Reading Copy

Here’s another crime fiction interview for you mystery buff’s. Lee Child talks about his newest novel and how he got the idea to write it.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Sports books are one of my passions, particularly football books, American football that is, although I also read soccer books too but they are, of course, football books in reality.

With the Super Bowl around the corner, some of my thoughts and recommendations about great football books are currently on the site. Everyone should read Friday Night Lights.

Since I wrote that piece I’ve actually moved on to another football book - It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium by John Ed Bradley. I’m really enjoying it - the book is written by a former LSU center who turned to writing after his college career ended.

Popularity: 13% [?]

The Guardian - as always the booklover’s newspaper - interviews crime writer Graham Hurley. Portsmouth’s version of Ian Rankin.

Popularity: 9% [?]

A lot of people dream about opening a cosy little bookstore - here’s another one in The Guardian blog

Popularity: 15% [?]

AbeBooks.com currently has an excellent feature about books of hours thanks to our friends at Fine Books & Collections magazine.

As a group, Books of Hours are arguably the most beautiful of all books. They are also some of the most expensive, with modest examples starting in five figures. One of the finest Book of Hours—the richly illuminated Rothschild Prayerbook—sold for a record $13.5 million (£8.6 million) in 1999.

Books of Hours are private devotional books that were enormously popular with wealthy Catholics in the fifteenth century. They were typically structured around the hourly prayers observed in monasteries, and devout Catholics were expected stop eight times a day and recite the appropriate liturgy.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Forbes.com has the best books on investing. I won’t be reading these books - what’s the point? I can’t make an investment with my life savings of an old button and a packet of M&Ms, although this one sounds OK…..

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, by Edwin Lefèvre

For pure entertainment, this book is hard to beat. It was first published in 1923 as a novel. Lefèvre follows the life and times of Larry Livingston, a fictitious name for Jesse Livermore, one of Wall Street’s shrewdest traders.

Hugely entertaining, this is an insider’s view of the stock market in the wild, unregulated days of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Livermore was a speculator who made and lost several fortunes. He never considered himself an investor and didn’t mind being long or short, so long as he was right. Correctly assessing that he would never catch the top or bottom, he would wait for a trend to develop and then jump in. In today’s market he’d be called a momentum investor.

What keeps this book so popular after 84 years? Livermore’s advice on exploiting fear, greed and the herd mentality are just as relevant today as they were then

Popularity: 13% [?]

Lots of stories have caught my eye this morning…..

100 years of Mills & Boon in The Observer in the UK;

From The Guardian, online shoppers prefer books - oh thank God for that!;

Martin Amis earns £3,000 per hour for teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester according to The Guardian - nice work if you can get it;

Striking/starving Hollywood screenwriters are desperately sending off book proposals to publishers as they look for their next meal according to the LA Times - why don’t they apply to the University of Manchester?

The Scotsman has an interview with AL Kennedy, author of Costa Award-winning Day - I bet her stand-up routine is pretty good.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Someone took the time to compare the SAT scores and the ten most popular books at every college (on FaceBook). And while as the creator points out correlation does not equal causation - the results are interesting.

Popularity: 31% [?]

“Crime books easier to write than ’serious’ novels? That attitude is, frankly, cobblers”.

God, I love the word ‘cobblers’ - I also love the word ‘bobbins’, another very effective word for describing anything that’s rubbish…. like Dan Brown books for instance.

(In case you didn’t know, cobblers is Cockney rhyming slang for cobbler’s awls - the sharp hand-tools used to make holes in leather - and awls rhymes with balls.)

Popularity: 13% [?]

The Guardian has a feature on ‘penny bloods’ with Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd movie now open in the UK.

The term “penny blood” - first used to describe a popular genre of literature in the first half of the 19th century - originated as a term of abuse. “Bloods”, as one would expect, generally retailed for the affordable price of one penny or just a bit more. They offered inexpensive serial narratives to an emerging audience of (primarily) younger readers for whom even the least expensive of the many novels being sold by booksellers would still have been considered something of a luxury.

Popularity: 8% [?]

While Dan Brown sits at home in Maine watching Oprah and Judge Judy, and taking little naps after lunch, and generally enjoying the life of the rich and famous, the publishing world is praying that he’ll churn out another book. After all, the Harry Potter years are over so it’s Dan Brown or nothing….

The Wall Street Journal reports that “the whole industry is impatient.”

Popularity: 9% [?]

The Telegraph has compiled a list of 100 books every child should read. In the introduction they state:

“We have to stop proclaiming reading as a ladder to academic success. Treated simply as an educational commodity, some kind of pill to be taken to aid intellectual development, it is all too often counter-productive and ultimately alienating. Of course we must and should study literature in our schools, but first we have to imbue our children with a love of stories.”

What are the books you think children should read?

Popularity: 22% [?]

USA Today has an interview with Stephen King about his new book, Duma Key.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Art Garfunkel’s list of every book he’s ever read. How can he remember them all? Did he write them down after he’d finished each one? I suppose he’s had a lot of time on his hands for reading since he broke up with Paul Simon.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Bobby Fischer found solace in a bookstore in Iceland.

Popularity: 15% [?]