Reading Copy Book Blog

The books listed here were the top 10 best selling books on AbeBooks.com for the month of June, 2008

1) Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert
2) Wisdom of Our Fathers by Tim Russert
3) Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Daniel Amen
4) Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama
5) The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
6) The Red Car by Don Stanford
7) A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
8) Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
9) The Wordsworth Dictionary of Culinary and Menu Terms by Rodney Dale
10) Night by Elie Wiesel

Toni Jordan, who novel Addition was just selected by Richard and Judy for their summer reading list picks her top 10 flawed romantic heronines

1. Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
2. Prudence Merridew in The Perfect Rake by Anne Gracie
3. Ayla in The Valley of Horses by Jean M Auel
4. Lucinda Leplastrier in Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
5. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch by George Eliot
6. Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
7. Lisa Palmer by What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn
8. Christabel LaMotte and Maud Bailey in Possession by AS Byatt
9. Miss Haversham in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
10. Esther Evans in Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

Entertainment Weekly thinks that these are the 10 best books of the past 25 years…

1. “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy
2. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” J. K. Rowling
3. “Beloved,” Toni Morrison
4. “The Liars’ Club,” Mary Karr
5. “American Pastoral,” Philip Roth
6. “Mystic River,” Dennis Lehane
7. “Maus,” Art Spiegelman
8. “Selected Stories,” Alice Munro
9. “Cold Mountain,” Charles Frazier
10. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” Haruki Murakami

I’m a little late putting May’s list up, but better late then never!

1. Etudes à l’Eau-Forte by Francis Seymour Haden - $17,216
A collection of 25 etchings by Seymour Hayden. 24 of the plates depict the landscape around London, the Thames, Ireland and Wales and the final plate is a portrait of Thomas Haden. The text reproduces an article printed in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts by Philippe Burty and contains a catalogue of the etched work of Seymour Haden.

2. Grimms Fairy Tales by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm - $11,388
A first edition, first issue copy of these famous fairy tales, includes 22 etched plates by George Cruikshank. Housed in clamshell box.

3. Atlas der Krystallformen by Victor Goldschmidt - $8500
A complete 18 volume treatise on modern mineralogy by the man considered to be the founder of modern geochemistry and crystal chemistry, developer of the Goldschmidt Classification of elements.

4. Traité élémentaire de Chimie by Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier - $7709
Second printing of Traité élémentaire de Chimie, which is considered to be the first modern chemistry Textbook created. Lavoisier has been called the father of modern chemistry and is credited with the introduction of the metric system and the law of conservation of mass.

5. The Library of Treasury of French Law by Laurent Bouchel - $6356
A digest of the laws of France put together in alphabetical order by the lawyer and French writer Laurent Bouchel in 1615.

6. English Etchings - A Collection of Original Etching - $5867
An 8 volume set of the English Etchings series of prints. A thorough survey of the etched work of English artists such as William Strang, James McNeill Whistler, Frank Short, Percy Thomas, Herbert Marshall, Robert Currie, Buxton Knight and Oliver Baker among othes.

7. The Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio - $5844
A treatise by the Italian Renaissance architect widely considered to be one of the most influential people in the history of Western architecture. This was the first French edition (1640), which included woodcuts from the original Italian edition of 1570

8. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf - $4950
A limited, signed, first edition copy of this 1929 essay on feminism.

9. The Collected Poems by D.H. Lawrence - $4893
A limited first edition, one of 100 numbered copies that were signed by Lawrence. This 1928 two volume collection comes with a cream dustjacket that is especially prone to wear, thus making fine copies highly desirable

Montreal writer Rawi Hage has just captured the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel, De Niro’s Game. The Dublin Award is one of the richest prizes in literature at €100,000.

What makes the win so fascinating is that as a Lebanese Canadian, English is Hage’s third language, which makes winning this award that much more amazing. What’s also interesting is it appears that prior to the win the book may have been remaindered, so you can pick up a copy of De Niro’s Game for a couple of dollars. Or you can splash out for a signed copy.
De Niro’s Game beat out a short list that included:
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe.
The Attack by Yasmina Khadra.
Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua.
The Woman Who Waited by Andrei Makine.
The Sweet & Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne.
Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones.
The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas.

Sorry we are late to blog today.

The Guardian has the top 10 philosophers’ deaths!!!!!!!!!!

1. Heracleitus (540-480 BC)
Heracleitus became such a hater of humanity that he wandered in the mountains and lived on a diet of grass and herbs. But malnutrition gave him dropsy and he returned to the city to seek a cure, asking to be covered in cow dung, which he believed would draw the bad humours out of his body. In the first version of the story, the cow dung is wet and the weeping philosopher drowns; in the second, it is dry and he is baked to death in the Ionian sun.

