Feed Me!

I recently decided I've been frittering away one to two hours every morning glued to the tube, shuttling between CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC, and that a good portion of what I've absorbed during this daily ritual has been crappola.

The tipping point came about two weeks ago, when MSNBC presented a "breaking news story" about a fire in a multi-story nursing home somewhere in the northeast. Smoke poured out of the roof as a fireman slowly hoisted a nightie-clad nonagenarian down a ladder in what appeared to be slow motion, grandma's dangling white legs and unfortunate wedgie there for all the world to see.

No problem, I thought, and I flipped the channel to CNN. Same grandma. Same white legs. Same wedgie. I continued flipping channels and discovered that there was no escaping this news du jour -- regular updates on the situation continued, on national news, throughout the morning. I realize that this coverage was probably of momentous importance to the relatives of the nursing home residents, and it was of no small significance to the local city involved, but if a national news channel can find nothing better to broadcast ad nauseam throughout the day, it has a dearth of real news and a serious oversupply of airtime.

What does any of this have to do with books? I decided to reclaim my wasted mornings by developing an assortment of book-related RSS audio feeds that I could listen to each day in lieu of the tube, and I've stumbled upon some real gems that I'd like to share.

After spending considerable time reviewing the merits of various prose and poetry sites, I narrowed my selections to the following RSS feeds, which currently seem to offer me the most bang for my buck: (1) NPR: Books (2) the New York Times Book Review podcast (3) KCRW's Bookworm, (4) Slate's Audio Book Club , (5) Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day , and (6) Sonibyte's Poem of the Day . Each site provides instructions on how to subscribe to regular podcast feeds.

Here are direct links to some of the best episodes I gathered from these sites over the course of the last two weeks:

1. Excerpts of past interviews with Philip Roth, in honor of his 75th birthday, gleaned from the NPR Books Site.

2. A reading of the first passages of "The Gathering," (winner of the Man Booker Prize 2007) by Ann Enright, courtesy of the KRCW Bookworm site. (one warning -- this podcast always begins with a cheerful "theme song" that will grate on your nerves)

3. A Slate Book Club discussion of "The House of Mirth."

4. A Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day about the persistence of desire.

5. A curiously engaging poem about a snail from Sonibyte Poem of the Day (scroll down to "Considering the Snail)

(Some of these sites may have a limited cyberlife --my apologies if, for some bizarre reason, you are reading this post in the distant future)

Experiment with your own mix of RSS feeds -- you'll enjoy yourself and improve your mind, which is more that can be said about watching minute to minute coverage of a toddler's miraculous rescue from an abandoned well in Scranton.