Reading Copy Book Blog

Randy Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and he described his most proud professional moment as creating a free computer programming tool for children called Alice

However he will be remembered by most for the uplifting talk that he gave for his children, one that he let the rest of the world hear. His lecture wasn’t about the pancreatic cancer that was taking his life, but about his own childhood dreams and how to help his children and others achieve their own goals in life.

The lecture was never meant to be more than a home movie for his children to watch later in life to get to know their own father, and he only delivered it in public so his children could see their dad at work, in his own in environment

Dr. Pausch said that his wife persuaded him to write The Last Lecture into book form, but that he was worried it would take too much time away from the children. He rode his bike daily to keep up his strength so he spoke with his co-writer during these rides and the co-writer transcribed the books contents over 53 one-hour bike ride phone calls.

Randy Pausch died today, July 25th, 2008. at his home in Virgina.

BC, the province where AbeBooks HQ is located is turning 150 this year so to celebrate we did a quick little search for the most expensive books about British Columbia that AbeBooks has ever sold.

It turns out that the most expensive book about BC that we have ever sold is also the most expensive book that a resident of Victoria (the city we are located) has ever bought!

David Thompson’s Narrative of his Explorations in Western America 1784-1812
First edition, 1916 copy of this Champlain Society publication, limited to only 550 copies. A first hand narrative from Thompson’s explorations of the Western Canada to the Pacific, including rarely found information of the local native tribes of the region sold for $4,250

Happy Birthday BC!

Yesterday’s Observer writes about Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Then the fever subsided - and inspiration struck. Fittest variations will survive longest and will eventually evolve into new species, he realised. Thus the theory of natural selection appeared, fever-like, in the mind of one of our greatest naturalists. Wallace wrote up his ideas and sent them to Charles Darwin, already a naturalist of some reputation. His paper arrived on 18 June, 1858 - 150 years ago last week - at Darwin’s estate in Downe, in Kent.

Tasha Tudor, the beloved American author and illustrator, was reported to have died in her home yesterday at the age of 92.

She was best known for her first story Pumpkin Moonshine which was published in 1938, after which she went on to write Corgiville Fair, Amanda and the Bear, and the Caldecott award winning 1 is One.

Tudor also illustrated many works for other authors including a 1966 edition of Wind in the Willows and a 1975 edition of The Night Before Christmas.

There was a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the activities one can undertake when stranded on a plane trip without any books.

We’d barely cleared Italian airspace, though, before the screen in front of me - and every other one on the plane - froze, flickered and then displayed something that looked an awful lot like Microsoft’s dreaded Blue Screen of Death. Every video channel went dead; every audio channel went silent. For the next half hour the crew tried to reboot the entertainment system half a dozen times, and finally gave up.

Entertainment-wise, we were on our own.

It is an interesting quandary, and readers from Shelf Awareness have been writing in with their own solutions…

Jane O’Connor, editor at Penguin Books for Young Readers, offers yet another literary time killer:

Write the alphabet down one column. Pick a phrase from newspaper, book, airplane mag, whatever. Then pair the first 26 letters of the phrase with the alphabet letter. For example, if the phrase was “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy . . .” your letter pairs would be: AT, BH, CE, DQ, EU, and so on. Then try to come with a famous name for each pair: Arthur Treacher (of Fish and Chips), Bob Herbert (of the New York Times) and so on. Fun to play competitively. Set a time limit. You get one point for a name that another contestant has, two points if you’re the only one with the name.

It sounds like a fun game, and sounds a lot like one I play with friends on road trips. You start with an authors name, “Charles Dickens” and the next player in line has to say an authors name starting with the final letter of the previous author “Sylvia Plath”… then “Harold Pinter” and so on. The rule is you can’t repeat an author twice, and usually we play high stakes - If you can’t come up with an author, or if you repeat, you have to buy the next round of coffees (if we are driving, if we are at the pub its a different game all together)

It may sound easy but there’s a skill in the game, such as trying to work in authors with the last name FOX, because there are only so many blokes named Xavier…

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.

Is this the next megaselling book? The Last Lecture by Professor Randy Pausch. USA Today has an extensive article about this just-released book.

Pausch, a professor at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, is dying of cancer but - thanks to Youtube - he’s already a folk hero to many.

A now-famous lecture he gave at Carnegie in September has inspired millions who have viewed it on YouTube to follow his example. He hopes his new book, The Last Lecture, in stores today, will do the same. His publisher is banking on Lecture to become the next Tuesdays With Morrie, the mega-best-seller about another dying professor.

Written with Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, The Last Lecture expands on Pausch’s speech, in which he spoke of the importance of having fun and dreams. It was delivered with good humor. Hyperion, in a bidding war, paid $6.7 million to publish it. The first printing is 400,000 copies, and it’s being translated into at least 17 languages.

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.

It’s a sad day for Science Fiction lovers as one of the greatest authors in the genre has passed on. Arthur C. Clarke died today after decades of battling post-polio syndrome.

Clarke had a phenomenal creative output, writing more than 80 novels but was most well known among SF fans for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Songs of a Distant Earth, or The City and the Stars.

Almost more amazing was Arthur C. Clarke’s scientific mind. Not only did he write about futuristic settings and outlandish ideas. Clarke described scientific concepts decades before their eventual production. An example would be communications satellites, which he described in 1945 because of this geosynchronous orbits are called Clarke orbits.

However for all the things he did in his life I will remember him as a great writer, and I am glad that he agreed with me!

“Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered, I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer.” - Arthur C. Clarke

The Guardian sticks it to My Year of Living Biblically and all those other rubbish books.

Think of something you could do in year and then tell an agent. Trust me, they’ll drool. It doesn’t matter how dull the thing is (I’ve just secured a six-figure two-book deal with My Year of Slightly Changing My Cycle Route to Work and its sequel, My Year of Reverting to the Original Route).

If you have a million dollars then you are simply middle class in America according to a new book. Discuss. The mere fact that this book even got published says a lot about America.

C’mon America - get it together.

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

The book in question is Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason.

The Telegraph has compiled a list of 100 books every child should read. In the introduction they state:

“We have to stop proclaiming reading as a ladder to academic success. Treated simply as an educational commodity, some kind of pill to be taken to aid intellectual development, it is all too often counter-productive and ultimately alienating. Of course we must and should study literature in our schools, but first we have to imbue our children with a love of stories.”

What are the books you think children should read?

An uber phat article about a book from a 13-year-old girl at Cheltenham Ladies College.

A contemporary bookstore now residing in a converted church. Quite stunning I must say.