Critics on The Telegraph were tasked with listing books which they had recently read, and enjoyed.

Some of the books they suggested:

1)The Hamburger: A History (American Icons Series)
2)Goodbye 20th Century: “Sonic Youth” and the Rise of Alternative Nation
3) Moneyball by Michael Lewis
4) Jon Stewart’s America: the Book
5) The Winter of our Discontent by John Steinbeck
6) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
7) Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
8) A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
9) The Wound and the Bow by Wilson Edmund
10) The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

I was browsing through the British papers when I came across this article/list in The Independent - the UK’s top 50 bookshops. It made me smile. AbeBooks.com is listed at No.8 and we’re not even a bookshop. Really, it should be AbeBooks.co.uk because it’s best to use our UK site if you are a UK-based buyer - that way you are purchasing in pounds rather than dollars.

Technically, we are an online marketplace - a middleman, a third party that links buyers to booksellers. Several of our sellers are actually listed ahead of us, including the wonderful Much Ado Books in East Sussex (Lynne Truss’ favourite bookshop). Lots of other AbeBooks’ booksellers are on the list. Normally, I don’t really say anything about our competitors as online bookselling is a very small world, but I had to laugh when I saw Amazon.co.uk listed at only No. 35.

I don’t know about the rest of you in the Northern Hemisphere but summer took it’s sweet time to get to us in here in Victoria, but now that it’s here there are a good number of hours that must be passed in a hammock with a good book.

Some of my colleagues have put together some nice suggestions for summer reading, and so have the NPR, USA Today, New York Post and the Wall Street Journal.

William Grimes writes in the New York Times book section about a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Within a few sentences, he utters….

The book is British. Of course. The British love literary lists and the fights they provoke, so much so that they divide candidates for the Man Booker Prize into shortlist books and longlist books.

Grimes, who be nicknamed Grimo or Grimey in the UK, thinks Americans are above lists. Has he never looked at the sports pages of the US papers where there are endless lists of baseball statistics and lists of leaders in football rushing yardage. What would the New York Times book section be without its bestseller lists? Any form of written word media uses lists because they convey information at speed and cause debate. Lists are good. We make shopping lists, lists of things to do, lists of favourite songs, Christmas card lists, and lists of newspaper columnists to avoid. Nick Hornby wrote an entire book (High Fidelity) about a man who’d rather make a list than get his life sorted out. Grimes would, of course, point out Hornby is a list-obsessed Brit but the Americans were quick enough to turn High Fidelity into a movie and transport the whole storyline to Chicago.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die does the trick since Grimes can’t resist debating the merits of books on the list…even though lists are beneath him. Long live lists.

The Commonwealth Prize was awarded on Sunday at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in South Africa. The Best Book award was given to Lawrence Hill of Canada, and Best First Book went to Tahmima Anam of Bangladesh

Best Book
The Hangman’s Game by Karen King-Aribisala (Nigeria)
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill (Canada)
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (India)
The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll (Australia)

Best First Book
Imagine This by Sade Adeniran (Nigeria)
The End of the Alphabet by C S Richardson (Canada)
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh)
The Anatomy of Wings by Karen Foxlee (Australia)

The top 10 books about islands.

If your looking for some obscure summer reading the Village Voice asked a number of authors to suggest a book to make you appear more well read then you really are.

Jennifer Egan:
You Can’t Live Forever, by Harold Q. Masur

John Banville
Some People, by Harold Nicolson

Donna Tartt
Blood in the Parlor, by Dorothy Dunbar

Rick Moody
Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, by Ben Watson

Jonathan Ames
The Lunatic at Large, by J. Storer Clouston

Nathan Englander
Gob’s Grief, by Chris Adrian

Tom Bissell
Invasion of the Space Invaders, by Martin Amis

Colum McCann
Fup, by Jim Dodge

George Pelecanos
Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter

Susan Choi
The Wars, by Timothy Findley

Ned Vizzini
The Assistant, by Robert Walser

Ed Park
The Marceau Case, by Harry Stephen Keeler

Matthew Sharpe
The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington

Tao Lin
Color of Darkness, by James Purdy

Sheila Heti
The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector

Bookslut tells me about a blog called The Art of Manliness that has a list of 100 books for men. Nice list - Call of the Wild by Jack London is a geat book that will never interest girls in a million years.

Paper Cuts, the New York Times Blog, is features 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help.

The top 10 were:
“The Communist Manifesto”
“Utilitarianism”
“The Descent of Man”
“Beyond Good and Evil”
“The State and Revolution”
“The Pivot of Civilization” (by Margaret Sanger)
“Mein Kampf”
“The Future of an Illusion”
“Coming of Age in Samoa”
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”

We did our own feature a few months back on Books that Changed the World (for better or worse), which shared some of the same titles.