Are you addicted to reading?

Gwen Dawson wrote this great article on her blog today about how to tell if you are addicted to reading or not. She also had a link to a fun quiz you can take to find out if you are addicted.
My results?
"You are totally crazy about reading novels. It is more than a passion for you. Reading novels is an obsession for you."
Uh-oh...what I want to know is, is it unhealthy?

A new Richard Russo novel

Roxanna Robinson reviews Russo's latest novel, his seventh, in today's New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Join the President Obama Book Club!

Check out this presidential reading list from The Daily Beast. Its packed full of what President Obama has been reading so far this year, many of them presidential biographies, some literary fiction and a couple others on very timely topics (read: environmental technology and climate change).

The lost art of reading

Please don't tell me people aren't reading -- I just don't believe it. But I will grant you that people aren't reading well. Here's the article from the Los Angeles Times...

New Pynchon novel released

Thomas Pynchon has a new novel out and the reviews are mixed...

Frank McCourt, 1930-2009

The author of Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt, has died at age 78.

Graphic novels in the works

Twilight, that infamous teen vampire novel, will soon be released as a graphic novel. A perfect medium for this particular genre, one of my favorites being the Anita Blake vampire hunter series which has been re-done as a very successful graphic novel series. I was also very excited to hear that my favorite novel of all time, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, will also be forthcoming as a graphic novel. Yippee! Kudos to the writers who don't feel afraid to reinvent their work in a different format.

How to connect with booklovers on the Internet

With all the possibilities available on the web, are you still unsure where to go for book, author and literary information? This is kind of an old web page (updated about a year ago), but most of the links still work. 100 Places to connect with Bibliophiles Online. Just my cup of tea.

Much ado about the supposed "sequel" to Catcher in the Rye?

There has been a lot of talk lately about a supposed "sequel" to Salinger's most famous work, Catcher in the Rye. Here's one take from Slate Magazine's Juliet Lapidos, which is actually laugh-out-loud funny because its not that she agrees with Salinger, but that this sequel is supposedly so badly written.
Having just finished reading Catcher a few weeks ago (I know - shocking!) I can't say as I'm that overwhelmed by the controversy, but its an interesting story just from the vantage point of authorial control vs. readers' demands for closure and/or some sort of say in what happens to a character.

Reading aloud in the modern age

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote an interesting piece in The New York Times last month about the joys of reading aloud. Read it here.
His last sentence struck me, "But what I would suggest is that our idea of reading is incomplete, impoverished, unless we are also taking the time to read aloud." This is more than readily apparent when we are children and we are learning and acquiring language, but it seems a lost art as we grow older. I remember some of my favorite moments in English class when I was called on by my English teacher to read out loud. It was the art of being to connect with the words and their intentionality, to bring life to the meaning of the author's written work. There is a beauty in that when you hear someone get the book, to bring life to it by reading it aloud.