Reading Copy

Alpinism, mountaineering, and climbing. Call it what you will, The Guardian selects the 10 best books on traversing the highest peaks.

1 Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
2 Starlight and Storm by Gaston Rébuffat
3 Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage by Herman Buhl
4 The Mountains of My Life by Walter Bonatti
5 Conquistadors of the Useless by Lionel Terray
6 Savage Arena by Joe Tasker
7 The Shining Mountain by Pete Boardman
8 Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
9 Into A Slender Thread by Stephen Venables
10 No Picnic on Mt Kenya by Felice Benuzzi

Popularity: 16% [?]

I always find them a bit of a let down, perhaps it’s just because I’m sad about finishing the book, but here are the 100 best final lines from novels in handy PDF form!

Thanks to the Blog of a Bookslut

Popularity: 30% [?]

I finished reading The Outcast by Sadie Jones last night. I’m not a huge reader of fiction but this one is pretty good, especially considering that this is a debut novel. The book - about a lonely child affected by the drowning of his mother in 1950s’ Surrey - reminds me somewhat of Ian McEwan but the second half of the book is more pacy than a McEwan novel.

Stand by for an interview with Sadie Jones coming up next week.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Less news and more of a request really…

Today is world book day in the UK and Ireland and most other countries on April 23rd.

Either day is a good excuse to celebrate so I am going to celebrate both!

Popularity: 20% [?]

I was delighted to see that my favourite novel, Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley, was one of the five Canada Reads books this year. Canada Reads is a lively and highly-followed discussion (at least here in Canada) where five celebs (O.K….Canada’s version of a celebrity) defend their choice on CBC radio. Each day one book is voted off and then the winner is the recommended read for all of Canada. The other books being discussed are:

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant
Icefields by Thomas Wharton
King Leary by Paul Quarrington

You can check out the discussion on the CBC website.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Unlike other online retailers, AbeBooks has a single global database of books that is searchable through all of our five websites. We record the bestselling books for each of our websites but essentially buyers are purchasing from a single list of 110 million listings. So a buyer in the UK can buy a book from a bookshop in the US very easily on AbeBooks. This often happens when there is demand for a book in Britain but the book is simply not available from UK-based retailers.

This is happening right now….with a dog training book. I’m sure North Americans will be familiar with Cesar Millan - aka the dog whisperer - but he isn’t so well known in the UK.

It turns out that British dog lovers are scouring AbeBooks for his latest book, Be The Pack Leader, that has yet to be published in the UK. Be the Pack Leader is the bestselling book on AbeBooks.co.uk in 2008 so far with UK dog owners purchasing the book from our booksellers in the United States. I can imagine all these people in places like Norwich or Coventry trying to find this book while in the background uncontrollable dogs are chewing slippers or destroying furniture.

The book will be published in the UK on March 6 but has been available in the United States since October 2007. Millan is a household name in the US thanks to appearances on Oprah, CNN, Good Morning America, Martha Stewart, and Jay Leno. He also has his own cable TV show called The Dog Whisperer. Clearly news about Millan has spread across the Atlantic, probably via blogs and dog websites.

AbeBooks.co.uk top 10 bestselling books from Jan 1 – February 24 2008
1. Be The Pack Leader by Cesar Millan
2. Rules of the Red Rubber Ball by Kevin Carroll
3. Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump
4. Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs
5. When God Winks at You by Squire Rushnell
6. If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat by John Ortberg
7. The Mass Book for Children by Rosemarie Gortler
8. Cesar’s Way by Cesar Millan
9. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore
10. The Art of Fiction by John Gardner

Popularity: 25% [?]

Last weekend was my favourite weekend of the year here in Victoria, BC - the Times Colonist Book Drive. Here’s what I picked up for a song at the charity book sale….

John Buchan’s autobiography - Memory Hold-The-Door. I found the 1941 Canadian edition.

I’m also looking forward to reading Hard Courts by John Feinstein where he spent a year on the pro tennis circuit as John McEnroe’s career was fading away. It was only published in 1991 but is out-of-print already.

I also picked up Life of a Country Vet - Gordon Lord’s biography of vet-turned-author James Herriot - to remind me of life back home.

Popularity: 13% [?]

The Independent in the UK has a feature on ‘hic lit’ - or how I beat the booze memoirs.

Authors and alcoholism have a long history – think Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski – but the days when writers’ pens dripped with neat alcohol are long gone. Publishers see “hic lit” as the natural successor to the “real lives” columns that dominate women’s magazines. Ms Russell added: “It’s voyeurism. People buy the books for the same reason that they buy Bizarre magazine to see the unsavoury pictures.”

Popularity: 15% [?]

The Guardian has posted a podcast of Khaled Hosseini reading an excerpt from The Kite Runner.

If you like what you hear you can get the whole novel in Audiobook format.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Art Garfunkel’s list of every book he’s ever read. How can he remember them all? Did he write them down after he’d finished each one? I suppose he’s had a lot of time on his hands for reading since he broke up with Paul Simon.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Stephen King spent Christmas reading a book on a Kindle. He says the Kindle is “just fine.” King adds the method of delivery really doesn’t matter and that the story is more important than anything, including the author. Incidently, this is the book he was reading.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a list of the best books for babies. I’m an expert on this and I haven’t heard of any of them. I recommend Peepo by Allan and Janet Ahlberg. There’s also an art to reading a book to a baby - if you know make things sound interesting you could read the telephone directory to a baby and still be entertaining.

Popularity: 16% [?]

The Ventura County Star has an interesting article on what people in prison like to read - although no-one in the slammer is actually interviewed.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The Guardian Unlimited lists their 10 most read book stories of 2007

Popularity: 14% [?]

On Sunday, I pulled into a gas station. After cursing about the latest five cents price hike for petrol, I walked into the store to pay. There was a teenage girl behind the counter and she was clutching a copy of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. She was reading intently as I approached and barely looked up as I passed over my money.

“Are you enjoying the book?,” I asked, immediately recognising the cover.

“Yeah, it’s about a recovering alcoholic and junkie who’s in rehab,” she said.

She was back to her reading before the change reached my hand. The girl had folded over the pages she had completed so she could easily hold the book in one hand while conducting the gas transactions with the other. I could have given her monopoly money and she wouldn’t have noticed.

I was going to make a smart alec remark - something like…”You know it’s a fake memoir by some bloke who made up large amounts of the story.” But she was so intensely involved with the book that I just couldn’t.

Popularity: 13% [?]