Reading Copy Book Blog

If you Americans stop Sebastian Horsley from entering the States, then we Brits are going to stop Martha Stewart from entering the UK.

Tit for tat.

From The New Yorker’s excellent book blog, The Book Bench…(this is one of my go-to blogs now)

9:45 A.M., Manhattan-bound D, Pacific to West Fourth. Young woman wearing red bandanna, light striped cotton T-shirt, and loose blue jeans, cuffed at the ankles. Smear of red lipstick. Intermittent scowls fail to cease even when acquiring a prime rush-hour seat. Green Crocs ventilate her feet. Large white plastic headphones hover over her ears. Just begun: a clean sepia paperback copy of Franklin Foer’s “How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.” A glare, as though longing to kick something.

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.

By far the most interesting story of the day comes from the Daily Telegraph…..

The world’s finest travel writer, Jan Morris, who used to be a man but became a woman after a sex change, has remarried the wife she first wed as a man. Morris chronicled her sex-change operation in the book, Conundrum.

I think I would like to read Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles….. USA Today has an interview with the author. How fantastic that the book is taking off and he’s having to do a nationwide booktour where air travel is a daily requirement! I’m sure he’s not using American Airlines.

Miles’ debut novel, Dear American Airlines, is written in the form of an exasperated 180-page letter of complaint from a passenger stranded at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

There is a nice interview with Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid about their most recent book, Beyond The Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China which combines the best elements of life cooking and traveling though China.

Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, and Martin Luther King had a lot in common says the Daily Telegraph.

America remains safe and secure after author and artist Sebastian Horsley was turned away last week. Thankfully, some of the most incisive citizens of the United States are keeping watch.

They also asked him what he was keeping in his hat, to which he replied: “My head.”

This is a wonderful example of the kettle calling the pot black in the New York Times. The US of A refuses entry to British memoirist Sebastian Horsley, the author of Dandy in the Underworld, because he’s a former druggie and used prostitutes. Interesting! The still warm Eliot Spitzer nonsense is generating acres of newspaper print but US customs and immigration is making sure a sicko Brit doesn’t taint any God fearing Americans.

Here what he would have outlined to America….

Sounds like a regular memoir to me - I wonder if he made it up?

The world’s best travel writer, Jan Morris, has a new book but we have to wait until she “kicks the bucket” to see it. Her words not mine. When I came to Canada, I picked up City to City by Jan Morris - a book that looks at many of this country’s major cities.

A few months ago we asked AbeBooks visitors to vote on the world’s weirdest travel books

The New York Times travel section takes a bibliophile’s tour of the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. Lots of great bookstores.

To celebrate Halloween, The Guardian’s Sam Jordison visits Whitby in Yorkshire - a quiet seaside market town….and, of course, the scene of Dracula’s evil work.

When I first read this story on Publishers Weekly.com, I thought ‘great, a weekend at Lake Geneva with a bunch of authors’. Then I saw it was Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and not Lake Geneva in Europe. Still, it’s a pretty good idea from Penguin and a Wisconsin bookstore, who have partnered to create a weekend where readers can meet authors. It will cost you $310 for one night or $365 for two. Kim Edwards is among the authors who will attend. If the authors are dull, I suppose you could always go and watch the Green Bay Packers.

Stars and Stripes, a publication we rarely get to link to, has a feature about booktowns around the world.