Reading Copy

The Winners have been announced for the BC Book Prizes, of which AbeBooks is a sponsor for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize

Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
Conceit by Mary Novik

Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
Everywhere Being is Dancing by Robert Bringhurst

Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Forage by Rita Wong

Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by J.B. MacKinnon, Alisa Smith

Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane by Polly Horvath

Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane by Polly Horvath

Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize
A Sea-Wishing Day by Robert Heidbreder

BC Booksellers’ Choice Award in Honour of Bill Duthie
The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Great Bear Rainforest by Ian McAllister

Popularity: 23% [?]

Free copies of Star Wars Legacy of the Force: Betrayal in E-book and audiobook format are available here until May 13th.

Publishers… more like pushers, Go and get me hooked with a freebie and then jack up the price.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Alpinism, mountaineering, and climbing. Call it what you will, The Guardian selects the 10 best books on traversing the highest peaks.

1 Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
2 Starlight and Storm by Gaston Rébuffat
3 Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage by Herman Buhl
4 The Mountains of My Life by Walter Bonatti
5 Conquistadors of the Useless by Lionel Terray
6 Savage Arena by Joe Tasker
7 The Shining Mountain by Pete Boardman
8 Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
9 Into A Slender Thread by Stephen Venables
10 No Picnic on Mt Kenya by Felice Benuzzi

Popularity: 19% [?]

While attempting to research a biography on Louis XIV’s mistress Veronica Buckley stumbled upon the lost diaries of the former king of France. The problem was the diary was not written 282 years ago, but in 1998.

What Buckley quotes is in fact the work of François Bluche. In 1998 this French academic decided to imagine what the king’s journals might have been like, by piecing together information gleaned from myriad historical documents. The result was a book, Le Journal secret de Louis XIV, which Buckley got hold of and used as a primary source.

I think this brings the fraudulent or recalled memoir/biography count to four? or is it five? this year…

More in The Guardian

Popularity: 19% [?]

This month’s Avid Reader is all about ephemera, which on AbeBooks includes all manner of paper collectables that are not specifically books.

One thing we don’t talk about in this Avid Reader is newspapers, which can also end up being collectable, though some people are a little more passionate about it then others.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Douglas Todd, a religion and spirituality reporter for the Vancouver Sun, was supposed to interview touted atheist Richard Dawkins (author of the God Delusion). However Dawkins refused to do the interview. Eventually an interview was arranged with a different reporter.

You would think that someone like Dawkins would be just itching to get into it with a religion reporter…

Popularity: 21% [?]

There is a nice interview with Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid about their most recent book, Beyond The Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China which combines the best elements of life cooking and traveling though China.

Popularity: 26% [?]

A big thanks to everyone who visited the AbeBooks and Story Laboratory booths at the LA Times Festival of Books over the past weekend. We met buyers, collectors, booksellers, librarians, teachers, authors, researchers, publishers, mums, dads, kids and many more bookloving folk on Saturday and Sunday. It was blazing hot on Saturday (almost 100 degrees) - seven days earlier we had experienced snow in Victoria, British Columbia, where AbeBooks is headquartered.

The nice thing about the festival is that it pulls in a broad range of book people - people who are happy reading Danielle Steel wandering about alongside those who adore Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy.

Popularity: 18% [?]

The shortlist for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse comic fiction prize has been announced.

Alan Bennett - The Uncommon Reader
Garrison Keillor - Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon
Joe Dunthorne - Submarine
Julian Gough - Jude: Level 1
John Walsh - Sunday at the Cross Bones

The thing about a prize for funny books is you need a funny prize, in this case the winner receives a considerable quantity of bubbly, but also has a Gloucester Old Spot named after their winning book. An act ment to honour the legendary Empress of Blandings, the prized pig of PG Wodehouse’s fictional hero Clarence Emsworth.

Popularity: 13% [?]

James Frey is back, and this time he is admitting it’s a novel

Popularity: 14% [?]

In downtown Toronto

Thanks to Book Ninja

Popularity: 13% [?]

AbeBooks wants to know which of the past 41 Man Booker prize winners was the most deserving winner. Tell us which Booker is your favorite and why.

We will post the results on our website and on the blog.

Popularity: 17% [?]

LA Times Festival of the Book occurred this past weekend in LA. The AbeBooks staffers who were at the fair will probably talk about it in tomorrows blog posts but today, to tide you over, here are the winners of the LA Times Book Awards:

Fiction: Andrew O’Hagan - Be Near Me
Current Interest: Elizabeth D. Samet - Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Science & Technology: Douglas Hofstadter - I Am A Strange Loop
Young Adult Fiction: Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain
Poetry: Stanley Plumly - Old Heart: Poems
Mystery/Thriller: Karin Fossum - The Indian Bride
History: Tim Weiner - Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Biography: Simon Sebag Montefiore - Young Stalin

Popularity: 16% [?]

The Hitler Diaries, one of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time, was printed 25 years ago.

There are things you wish you’d never done. One of mine was to have held up the front page to the newsroom, saying: “Look at that. You’ll never see another front page like that as long as you live.”

Popularity: 15% [?]

This past weekend the presentation of the Nebula Awards took place in Austin Texas. Here’s a list of the major prize winners.

Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union - Chabon, Michael
Novella: Fountain of Age - Kress, Nancy (Asimov’s, Jul07)
Novelette: The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate - Chiang, Ted (F&SF, Sep07)
Short Story: Always - Fowler, Karen Joy (Asimov’s, apr/may07)
Script: Pan’s Labyrinth - del Toro, Guillermo (Time/Warner, Jan07)
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Rowling, J. K. (Scholastic Press, Jul07)

Damon Knight Grand Master for 2008: Michael Moorcock

There is a bit of a recap on the weekends activities in the blog of the nominees, Sarah Beth Durst

Popularity: 19% [?]