LibWorm.com provides a librarian RSS filtering service. Over 1500 RSS librarian sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest headlines from journals and sites in the Non-fiction interest group. http://www.libworm.com/rss/librarianqueries.php Fri, 05 Aug 2011 02:52:31 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.lisnews.org/fact_checking_john_steinbeck039s_travels_charley Fifty years ago, John Steinbeck took a road trip across America with only his dog Charley for company. He published a non-fiction book about his experiences two years later, called Travels with Charley: In Search of America. Journalist Bill Steigerwald retraced Steinbeck’s journey this year and says the only problem with Steinbeck’s story is that it’s mostly a fabrication. (Source: LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News) Sun, 26 Dec 2010 18:19:35 +0100 895874 http://lisnews.org/fact_checking_john_steinbeck039s_travels_charley Fifty years ago, John Steinbeck took a road trip across America with only his dog Charley for company. He published a non-fiction book about his experiences two years later, called Travels with Charley: In Search of America. Journalist Bill Steigerwald retraced Steinbeck’s journey this year and says the only problem with Steinbeck’s story is that it’s mostly a fabrication. (Source: LISNews.org) Sun, 26 Dec 2010 18:19:35 +0100 895085 http://www.lisnews.org/lawrence_weschler_fiction_nonfiction Joseph Mitchell and Ryszard Kapuscinski were both non-fiction writers who cut their teeth as reporters but went on to create some of the most celebrated narrative non-fiction of this century; full of indelible characters, plots, settings and dialogue. But both have also been dogged by accusations that they committed journalistic sins by doctoring dialogue, manufacturing scenes and creating composite characters. For Bob these were unforgiveable transgressions but Lawrence Weschler, himself a celebrated author of narrative non-fiction, argues that the problem actually lies with Bob’s rules of truth and consequences. (Source: LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News) Sun, 26 Dec 2010 18:01:11 +0100 895876 http://lisnews.org/lawrence_weschler_fiction_nonfiction Joseph Mitchell and Ryszard Kapuscinski were both non-fiction writers who cut their teeth as reporters but went on to create some of the most celebrated narrative non-fiction of this century; full of indelible characters, plots, settings and dialogue. But both have also been dogged by accusations that they committed journalistic sins by doctoring dialogue, manufacturing scenes and creating composite characters. For Bob these were unforgiveable transgressions but Lawrence Weschler, himself a celebrated author of narrative non-fiction, argues that the problem actually lies with Bob’s rules of truth and consequences. (Source: LISNews.org) Sun, 26 Dec 2010 18:01:11 +0100 895087 http://santafelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/12/i-comics.html Yes, I admit it, I love comic books! Like many kids, I grew up on Archie comics, simple stories with bright colors, and in conjunction with picture books that's how I learned how to read. When I grew out of the Archies, all that was available were superhero comics. Now, while I loved the Wonder Woman TV show and the Super Friends cartoons, the comic books weren't quite to my taste. So, alas, I put the comic books aside in favor of "real books" such as novels, non-fiction, poetry, and of course, schoolwork.Thankfully, a college friend introduced me to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. With stories that dovetailed nicely with the mythology and literature classes I was taking, and breathtaking art that made the Archie comics look like doodles, I was immediately hooked. I was soon seeking out interesting, intelligent, and beautifully-styled comic books on a weekly basis. When I'd travel to another city, I'd load up on "graphic novels", an emerging literary form that was giving those flimsy funny books a more substantial binding and cover.Many years later, comics and graphic novels that were once hard to find have now hit the mainstream. Hollywood regularly adapts some of my favorite tomes for the big screen with mixed results. K-12 teachers are using graphic novels in the classroom, both to assist struggling readers and to teach these beautifully crafted stories as literature. Advances in printing and publishing technology have surely helped, but I think we've also gone full circle: back to a golden age of books, when illuminated manuscripts demonstrated that information and tales can be presented beautifully.While we may not be as knowledgeable as some of the folks at True Believers and other comics shops, we do have quite a collection of graphic novels for all ages and tastes. Many of our books, including manga and superhero series, are in an easy-to-browse section of the Young Adult collection. ... Thu, 23 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0100 894680 http://librarywriting.blogspot.com/2010/12/call-for-papers-childrens-and-young.html Call for Papers Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture for the PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture AssociationsJoint ConferenceApril 20-23, 2011San Antonio, TXhttp://www.swtxpca.org/You may submit your proposals online by going to the conference event management database, here: http://ncp.pcaaca.org/Once in the database, create an account, and then submit a proposal. For submitting to this area, please use the pull down menu for the Topic Area: choose the one that reads: Children's/Young Adult Literature and Culture (Dominguez). This will make sure your presentation is submitted to my area for programming purposes (the national PCA/ACA also has a children's literature and culture area).You may also submit proposals to me directly:Dr. Diana Dominguez, Area ChairE-mail submissions preferred:gypsyscholar@rgv.rr.comPlease put SWPCA Submission in e-mail subject line.Proposal submission deadline extended to: December 31, 2010Conference hotel: Marriott Rivercenter San Antonio101 Bowie StreetSan Antonio, Texas 78205 USAPhone: 1-210-223-1000Now accepting proposals for the Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture area of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Associations Conference. This area is not limited to proposals/papers about traditional literature; children's and young adult culture can encompass a myriad of media: books, television, film, computer/internet culture, fan fiction, toys, marketing issues, music, comics and graphic novels, and non-fiction mediums like documentaries, non-fiction books or magazines, textbooks, television non-fiction shows. Theoretically-based papers about the very nature of "children's" and "young adult" categories/genres also encouraged. ... Wed, 22 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0100 894986 http://memphisreads.blogspot.com/2010/12/memphis-reads-question.html By now, several year-end lists detailing the best books chosen by editors, book critics, and selection committees have been released.Memphis Reads wants to know what books were chosen by our blog visitors as the best of 2010. Memphis Reads asks: What was the best book (fiction or non-fiction) you read in 2010? Leave us a comment by clicking the "comments" link below. (Source: Memphis Reads) Mon, 20 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0100 894362 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/18/author-alex-butterworth-digital-reviews Alex Butterworth on the book as appBack in the mid-1990s I did some research on narrative in digital media. Of the projects I worked on, those that seemed most outlandish then have since become familiar concepts. Virtual worlds hit the headlines with Second Life, geo-tagging has become mainstream with Foursquare, while many of today's best video games deploy something like a "story engine" to manage the narrative flow experienced by the player.What, though, of the digital book, and its promise of a rich, new, constructive interaction with the text? With this Christmas looking like the moment when the transition from codex to screen will finally gain real traction, will the expectations of new digital readers be fulfilled? And is there anything to encourage my own ambitious sense of the revolutionary changes in narrative that digital books might bring about?There was a time when I would have scorned a mere nonlinear rendition of a book as too simple, as not fulfilling its digital potential. So I was surprised to find myself warming to the MyFry app version of Stephen Fry's memoir. Its elegant interface charted my progress through a wheel of segments colour-coded by theme and character, drawing me into an episodic engagement with the text: I skipped through the story of Fry's addictive personality – he was hooked on sugar as a seven-year-old, before picking up serious smoking and reading habits.Are other new apps similarly successful? Illustrated non-fiction immediately suggests itself as an area where the iPad's qualities might be most apparent, and two apps without accompanying books seek to be in the vanguard. The Solar System, from the makers of The Elements, is self-explanatory, while Why the Net Matters, by David Eagleman, sells itself as a groundbreaking interactive essay on the world-saving potential of the internet. Sadly the latter over-promises, with a design that's sometimes cluttered, at other times misleading. ... Sat, 18 Dec 2010 00:07:32 +0100 893551 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/18/steven-poole-nonfiction-choice-reviews The God Instinct by Jesse Bering | Zero-Sum World by Gideon Rachman | Adonis to Zorro: Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion by Andrew Delahunty & Sheila DignenThe God Instinct, by Jesse Bering (Nicholas Brealey, £16.99)Is the idea of God an invention maliciously hammered into the heads of the innocent young, or is it innate? Bering, an evolutionary psychologist, thinks the latter. Theism stems, he writes, from a cluster of brain adaptations that lead to cognitive biases and illusions. Useful abilities – such as our theory of mind, our "person-permanence thinking", or our perception of patterns and causes – work not wisely but too well, so that we intuit a big watcher, an engineer of coincidence ("encrypting information in [. . .] events"), a guarantor of immortality, or a designer of our life's purpose.God, in sum, is a "sort of scratch on our psychological lenses", hard to get rid of completely. Disarmingly, Bering tells stories of his own superstitious moments, and references to Sartre and Gide add a patina of literary class. The deep-historical theses, as usual in this field, are plausible to varying degrees but always unprovable. Did the idea of God solve the problem of gossip among early humans by inhibiting reputation-harming behaviour? Maybe, but we'll never know. Bering also downplays the role of culture excessively: indoctrination and tradition do exist, and they work. First-cause deists, meanwhile, will be serenely untroubled by it all, as they usually are.Zero-Sum World, by Gideon Rachman (Atlantic, £20)Since the financial crisis hit, we are living in an "Age of Anxiety", which follows the "Age of Transformation" (1978-91: Reaganomics) and the "Age of Optimism" (1991-2008: the "end of history"). ... Sat, 18 Dec 2010 00:07:09 +0100 893561 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/16/culturomics-google-tool-cultural-trends Two hundred years of history in the form of 5,195,769 digitised books can now be probed for cultural trends using Google's new culturomics toolEmail updates and links to science@guardian.co.uk. We'd like to hear about your own research using the new tool. What trends have you unearthed? The paper's authors have agreed to analyse some of the best ones for usRead the research in Science (register to view it in full)Friday 17 December 3.34pm: Our own Martin Robbins has used the tool to identify a marked cultural trend in favour of a certain liberal-leaning newspaper.Friday 3.27pm: A vast collection of Google ngrams is already being amassed at #ngrams on Twitter.Friday 3.21pm: A bona fide linguistics researcher has weighed in with a blopost at the Language Log. Geoff Nunberg of the University of California Berkeley welcomes the research, and the new Google tool, but looks forward to more bells and whistles:The big news is that Google has set up a site called the Google Books Ngram Viewer where the public can enter words or n-grams (to 5) for any period and corpus and see the resulting graph. They've also announced that the entire dataset of n-grams will be made available for download. Some reports have interpreted this as meaning that Google is making the entire corpus available. It isn't, alas, nor even the pre-1923 portion of the corpus that's in public domain. One can hope…At present, that's all you can with this. You can't do many of the things that you can do with other corpora: you can't ask for a list of the words that follow traditional for each decade from 1900 to 2000 in order of descending frequency, or restrict a search for bronzino to paragraphs that contain fish and don't contain painting, etc. And while Lieberman Aiden and Michel made an impressive effort to purge the subcorpus of the metadata errors that have plagued Google Books, you can't sort books by genre or topic. ... Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:10:47 +0100 893359 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/16/google-tool-english-cultural-trends Harvard and Google say they have developed a way to identify cultural trends over the past 200 years using a database of 5m digitised booksHow many words in the English language never make it into dictionaries? How has the nature of fame changed in the past 200 years? How do scientists and actors compare in their impact on popular culture?These are just some of the questions that researchers and members of the public can now answer using a new online tool developed by Google with the help of scientists at Harvard University. The massive searchable database is being hailed as the key to a new era of research in the humanities, linguistics and social sciences that has been dubbed "culturomics".The database comprises more than 5m books – both fiction and non-fiction – published between 1800 and 2000, representing around 4% of all the books ever printed. Dr Jean-Baptiste Michel and Dr Erez Lieberman Aiden of Harvard University have developed the search tool, which they say will give researchers the ability to quantify a huge range of cultural trends in history."Interest in computational approaches to the humanities and social sciences dates back to the 1950s," said Michel, a psychologist in Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. "But attempts to introduce quantitative methods into the study of culture have been hampered by the lack of suitable data. We now have a massive dataset, available through an interface that is user-friendly and freely available to anyone."In their initial analysis of the database, the team found that around 8,500 new words enter the English language every year and the lexicon grew by 70% between 1950 and 2000. But most of these words do not appear in dictionaries. ... Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:00:29 +0100 893220 http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/digital-book-world-announced-publishing-innovation-awards/ From the press release: The Publishing Innovation Awards will recognize the best ebooks and book apps based on their merits in the areas of origination, development, production, design, and marketing. To celebrate the launch of the awards, organizers at Digital Book World 2011 Conference + Expo will present the inaugural Publishing Innovation Awards in five categories – Fiction, Non-Fiction, Reference, Children’s, and Comics — during their opening ceremony on January 24th, 2011 at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in New York City. “The Publishing Innovation Awards will honor those making strides in this nascent medium,” said David Nussbaum, CEO of F+W Media, parent company to Digital Book World. “As the mission of Digital Book World is to learn, share and celebrate innovation in our industry, the Publishing Innovation Awards are a natural extension to the community.” To advise the launch of the Publishing Innovation Awards, Digital Book World has recruited some of the brightest minds working at the intersection of publishing and technology, including Peter Costanzo, Online Marketing Director of Perseus Books Group, Elizabeth Castro, author of EPUB: Straight to the Point, and Peter Meyers, author of Best iPad Apps and the E2BU white paper, “Enhanced Ebooks Today and Tomorrow: A Survey for Authors and Publishers.” Liza Daly, president of Threepress Consulting and developer of Bookworm, ePub Zen Garden & Ibis Reader, and Joshua Tallent, founder/CEO of eBook Architects and author of Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide, will assist the panel in selecting and judging the inaugural winners. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:59:31 +0100 892775 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/14/alternative-christmas-book-hits Away from the trashy till-ringers, some rather more interesting titles are filling Christmas shoppers' basketsForget the celebrity memoirs, selling in their dispiriting droves to the imaginatively challenged in search of a Christmas present-by-numbers. Elsewhere, particularly in independent bookshops, a range of much more interesting books are turning into seasonal hits this week, as shoppers put away their snowboots and head into the bookshops before the next Arctic blast.As is traditional, there are some quirky beasts among the most popular titles. At Foyle's, web editor Jonathan Ruppin said the left-field of the Christmas market was being dominated by Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, beautifully published by US art house Visual Editions, with a different die-cut on each page. The story itself takes Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles and pulls out words and phrases to leave the reader with an alternate narrative. But it's the book's identity as a physical object that is really getting book-buyers hooked, Ruppin said: "When you pick it up, it's such fun and such an intriguing thing." And on a sillier note, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel is doing "fantastically well" with Foyles buyers, added Ruppin.Jaffe and Neale's in Chipping Norton is having a hit with Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, Judith Schalansky's intricately designed love letter to the distant places that she dreamed of as a child growing up on the wrong side of the Berlin wall. And at the Totnes bookshop in surf-loving Devon, all-conquering Jamie Oliver is being given a run for his money by Martin Dorey and Sarah Randall's The Camper Van Cookbook, while local poet Matt Harvey's "very funny" illustrated collection Where Earwigs Dare is the top-selling title, said manager Nigel Jones. ... Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:20:00 +0100 892702 http://drakelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/12/traveling-tips.html Folks will be doing a lot of traveling this week, both students and staff, and we hope you all enjoy a safe trip. The Thruway Authority has some helpful safe driving tips for winter, as does AAA. The NOAA web site, from the national weather service, will give you a good idea of weather conditions.And this wouldn't be a library blog if we didn't suggest that you pick up a book or two to bring with you on your travels and for when you go home. Drake Library has the biggest book collection of the SUNY four year colleges, every sort of non-fiction and fiction imaginable. Check the catalog, get a few books for break, and drive safe :-) (Source: Drake Memorial Library) Tue, 14 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0100 893542 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/11/etcetera-reviews-roundup-steven-poole Disconnect by Devra Davis, Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran by Annabelle Sreberny & Gholam Khiabany and Enter Night: Metallica, the Biography by Mick WallDisconnect, by Devra Davis (Dutton, £18.99)When you talk on your mobile phone, do you hold it an inch away from your ear? No, me neither. So why exactly do all phones sold today come with a tiny warning buried somewhere in the documentation not to hold them too close to the body? (I checked mine: it says at least 15mm away, which rules out carrying it in a pocket.) And why won't insurance companies insure phone makers against health lawsuits? You don't need to be wearing a tinfoil hat to find epidemiologist Davis's story very interesting. She interviews many scientists who claim their work showing harmful effects of mobile-phone radiation was suppressed, accused of fraud, or followed quickly by obscurantist industry-sponsored "research".According to Davis's description of various studies, mobile-phone radiation kills reproductive cells in fruit-flies and breaks DNA in rats' brains. Analyses show heavy mobile-phone use in humans to be correlated with increased rates of brain and face tumours. Davis won't say "mobile phones cause cancer", but she makes a persuasive case – despite the emotive inclusion of individual case studies that, as she knows, prove nothing – for caution. Ladies and gentlemen, don your headsets.Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran, by Annabelle Sreberny & Gholam Khiabany (IB Tauris, £14.99)Western pontificators called it a "Twitter revolution" when disaffected young Iranians took to the net in the wake of the 2009 election results, but the authors of this excellent study are sceptical: "Twitter functioned mainly as a huge echo chamber of solidarity messages from global voices that simply slowed the general speed of traffic [. . .] the 'real' action remained on Iranian streets and rooftops. ... Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:06:39 +0100 891873 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/11/grandville-mon-amour-bryan-talbot-review Michael Moorcock enters the parallel universe of Insepctor LeBrock and Detective RatziBryan Talbot has always specialised in that brand of nostalgic satire known as steampunk. His Luther Arkwright stories were set against the background of a British Empire where uniformed airshipmen fought for queen and country, until discovering their idealism to be a little misplaced – whereupon their adventures continued apace, only with somewhat altered objectives.In those books Talbot drew heavily on a wide range of English iconography to depict an Albion ruled by monarchy and church. This came in for some stern thrashings through the 1990s as he continued his relentless prosecution of authoritarian power, up until what remains my own favourite, The Tale of One Bad Rat. This moving story of child abuse set pretty much in the here and now referenced, of course, Beatrix Potter.Talbot's storytelling, as well as his draughtsmanship, has grown steadily more assured and subtle. With his superb graphic novel Grandville, published last year, he extended his range to include references to the mid-19th-century French artist JJ Grandville, best known for his anthropomorphic representations of animals. That said, Talbot's animal characters owe more to British artists such as Tourtel and Bestall, who drew the Rupert stories. Their inhabitants of Nutwood included Percy the Pug, Bill the Badger and Edward the Elephant, all drawn to the same human scale. It's a tradition dating at least from ancient Egypt, which gives us such 20th-century favourites as Tiger Tim, Korky the Cat and, of course, the enduring characters from The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh. Talbot knowingly chooses to work in a European, predominantly English, tradition. ... Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:06:27 +0100 891881 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/09/jamie-oliver-30-minute-meals-record Chef's latest cookbook has sold 735,000 copies in 10 weeks to become the UK's fastest selling non-fiction title of all timeHe has persuaded schoolchildren to eat broccoli, changed government policy, revolutionised cookery on TV and was awarded an MBE aged just 28. Now Jamie Oliver has yet another claim to fame: writing the UK's fastest selling non-fiction title of all time.His latest cookbook, Jamie's 30-Minute Meals, has sold 735,000 copies in 10 weeks, beating the previous record held by Peter Kay's memoir, The Sound of Laughter. In the past week, its sales were more than twice that of its nearest rival, Guinness World Records.If things continue, Oliver will beat Delia Smith, whose How To Cook (Book 1) is currently the bestselling cookbook of all time, with more than a million copies sold. Jamie's 30-Minute Meals, which contains recipes for 50 quick three-course dinners, was made into a television series for Channel 4.The past week has been the biggest for sales so far, with 110,000 copies bought. Tom Tivnan, features editor of The Bookseller magazine, told the BBC: "It really is quite phenomenal to have sales like that when the TV series is finished and the book has been out a few weeks. I am pretty sure it will go on to be the biggest selling cookbook ever."According to official figures compiled by the Bookseller, the second placed title, Guinness World Records, sold just 50,444 copies in the past seven days. In third place in the overall chart was The Simples Life, by The Meerkat, with sales of 37,640.Tivnan said cookbook sales as a whole had flattened off in recent years, but there was certainly "much more of a foodie interest" in Britain now than a decade ago."There are really four or five cookbook writers who dominate the market and they're the ones we know by their first name - Jamie, Delia, Gordon, Nigella," he told the BBC. "I think accessibility is really the key to Jamie's success. ... Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:09:13 +0100 891564 http://www.sla.org.uk/blg-bill-bryson-wins-2010-educational.php The Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS) and the Society of Authors today announced that Bill Bryson had been awarded the 2010 Educational Writers' Award for A Really Short History of Nearly Everything, abridged and edited by Felicia Law. The award was made at the All Party Writers Group (APWG) Winter Reception at the House of Commons by Lord Hill, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools, who presented a £2,000 cheque to the winners.The 2010 Award focused on books for 12 -18 year olds published in 2009 & 2010. A Really Short History of Nearly Everything (Doubleday) beat off strong competition from a shortlist that was described as "highlighting humour, scholarship and lateral thinking". Fellow shortlistees for 2010 included: Ben Crystal for Shakespeare on Toast (Icon Books); John Farndon for Do You Think You're Clever? (Icon Books) and Liz Strachan for A Slice of Pi (Constable).ALCS and the Society of Authors created this award in 2008 to ‘celebrate educational writing that inspires creativity and encourages students to read widely and build up their understanding of a subject beyond the requirements of exam specifications'.  It is the only UK Award that focuses on educational non-fiction.  It is made annually for an outstanding example of traditionally published single volume work, with or without illustration, for the specified age group.  The age group alternates each year; this year's focus was on works for 12 - 18 year olds and in 2011 the focus returns to works for 5 - 11 year olds.  The 2010 judging panel comprised three educational experts:  school librarian Maggy Campbell, teacher Louise Gerrard and writer Stewart Ross.The forthcoming deadline for submission for the 2011 award for the 5 - 11 year age group is 1st June 2011.  For further details please see the website. ... Wed, 08 Dec 2010 10:19:18 +0100 892258 http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/call-for-submissionsyoung-writers.html "If you are a teenager currently enrolled in high school, grades 9-12, Crashtest, the new online literary magazine for high school writers, would like to hear from you! Crashtest publishes poetry, stories and creative non-fiction in the form of personal essays, imaginative investigation, experimental interviews, or whatever else you would like to call it. We’re looking for writing that has both a (Source: NewPages Blog) Wed, 08 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0100 892177 http://librarychronicles.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html#9066402814803535366 Salon's "Best Non-Fiction of 2010" lists six titles only one of which I've read (The Big Short by Michael Lewis) and another I'm waiting to read (The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson) So I can't really comment much other than to say The Big Short is so character-driven that it could make a halfway decent movie and that I saw Wilkerson interviewed on Book TV this year and was interested in her subject but hope her writing isn't as boring as her personal presentation.Anyway it's December and 'tis the season for "Best of" book lists. Book TV has several of these compiled in the "News about Books" window on the front page of its website. I've been looking through the lists all day and have found that I've read, checked out and not read, or am planning to read only a few of these selections. In addition to The Big Short and The Warmth of Other Suns I've also checked out Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition but had to return it because I was reading something else at the time. It will go back in the queue and I'll get to it eventually. Also on one of these lists (Library Journal's) I noticed The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption which I had just checked out a few days ago. