newsgroup: rec.arts.books

After all the predictions that the net was going to destroy both community and interest in any text longer than an email, it's a wonderful irony that one of the busiest newsgroups is rec.arts.books. In fact, this is a community in love not just with books (poetry, novels, non-fiction, anything in the printed word genre), but with words themselves. In rec.arts.books you can read or join in discussions of "defenestration" and other fun, odd, or interesting words readers encounter in their favorite books. Or you can get specific and chat about puns in Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and end up defending "The Great Gatsby" or some other classic that's being trashed by some other reader. Not that you have to get all high-minded to hang around rec.arts.books. You can trot out your desert island list, argue over the best Robert Heinlein science fiction novel or confess your lust for books on tape. Rec.arts.books takes all comers with a passion for words, both the ones you read and the ones you use to talk to others about what you've read. -R.K.

subject matter: literature, language

regional affiliation: global

format: newsgroup

language: English

cost: no cost