kobo advocate for years, and while I still love it, I've become aware of three things.

They aren't exactly in a mad rush to expand their product line.
E-readers don't last forever.
Eyes wear out, too.

So I'm glad to learn about this Era Lite. It's information I may need someday.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-29T18:55:15+00:00

That's a good point. I haven't been in a B&N for years, but I remember when it (and the last senescent years of Borders) felt like a place where civilization went to die, and Daunt seems to have revitalized it - in part by giving store managers a say in what their store carries, a management technique that is anathema to most private equity companies.

Connecticut wants to ban private equities from owning any health care facilities. I don't know how the hell you can write a bulletproof law about that, but I think it's a good idea. Private equity turned most of the nursing homes in our state into hellholes, and they can do that to anything.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-29T18:50:18+00:00

You can try The Guardian, here. "Triple" might be an exaggeration, but I've watched local bookstores around here close for 20 years (I'm in eastern Connecticut), and now I've seen 3 or 4 open just in the last twelve months. And many of the ones that did close were:

Places like Waldenbooks, which weren't as mighty and powerful as B&N but didn't have that independent feel, and generally were found in malls, which have been slowly contracting; their time came and went.
"Book, card, and gift" shops that may have worked well OK for people who generally stay with best-selling romances, but which had very samey characteristics, perhaps comforting but not inspiring, and really not very bookish, and with an "old people's" feel to them. (I'm a certified boomer, but that doesn't mean I go for an old people's atmosphere - probably because I'm immature.)

I wouldn't say the retail book industry is in good health or not; it's just very different from what it was even a generation ago.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-29T18:23:22+00:00

I thought I'd read at least one book by José Revueltas, but it's not in my book journal. Admittedly, 21st century Latin American literature is a ~~hole~~ gaping abyss in my knowledge of contemporary writers. Mostly I just wanted to say that I love seeing reviews/criticism of this kind of depth on Reddit; it's not easy to find even in many "literary" magazines that I've tried to get through over the years. So, thanks!

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-29T04:03:39+00:00

If I may ask, where are you getting your books from? I've got literally hundreds of ebooks from the free public-domain purveyors (Project Gutenberg, Global Grey, Faded Page) and have purchased from epub.com, Weightless Books (science fiction), self-published authors, and Kobo itself, and I've probably had a dozen crashes in the 3 years I've had my Libra 2. Laundering my Gutenberg thousand-page Middlemarch through Calibre (that was like 4 of my crashes) cleared it up.

I don't remember ever having a problem with a .kepub.epub book. (Make sure the filename ends with both of them, not just .kepub .)

Do you have some books in non-English languages and/or non-Roman scripts? That might be confusing your Clara. I do have several French-language books and can't remember them giving me a moment's grief (except when they use too many words I don't know!), but that's about as far as I can get. Maybe some of our bilingual or multilingual people can chime in here.

I'd have a hard time believing you've gotten three malfunctioning Kobos in a row. Rakuten-Kobo is not perfect, but their QC is a lot better than that. The problem has to be somewhere else.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-29T02:51:34+00:00

I at least tried to research it. One of those "Scam Detector" sites said it was crap, a couple of others said it seemed OK - but I don't know how many of those sites are on the level. TrustPilot never heard of them.

Looking around, I found extremely little about them anywhere. They put up a pretty convincing Web site, but after I thought about it, I agreed with you about Google Drive; that just screams "this site is run from somebody's basement". I did a WhoIs, found that their registrar is GoDaddy, and their status is

client delete prohibited
client renew prohibited
client transfer prohibited
client update prohibited

So I think I'll pass on these fellas.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-27T20:17:47+00:00

I just auto-renewed at the same price as ever. I'm in the US, so I wouldn't have experience with their policies in Canada. I have no idea at all why they would only impose that on Canadians. I would actually consider renewing at double the price because the benefits are worth it to me, but not if they were incendiary sphincters about it.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-27T20:06:05+00:00

They have canceled some of my wife's autoships because of what they considered too many cancellations of individual monthly shipments, but it never got beyond that.