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is near the top of everyone's fiction lists. I read the first chapter of it last night and am not surprised that I already want to punch Franzen in the face along with each of his stupid neurotic yuppie characters nobody should care about.I guess I should put together a list of books I read in 2010 just for comparison's sake. Maybe later. Meanwhile here's what I read on the internet today.Here is a NOLA Defender item on yesterday's Inspector General's report on New Orleans Hotels who don't pay their fair share of occupancy taxes.Here is a Times-Picayune editorial opining that they probably should do that. ... Wed, 08 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0100 892018 http://lorelibrarian.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/farnham-library/ I joined Farnham Library the other day – something I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. The first task was getting in to the Library – it is slightly confusing, as there is a big door and opening hours off the main street, but I don’t think you can get in that way (not sure, it isn’t very welcoming if you can, but if you can’t it is an odd place to have the opening hours up). I went in through the car park entrance. Much easier. Once inside, there was a very small queue at the help desk, but I didn’t have too long to wait. I was greeted by a helpful Library Assistant – I know she was a Library Assistant, as she had a name badge with it on (something which might be an idea for my Library, to stop all those ‘do you work here?’ questions) – who seemed quite pleased I had remembered to bring some id with my address on. I had to choose one of the Library card designs, which threw me a little, as I hadn’t been expecting to have to make any decisions at this point. I picked  one with Newlands Corner on, pretty much at random – there weren’t any with anything in Farnham on. I had to sign my name in a book, sign the card, then was given my PIN, and a few leaflets, and that was it. I had a quick browse round the shelves, found a couple of books to borrow, and then faced my first time using the self-service machine. It was thankfully easy (how embarrassing it would have been if I’d had to ask for help!!), and I opted to print a receipt to remind me when the books are due back (and it doubles as a handy bookmark). It seemed like a nice enough place – not huge, but not tiny either.  It was interesting to see the sizes of the various sections – lots of crime books, and general fiction, a small amount of sci-fi/fantasy, and lots of non-fiction. ... Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:04:17 +0100 892316 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/dec/06/bookselling-merry-christmas For all the kvetching about the digital era, the books world's vital signs are looking very healthyAt the end of a week in which Google announced the launch of its long-awaited e-reader, and at the end of a year in which the digitised text swept all before it (sales of ebooks in the USA now approach $1,000m (£638m) you might think that the game was up for traditional publishing, or that the conventional book was history.Not a bit of it. Three items of current, unrelated book news suggest that now – as never before – the printed word remains in rude good health, despite the merchants of doom.First, there's World Book Night, the great book giveaway scheduled for 5 March 2011, and masterminded by Canongate's Jamie Byng. Put aside the inevitable carping that such a bold and imaginative scheme is bound to excite. The headline news is that the reading public will be getting tens of thousands of free (rather good) books courtesy of Seamus Heaney, John le Carré, Philip Pullman, Sarah Waters, and several others. What's not to like?Next, I note that Random House is currently cleaning up in the British non-fiction bestseller list with the ghosted autobiography of a little furry animal of Russian extraction, the meerkat Alexsandr Orlov, star of the meerkat.com TV advert. Nothing new here. JR Hartley, the old chap who starred in the 1983 Yellow Pages advert in search of a book about Fly Fishing later became a genuine bestseller when an enterprising publisher commissioned a faux-fishing classic. Again, an example of consumer preferences for the quasi-literary entertainment in book form.Finally, on a slightly more elevated note, Hilary Mantel, 2009 Booker-winner has written Ink in the Blood, a short memoir of her recent terrifying post-operative hospital experience last summer. ... Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:17:28 +0100 890761 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/dec/06/psychologist-as-novelist Do pyschologists make better novelists? What happened when one researcher applied his powers of human understanding to the literary formAn eminent psychologist confided to me: "Whenever any group of really good research psychologists gets together socially, after a few drinks they always – and I do mean always – talk about why novelists are so much better at it than we are." One psychologist came at the question from a different direction. He became an unpublished novelist, and then published a monograph telling other psychologists how they can further their careers in this same manner.J Kelly Moreno, professor of psychology at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, wrote a case study called The Psychologist as Novelist. It appears in the journal Professional Psychology: Research and Practice.No mere navel gazing, this. Professor Moreno methodically analyses his actions, accomplishments and emotions, so that his peers can learn to become literarily productive persons. "This article", he writes, "invites psychologists to apply their knowledge of human behaviour and facility with the written word to the modern novel."Professor Moreno counsels psychologico-literati-wannabees to begin with the beginning. "Steps for starting are itemised," he explains, "as is other information pertinent to persisting in the face of opposition and resistance."Professor Moreno's CV, on his website, lists four works of fiction, with indications of their fate. Here's the complete list: Moreno, JK (1998). Scared to Death. Unpublished short story. Moreno, JK (2000). The Porno Judge. Unpublished short story. Moreno, JK (2002). A Duty to Warn: A Novel. Unpublished manuscript. Moreno, JK (2006). Reality Testing: A Novel. Unpublished manuscript.Professor Moreno's monograph adds flesh – and news of a third unpublished novel – to that bare skeletal description. ... Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:31:05 +0100 890764 http://librarywriting.blogspot.com/2010/12/cfp-american-literature-association.html CFP: AMERICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION - CHILDREN'S LITERATURE SOCIETYMAY 26-29, 2011Boston, MAThe Children’s Literature Society of the ALA seeks abstracts for two panels on children’s literature for the American Literature Association Conference to be held May 26-29, 2011, at The Westin Copley Place in Boston, MA.Panel 1:Images, Imagination and Children’s Literature: Graphic Novels and Picture Books through History.This panel explores the expression of the American imagination through illustrated literature for youth. This interpretation of images and the text that mediates them will deepen our understanding of how the American imagination exists in children’s literary tradition. Papers in this panel investigate uniquely American attributes in graphic novels, picture books and other forms of illustrated literature. Papers may also investigate how defining characteristics of American illustrated literature for youth have influenced or been influenced by literary culture. Papers about influential illustrators are also of interest, as are papers that offer an historical or interpretative overview of the topic.Please send panel proposals or paper abstracts (250-500 words) by December 30, 2010 to Linda Salem lsalem@mail.sdsu.eduPlease include academic rank and affiliation and AV requestsHard copies can also be sent toLinda SalemLibrarySan Diego State University5500 Campanile DriveSan Diego, CA 92182-8050Panel 2: The Digital Worlds of Children’s Literature: From Video Games to the iPadWhen Steve Jobs presented the iPad, combining the e-book format with multimedia capabilities, “books” and “reading” were alleged to have changed. But this “change” had already been occurring in the world of children’s new media adaptations and formats The seamless relationship of young people and new media has, in fact, led the MIT Comparative Media Studies website to call the generation entering the 21st century, “generation. ... Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0100 892103 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/04/critical-eye-book-reviews-roundup Working the Room by Geoff Dyer, An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin and Polly Samson's Perfect Lives"I had no difficulty in lapping up page after paragraph of this fare . . . For a self-confessed lazy man . . . he's a notably diligent researcher whose writing bespeaks a confident – although never showy – erudition." Will Self in the Financial Times admired Geoff Dyer's collection of essays, Working the Room, even if it "doesn't quite pack a heavyweight punch . . . Dyer, who makes much of his writerly lifestyle, revolving through the world high and unanchored . . . sometimes strikes me as a sort of kidult sage – but then that would be an oxymoron." Colin Waters in the Herald put the question: "Is what Dyer does great? I could read his non-fiction all day. There's a danger that we underestimate him given the approachability of his prose. His language isn't matey but it hits a relaxed, intimate note, a directness that never lapses into the demotic". "An autodidact and magpie, Dyer . . . enthuses when putting himself in the picture," noted Rob Sharp in the Independent. "His writing is insightful, humorous and mostly easy to follow", but "it is odd that he feels the need to tell just how little he cares"."Had I read this novel without knowing who wrote it, I would have expected it to be packaged in a pastel-coloured cover sporting an image of a sexy babe toying with an auctioneer's gavel." Lee Randall in the Scotsman was perplexed by Steve Martin's novel An Object of Beauty, which, while "not officially 'chick lit', since the subject is the Manhattan art scene rather than snaring a mate . . . does share the light, bright breeziness so characteristic of that genre. . . this is a perfectly serviceable, racy potboiler. ... Sat, 04 Dec 2010 00:06:06 +0100 890154 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/04/life-times-nadine-gordimer-review Two new collections map Nadine Gordimer's engagement with the moral dimension of her art. By Mark Gevisser"The moment when I am no longer more than a writer, I will cease to write." This statement by Albert Camus is Nadine Gordimer's credo, she tells us in a 2006 essay collected in Telling Times, (Telling Times: Writing and Living 1950-2008, Bloomsbury, £35), the magisterial anthology of her non-fiction written since 1950, which serves as a companion to Life Times, a new collection of her short stories.Camus's statement helps to explain the vitality of this extraordinary writer and the moral gaze she has cast – arch and rigorous – over literature and politics in the past 60 years. It explains why she took herself off to Israel/Palestine well into her 80s to give a lecture on the need to bear witness. It also surely explains why, at the age of 87, she recently decided to lead South African writers in protest against the moves towards restricting press freedom by the ruling African National Congress, the movement she has long supported.In early essays Gordimer noted the lack of a Camus-like figure, the philosopher-novelist, in anglophone literature. These new collections demonstrate how assiduously she has set out to establish for herself such a role, from her "beautiful old tin-roofed house with room for my books", with Johannesburg's mine-dumps and tough black townships just beyond. She is intensely conscious of her position as a white South African who saw, early on, the evil being done in her name and thus became a "minority-within-a-minority". She has taken what she believes to be her primary burden and turned it into a lifelong moral quest: to be a writer by being more than a writer. ... Sat, 04 Dec 2010 00:05:37 +0100 890149 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/12/03/caldecott-gold-2011-predictions-anyone/ Last year, around this time, I reviewed some picture books which I believed were strong contenders for the Caldecott Medal.  The Caldecott Medal is “awarded to the artist of the most distinguished American Picture Book for Children published in the United States during the preceding year.”  Yet in past years the committee has chosen not only picture books for this distinction but also highly illustrated non-fiction books and even a highly illustrated work of children’s fiction (The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures).   This year amongst the others, two noteworthy contenders are non-fiction books. In the Wild, by David Elliott, illustrated by Holly Meade.  Elliott’s collection of poems highlighting individual species of animals is wonderfully complimented by Meade’s illustrations.  Using woodblock prints and watercolor Meade has beautifully illustrated each featured animal and it’s habitat.  Meade’s work is representational and yet supplies lots of detail, and she allows the reader to see the textures that can come through using woodblock printing as a medium.  Her use of light and shadow adds detail, and her lines evoke each animals movement and attitude. Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow, by Gary Golio, illustrated by Javaka Steptoe.  Golio has written a biography of Jimi Hendrix, from his childhood in Seattle, to his early years as a professional musician.  Steptoe’s mixed media illustrations are vibrant, loud, reflective of their subject, and highly original.   In fact, original is the word that most quickly comes to my mind as I pour over Steptoe’s illustrations. Chalk, by Bill Thomson.  