Reading Copy Book Blog

The finalists for the 2008 Locus Awards have been announced. Awards to be given out on the 21st of June

SF NOVEL
The Accidental Time Machine, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
Brasyl, Ian McDonald (Pyr)
Halting State, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Spook Country, William Gibson (Putnam; Viking UK)
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

FANTASY NOVEL
Endless Things, John Crowley (Small Beer Press; Overlook)
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)
Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
Territory, Emma Bull (Tor)
Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada; Roc)

Doris Lessing gets more ink by being frim of mind and sharp of tongue.

It takes Doris Lessing just four minutes to come out with something, if not actually controversial, then at least unexpected. It’s about Hitler. She says she understands him. This from a former member of the Communist Party. (She left in 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress, the one in which he denounced Stalin.) We are talking, I should explain, about Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. She recently read another of his books, about three German soldiers who, like Hitler, return from the Great War to the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic. ‘They see people carting millions of marks around in wheelbarrows and, being old comrades, they stand by each other. And as you read that you suddenly understand Hitler.’

One of the last great mystery pulp writers passed on recently. The obituary of Edward D. Hoch was featured in The Guardian this morning.

In every monthly issue since May 1973, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine has featured a short story by Edward D Hoch. Hoch, who has died after a heart attack aged 77, was perhaps the last heir of the penny-a-word scribes who pounded out a living in pulp magazines. He published nearly 1,000 short stories, primarily mysteries, in the few fiction magazines that survived the demise of the pulps…

Hoch was best known for his short stories but also wrote a few novels including The Shattered Raven, The Blue Movie Murders, and The Frankenstein Factory.

This weekend AbeBooks.com will be at the LA Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus. We’re going to have two booths - one for Abe and one for Story Laboratory, our book-making workshop for kids.

Myself, Jordan and Shauna will be on the main AbeBooks.com booth (No 654 in zone F), which is actually close the big LA Times stage. Look out for some incredibly red t-shirts - you can’t miss us. We’ll be giving out free stuff and telling everyone about AbeBooks.com. We’ll also be staging some literary quizzes at 11am, 12 noon, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm and 4pm on Saturday and Sunday - come along and show your knowledge of books and authors, and you could win some books.

Story Laboratory - staffed by Anna and Andrea - can be found in the vast children’s section of the event. As usual, we’ll be helping kids put together their own books, including writing, illustrating and binding. I’ve seen Story Lab in action several times and children love it, and parents love it too (because they get a break!). If you’ve got children, then stop by.

Down in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald profiles Anne Enright - last year’s Booker Prize winner with her gloomy Irish novel, The Gathering.

Hannah Montana has signed a book deal to tell the story of her life. She’s 15. I won’t say another word.

The Guardian has the top 10 books about the wilderness. A few months ago, I read Into the Wild and came to the conclusion that Chris McCandless was a very stupid person indeed. I still use a map to get around London - I’d definitely take a map to the Alaska wilderness.

With all of the floggings that memoirs and self-published books alike have recevied in recent months (years?) seeing that headline in the Guardian supprised me. However it appears to be true.

Jane Haynes’s Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? revolves arround a psychotherapist and her patients, thus far the critics have been kind.

The entire shortlist for the prize is as follows:
Ed Husain’s The Islamist
Miranda Seymour’s In My Father’s House
Dannie Abse’s The Presence
John Lanchester’s Family Romance
Jane Haynes’s Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?

Dressing the bible up like the whore of Babylon

Revolve makes over the New Testament like a glossy teen magazine, with cover lines such as “Do U Rush to Crush?” and pages that surround the Gospels with “quizzes, photos of beaming of teenagers, and sidebars offering Bible-themed beauty secrets,”

American Nicholson Baker tosses out some fairly unique ideas about the Second World War, namely that the allies should have left Hitler alone.

His new book Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization will probably offend as many as it intrigues.

“In the worst case,” he says, “you would have had 15 years of the Third Reich at peace in Europe. That is an incomprehensibly bad thing, but, as long as the United States and England reopened their borders, millions of people would have survived. And I don’t care about British hon-our, I’m not interested in it. I’m interested in the people who were actually suffering at the bottom of the hierarchy in Germany – those were the Jews.”

His eyes are fixed on some distant, western point in the vicinity of Fenway Park or Cambridge. “I think even the absolute worst moment – which is allowing this idea of Adolf Hitler to be in charge of an entire sub-continent for the duration of his life, however long it was, and yet at peace – that that horrific idea would have allowed more beautiful things to survive everywhere (truth, public truth, beautiful buildings and human beings) than what actually happened.”

Full article in The Times

Penguin has released the sixth of its experimental online stories, and it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure, all be it a more literary version written by Booker nominee Mohsin Hamid.

SFX magazine has announced that they are going to be beaming a digital version of their magazine into space.

The downside of all this is Earth is now the equivalent of the Dungeons and Dragons club in the high school of our Galaxy.

While we are on the favourite books’ bandwagon. New Scientist asks 17 of its kin to discuss their favourite book.

1. Farthest North - Steve Jones, geneticist
2. The Art of the Soluble - V. S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist
3. Animal Liberation - Jane Goodall, primatologist
4. The Foundation trilogy - Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist
5. Alice in Wonderland - Alison Gopnik, developmental psychologist
6. One, Two, Three… Infinity - Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
7. The Idea of a Social Science - Harry Collins, sociologist of science
8. Handbook of Mathematical Functions - Peter Atkins, chemist
9. The Mind of a Mnemonist - Oliver Sacks, neurologist
10. A Mathematician’s Apology - Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician
11. The Leopard - Susan Greenfield, neurophysiologist
12. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior - Frans de Waal, psychologist and ethologist
13. Catch-22 / The First Three Minutes - Lawrence Krauss, physicist
14. William James, Writings 1878-1910 - Daniel Everett, linguist
15. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Chris Frith, neuroscientist
16. The Naked Ape - Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
17. King Solomon’s Ring - Marian Stamp Dawkins, Zoologist

This poll to determine the World’s Favorite Book is looking a lot like our Most Collectible Authors results. Harper Lee, George Orwell, Phillip Pullman…. I don’t think I could narrow it down to five.

Tobias Wolff, on the NPR, discussing his new book Our Story Begins.

“A young farmworker goes out drinking and winds up in a shabby hotel with migrant workers.

Everyone is happily drunk — or so it seems — until one of the workers pulls out a gun and starts ranting, entirely in Spanish. The man gets angrier and angrier, and suddenly, in that room, the narrator realizes that he is in control of nothing…”