Reading Copy Book Blog

Sad news from Berkeley. Peter Howard, the owner of Serendipity Books on University Avenue, is ill with pancreatic cancer. Serendipity Books, in case you are not familiar with his bookshop, is an institution within Northern California and the wider rare book community. Howard has been attempting to sell the business but no buyer has come [...]

There is no such thing as bad publicity.

I was thinking a lot about cake yesterday. It’s not unusual for me to be distracted by food. There are days when I think about cumberland sausages, days when I become obsessive about balti curries, and days when I dream of cheesecake. Cake was on my mind because AbeBooks employees conducted a silent auction yesterday [...]

Can you name two famous Panamanians? Former dictator Manuel Noriega has been in the news lately. And how about former boxer Roberto Duran? I am reading a book called Four Kings by George Kimball about boxers Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Marvin Hagler and Duran who all fought in the same era at the end [...]

Flavorwire.com has a funny piece you should check out about literary characters and their modern-day tabloid counterparts. It isn’t exactly in-depth, but it’s fun to think about and peruse. I did cringe, however, upon seeing Chaucer’s Wife of Bath compared to something called the Bravo Real Housewives. The horror. My suggestion? Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert from [...]

What books did you read as a child/adolescent that struck a chord and really made an impression? Check out this list of 20 books you should read before age 16 and see if you agree.

Australian-turned-New Yorker Peter Carey is profiled in the NY Times. Unlike Robert Hughes and Clive James, other celebrated expats, Mr. Carey did not leave Australia in a Joycean act of self-invention. He moved here — temporarily, he thought — because the woman he was married to then wanted to live in New York, and he [...]

This year, I was lucky enough to attend the 2010 BC Book Prizes Awards Dinner and Gala. It was a thrill to be surrounded by book industry people, all talking about writing, publishing, and the evolution of the….(more)

Nottingham-born novelist Alan Sillitoe has died aged 82. He is famous for writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – so called kitchen sink dramas. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner focuses on a rebellious boy with a talent for running. It won the Hawthornden Prize in [...]

Over the past seven days, the most searched for book on AbeBooks.co.uk has been All Four Engines Have Failed: True and Triumphant Story of Flight BA 009 and the Jakarta Incident by Betty Tootell. Never heard of it? That’s not surprising considering the book has been out-of-print for years. BA Flight 9 went from London [...]