This wordless picture book is a marvel, combining highly realistic illustrations with a storyline that is pure fantasy.  Three friends are out walking on a rainy day and come across some chalk. ... Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:47:09 +0100 890242 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/XCLdcrkfkA4/don-kerr-new-poet-laureate-of.html "Don Kerr of Saskatoon is the new Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan. Kerr's term will begin January 1, 2011 and will run until December 31, 2012. The official inauguration will take place on January 10, 2011 at Government House at 7:00 p.m. Don Kerr is a poet, dramatist, fiction and non-fiction writer living in Saskatoon. Kerr has published nine books of poetry, with the most recent, The Dust of Just Beginning, being shortlisted for the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Awards. His plays have been produced at the 25th Street Theatre and at the Greystone. He has had extensive editorial experience and on the boards of Coteau Books and NeWest Press, as press editor for books of poetry and politics, and has been a mentor to emerging writers on Grain. The selection committee is enthusiastic in their recommendation of Kerr. They note not only the skill of his poetry, but also his work in the literary community: 'He is devoted to the province of Saskatchewan and celebrates the place and the people through many of his writings. Kerr has received the Saskatchewan Order of Merit and has dedicated himself to the history of his city and his province.' Kerr is the fourth person to hold the title of Poet Laureate; his three predecessors were Glen Sorestad (2000—2004), Louise B. Halfe (2005—2006), and Robert Currie (2007-2010) (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Fri, 03 Dec 2010 16:55:32 +0100 890190 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/01/alexandra-harris-guardian-first-book-award Alexandra Harris takes £10,000 prize for her non-fiction book Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John PiperAlexandra Harris's elegant re-evaluation of the arts in Britain between the wars, in which she argues that some of the key battles of modernism were fought in English tea shops and churchyards, was tonight named the winner of this year's Guardian first book award.Harris was awarded the £10,000 prize for Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper at a ceremony at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.She follows in the footsteps of Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer, two previous winners of the award. Harris, 29, is a lecturer in English at Liverpool University. Her book presents a radically new interpretation of the arts in the interwar period.The Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armitstead, who chaired the judging panel, said she was excited by the judges' choice, which had been described as a "counterintuitive decision" by one of their number."Serious works of art history rarely win populist prizes, and often have trouble finding publishers at all," Armitstead said. "Yet the response from our Waterstone's reading groups, as well as from our central panel, showed that readers of all sorts are willing to engage with demanding books, if they are well written and beautifully produced."Romantic Moderns interrogates the received notion that the interwar period was imbued with a simple nostalgia, looking only to a provincial world of tea shops and old churches while the key battles for modern art and modern literature were being fought in Paris and Spain. Instead, Harris argues, English culture of the time was eclectic and urgent, pursuing its own often pastoral slant on modernism. ... Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:00:07 +0100 889606 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/dec/01/first-book-award-serious-reading Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns is unashamedly complex, but contrary to prevalent assumptions, this doesn't need to put readers offAlexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns is unashamedly academic and it deals with the difficult subject of Englishness. It would seem, one judge remarked, to be a counterintuitive winner of the Guardian first book award. But the first print run sold out within a month of publication and it got the second highest overall score from the Waterstone's reading groups involved in the judging. Something interesting is clearly happening, but what?When I first spotted Romantic Moderns in a dowdy proof way before publication I was reminded of the moment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when the thaw sets in and the entire landscape begins to change in ways that are only discernible from the sound of dripping water. It's the job of prizes to reflect the drip of change and I think this year's prizes have shown that the literary landcape is shifting in profound ways.You only have to look at the novels on this year's first book longlist – as on the Booker – to see that literary fiction has a new spring in its step. But change, and the hunger for it, is strongest in non-fiction. The judges of the Costa biography prize more or less turned their backs on conventional biography. At the Samuel Johnson prize cermony in the summer, I was buttonholed by a couple of trustees who were worried that the leading award for non-fiction was being hijacked by a pursuit of populism that didn't necessarily privilege the best literature.For a variety of reasons – reduced publishing advances, more cautious commissioning, the stranglehold of an increasingly centralised marketplace on what is seen as sellable – non-fiction publishing has been getting safer. And in becoming safer, it's become both more conservative and more superficial. ... Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:00:06 +0100 889607 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/01/guardian-first-book-award-romantic-moderns Revisionist study of English culture between the wars is surprise winner of £10,000 prizeThis year's Guardian first book award has this evening gone to a cultural history arguing that modernism has just as much to do with English teashops and churchyards as exotic European -isms and abstractions. Alexandra Harris's elegant re-evaluation of the arts in Britain during the interwar period, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, was awarded the £10,000 prize in a ceremony at London's Victoria & Albert Museum.Harris, a lecturer in English at Liverpool University whose book presents a radically new interpretation of the artistic expression of this period, follows in the footsteps of Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer, two of the previous winners of the award.Guardian literary editor Claire Armitstead, who chaired the judging panel, said she was excited by the judges' choice, which had been described as "a counterintuitive decision" by one of their number. "Serious works of art history rarely win populist prizes, and often have trouble finding publishers at all," Armitstead said. "Yet the response from our Waterstone's reading groups, as well as from our central panel, showed that readers of all sorts are willing to engage with demanding books, if they are well written and beautifully produced."Romantic Moderns interrogates the received notion that the arts in Britain during this period were dominated by a simple nostalgia, looking only to a provincial world of teashops and old churches, while the key battles for modern art and modern literature were being fought in Paris and Spain. Instead, Harris argues, English culture of the time was eclectic and urgent, pursuing its own often pastoral slant on modernism. ... Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:00:05 +0100 889601 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BPLDNews/~3/X6S-x7YQKJ4/buena-park-librarys-volunteer-guild.html The always popular Double Discount Sale of the Volunteer Guild Bookstore will be held Saturday, December 11, 2010, from 12 pm to 4:30 PM in the Guild's bookstore, located on the 2nd floor of the Buena Park Library District at 7150 La Palma Avenue. Just in time for the holiday gift shopping, tables full of donations, including a large selection of audio books, music CDs and cassettes, music LPs, VHS movies, magazines, Christmas themed books of all kinds, and a ton of fiction and non-fiction titles will be on display for perusal and purchase. Come early for best selection! Cash only, please. The Bookstore is elevator-accessible. For further information, please contact the Volunteer Guild, 714.826.4100 x123. (Source: Buena Park Library District News) Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:16:10 +0100 890289 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/booksquare/~3/aruOzZXl-5w/ As much as the idea of enhanced ebooks brings the sexy to publishing, it doesn’t really do much for most of the books published. Enhanced, enriched, transmedia, multimedia…these are ideas best applied to those properties that lend themselves to multimedia experience (or, ahem, the associated price tag). While many focus on the bright and shiny (and mostly unfulfilled) promised of apps and enhanced ebooks, the smart kids are looking at the power of social reading. And with the reading comes the book discussion. Social reading is normal reading. It’s how we already read in an offline world, and, yes, how we read in an online world. First, some historical context, all stuff that is well known. In the beginning, humans told stories around campfires*. The storytelling happened in group situations, with some stories passed from campfire to campfire, and eventually the woolly mammoth the hunter felled was a large as the Titanic. Some stories became institutionalized — myths, biblical stories, parables. Others, well, they never really gained market share. Hmm, publishing, the early days. Time passed. We developed alphabets, we coalesced around local language standards, we wrote stuff down, but the process was laborious (think rocks) or fragile (think parchment) or valuable (think illuminated manuscripts). These printed stories (using both words broadly), fiction and non-fiction, were not possessed in great numbers by common folk. Reading, or sharing of stories, was done in groups, except for those ancient-times-us who wrote stories in their heads (go ancient-times-us!). Even after the invention of the Gutenberg press, the possession of books was outside the reach of most people. We moved from campfires to candlelight, while the act of reading remained a social activity. The tradition of people reading to each other remains alive and well. ... Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:43:53 +0100 889570 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/30/bad-sex-award-novelist-rowan-somerville Lurid insect imagery secures prize for The Shape of Her, just ahead of Alastair Campbell, who was disqualified for wanting to winWith one killer sentence using the image of a butterfly collector – "like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her" – the novelist Rowan Somerville demolished all comers and secured this year's coveted Literary Review Bad Sex award.The Shape of Her is Somerville's second novel. He graciously accepted the honour, presented by film director and food critic Michael Winner, saying: "There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you."The judges were also impressed by his nature notes, such as the pubic hair "like desert vegetation following an underground stream", and the passage: "He unbuttoned the front of her shirt and pulled it to the side so that her breast was uncovered, her nipple poking out, upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing the night. He took it between his lips and sucked the salt from her."Somerville narrowly defeated Alastair Campbell, nominated not for his political diaries but his novel Maya. The judges felt his naked enthusiasm for winning disqualified him.In this week's Observer, Campbell explained: "People have wondered if I am bluffing when I say I want to win. I do know that on Monday night they will have a very good laugh if they read certain passages out aloud. There is a bit where my central character describes a pair of breasts as 'perfect desirable objects' and they may well think that is a wanky line. But Steve is an unreliable narrator and that is the way he sees it. If some people get aroused by reading the sex scene, then fine, but these lines are mainly about the significance of this moment for the character. ... Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:49:56 +0100 889362 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/28/you-better-not-cry-review Running With Scissors author Augusten Burroughs mixes misery and mistletoe in his latest work to oddly cheering effect, writes Jessica HollandAugusten Burroughs has a strange approach to Christmas if this collection of stories is anything to go by. As a child, after finally realising that Jesus and Santa were separate entities, he finds himself inexplicably kissing a life-size model of the latter and getting so wrapped up in the moment that he starts biting chunks off the figure's face and having to have his stomach pumped due to ingested plaster.Twenty years later, and caught up in alcoholism and a promiscuous sex life, Burroughs wakes up to find himself naked in bed with an elderly man dressed as Santa, who confirms that the two did, briefly, have intercourse. "If one was sexually attracted to Santa, one had departed from mainstream reality," Burroughs writes. "Outlook not so good."Anyone who has read the rest of Burroughs's non-fiction output – the wildly popular Running With Scissors, about his chaotic, neglected childhood; Dry, about his later alcohol and drug abuse and loss of a partner to HIV; and the other three volumes of his memoirs – knows not to expect tales of festive cheer from this latest book. They might also be surprised that there are any anecdotes from Burroughs's life left to tell.Along with the X-rated Santa stories, the main thrust of the book is Burroughs's search for a proper Christmas, with a tree, lights and roast lunch and it's told in the sort of light-hearted style that makes a Christmas spent with tramps after a three-day bender sound like fun.The story gets the closest to serious (but also to cliche) when Burroughs talks about finally falling in love and building a home. He gets his tree and someone to spend the holidays with but, inevitably, disaster strikes and it turns out to be "a lump of coal and reindeer-hit-by-car sandwiches Christmas. Just exactly like all the motherfucking rest of them". ... Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:05:08 +0100 888831 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/28/margaret-atwood-interview With almost 50 books to her name, the formidably intelligent Margaret Atwood is a force to be reckoned with. But one year on from the Copenhagen Summit, not even her dark imagination could have predicted the bleak situation the world now faces. Here, she talks about cowardly politicians, her love of birds and why she's joined the TwitteratiIt's 25 years since the publication of The Handmaid's Tale, her dystopic masterpiece, but Margaret Atwood firmly resists the suggestion that she might be an icon of Canadian literature. "What does that mean?" she counters in her distinctive prairie monotone, somewhere between a drone and a drawl. "I don't like being an icon." A thin ironic smile. "It invites iconoclasm. Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself."Now no one has ever dared suggest that Margaret Atwood, a famously scary and prodigiously gifted Canadian intellectual with nearly 50 books to her name – poetry, fiction, critical essays, books for children, radio and film scripts, anthologies and collections of short stories – would ever willingly make an idiot of herself in public. But here's the big surprise: lately she's become game for a laugh. "If you want to see me make an idiot of myself in public," she goes on in that inimitably dry timbre, "you can look it up. Margaret Atwood + goalie + Rick Mercer."It turns out Mercer is an entertainer who performed this national service when he insisted that the author of The Edible Woman, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin (which won the Booker Prize in 2000) should get kitted up as an ice-hockey goalie for television in an item entitled "How to Stop a Puck". At first Ms Atwood demurred. No, said Mercer. You've got to be a goalie. Why, she asked. Because it will be funny, he said. ... Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:04:02 +0100 888813 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/27/christmas-books-year-roundup Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tinyJapanese sculptures... which books most excited our writers this year?Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieIn Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.John BanvilleWilliam James, brother of the – in some quarters – more famous Henry, was that rarest of beings, a philosopher who wrote clear, elegant and exciting prose. In The Heart of William James (Harvard University Press), James's biographer Robert Richardson has put together a dazzling selection of this great thinker's work, with perfectly judged short pieces to usher in each of the selections.Tony Judt, too, had a wonderful prose style, and his little book The Memory Chalet (William Heinemann), a collection of autobiographical essays, is beautiful and moving. Although Judt, who suffered from motor neurone disease, died earlier this year, this late work is more sustaining than sad.Death stalks the pages of Seamus Heaney's collection Human Chain (Faber), but as we would expect from this most affirmative and celebratory of poets, the book in the end is really a meditation on life in all its fleeting sweetness. ... Sat, 27 Nov 2010 00:10:00 +0100 888666 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2010/nov/25/science-fiction-questions-literature This week on the Books podcast we're in pursuit of answers – how to grapple with the big issues of science, whether we should worry about our talent for getting things wrong, and what kind of story you can make out of a bunch of questions.We begin with a debate which has been developing on the Guardian Books website since readers like DesGreene suggested that the best way of informing the public about science is to treat it "as a subject in narrative fiction". The writer Simon Ings, who has published science fiction, literary fiction and a non-fiction history of vision, joins us in the studio to respond to Damien Walter's assertion that only SF can grapple with the modern world, and tells us what it's like to leave the comfortable embrace of genre.With the Guardian first book award due to be announced next week, we complete our survey of the shortlist with Kathryn Schulz. She tells us how the idea for her study of error, Being Wrong, came to her gradually, as she kept coming across problems caused by our received notion that inaccuracy should be rooted out. She argues instead that wrongness is part and parcel of the human condition, a natural by-product of our ability to get anything right at all.Finally we take Padgett Powell's novel in questions, The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, out on to the streets of London. Can you really make a novel out of only questions? How does it feel when a book puts the reader under the microscope? Can a selection of passers-by give us the answers?Reading listBeing Wrong Kathryn Schulz (Portobello)The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? Padgett Powell (Profile)The Weight of Numbers Simon Ings (Atlantic)Solaris Stanislaw Lem (Faber)Sputnik Caledonia Andrew Crumey (Picador)The Complete Cosmicomics Italo Calvino (Penguin)The Drowned World JG Ballard (HarperPerennial)House of Suns Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)Claire ArmitsteadSimon IngsRichard LeaTim Maby (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Fri, 26 Nov 2010 13:26:19 +0100 888671 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/cqNzdO-dCQA/john-llewellyn-rhys-prize-2010-winner.html "The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, founded 68 years ago in honour of the writer John Llewellyn Rhys, who was killed in action in World War II, is open to British and Commonwealth writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, aged 35 or under, at the time of publication. The prize is worth GBP5,000 to the winner, with the other shortlisted authors receiving GBP500 each. The winner is Amy Sackville for The Still Point" (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:48:33 +0100 888253 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/dTJJL/~3/cqNzdO-dCQA/john-llewellyn-rhys-prize-2010-winner.html "The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, founded 68 years ago in honour of the writer John Llewellyn Rhys, who was killed in action in World War II, is open to British and Commonwealth writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, aged 35 or under, at the time of publication. The prize is worth GBP5,000 to the winner, with the other shortlisted authors receiving GBP500 each. The winner is Amy Sackville for The Still Point" (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Wed, 24 Nov 2010 05:00:00 +0100 888362 http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/piracy-an-objective-view/ A recent comment thread in an article here had some interesting remarks from people on all sides of the issue. This is always a fascinating topic for me because I did spend a few years as a professional writer, and ultimately decided that I just did not have the personality type to hack it as a freelancer. Unstable income and irregular work did not agree with me, so I made the choice to make a day job change and keep writing as just a hobby. But do I blame the ‘pirates’ for this? Or are there other forces to think about here? THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A HOBBY AND A JOB Let’s start with one fact we can all agree on: all of us have to pay our bills. None of us is ever guaranteed that we can do this solely with things we find meaningful, creative and interesting though! There are others, like me, who don’t have the personality for it (I have two co-workers in my ‘day job’ who are currently spending large chunks of off-hours time in rehearsals for community theatre productions—both of them used to do such things professionally to varying degrees of success before reaching the same conclusion about their personality type that I did). There are also others for whom the money they earn with their passion is not the driving force for them. I have two relatives whose sole paid job is their ‘art’ and one of them has a husband with a fairly mundane but lucrative family business, and the other has a husband who is a tenured professor. The fact is, people like a lot of things that don’t pay the bills. If they have to manage their time to juggle these things plus their paid jobs or their families or whatever commitments they have, it’s just life, and not something to feel sorry about. So, to me, writers who whine about having to give up writing because they couldn’t make enough money to support their families come off to me as very amateurish. ... Tue, 23 Nov 2010 13:40:26 +0100 887998 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/11/22/adventure-in-the-amazon-no-neoprene-no-nalgene/ The Lost City of Z: a Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is from a category of book I like: narrative non-fiction about recreating someone’s trek, and along the way giving lots of historical background about the original trek and those who tried to follow.  In this case the original trekker is the explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett, known simply as Fawcett.  At the turn of the 19th century he went on expedition after expedition into the amazon jungle often with the support of the Royal Geographical Society (of England). Can you just imagine?  No neoprene, no high tech footgear, no satellite radios. Part of the intrigue surrounding Fawcett’s trips were that he seemed more vigorous, not less, as the expeditions wore on.  Whilst others were laid flat with malaria, maggot filled wounds and more, Fawcett seemed to be able to move even faster than at the outset.  In the first few years of his career as an explorer, Fawcett gets wind of an ancient city, vast and beautiful, that supported thousands of Indians in the depths of the jungles of Brazil.  This  becomes his obsession, and ultimately his downfall. Along the way in this engrossing narrative we hear about other explorers in competition with him, such as Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, a Harvard Medical School grad with an interest in tropical diseases. There was quite a bit of competition amongst the explorers of the time, and in Fawcett’s case it seemed especially important to him to point out how others took easier river routes, while he bushwacked. As we meet these various competitors of Fawcett’s, we also come to understand the variety of approaches and attitudes of the explorers of the day (and the conquistadors of history.)  Some remained aggressive and weapon wielding toward the local Indian tribes.  Others like Fawcett had a policy of lowering their weapons when encountering Indians of the amazon. ... Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:58:09 +0100 887807 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/20/jonathan-safran-foer-bruno-schulz Jonathan Safran Foer on the art of making a book that cannot forget it has a bodyThe order was given to destroy the Second Temple. Three of the walls went down, but the fourth resisted. It stood firm against hammers, and pick-axes, and clubs. The Romans had elephants push against the wall, they tried to set fire to it, they even invented the wrecking ball. But nothing, it seemed, would bring the wall to its knees. The soldier in charge of overseeing the Temple's destruction reported back to his commanding officer: "We have destroyed three of the Temple walls.""And what about the fourth?""I am of the opinion that we should leave it, as a testament to our greatness.""I don't understand.""If nothing remains, it will be as if nothing were there. But when people see the wall, they will be able to conjure the enormity of the Temple, and the foe we defeated."It's been tradition, ever since, for Jews to leave small notes of prayer in the cracks of the wall. It could be said that these form a kind of magical, unbound book, conjuring the enormity of the desperation of the world, the needs we haven't defeated.Bruno Schulz was born in 1892 in Drohobycz, a small town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. A teacher by profession, his explosive creative energy expressed itself through fiction, correspondence, drawing and painting. When the Germans seized Drohobycz in 1941, Schulz, a Jew, distributed his artwork and papers – which are said to have included the manuscript of a novel, Messiah – to gentile friends for safekeeping. These comprised the great bulk of his artistic output, and not a single item of them has been seen since. All that we have of his fiction are two slim story collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. On the basis of these, Schulz is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century. ... Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:07:17 +0100 887323 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2010/nov/19/latin-america-mexico-maile-chapman In a week of escalating violence near Mexico's border with Texas, we call on two experts to explain what is going on and why. The journalist Ed Vulliamy travelled the length of the 2,000-mile border while researching his book Amexica. He reports on the violence he found there, and also the warmth and courage of ordinary people trapped in an increasingly bloody war.Colombian historian Oscar Guardiola-Rivera points out that Latinos will be the majority in the US by the middle of this century, and suggests some of the ways in which Latin America could offer a lead to the developed world as it struggles to come to terms with social, economic and environmental meltdown.Plus we go to New York to interview the fourth of the authors shortlisted for this year's Guardian first book award, Maile Chapman. We ask why, with so much going on in the here and now, she should have have chosen to set her debut novel in Finland in the 1920s.Prize drawWe also have two signed copies to give away of Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids, which this week won the US's prestigious National Book Award for non-fiction. Send your answers to books.competition@guardian.co.uk – but be warned, two of them come in two parts.1. Which Irish novelist nominated Patti Smith as his hero in the Guardian Review, and which poet did he cite in making his case? 2. Where did Simon Reynolds meet up with Smith for an Observer interview in 2005?3. Who reviewed Just Kids for the Guardian Review, and which of the reviewer's books did Smith tell her audience to go out and buy during a comeback concert in New York?4. What is the price of the hardback edition of Just Kids at the Guardian bookshop?&#149: Terms and conditions for the Patti Smith prize drawReading listWhat If Latin America Ruled the World? Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Bloomsbury)Amexica Ed Vulliamy (Bodley Head)Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto Maile Chapman (Cape)Claire ArmitsteadEd VulliamyTim Maby (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:59:32 +0100 887191 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/Y6QjdKYU5-Q/2010-national-book-award-winners-usa.html The 2010 National Book Award winners have been announced: Fiction * Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.) Non Fiction * Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers) Poetry * Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin) Young People's Literature * Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird (Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group) (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Fri, 19 Nov 2010 13:03:37 +0100 887229 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/18/patti-smith-national-book-award Memoir of her bohemian days with artist Robert Mapplethorpe earns acclaimed musician National Book Award in USFor a musician who virtually dropped out of public life for almost two decades, Patti Smith has become remarkably ubiquitous. Barely a month passes without her being graced with a new award or feted at a Manhattan cultural event.The latest accolade for the 65-year-old "godmother of punk" was the National Book Award for non-fiction, which she won on Wednesday night for her memoir of her bohemian days in the Chelsea Hotel with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. It marked the fulfilment of Smith's lifelong dream to be a writer, or as she put it at the awards ceremony at Scribner's bookstore in New York, "of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf".The cheers that greeted the announcement of her victory were a far cry from the 16 years she spent in semi-retirement during the 1980s and most of the 1990s, when she retreated to the outskirts of Detroit to bring up her family. She returned to performing, with the encouragement of friends such as Bob Dylan, beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Michael Stipe of REM, only in 1996, and in the past three years has enjoyed a cultural blooming in some ways even richer than her heyday in the 1970s.Next year she will release her 11th album, 36 years after her debut album Horses, which, with its iconic Mapplethorpe portrait of her on the cover, propelled her to countercultural fame. Dream of Life, a documentary on her life and work that involved her being followed around with a camera for more than a decade by the fashion photographer Steven Sebring, was released in 2008 and continues to do the rounds of art cinemas and music venues, often with live performances by Smith.Her rise as an author provides the unexpected icing on the cake of her cultural rebirth. ... Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:07:32 +0100 886877 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/18/alastair-campbell-bad-sex-award Former spin doctor beats off stiff competition from ex-PM to reach shortlist for prize honouring clumsy prose about coitusAlastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor, has put one over on his old boss by joining literary big-hitters Jonathan Franzen and Christos Tsiolkas on the shortlist of the Literary Review's 2010 bad sex award.The former prime minister's autobiography, A Journey, received a nomination for the prize – which rewards "poorly written, redundant or crude passages of a sexual nature" in fiction – but did not have the staying power to make it past the longlist stage.Although one of the judges at the Literary Review, Jonathan Beckman, admitted Blair's description of himself as "an animal" devouring "the love Cherie gave" was "grim", he said that the sexual element wasn't strong enough for judges to shortlist a work "ostensibly of non-fiction"."There wasn't quite enough of it to merit inclusion," he said. "Blair held a bit back."His former press secretary makes the shortlist for the second time with his second novel, Maya – the judges citing a passage which culminates with the narrator thinking that "the walls were going to fall down as we stroked and screamed our way through hours of pleasure to the union for which my whole life had been a preparation".According to Beckman, Campbell's use of cliches – such as one that has the narrator seeing Maya's breasts "for the first time" during the nominated passage – makes him one of the favourites for the award."This one is really bad," he said. "He seems to be really giving it a go; really gripping the bull by the horns."Campbell faces stiff competition from Franzen, Tsiolkas and Rowan Somerville, whose novel The Shape of Her was described by Francesca Segal in the Guardian as "a novel with penetration on almost every page". ... Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:01:49 +0100 886874 http://library.waubonsee.edu/wordpress/2010/11/18/2010-national-book-award-winners/ YPL = Mockingbird by Katherine Erskine (Philomel Books) Poetry = Lighthead by Terrance Hayes (Penguin) Non-fiction = Just us Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco) Fiction = Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (McPherson & Co) via  nationalbook.org   (Source: Featured Resources) Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:05:48 +0100 887753 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/18/patti-smith-national-book-award Singer-songwriter's memoir of life with photographer and within 1960s New York scene wins prestigious US prizePatti Smith's bitter-sweet memoir of a youthful affair with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe won her a prestigious National Book Award in the US last night.The singer-songwriter's widely praised book Just Kids tells how Smith met Mapplethorpe in the 1960s and charts their transition from flatmates to lovers, against the backdrop of a New York scene inhabited by the likes of Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.Though they later split up after Mapplethorpe settled on his homosexuality, they stayed close friends, with the photographer taking the famous image of Smith that adorns the cover of her debut album, Horses, released in 1975.An emotional Smith said she had "loved books all my life" as she accepted the prize at a ceremony in New York.Just Kids took the National Book Awards non-fiction prize, while little-known writer Jaimy Gordon caused an upset by taking the fiction prize with her horse racing tale, Lord of Misrule.Pundits had tipped Nicole Krauss's Great House or Lionel Shriver's So Much For That to take the fiction prize, but it went instead to Gordon's comedy about the bargain-basement end of the horse racing world. Gordon's book follows the lives of five battered characters involved with a poor racetrack in West Virginia and is published by small press McPherson & Company.Terrance Hayes took the award for poetry with his collection Lighthead, while Kathryn Erskine's Mockingbird, won for young people's literature.Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities, received a lifetime achievement award.The National Book Awards have run annually since 1950, with winners now receiving $10,000 (£6,200).Patti SmithPhotographyUnited StatesPop and rockAwards and prizesBenedicte Pageguardian.co. ... Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:58:39 +0100 886872 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/17/nick-hornby-jamie-oliver Where Oliver's career has all taken place in public, Hornby's hallmark is almost an absence of personalityThe Jamie Oliver of storytelling. The man who plans to reclaim literacy for the masses. That's how Nick Hornby now finds himself positioned, and it's not a job description you would expect him to enjoy. Where Oliver's career has all taken place in public, Hornby's hallmark is almost an absence of personality. He often comes across as awkward – veering on the pathologically shy – and seems to regard media appearances as an unwelcome, if necessary, ordeal.Hornby is the Everybloke of modern British fiction. Neither highbrow nor lowbrow, his books have an almost Richard Curtis-like talent for telling stories people want to read. His heroes are usually emotionally stunted 20-, 30- or 40-something males trying to be vulnerable while struggling to relate to their wives, girlfriends, children and the world in general: men not unlike Hornby, you suspect.Hornby is the architect of lad lit. He set his stall out with Fever Pitch – his non-fiction exploration of his difficult relationships with both his father and Arsenal – which spoke to a whole generation of men who had spent their childhoods in emotional silence. In his first novel, High Fidelity, he hit another male central nerve with his story of a bloke who expresses his emotional world in song titles while working in a record shop, and he's been mainlining the male psyche ever since.Male readers love him because he writes to their condition; women like him because he confirms what they've always suspected about the limitations of the male mind. And both sexes can't get enough of him because they know they can rely on him for a feelgood happy ending. John CraceNick HornbyJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:17:08 +0100 886789 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/nov/16/costa-books-biography-shortlist Cost-cutting among publishers unwilling to stump up advances for biographies, which demand extensive research, often in far-flung places, may lie behind the short Costa shortlistUnintentionally, if you believe their protestations, the judges of the biography strand of this year's Costas have touched on one of the big issues facing the literary community. By listing only three titles, they are sending a signal that there wasn't a fourth of sufficient stature to be shortlisted.Why should this be? In last Sunday's Observer the biographer Victoria Glendinning complained that the squeeze on advances for literary biography meant she was having to finance her research for her next book herself. Gone are the days when Michael Holroyd could command a high six-figure advance for a four-volume study of George Bernard Shaw.The Shaw biography was, in truth, never likely to repay its advance. But neither is a series of novels by a high-end literary novelist and advances for fiction have also been slashed, yet with little effect on the ambition of the literary novel.The difference is novels can be written in a garret while a good biography may involve years of research in far-flung places. Glendinning's so far uncommissioned biography of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles requires visits to Singapore, the city state he founded.As the fortunes of biography ebb, some historical biographers have fled into fiction. Philippa Gregory and Alison Weir are just two who have made very lucrative defections in recent years. But another outcome seems more relevant to the Costa judges' decision: with nobody prepared to underwrite it, biography as a form has been thrown into crisis. Over 11 years of the Guardian first book prize, I have seen more and more biographies of "safe" subjects, often put together from secondary sources. The adventure lies elsewhere.It is habitual to bemoan the rise of the celebrity biography, as if it is somehow to blame. ... Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:36:00 +0100 886507 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/MmauEg7uxRo/2010-cundill-prize-in-history-winner.html A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years has earned British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch the 2010 Cundill Prize in History at McGill University, the world's most important non-fiction historical literature prize (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:03:33 +0100 886167 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/dTJJL/~3/MmauEg7uxRo/2010-cundill-prize-in-history-winner.html A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years has earned British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch the 2010 Cundill Prize in History at McGill University, the world's most important non-fiction historical literature prize (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:00:00 +0100 886765 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/14/victoria-glendinning-biographies-publishers Works about major names no longer attract huge advances and publishers are only interested in familiar figures like the BrontësVictoria Glendinning, author of lives of Edith Sitwell and Anthony Trollope, is being forced to self-finance the research for her next work as a result of the shrinking market for serious biography."Getting an advance is very, very hard if you want to do something a bit different to what you've done before," said Glendinning, who is shortly to set off on a self-financed trip to south-east Asia to research a major new work on the life of statesman and adventurer Sir Stamford Raffles, best known now as the founder of Singapore."I'm not commissioned. But I'm feeling quite confident somehow," she added. "I will write 50 pages and try to sell it."Jeremy Lewis, author of studies of Graham Greene and Cyril Connolly, suspects that the publishing industry is undergoing a backlash after a long spate of huge advances for books that were always unlikely to make much money. "Writing a biography is time-consuming and labour-intensive and is getting increasingly difficult, but it will be sad if the only people who can afford to write them are salaried dons," said the writer, who is embarking on a biography of David Astor, a former editor of the Observer, for Jonathan Cape. "I have a fifth of the £50,000 I got for my book on Connolly in 1992, but I'm not complaining. The publisher in me disapproved of those absurd advances, anyway… publishers were behaving stupidly."Editors tried to push him towards a better-known figure, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, but in a piece for the Oldie magazine he argues there is no need for successive studies of the same few literary figures. ... Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:06:31 +0100 885881 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/14/why-books-are-too-long-robert-mccrum Jonathan Franzen, Tony Blair and Ken Follett are all guilty of crimes against brevityOne of the most remarkable things about Amanda Foreman's magnificent study of British involvement in the American civil war is both its length – it comes in a few folios shy of 1,000 pages – and also, almost as telling, that virtually no one has commented on this, perhaps out of respect for the fact that Dr Foreman devoted more than 10 years of her life to it. Film, video, TV and radio all accommodate our diminished attention spans, and the fragmentary nature of modern life, but books are definitely getting longer.There are some precedents here. "Another damned, thick square book," the Duke of Cumberland is said to have remarked to the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?" Today, however, Foreman's A World on Fire is just the biggest beast in a menagerie of fatties.To take a random sample from the current autumn season, Keith Jeffery's history of the secret service, MI6, is more than 800 pages. Tony Blair's A Journey tops 700 pages. Alan Sugar – Alan Sugar! – has an autobiography, What You See Is What You Get, that weighs in at 612 pages, while Orlando Figes's history of the Crimean war is almost terse at 575 pages.This trend is not confined to non-fiction. Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap is almost 500 pages and Ken Follett's doorstopper Fall of Giants, if anyone's counting, is about 850 pages, probably to appeal to his American readers. Is anyone editing these books? The truth is that they all bear the imprint of marketing, not editorial, values.Literary elephantiasis starts across the Atlantic. North America has a lot to answer for. In the "pile 'em high" tradition, US bookshops love to display big fat books in the window. The cut-and-paste technology of word processors must bear some of the blame, but overwriting is part of the zeitgeist. ... Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:03:05 +0100 885886 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/14/best-books-of-year-2010-franzen How many picked Jonathan Franzen? And who's the only one to recommend Tony Blair's autobiography? Writers and public figures tell the Observer about their favourite books of 2010• To buy the books chosen below with a 20% or more discount and free UK p&p, click on the book's title – or, to choose from the full list, click hereSam MendesDirectorJonathan Franzen's Freedom (Fourth Estate) was head and shoulders above any other book this year: moving, funny, and unexpectedly beautiful. I missed it when it was over. Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat (Virgin) was like its author: fascinating, precise, opinionated, brilliant. I loved Stewart Lee's How I Escaped My Certain Fate (Faber). Never has anyone made me feel so close to the terrifying and occasionally exhilarating insanity that is stand-up comedy.Sebastian FaulksNovelistI enjoyed – if that can be the word – The Big Short by Michael Lewis (Allen Lane), an account of how a group of people contrived to bring the banking system to its knees, to take much of your money and many of your jobs, to condemn your children to a life of debt – and got away unpunished, with millions in their own back pockets. It's in the interest of bankers to pretend that their work is too technical for lay people to follow, but in an account such as Michael Lewis's, it's really not that difficult. It's quite clear what they did. Harder to understand is how they got away with it.Rachel JohnsonEditor, the LadyHitch-22 (Atlantic) by Christopher Hitchens is like a tin of Pedigree Chum: solid, meaty nourishment. Hitchens is incapable of writing a boring sentence. When he asks himself what he'd like to be different if he had to be the Hitch all over again, he answers: "more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period". I cried several times during Deborah Devonshire's memoir Wait for Me! (John Murray), mainly at deaths: sister Nancy, brother Tom, and her three stillborn children. ... Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:02:03 +0100 885873 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/13/bookshelves-miscarriage-justice-spiders-reviews Phantoms on the Bookshelves, by Jacques Bonnet | Dispatches from the Dark Side, by Gareth Peirce | Spider, by Katarzyna & Sergiusz MichalskiPhantoms on the Bookshelves, by Jacques Bonnet (MacLehose, £12)A man who lives among 40,000 books (his "womb") here pays delightful homage to the habit of acquiring such "monstrous" quantities of printed matter, a habit that might vanish in the rosy promised era of digitised texts. But as publisher and writer Bonnet points out, electronic "access" to snippets is not the same thing as knowing where to look among one's own books, quite apart from the delicately described pleasure of doing so: as Bonnet rehearses some salacious stories from obscure novels, or reels off some titles from his reference shelves (I must get a copy of the Dictionary of Imaginary and Facetious Saints), one can almost see him caressing the spines.As the author describes the intricacies of his shelving system, it becomes clear that any such classification scheme rapidly comes to resemble Borges's famous taxonomy of animals. (Chez Bonnet "There is a whole bookcase containing art books that do not fall into any category.") This little book crams in, Tardis-like, a remarkable quantity of anecdotes, elegant aphorisms, and mouth-watering literary recommendations. Bonnet hymns books that have altered his perspectives at one stage of life or another; but do not call his volume autobiography: "Autobiography is no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction." Perhaps "autobibliography" will do.Dispatches from the Dark Side, by Gareth Peirce (Verso, £9.99)When is a "miscarriage" of justice really a perversion of it? The answer is clear enough in the most compelling essay here, on the Lockerbie bombing, justifiably entitled "The Framing of al-Megrahi". ... Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:05:39 +0100 885750 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/13/romantic-moderns-alexandra-harris In the second of our Q&As with the shortlisted authors, Alexandra Harris discusses her cultural history, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John PiperWhy did you decide to write about English culture between the wars and what you call romantic modernism?My first big passion was for Virginia Woolf. I wrote some "completely dotty" essays about her at university (my tutor's phrase), and then, because I was also addicted to paintings, I did an MA in modern European art. There was a series of brilliant exhibitions on in London, exploring the work of English artists such as John Piper, Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. I realised that the time just before the second world war, when everything was threatened, was a moment of truth for the arts in England. How to celebrate a country and its traditions without lapsing into insular sentimentality?Was it your first attempt at writing a book?It was the first serious attempt at a book, but I was able to draw on lots of much shorter things I'd written. I had done an essay on the modern revival of interest in John Sell Cotman, and another on Victorian taste. And I had co-edited a collection of essays called Modernism on Sea, from which I learnt a great deal. Fortunately there are no exhibits from the "Tudor Trilogy" I wrote when I was at junior school.What came first?An enormous doctoral thesis! It was meant to be about Woolf's argument with the idea of pure form, but the subject grew bigger and bigger. I kept drawing new comparisons into the discussion: John Betjeman's guidebooks, Evelyn Waugh's houses, Edith Sitwell's eccentrics, EM Forster's pageants – I just couldn't resist. Then I had to rewrite the whole thing to make it remotely readable as a book.What were the hardest bits?Every point seemed to depend on all the others having been made already. I swapped things round endlessly. ... Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:05:37 +0100 885751 http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2010/11/libraries-using-readers-choices-in.html The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice report at page A11 in print of Nov. 12 issue, "Reader Choice, Not Vendor Influence, Reshapes Library Collections," by Jennifer Howard. The article discusses two models being explored by libraries, one old and one new. In the older model, libraries simply set up a system of purchasing items requested one or more times on inter-library loan. They may set up parameters, such as no more than X dollars, non-fiction, and include a live person to monitor the types of titles being purchased this way, so that they remain firmly within the mission of the school and library. This is a wide-spread practice and springs from the well-known fact that the inter-library loan process costs money. This article quotes the average sum of $27.83 per book borrowed. That very quickly begins to save money if the same university press title is requested more than once on inter-library loan. It would be cheaper to buy the book, rather than borrow it. The more innovative model makes use of the newer availability of e-books in library catalogs. Whenever a patron accesses, uses, or prints pages from an e-book in the catalog, it counts as a "trigger event." X number of "trigger events" result in a purchase of the title from the vendor. The article reports a growing number of research libraries are using this model to stretch their budgets, and be certain they are purchasing monographs of interest to their user populations. There is also a mention of the use of the Expresso print on demand system. This also allows the library to use patron demand to build the collection. There was not, however, any discussion of the quality of the book produced with the instant printing system. I wonder about the binding, quality of paper and ink, and types of font, and layout. ... Fri, 12 Nov 2010 05:00:00 +0100 885784 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/nov/11/french-literary-awards-michel-houellebecq France has a much more formal approach to literary prizes, so victories for two of its most controversial authors resulted in a sense of chaosFrench novels come all at once in an autumn rush, and so do France's most prestigious literary prizes a few weeks later. Whereas Britain's awards ceremonies are spaced out between October and June, the Femina, Médicis, Goncourt and Renaudot announcements all fall within a seven-day period, and this week Michel Houellebecq triumphed in the Goncourt (after two previous defeats, one leading him to spit that the judges had been "bought") and Virginie Despentes took the Renaudot, awarded on the same day.What also differentiates the French way of honouring literature is formality: the prizes are long-established and retain their sponsor-free original names, and the panels are "academies" whose members keep their "seats" from year to year, meet and reveal their verdicts in restaurants, and enjoy an agreeable meal together after doing so (lobster for the Goncourt jury – which always convenes at the belle époque Restaurant Drouant). Traditional, too, is the near-monopoly of major prizes enjoyed by a few distinguished houses – Houellebecq's La Carte et le Territoire is published by Flammarion, Despentes's Apocalypse Bébé by Grasset.The augustness of this process accentuated the sense of chaos caused by the unprecedented scrum of media and book trade types who encircled the judges' table and crowded the Drouant's staircase for Houellebecq's widely anticipated coronation; and also the impact of two self-exiled rebels – Houellebecq the shock-soundbite merchant and mocker of Parisian bien pensants, Despentes the hard-core feminist best-known for the disturbing film Baise-Moi and the non-fiction work King Kong Theory – being saluted together by a cultural establishment that had previously appeared to disdain them. ... Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:05:00 +0100 885338 http://blog.njla.org/archives/2010/11/#001014 http://www.northjersey.com Tuesday, November 9, 2010 BY BRAD LEIBOWITZ Community News (Elmwood Park Edition) Staff Writer The Saddle Brook Public Library (SBPL) is in the midst of a significant expansion which includes a larger library, a more comprehensive fiction/non-fiction book selection, a larger online database and an infusion of materials designed to get residents of all ages reading once more. In a letter sent to Saddle Brook residents, President of the Board of Trustees to the SBPL Dr. James J. McGinnis announced the library's intentions. "We find now that due to careful planning and preparation combined with extremely favorable construction costs and interest rates, we have a rare opportunity to execute a significant construction project with no additional tax burden for our residents," he wrote. For the library expansion to take place, a few things had to fall into place before any ground could be broken, the first of which was meeting New Jersey standards of building to maintain a permit. The library has had plans to expand since the spring of 2007 yet due to a provision in New Jersey which protects wet lands, the library met stiff resistance. Technically, the grounds which the library sits on are classified as wetlands. Due to this, for the library to break new ground, it had to either wait for the law to change or figure out a way to break dirt without destroying the wetland ground. Fortunately for the library, both happened. The library was granted a building permit in November 2009. Once the permit was issued, it was determined that the first part of the library which needed to be redone and expanded was the front entrance. The entrance construction, which broke ground on Oct. 13, will expand the entrance for residents making it easier to enter and exit the building. With construction currently taking place, the entrance of the library will be closed until March 2011. ... Thu, 11 Nov 2010 05:00:00 +0100 886829 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/09/rebecca-skloot-henrietta-lacks-wellcome True story of African-American woman whose cancer cells transformed modern research wins Wellcome Trust awardListen to the Science Weekly podcast starring Rebecca SklootReview: The Immortal Life of Henrietta LacksThe true story of an American woman who died in obscurity 60 years ago, but whose cancer cells, taken from her illicitly, live on as a key tool of modern medical research, has won the Wellcome Trust book prize.Science writer Rebecca Skloot's first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took the £25,000 award at a ceremony earlier this evening.Lacks was a poor African-American tobacco farmer from Virginia, who died at 31 and is buried in an unmarked grave. Yet the cells taken from her without her knowledge in an era of experimentation on African-Americans – the HeLa cells as they became known – have since replicated in research laboratories around the world, helping to develop the polio vaccine, treatments for cancer, and advances like in vitro