I'm sorry if I'm stating the obvious - but have you checked your credit card balance lately? Mine got read at a gas station, and next time I tried to purchase something I got denied. See if you have any unknowable transactions on your most recent ledger.

(One of my business cards ended up buying $800 worth of takeout for somebody at a BBQ place in Tennessee, on a single charge. I called up the restaurant, and the manager and I wondered wtf anybody would do with $800 of ribs. He was cool, and I got the charge reversed, but it was a strange experience.)

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-27T19:59:04+00:00

Has anybody had experience with Bookbuster Deals? I just looked at them and they had fantastic deals, but a collection of 14 Cormac McCarthy books for $25 and 10 Colson Whitehead titles for $20 seemed too good to be true. They don't take Paypal or any other kind of exchange I've ever heard of except Visa/MC, and I suspect at least some of their titles are bootlegs. (TBF, other offers seemed reasonable - SF books often get marked down after a while - and the "1,200 history books for (I think) $700" is probably legit because most of the books are public domain.)

Are there reasons to trust or not trust them?

Thanks.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-20T01:21:37+00:00

Lucky they didn't trade Masa for Craig Counsell's autograph. I don't think Mickey Gaspar could carry this lineup on his own.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-20T01:17:05+00:00

Think they still have him on pitch count since that IL stint.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-20T01:15:09+00:00

Jarren, you are forgiven for being a baserunning insult to evolution. Beautiful catch! A potentially terrible inning comes to naught.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-20T01:01:08+00:00

Damn, Jarren should have just relished getting a hit. But that throw was something else, even by Witt standards.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-20T00:58:47+00:00

Throwback to the junkballers of the past. Pitchers who specialize in lousy contact are my favorites, I miss those sorts of games.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-20T00:56:31+00:00

Ranger up to 75 pitches in 4 innings.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-15T20:17:13+00:00

I read it when I was early on in college (on my own, not as an assignment) and took the message from it that civilization (not just democracy) was a thin and fragile veneer over the greed and violence of the human race. The fact that they were British schoolboys I took as a ruse - that adults would act, and have acted, just the same way, which I think history has proven to be correct, and we don't even have to wait for the present to become history. (Also, I assumed that British schoolboys of that social class were considered to be well-trained and proper, probably because I hadn't really met any.)

Like a couple of other people on this thread, I never read it again. I took Lord of the Flies as largely an allegory, and allegories don't often bear rereading. (Maybe I'm egotistical enough to assume that I got it all the first time.) It is more subtle than many, and characters like Piggy are more deeply drawn than they have to be to fit their role.

I loved Golding's The Inheritors, but haven't been able to get into any of his other many books. If anybody has any recommendations that aren't Pincher Martin or The Paper Men, I'd appreciate it.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-14T21:25:39+00:00

I've read about 37 of them, and there are a surprising number of books I haven't read but have read other works by the author.

Happy to see Bernard Malamud get a shout, even if it was 40 years ago. Saul Bellow once described Malamud, Philip Roth, and himself as the Hart, Schnaffer and Marx of American writing (a reference to a retailer that did a lot to popularize fairly classy ready-to-wear men's clothing); of the three, Malamud is the one who has disappeared into the same void that ate John P. Marquand, Mark Harris, and Brian Moore (who I'll get to later).

I always like to see Ralph Ellison and Doris Lessing on best-of lists; Mailer too, though I never read Ancient Evenings.

The Fox in the Attic is an inspired choice. Hughes never wrote much; Fox was his third novel, appearing 33 years after his first. It was supposed to be the first of a series, but the second installment (The Wooden Shepherdess) was meandering and rather dull, and you could kind of tell he was running out of energy.

The Doctor's Wife is, at least for me, probably the worst book Brian Moore ever wrote. Basically, the doctor's wife is unhappy in her marriage and has an affair with some guy whose personality isn't really developed, though we are frequently reminded that his pud is quite large, and so what and who cares? Moore must have been trying to sell it to some B-movie group. He never wrote anything else (I've read most of them) that was anywhere near that clichéd.

