Who among us doesn't suffer from information overload? But information can and should be a beautiful thing, and no where is it displayed more beautifully than at informationisbeautiful.net created by David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer whose passion is visualizing large quantities of information with nary a boring Powerpoint chart to be found!

Here are some of my favorites. Click on the image to go to the original post which usually includes the sources used to create the chart.

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A cool book promotion idea comes to us from Cairo, Egypt where Alef Bookstores has launched the "Taxi of Knowledge" initiative.

Alef Bookstores mission is to "instill the light of knowledge and learning that once upon a time made great Arab thinkers the pillars of modern civilization in each and every individual who walks through our doors" - an objective that now extends to the passengers in over 200 Cairo taxis.

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As you probably already know, journalist and book reviewer Meghan Cox Gurdon unleashed a firestorm in the world of teen literature with her recent Wall Street Journal article in which she wrote of the "explicit abuse, violence and depravity" in many of the YA books published these days. The general gist of her argument seems to be that reading violent literature may lead to violence in the reader: "it is ... possible - indeed, likely - that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures."

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Group Messenger for Book Clubs is a new, free, and really easy to use messaging service that takes the hassle out of choosing books, scheduling meetings, and deciding genres or topics.

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London's Southbank Centre is planning a huge "Poetry Parnassus" to coincide with next year's Olympics.

Members of the public are invited to nominate up to 3 poets from any of the 205 Olympic competing nations. The organizers will select one from each country who will be provided with airfare, accommodation and visa so they can attend the event to be held in London in late June/early July 2012.

That a movie of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit is in production has been known for some time, but what I didn't realize is that the plans are for not one but two movies. The first, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey", will open in December 2012 (as will, incidentally, a movie of Life of Pi). The second, "The Hobbit: There and Back Again", will open in December 2013.

It will be interesting to see how the director strings out The Hobbit, a rather short and simple story compared to The Lord of the Rings, into two movies.I'm also intrigued to see how the actors who are reprising their roles from the "Lord of the Rings" (filmed a decade ago) will manage to handle the aging process.

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