Yet another museum book

Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, by Sharon Waxman. About the wonders of antiquity, from Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Italy, that are sitting in the Met, the Louvre and the British Museum.

Not as much about the ins and outs of the museums themselves, but interesting.

Another museum book

I'm not a reader exclusively of museum books or anything, but as it happens, one book on a topic is followed by another book on the topic.

This one about the Met in New York, by Danny Danziger, who appears to be a Guggenheim. The book is called "Museum" and it's quite interesting, it's about the people who work there.

A snippet: "It is the Metropolitan's boast that every culture from every part of the world is represented here, from Florence to Thebes to Papua, New Guinea, from the earliest times to the present, and in every medium."

Personal informatics

For the truly compulsive, from an article in The Wall Street Journal, there's a new trend involving keeping tabs of every little thing we do. "Everyone creates data--every smile, conversation and car ride is a potential datapoint. These quotidian aggragators believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live."

I am kind of compulsive, but this is not for me. Sounds very stressful frankly!

Collections

"All our lives are collections curated through memory."

From Dry Storeroom No. 1, The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, by Richard Fortey. The museum is sort of the ultimate found museum.