So Many Roads

Yesterday I stumbled across a website called The Magic Victrola.
Obviously I clicked through.

As it turns out, the site hosts an online book in eight parts by Sunnie Day. Aside from the fact that it's about a time-machine Victrola leading to a 1920s incarnation of George Clooney (what more do you really need), it's also blog-worthy thanks to the medium: because this is an online book, Day is able to insert picture slideshows of relevant images and embed youtube videos of the songs that she writes about directly into her prose.

On some level, this is becoming de rigeur for major print books about music: Alex Ross' (non-fiction) The Rest is Noise and Listen to This have a companion website featuring snippets of the music he describes; and Wesley Stace's novel Charles Jessold Considered as a Murderer refers readers to the author's website - which leads to other informational sites including the Charles Jessold homepage. Academics have also been getting in on the action: check out Marcel Cobussen's awesome interactive dissertation.

But all these last examples still store the material in two separate locations: text v. sound, print v. web. Day's novella may not be a book for the ages (whatever that means), but she does such a wonderful job using the internet medium to its fullest potential.