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To call the collection of the Library of Congress exhaustive is understatement of the highest degree. Charged with maintaining and continuing to build on the world’s greatest treasury of recorded (and copyrighted) human knowledge, the Library has a mind-boggling amount of information and data accessible to Congress, the government, and the public at large. ‘Accessible’ is the key word there, since the public at large largely isn’t anywhere near D.C. to drop by the Library for a quick browse.

Fortunately those wishing to have their minds boggled can do it using a web browser, as a great deal of the collections are digitized and placed online. Furthermore much of the materials about American history and culture have been organized into over a hundred American Memory collections, cross-linked and searchable, and all readable and watchable online. Early animation shorts coexist with advertising broadsides and ethnographic study summaries all together in a massive store of primary source information. In addition, lesson plans and other educator resources are also provided to stimulate interesting teaching of America’s unique heritage. It’s all there to see and free to do so.

Romeo What the heck was that big scene all about?
Juliet Who knows? I just passed out for a second
and everybody’s losing it. Luckily the dagger wasn’t sharp.
Romeo And the apothecary screwed up big-time!
What do you say we head home?
Juliet Sounds like a plan, my medieval man!

And so ends the “happy ending” edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, only one of a number of modifications available to customers of CustomizedClassics. In addition to being able to switch Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet to Joe Sixpack and Jane Doe, book buyers can also choose from a number of Sherlock Holmes classics, Tarzan and The Jungle book and more, having their names and other details substituted. A version of Moby Dick starring a corpulent enemy or mother in law is even possible. Literary subversives could role-reverse Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, or even Watson and the Hound. It’s a far cry from the customized kids’ books of a decade ago, and remains to be seen where this could end up: Stephen King’s IT, starring you and your friends?

Literature published on the web doesn’t need to be funny to be noteworthy. Equally cynical and articulate, the un-named Misanthropic Bitch has written rants and taunts for five years, leaving few from the wrath of her pen (er, whatever the computer equivalent would be. Mouse? Cursor?). She seems to enjoy annoying her intended targets as much as she does writing, as she has accomplished copious successes in both. It may be difficult to agree with every point she makes, but it’s even harder to argue against most of them.

Believe it or not, before the great blogging craze, some brave individuals had personal sites and pages filled with daily minutiae, anecdotes and stories–they just weren’t so easy to publish. Back then it took a certain kind, well, a lot of kinds, really, but one such type is the articulate but funny writer.

One such writer is Craig Mitchell, who has been posting journal entries, short stories and essays since 1998. These can be found on his site, as well as the epic dating novella “She hates my futon”. Also on the site is a very active forum, which Craig contributes to heartily. He’s got a writing style that’s both easy to read and engaging enough to want to devour all at once.

So what does it take to be a detective? A license, a fedora and a code of honor? Or is PI-ness more transcendent than that?

Studying detectives of all sorts is an art in itself, and given all of the media in which shamuses appear, a full amalysis would be a daunting task. Such is the case The Thrilling Detective Guy took, though probably not for a sobbin’ dame.

Evidence on flatfoots of all walks of life is revealed, covering a range from Deckard of Blade Runner to Sam Spade in all of his incarnations by Dashiell Hammett (et al). To call the site comprehensive is an understatement in the least.

For over a decade John Camp, under a pseudonym John Sandford, has been publishing exceptional murder thrillers in his Prey series. Though the books share many recurring characters (and the Twin Cities) his material never gets repetitive, and protagonist Lucas Davenport remains as interesting as at the beginning.

Lucas is (at times) a Minneapolis detective who drives a Porsche. His hobbies include role playing and as a game designer he has done quite well. His record on the beat is just as successful. Sandford surrounds Lucas with a number of interesting and well-fleshed-out characters for every outing as well.

Camp also wrote a number of books under his own name but his Sandford ones were the bestsellers. This is the exact opposite of the Stephen King/Richard Bachmann phenomenon, for those who keep track of the seedier doings of their favorite authors.

Sandford’s books definitely merit a spot on any thinking reader’s favorites list. His official web site is well maintained, and boasts synopses, reviews, excerpts and more from all of his books under either name as well as tour schedules, personal information and a message board.

Those outside of the genre may not know that all science fiction is not equal. Though no scale exists, there is a definite spectrum of how ‘hard’ a given SF work is considered. A truly ‘hard’ story is one that is deeply rooted in the scientifically possible, with everything else being rather quite plausible. Hard SF can be just as prone to bad predictions as the Jetsons, but usually it’s closer to eventual reality than pure speculation.

Tedium aside, one eminently readable yet hard SF author is Charles Sheffield. In his book Between the strokes of night he wrestles with the speed of light constraint against a story of intergalactic travel. And manages to do it well. He also covers considerable ground on the subjective perception of time, if not the entire falsehood of what humans call time. Nothing in the book is cliched, and to show the good basis of the story, Sheffield revisited the text after seventeen years, adding 25,000 words and a new ending, keeping pace with science but leaving the core narrative unscathed.

To call the book “timeless” could well be considered ironic, if not altogether preposterous.

Sheffield maintains his own webpage, replete with a drawn out biography and excerpts from his books.

Words are funny things. Most people, it seems, could get along just fine using a mere couple hundred words (in English, that is). So many, many more have been uttered and phrased and forgotten that it’s a wonder anyone would try to keep track of them, let alone elaborate on them.

But that is precisely the undertaking what Florida high school teacher Jeff Miller has, well, undertaken, and the results are staggering.

Mystery fiction’s a pretty murky genre. For less hardcore fans, a great majority of it is pretty cookie-cutter stuff (i.e. clichéd and tired) and hardly worth reading. Eric Garcia’s books, though, can’t well be pigeonholed or predicted easily, as they detail the cases of Vincent Rubio, PI, a longtime L.A. resident who also happens to be a Velociraptor.

In Anonymous Rex and its prequel Casual Rex, Vincent and a whole slew of other modern dinos hide in plain sight among human society by wearing elaborate disguises. The cleverness of this device is not wasted on the rest of the story, as Garcia has worked details upon details of this alternate society, down to their famous predecessors and favorite controlled substances.

Unwilling to be pigeonholed himself, Garcia’s also written some human-only fiction, namely Matchstick Men, made into a film (late summer 2003) by Ridley Scott.

Find this all at ericgarcia.com: He maintains and publishes it himself, and even responds personally to messageboard posts. What a great guy.