All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hours, and the books of all time. -- John Ruskin
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life feel free, significant and interesting. -- Aldous Huxley
It matters a great deal that your book-food be strong meat. We are what we think about. Think about trivial or weak things, and you lose fiber and become flabby in spirit. -- Amy Carmichael
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. -- Henry David Thoreau
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. -- E M Forster
The soviet dissident Yevgeney Yevtushenko once said 'the truth is replaced by silence, and the silence is a lie'. He could have been talking about the media in the US and UK (that in Europe is markedly better). When we have stripped away the obvious trivia, info-tainment and info-verts we are left with less than 5% that can lay claim to serious reporting, comment and analysis. Of this remaining 5% it is mainly party political claptrap and not much else, on the real issues that exist in the world the media remains silent.
The truth, the news, comment and serious analysis, is out there, it just never gets into the media mainstream. If we search, we can find it in cyberspace. Cyberspace has become the outlet for pamphleteers, resurrecting a tradition of dissent from earlier centuries, and a resurgence of the many underground publications that proliferated in the 1960s. Outside of cyberspace there are many small publishers and little known writers (often well known writers) whose books are rarely found on the shelves of libraries or good bookshops.
One reason why The X-Files has been such a runaway success is because the public is well aware that it has been taken for a ride by big government and big business, the state-corporate nexus.
The intention of this small corner of cyberspace is to try and highlight some of the many books that are worth reading. Ask for them in your book stores, recommend them to your friends, demand they appear on the shelves of your public and college libraries. Or why not release into the wild as a BookCrossing book and track the book's progress through the Internet via its unique BookCrossing ID (BCID)?
For an exploration of the many nooks and crannies and alternate byways of cyberspace return to the main index.