Reading Copy Book Blog

AbeBooks has an interview with Christian Lander, the author of Stuff White People Like. I recommend the book, which was a blog before it was a book.

“It all began on January 18 this year when a friend and I were discussing The Wire TV show and he said he wouldn’t trust any white person who didn’t watch The Wire,” said Lander. “We started joking around and talking more about how white people go into therapy and get divorced and so on, and I said let’s start a blog.

“It was all a joke. I didn’t expect the blog to be seen by anyone except a few friends. When the blog got 1,000 hits in a day I registered the name and then it jumped to 30,000 hits in a day, and then 300,000 and then – at the absolute peak – it got 800,000 hits per day.”

While other folks were reading McCarthy, Roth, or Rushdie over the weekend, I read a book called Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander. It’s another blog that became a book. As a middle class 40-year-old white person, I found Stuff White People Like very enjoyable. It has 150 mini-chapters (or blog postings if you wish) and I found myself ticking off the ones that applied to me.

Organic food - check
Renovations - check
Hardwood floors - check
Rugby - check
Threatening to move to Canada - check (except I actually did it)
Recycling - check
Making children learn a foreign language - check

I can think of many white people who should read specific chapters from this book. The sections on Apple products, DJs and Asian girls were very funny indeed.

I’m going to interview the author, Christian Lander, on Thursday so we should have something on the site by Friday.

The Washington Post reports one of Google’s co-founders is spending $35 million to become a space tourist and we already know Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is building his own space rocket.

So what do we spend our money on here at AbeBooks.com? Well, we splashed out on pizza the other lunch time.

What really happened at the Hay-on-Wye book festival over the weekend where the hippies and lefties were in charge.

For when your working the adult fiction section…

Batten down the hatches, Ginger Spice wants to be a children’s author.

The book is called Ugenia Lavender, and is about a red haired little girl. Apparently Geri’s imagination is as good as her singing.

From Bookforum magazine, this is the best article I’ve read in a long time - Alexander Waugh (guess which literary family he comes from) writes on Kingsley Amis and his addiction to the sauce.

Photographs of the novelist Kingsley Amis, taken between his fiftieth birthday in April 1972 and his death in October 1995, sometimes show a resplendent sheen on his forehead, nose, and cheeks. This is what some people call “sweat alcohol,” a common problem among heavy drinkers of shorts and beer. On both of the occasions on which I had the pleasure to meet this funny and distinguished man, he drank whisky throughout lunch and by the afternoon was wearing that slightly bewildered, slightly aggressive, slightly penitent expression known as the “Scotch gaze,” a look familiar to all who have walked the streets of Glasgow or Aberdeen at closing time on a Friday night.

How’s Your Glass?, Everyday Drinking and On Drink are Amis’ three books about drinking.

AbeBooks.com is Canadian and I’m British so Elliot Spitzer is fair game for this. The disgraced Governor of New York is going to have plenty of time on his hands in the near future so here are 10 books he could be reading:

Ten non-fiction books about prostitutes

1 Happy Hooker: My Own Story by Xaviera Hollander
2 Callgirl by Jeannette Angell
3 Mayflower Madam: The Secret Life of Sydney Biddle Barrows by Sydney Biddle Barrows
4 Love for sale: a world history of prostitution by Nils Johan Ringdal
5 Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women by Alexa Albert
6 Sex Work by Frederique Delacoste
7 Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott
8 Soiled doves: prostitution in the early West by Anne Seagraves
9 Courtesans: money, sex, and fame in the nineteenth century by Katie Hickman
10 The Madams of San Francisco by Curt Gentry

I can’t say I had ever searched for books on hookers until this morning. Who’d have thought so many madams had written books? Callgirl by Jeannette Angell looks interesting - a professor by day, callgirl by night. Hmmm.

Not only is the coffee giant selling books, making bestsellers out of Ishmael Beah and Mitch Albom’s titles, but they are taking over your bookstore too.

Starbucks now has its own mini-genre, Starbooks

When nothing else will do, sign it in blood!

Finally I can get started on my own interpretation of the Necronomicon.

Surfing through the Web this morning, I came across a blog at The Guardian about ‘concept’ books published for the Christmas market. The top book in the UK at the moment is Do Ants Have Arseholes? And 101 Bloody Ridiculous Questions, Now, I’m in Canada and haven’t seen this book so I can’t really comment on a train thought that it is utterly rubbish.

However, scroll through the article until you get to the comments underneath.

This is the first one….

“I specifically tell people that wish to keep me as a friend to never, never, never buy me books like that or so-called “humour” books for Christmas. It’s all for stupid thickos that probably don’t even read books anyway.”

A good point well made….

About half way down you get this comment….

“I’ve read some of Do Ants… - it’s not actually that terrible. There’s quite a good joke about Martin Amis, which suggests it’s not for the completely illiterate.”

And then someone comes up with a football team consisting entirely of Russian authors - God knows where that came from but I’m sure they’d be a pretty effective outfit. A lot of experience but those huge Russian beards might slow them down?

“This would be my Russian team, using a 4-3-1-2:
G: Bulgakov
CB: Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy
LB/RB: Pasternak, Gorky
CM: Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoevsky
CF: Pushkin, Nabokov
Subs: Saltykov-Shchedrin, Lermontov, Goncharov, Bely, Sologub.
I think they would take the English no problem.”

God bless the Internet!!!

One last tribute to Norman Mailer - the bad sex award.

Dwight Garner’s Paper Cuts blog tells us that Norman Mailer wrote his own obituary for the Boston Magazine in 1979 - here it is.

I’m sure you can imagine what a Borat book signing would be like…. USA Today reports on the insults and mayhem.

The Guardian wonders who is the world’s worst poet - Scottish writer William McGonagall, who wrote The Tay Bridge Disaster, is under threat.