If you'd like to spend this weekend reading a whodunit set in 7th century China, try "The Chinese Maze Murders" by Robert van Gulik, this month's free ebook from the University of Chicago Press. It was first published in the 1950s and is the first in a series of novels featuring Judge Dee, who must both solve the crimes and sentence the guilty. It sells for about $10 elsewhere. From the description: "Poisoned plums, a cryptic scroll picture, passionate love letters, and a hidden murderer with a penchant for torturing and killing women lead Judge Dee to the heart of the...

From the site: Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky’s home town of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America’s most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. “Pinsky offers a provocative take on the relationship between artists and small-town America. He explicates quotations from Cather, Faulkner and Twain, as well as scenes from filmmakers like Hitchcock and Sturges, and reminiscences about his own...

Libraries have been getting a lot of media attention lately, what with the Fox News story asking whether Chicago’s libraries were worth the money (and subsequent responses), and the Old Spice parody and actual Old Spice social networking videos about libraries. Now NPR blogger Linda Holmes wonders if this might be the start of a new movement in pop culture focusing on libraries. Call it a hunch, but it seems to me that the thing is in the air that happens right before something — families with a million kids, cupcakes, wedding coordinators —...

It seems that not just school libraries are in danger of being considered “luxuries.” A Chicago Fox News story (found via BoingBoing) casts a gimlet eye on the Windy City’s public libraries, which Chicago finances to the tune of $120 million per year—2.5% of yearly property taxes. The article wonders whether libraries are necessary now that the Internet and e-books are around, and whether the money could be better spent elsewhere. The reporter says she spent an hour in Chicago’s Harold Washington Library, one of the largest and busiest libraries in the nation, and counted 300 patrons, most...