Avian viruses are back in the news. I don’t typically take specific interest in flu virus-related articles, but this one in the NY Times caught my attention. I’m no Americanist, but I know about the 1918 pandemic that killed nearly 50 million people worldwide. This was particularly devastating because it was in the wake of WWI. The late William Maxwell, fiction editor of The New Yorker and a novelist, lost his mother in 1919 due to the flu pandemic. The majority of his fiction deals with childhood loss and suffering, as a result.

The University of Texas at Austin will probably be in the news for a long time regarding the odd absense of books from their library. I read a Christian Science Monitor article about it and was very pleased indeed when the author mentioned Alberto Manguel:

I told myself that my devotion to bound volumes might be merely old-fashioned.

Then Alberto Manguel, the author of “A History of Reading,” came to Rhodes College as scholar-in-residence. His latest title might make some people’s eyes glaze over. But don’t shortchange yourself – listening to Mr. Manguel and his ideas could just clarify our collective consciousness about the importance of reading.

In Manguel’s words, “It is relatively easy to be superficially literate, to follow a sitcom, to understand an advertising joke, to read a political message, to chat online. But to go further and deeper … we need to learn to read in other ways, differently, in order to learn to think.”

I hope someone doesn’t get the bright idea to replace gardens with flat, bland images of flowers (she wrote as she looked at her vase full of gerbera daisies).