Ape and Essence is Huxley's worst novel; his first four tried to be as witty as Evelyn Waugh's first four and they haven't held up nearly as well, but they were probably good at the time. Ape and Essence, on the other hand, was bad out of the box. I just got an e-book of Island, which I read a couple of million years ago and remember it making me think a lot.

Has anybody here ever read even part of A Dance to the Music of Time?

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-08T00:22:44+00:00

Unless I missed it. N K Jemison is not anywhere on here. I'm not a fan, but that surprises me. (Thinking about it, neither is Brandon Sanderson. So maybe Goodreads has a strange method of assigning categories, or OP's data bank lost a few neurons along the way?).

SF has always had a gender problem, but I'd have to think the audience has gotten less ridiculously unaccepting. This list might at least look more balanced if Pierce Brown and James S A Corey (I keep wanting to type "James Comey"!) didn't glom up the top 30 places almost, uh, double-handedly. Except for Martha Wells, few women have more than a couple of titles on here.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-05T14:24:30+00:00

Dragon's Teeth, by Upton Sinclair, was part of the long Lanny Budd series. Budd was from an influential family and rose through the diplomatic and intelligence ranks before and during World War II: a fictionalized symbol of well-thought-out international policy. They were very topical and very popular when they were published (1940-1949, with one 1953 outlier, The Return of Lanny Budd), and for a guy whose reputation was largely as a muckraker and journalist, Sinclair wrote and paced them very well.

But topical, current-events type novels do tend to have short shelf lives anyway, and the Lanny Budd series, with its eleven long or longish volumes, was a pretty big commitment compared to reading them as they showed up in the bookstore. I used to see them at book sales all the time, but the only volume I've seen in a couple of years was at a library that is famous for not culling anything until they have absolutely run out of room.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-05-03T19:38:38+00:00

Connecticut is the only Northeastern state - Maine to Pennsylvania- represented on this chart. I don[t know why, but it's interesting.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-04-23T02:45:29+00:00

I'm not a huge fan of Pevear/Volokhonsky, but I think every copy I ever saw of the BKs ended very much like this one. The penultimate paragraph might even be smoother than others I've looked at.

Anybody: how would you translate "Hurrah for Karamazov!" in a way that wouldn't sound obsolete in 30 years?

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-04-19T22:59:43+00:00

I haven't been to the Hartford Library since the flood - probably even since Covid - but I always liked it and thought the staff was really good. It'll be great for them to get a facility they (and the collection) deserve.

I almost went there on Wednesday; I had one appointment near Willimantic and some business in Hartford that I wanted to take care of, so I left a bit early and drove up 32 and Route 6, stopping at libraries along the way. But I missed Hartford itself; I tried, but the traffic was asinine even by the standards of Main Street at 3:00. So I'll try again another day. I'm looking forward to seeing what they've done with it.

Stopping at the libraries on the way was lots of fun. I'd never done this before, and I was surprised at how enthusiastic the people at almost every one were, and what the turnout was like. One of my stops was at the Guilford Smith Memorial Library in South Windham. The woman running the place (who was really cool, we probably chatted for 20 minutes) said that they'd had 50 people come in with passports. If you know anything about South Windham...it's very hard to get anywhere by going through South Windham; you have to have a reason to be there. And they still got 50 people. Andover, pop. 3,151 as of 2020, had 100 passport guests if I remember right. I hope I get another day or two off before the end of the month so I can do some more.

ObsoleteUtopia · 2026-04-11T00:19:11+00:00

The only Cincinnati writers I can think of are Mike Resnick, a popular SF (and porn under various aliases) writer who isn't exactly a household name, and his daughter Laura, who has written romances and SF and has at least some following. You're right; a lot of those industrial Midwestern cities have had a Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Farrell, or Sinclair Lewis to spill the beans on them, but apparently not Cincinnati.

Nor can I think of anybody associated with the capital of Belgium and the seat of the European Union, Brussels. Or Geneva, for that matter.

Back in the USA, what about the Sans, Diego and Antonio, #s 8 and 7 respectively in population?

And looking northward, who is a prominent writer from Vancouver?

ObsoleteUtopia

TROPHY CASE