The web for readers

Purists say you can't read on screen. Purists blame the Net for lowering standards of literacy. Purists insist that nothing could possibly compare to the book "" the genuine, dead-tree article. Purists, in short, are a pain in the neck.

My day as an online reader starts with The Invisible Library (www.invisiblelibrary.com ). This is a venerable, no bells-and-whistles site. It's incredibly soothing, reading about books that don't exist except in the overheated imaginations of authors.

Kilgore Trout's The Gutless Wonder (created by Kurt Vonnegut), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Behind the Moon (created by Neil Gaiman), Humbert Humbert's The Proustian Theme in A Letter from Keats to Ben Bailey (created by Vladimir Nabokov) "" it's as much fun speculating about the contents of these books as it is a relief knowing I will never have to add them to an overflowing To Read list.

Salon's Literary Guide to the World
(http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/index.html ) slots in between the orange juice and the pancakes.

Hillary Frey dreamed this up when she started thinking: "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a travel guide devoted not to restaurants, hotels and museums, but to the literature of a place?" I discover New Guinea courtesy "a horny anthropologist, a stricken war veteran and a curious young novelist" "" great fun.

The urgent summons of email keeps me from reading anything for the next hour, but it's easy enough to listen to poetry. At the Poetry Archive (www.poetryarchive.org ), Allan Ginsberg's voice rings across the years from 1956, when he read "America" in front of a live audience.

As a bonus, I listen to the only surviving recording of Rudyard Kipling's voice "" a fragment from "France", a minor poem, that he read in 1921. It's a scratchy, far-off sound, but it still sends a small shiver down my spine.

Indian and subcontinental poets are still poorly represented, but over at the South Asian Literary Recordings Project (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/archive.html ), I genuflect at the Urdu section to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Kaifi Azmi, Qurrutulain Hyder.

I catch a few slam poetry recordings at The Book of Voices (http://voices.e-poets.net ) before dropping by the Nobel Prize Literature archive (http://nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/ ) . It's nice to segue back and forth between Harold Pinter and Elias Canetti, and though Tagore's acceptance speech happened before audio recording became the norm, I read the acceptance telegram he sent when he won the Nobel.

Next, there are two sites to be bookmarked for nephews and nieces""the interactive Alice in Wonderland exhibit at http://www.ruthannzaroff.com/wonderland/ , where you can watch the Cheshire Cat disappear, and the Encyclopaedia of Arda (http://www.glyphweb.com/ARDA/), the one-stop destination for all things Tolkien. I flirt with the virtual literary worlds, from Moll Flander's London to the Shakespeare of Midsummer Night's Dream, at http://www.literaryworlds.wmich.edu/worldlist.htm but they're a trifle too academic for my taste. Artbomb (http://www.artbomb.net/home.jsp), as usual, has all the news I want on graphic novels and a couple of new online exhibits.

Perhaps this is too lightweight, I think guiltily, and do penance at The Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo).

This nifty random engine generates text that might fit into any poco-pomo journal, to wit: "If one examines the postmaterial paradigm of reality, one is faced with a choice: either accept posttextual discourse or conclude that the goal of the writer is significant form, but only if consciousness is equal to reality." It doesn't make much sense, but it answers a niggling question "" do I miss not having done my PhD? Na. And now I have to go back to Poetry Archive, they have new recordings.