The Sunday Times’ property section has an article on publisher Peter Kindersley - the man who brought us The Joy of Sex, which has sold an incredible eight million copies. Property-focused but still very interesting.
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I’m going to create a crazy blog and then wait for the megabucks book deal. Cue article in the NY Times. Stuff White People Like is a very clever blog - as a middle-class white person, I think it is very funny. The amazing thing is that this blog has only been around since January. Someone told me about it three weeks ago and here they are getting the $300,000 advance from a publisher.
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Margaret Atwood salutes Anne of Green Gables in Saturday’s Guardian. To the outside world, Margaret is Canadian literature so I suppose The Guardian had to ask her to write it.
Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908, a year before my mother was born, so when I first grinned and snivelled my way through it at the age of eight, it was a youthful 40. I revisited it through the eyes of my own child in the 1980s, when it was approaching 80. Then our family actually went to Prince Edward Island, and stayed in Charlottetown, and saw the sprightly, upbeat Anne of Green Gables musical that’s been running there continuously since 1965. I enjoyed it a lot, but watching a show about an 11-year-old girl with some real 11-year-old girls casts a different light on things: some of that enjoyment was vicarious
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Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, is interviewed at The Guardian.
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Jhumpa Lahiri is profiled at the New York Magazine. Her new book is Unaccustomed Earth.
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Over in the UK, there are several stories this morning….the Orange Prize for Fiction is paying a price for recruiting a flakey celeb as a judge. While at The Bookseller magazine, If You Want Closure in your Relationship, Start with your Legs has won the oddest book title of the year award - I don’t think its an odd title. And in Harrogate in the Republic of Yorkshire, a rare Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, has turned up at a charity shop reports the local paper.
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Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, and Martin Luther King had a lot in common says the Daily Telegraph.
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America remains safe and secure after author and artist Sebastian Horsley was turned away last week. Thankfully, some of the most incisive citizens of the United States are keeping watch.
They also asked him what he was keeping in his hat, to which he replied: “My head.”
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In the old days, there were just cookbooks. Now there are more books about food and eating than you can shake a truffle at. So says a lady in the Eugene Register-Guard in Oregon. She’s quite right - last night I started reading just such a book…. Heat by Bill Buford. I love these kind of books but overload isn’t far away.
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The Independent had an article last Saturday about ’superbooks.’ We have featured a lot of these very expensive, very high-end, very limited edition books before on this blog…usually because they get a fair amount of media attention. A slice of celebrity helps for this market.
G.O.A.T: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali - Champ’s Edition by Jeff Koons is a typical ‘Superbook’.
G.O.A.T stands for greatest of all time.
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Phone books may be slowly going the way of the Dodo but many people still find them useful and several more make millions selling advertisements in them. The Slate article I just linked you to also mentions the novelty factor of looking up your favourite authors or celebrities in an old volume (Bram Stoker on Victoria-1436 or P.G. Wodehouse on Kensington-4150).
We also did our own bit of research on phone books and found that genealogy researchers and history buffs have been known to pay top dollar for old directories.
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I always find them a bit of a let down, perhaps it’s just because I’m sad about finishing the book, but here are the 100 best final lines from novels in handy PDF form!
Thanks to the Blog of a Bookslut
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What would it be like to be married to someone like Hunter S. Thompson? An interview with his wife Anita Thompson in which she talks about the final years of his life.
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I finished reading The Outcast by Sadie Jones last night. I’m not a huge reader of fiction but this one is pretty good, especially considering that this is a debut novel. The book - about a lonely child affected by the drowning of his mother in 1950s’ Surrey - reminds me somewhat of Ian McEwan but the second half of the book is more pacy than a McEwan novel.
Stand by for an interview with Sadie Jones coming up next week.
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Other stuff….
JK Rowling used to be depressed - the Beeb.
An excerpt from Philip Pullman’s Once Upon a Time in the North - The Guardian.
A review of Ed Smith’s What Sport Tells Us About Life - The Observer.
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