Reading Copy

The new Sony e-Reader is reviewed in the Globe and Mail.

Oh thank God for that! I was worried there for a minute.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I have spent the past week or so reading Heat by Bill Buford - a former editor from The New Yorker who worked in the kitchen of a major New York restaurant for the hell of it. It’s a good book. Just like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, it reveals the high pressure environment of a professional kitchen. Buford becomes obssessive about the origins of Italian food but the best sections of the book are when he’s analyzing the characters he meets in the kitchen and later in an Italian butcher’s shop. His own struggles to master the various roles within the kitchen becomes secondary to the mini-dramas going on around him. I’ve been meaning to read this book for two and a half years, and I glad I did. The passages about Marco Pierre White are priceless.

Popularity: 28% [?]

The Old Bill read? These ones in the Seattle Times do.

Popularity: 20% [?]

This American bloke should meet Lynne Truss.

Popularity: 25% [?]

If you live in the San Francisco area here is a science fiction event for you!

Sunday, March 16
Jeffrey Ford and Tim Pratt
The Variety Preview Room
The Hobart Building, 1st Floor
582 Market St. @ Montgomery, by Montgomery St. MUNI/BART

Lounge and cash bar open at 5:30PM
6:00 PM readings

Each author will read from their latest works and have a Q&A with the crowd and then a signing afterwards!

Popularity: 22% [?]

Book Ninja points to rockstar poet, Mary Oliver.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Coffee and books - the perfect partnership according to this blogger on The Guardian. What about tea and books? That reminds how good a book The Camomile Lawn is by Mary Wesley.

You moron, pull yourself together and keep reading this book - the new generation of self-help books that dish out abuse to readers. The CSM reports. I’m not saying anything about self-help books because we sell them by the truckload.

The Guardian has an obituary for Nancy Phelan - the Australian author of travel and yoga books, and other subjects too.

Robert Mapplethorpe goes on sale in Japan…finally, says the CBC.

Popularity: 13% [?]

A couple of things caught my eye this morning. Several stories promised much but when I actually opened the link they were a disappointment. Why don’t newspapers interview more authors?

The Joy of Sex gets a ‘Generation Viagra’ makeover according to The Guardian. This story makes me feel a bit ill;

Robert Fisk - simply one of the finest journalists around - explains his love of books in Beirut in the Independent on Sunday.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Someone took the time to compare the SAT scores and the ten most popular books at every college (on FaceBook). And while as the creator points out correlation does not equal causation - the results are interesting.

Popularity: 31% [?]

“Crime books easier to write than ’serious’ novels? That attitude is, frankly, cobblers”.

God, I love the word ‘cobblers’ - I also love the word ‘bobbins’, another very effective word for describing anything that’s rubbish…. like Dan Brown books for instance.

(In case you didn’t know, cobblers is Cockney rhyming slang for cobbler’s awls - the sharp hand-tools used to make holes in leather - and awls rhymes with balls.)

Popularity: 14% [?]

Last Saturday, The Guardian saluted Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man - a fine, fine book. I read it not long after seeing the BBC’s 1981 adaption that starred Anthony Sher. The story of Howard Kirk and 1970s campus life is described as a modern classic by David Hodge, the article’s author.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The BBC.co.uk looks at the state of reading in the UK.

“Books are an eco-system, the bad ones make the good ones possible,” says Prof Sutherland. “Victoria Beckham’s autobiography pays for likes of Andrew Motion.”

Popularity: 10% [?]

Some interesting articles that caught my eye….

Patricia Cornwell is interviewed in the Daily Telegraph and talks about many things including her same-sex marriage.
The Telegraph also interviews Jeffrey Eugenides, who explains why he’s such a slow writer.
The Times lists the 50 best British writers since 1945 - the University of Hull’s librarian tops the charts.

Popularity: 11% [?]

We are pleased to announce that we now have a large print section on AbeBooks.com. It’s designed to help visitors find large print books more easily. The thinking behind this move is that we’re not getting any younger. Our typical customer comes from the bookloving Baby Boomer generation and eyesight problems are commonplace within this group of people. We just wanted to make life a bit easier for them.

I’m 39 and wear glasses to watch TV and drive, and read PowerPoint presentations in meetings at work. I’ve only read one large print book, Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, and I actually found the whole experience very positive. It was much easier on my eyes.

Our research showed lots of people used the library as a resource for large print books but they were dismayed by the lack of choice. “Nothing but romance” was how one person put it. Hopefully, we can help change that.

Also a big thanks to our friends at Random House’s large print imprint who supplied four large print books for a contest. The books up for grabs are Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything, Barack Obama’s Dreams Of My Father and The View From Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik.

If you are starting have trouble reading text on your computer screen, we recommend that you increase your browser’s text size by selecting “text size” and “increase font” under the “view” menu, or by pressing “control” and “+” (”apple key” and “+” on a Mac).

Popularity: 12% [?]