summer adventures

Librarian Nancy Pearl recommended some adventure novels for summer reading on NPR...

pop-ups

Remember those cute pop-up books from when you were a kid? Well, the University of North Texas Libraries has a wonderful site which takes you on a tour through the history of pop-up and moveable picture books...
{Note: found on LII.org}

Book Sense winner

Book Sense, the online commercial venture of independent booksellers across the U.S., announced their 2005 Book Sense Book of the Year award for fiction: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke...

books to remember

The New York Public Library has an annual 25 Books to Remember -- a list of the 25 best books from the previous year's publications, both fiction and nonfiction. The list is compiled by a committee of librarians who read TONS of reviews to narrow down the list to 25 -- I should know! I served on the committee selecting the books for the 1998 list...

Austen adapted

Finished another retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice over the weekend. This book is entitled Vanity and Vexation: a novel of pride and prejudice by Kate Fenton. The new twist in this story involves a middle-aged reporter-turned-novelist, who moves to the country and stumbles into a real-life Pride and Prejudice plot. The Mr. Darcy character in this new P&P is a dark, arrogant, & headstrong female director named Mary. The Elizabeth Bennet character is reversed, and is now Nick Bevan, the novelist. Misunderstandings and mix-ups ensue, with much hilarity. One particularly neat device involves a "novel-within-a-novel" plot twist which surprises the reader halfway through the novel.

freaky economics

Book of the Day goes to...
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner, which has been getting all kinds of crazy press in the past few weeks. Yesterday, the two authors were interviewed on the TODAY show with Matt Lauer about their controversial new book. The two authors come to some startling conclusions about ideas, using rigorous statistical analysis. Examples include: "Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?"
Read some reviews here: About.com, BookBrowse, English Rules, Powell's Books, SocioWeb, The Weekly Standard...

foreign fiction prize

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, given out by Arts Council England, was announced. The winner is Windows on the World by Frédéric Beigbeder -- a novel about September 11th.

one wild and crazy guy...

I'm in the midst of listening to Steve Martin narrate his novella, Shopgirl -- its fantastic by the way -- and found out that the movie version is to be released in October 2005, starring Claire Danes, and (of course!) Steve Martin as two of the main characters. His most recent novel, The Pleasure of My Company recently won Martin a Grammy for Best Spoken Word album of 2004...

fast-food reading

Want to learn how to read more -- faster? Steve Leveen shows us how... (p.s. this guy happens to know his stuff -- he is CEO of Levenger)

fragmentary white noise

From the "wow, what do people do with all their free time?" category via Bookslut today...
Here's the hook -- "White Noise on White Noise is a collection of 36 randomly selected fragments of text from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. The identifying details of each fragment - the page number it appears on, the line number to begin quoting from and the number of lines to quote - were selected using a random number generator. The fragments appear in page number order, to provide an experience akin to quickly browsing through the novel in a bookstore..."
The novel was interesting, but come on, is this really necessary?