The Meme Of Five

No, this isn't a chain post. That would be the meme of seven you're thinking of.

About a week ago, Chris flagged a blogger dust-up between independent journo David Axe and the milbloggers at Blackfive. It wasn't pretty. Since then, five has been dogging me everywhere I go. Not the mil types - more like something out of the Jim Caviezel/Ian McKellan Prisoner remake, with that big, luminescent, bouncing ball taking me down everytime I try to get away: first, at a slick new(ish) online resource called Five Books (and its companion site The Browser), then, between the lines at The Morning News, and Friday night, in a copy of the Times Literary Supplement I picked up at Euston station before catching my train home.

Five Books is a fantastically focused little website that deals in books, books, books, and interviews with those who write them and read them. I stumbled across it a little while ago, and love it for its simplicity, clarity and focus. Last week, its editors were quizzing writers and scholars on their five favorites in dark and nasty topics: Audrey Kurth Cronin and Mary Habeck on terrorism, Andy McNab on the politics of war, James Miller on apocalyptic novels, Lindsay Porter on assassination, Simon Conway on crime and terror. And that's just last week's offerings. Five Books' sister site, The Browser, has nothing all to do with The Meme Of Five, but if you're tired of tracking hundreds of news sources and happy to rely on someone else's nose for tasty tidbits, this mini-aggregator is worth the time.

Meanwhile, over at The Morning News, a Gothamish local e-zine that's been around for more than a decade: The Biblioracle, by writer John Warner, who "takes the last five books you read and recommends what to read next." Seriously, go take a look. The folks at Morning News have published "A Short Primer To the Biblioracle", which was open for reader inputs for one day only, on May 27th... and if you scroll down to the comments section, the 1045 comments are a blend of reader lists and Warner's recommendation to each. Overall, a pretty creative and stimulating approach to content generation.

Last but not least, in the latest Times Literary Supplement, some fiction: Keith Colquhoun's Five Deadly Words. I read the TLS review in hardcopy, and haven't been able to find it online anywhere (go figure, this is The Times we're talking about after all) - see the May 28th edition, p. 20. Heather O'Donoghue's review describes Five Deadly Words, a book about a deposed Asian dictator on the lam in merry old England, as "an oddly mesmerizing and quirky novel peopled with a motley group of hard-to-read eccentrics." Sounds a bit like academia, really...