fertilisation and gene mapping.In a further twist, Lacks's family today are unable to afford the healthcare treatments their mother's cells helped to make possible, Skloot's book explains.Chair of the prize judges, Clive Anderson, said The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which took a decade to write, was "a worthy winner of a prize designed to honour fine writing on a medical theme", telling the stories of changing medical attitudes and ethics, and the economics of healthcare, as well as the human story of Lacks and her family, whom the author got to know in the course of her research.This was the second year of the Wellcome Trust book prize, which is open to both fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health and medicine. ... Tue, 09 Nov 2010 21:00:00 +0100 884984 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/09/fela-anikulapo-kuti-musical-sued Show based on life of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti faces $5m lawsuitHailed as the Muhammad Ali, James Brown and Bob Dylan of Africa all wrapped into one, modern hip-hop wouldn't exist without Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late Afrobeat star.But Kuti, an African revolutionary, musical visionary and polygamist who married 27 women on the same day in 1978, is turning out to be as controversial in death as he was in life. An award-winning American musical based on his life – lavishly praised by a string of American celebrities, including Madonna, Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey and co-producer Jay-Z – has been hit with a $5m lawsuit. Carlos Moore, the musician's only official biographer, claims the producers of Fela! breached his copyright by failing to credit his book, Fela: This Bitch Of A Life, as a source for the production."I felt hurt and humiliated. It was a slap in the face," Moore, a highly respected African-Cuban scholar with a track record of advocating international black causes, told The-Latest.com. In his federal court filing, Moore says he was approached in 2007 and offered a "grossly insufficient" offer of $4,000 for the rights to his authorised biography, which was published in 1982 during Kuti's lifetime and reissued last year. Rejecting the offer, Moore demanded "an advance and participation in the royalty pool". But, he says, no further offer was ever made. Moore's Manhattan writ says that after his refusal, the playwright Jim Lewis and director Bill T Jones went on to use his book to develop their musical without the author's "knowledge, authorisation or consent", he claims.Fela!, which opened on Broadway less than a year ago to ecstatic reviews – the New York Times wrote: "there should be dancing in the streets" – has won three 2010 Tony awards. By the time it closes later this year, over 400,000 people will have bought tickets. ... Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:59:28 +0100 884989 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/09/bush-memoir-crime-category Shelving George Bush's memoir under 'crime' raises a deeper point. Does categorisation by genre limit books, and readers?Some people have wittily been moving Bush's presidential memoirs to the "crime" section.Putting Decision Points next to Patricia Cornwell is, however, more than a joke. It's a genteel protest against bigotry. Book people, in general, tend to be Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, and dissidents in China.It was Bush's Patriot Act that obliged libraries, and booksellers, to hand over details about who borrowed what, and who purchased what, to the FBI. The great snitch (alias "homeland security") was begun.There's nothing new in recategorisation as such. When James Frey's drunkalog, A Million Little Pieces, was revealed by the website Smoking Gun to contain more than a few little fibs the autobiography was moved from the non-fiction to fiction bestseller lists in the US (such is the perversity of the reading public that it continued selling). Had JM Coetzee's shortlisted Summertime won the Man-Booker there would have been protests that it's an autobiography, not a novel.Where would Richard Dawkins, one wonders, shelve the Bible? In fantasy and science fiction, of course.Genres and categories exist for the benefit, principally, of book retailers and customers. Book-buyers browse; they need to have a rough idea where their favourite fodder is to be found. Shelving is their compass.Creative writers, however, aren't always happy about being fenced in. Literature likes to be free. When Daniel Defoe wrote the book that started it all, Robinson Crusoe, he didn't know he was writing a "novel". A lot of readers, we're told, assumed it was a bona fide travel book about exciting experiences in far away places. If you pick up a cup of coffee, thinking it's tea, it tastes like shit. So, I suspect, did Robinson Crusoe if you didn't know where it was coming from. ... Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:30:01 +0100 884990 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/08/nadine-gordimer-south-africa-interview Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer talks to Emma Brockes.Nadine Gordimer is 87 this year and as resistant to autobiography as ever. The Nobel prize winner, small, chic, straight-backed as a dancer, says "my private life is my private life" – a practical as well as a moral concern: what she calls the "jealous hoarding of private experience for transmutation into fiction".It makes reading her non-fiction, collected earlier this year in a single volume and plain to the point of snappish, an exercise in sifting for lapses: the "bun-faced" nuns who taught her at school; her early "talent for showing off". The only thing that could deflect her from work, she once wrote, was "being in love", whereupon everything else flew out the window. She smiles indulgently. "Yes, I used to make bargains. I used to say I don't care if that book's published or not, it's the man that I want."It is, for Gordimer, a year of collections; on the heels of the non-fiction, an equally large volume of collected stories, both covering a period from the early 1950s, when she started writing, to the present. It is a huge amount of work – "you're surprised that you've worked so hard" – and not even the main event. "That's nothing," she says, of the essays. "That was just on the side. Fiction is what really matters." Her writings about politics served a purpose, surely?"They served a purpose only in that things happened – because you are not only a writer, you're a human being, with responsibilities. And so I would never write non-fiction if these things didn't occur. Even that very first essay in 1951, I wrote in the New Yorker because I badly needed the money. ... Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:00:01 +0100 884662 http://lib.wmrc.uiuc.edu/enb/2010/11/03/2011-green-book-festival-call-for-entries/ The 2011 Green Book Festival has issued the call for entries to its annual competition honoring books that contribute to greater understanding, respect and positive action on the changing worldwide environment. The 2011 Green Book Festival will consider published, self-published and independent publisher works in the following categories: non-fiction, fiction, children’s books, teenage, how-to, audio/spoken word, comics/graphic novels, poetry, science fiction/horror, biography/autobiography, gardening, cookbooks, animals, photography/art, e-books, wild card (anything goes!), scientific, white paper, legal, business, mystery and spiritual. Entries can be in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese or Italian. Our grand prize for the 2011 Green Book Festival is $1500 and transportation to our May awards in San Francisco OR an equivalent amount donated in your name to the environmental charity of your choice. A panel of judges will determine the winners based on the following criteria: The overall writing style and presentation of the work; The potential of the work to enhance understanding of the environment and its issues; TO ENTER: Entry forms are available online at http://www.greenbookfestival.com or may be sent to you by emailing GreenBookFestival@sbcglobal.net or calling our office at 323-665-8080. The Green Book Festival is produced by JM Northern Media LLC, producers of the Hollywood Book Festival, New York Book Festival and DIY Convention: Do It Yourself in Film, Music & Books. (Source: Environmental News Bits) Wed, 03 Nov 2010 18:48:36 +0100 883757 http://www.teleread.com/library/overdrive-most-downloaded-for-october/ Here is the most downloaded for October for Adult Fiction and Adult Non-Fiction. More info here. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:22:28 +0100 883477 http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/wowio-there-are-ads-in-my-ebook/ Would you buy an ebook if it had advertising embedded in it? No? What about if those ads were full-page ads added at the start and end of the ebooks? No? What about if they meant that the ebooks was free? Hmmmm. Even though the whole concept of advertising embedded in ebooks usually sparks howls of outrage, shortly followed by irate blog flaming, under the above conditions the issue starts to look less black and white. I, for one, would at least try an ebook with a couple of pages of ads at the front or back, if they were whole pages that didn’t impinge on the body of the book. And I don’t think I’d be the only one. I think this ebook model has legs, and here are three reasons why: 1. We are used to ads in books. What publishers call trade paperbacks have been using this model for years. I suspect we’ve all bought thrillers and other fiction with a couple of pages of ads bound in at the back. They are often full-colour ads for other authors from the same genre and publisher. And that’s not counting “also by this author” ads. 2. We are used to ads in other media. Picked up a physical magazine lately with no ads in it? What about a magazine app? A newspaper? Watched an ad-free show on free-to-air TV? Didn’t think so. We understand that advertising pays for the content we consume and are usually happy to put up with it in order to get free stuff. Of course, some are prepared to pay extra to get rid of ads – premium TV subscriptions etc – and I think this will also apply to ebooks eventually. It’s also happening in music. Seen a free music service called Guvera? It’s exactly the same model. Advertisers decide what music fits with their brand, and then sponsor those albums, artists by creating (for example) the Coke channel. Yes, you’ve got to put up with advertising banners around the download buttons to the songs, but they aren’t as intrusive as you would think. And all the songs are free. ... Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:17:31 +0100 883113 http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/eason-top-ten-ebooks-october-2010/  One of the most interesting things about ebooks is that they seem to attract in their initial stages, string demand from fiction readers. Perhaps it is that their current formats are best suited to long form narrative. Whatever the reason, the top ten from Easons shows exactly this impact with only two non-fiction title making the top ten! 1 Homecoming by Cathy Kelly2 Room by Emma Donoghue3 Skippy Dies by Paul Murray4 Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert5 Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich6 I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore7 The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown8 The Chosen One by Sam Bourne9 The Help by Kathyrn Stockett10 Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese Via Irish Publishing News   Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 01 Nov 2010 13:54:01 +0100 883114 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/GCf8bXsKAL4/2010-galaxy-national-book-awards.html The shortlists for the 2010 Galaxy National Book Awards have been announced: Sainsbury's Popular Fiction Book of the Year * Dead Like You Peter James (Macmillan) * The Ice Cream Girls Dorothy Koomson (Sphere) * Jump! Jilly Cooper (Bantam Press) * One Day David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton) * The Red Queen Philippa Gregory (Simon & Schuster) * Worth Dying For Lee Child (Bantam Press) Non-Fiction Book of the Year * Alex's Adventures in Numberland Alex Bellos (Bloomsbury) * At Home Bill Bryson (Doubleday) * D-Day Antony Beevor (Viking) * The Making Of Modern Britain Andrew Marr (Pan) * Must You Go? Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) * Operation Mincemeat Ben MacIntyre (Bloomsbury) National Book Tokens New Writer of the Year * Patrick Barkham The Butterfly Isles (Granta Books) * Edmund de Waal The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus) * Katherine Webb The Legacy (Orion) * Rebecca Hunt Mr Chartwell (Fig Tree) * Natasha Solomons Mr Rosenblum's List (Sceptre) * Simon Lelic Rupture (Picador) WH Smith Children's Book of the Year * The Great Hamster Massacre Katie Davies, illus Hannah Shaw (Simon and Schuster) * Monsters of Men Patrick Ness (Walker Books) * Mr Stink David Walliams (HarperCollins Childrens Books) * Shadow Michael Morpurgo (HarperCollins Childrens Books) * TimeRiders Alex Scarrow (Puffin) * Zog Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler (Alison Green Books) Tesco Food & Drink Book of the Year * The Flavour Thesaurus Niki Segnit (Bloomsbury) * Jamie's 30 Minute Meals Jamie Oliver (Michael Joseph) * Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home Nigella Lawson (Chatto & Windus) * Kitchenella Rose Prince (Fourth Estate) * Plenty Yotam Ottolenghi (Ebury Press) * Tender II Nigel Slater (Fourth Estate) Tesco Biography of the Year * Coco Chanel, The Legend And The Life Justine Picardie (Harper NonFiction) * Decline and Fall: Diaries 2005-2010 Chris Mullin (Profile Books) * The Fry Chronicles Stephen Fry (Michael Joseph) * A Journey Tony ... Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:06:57 +0100 882500 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/29/guardian-first-book-award-shortlist Three novels and two non-fiction works vying for £10,000 Guardian first book awardBooks that challenge orthodoxy and readers' expectations dominate the shortlist for this year's Guardian first book award, which includes a novel influenced by the African tradition of sung history, and a study of error that argues we should celebrate our ability to get things wrong.Three novels and two non-fiction works are vying for the £10,000 prize. The shortlist was chosen by a judging panel that includes the biographer Richard Holmes, the actor Diana Quick and the novelist Adam Foulds, plus Waterstone's reading groups in Oxford, Bath, Leeds, Covent Garden and Edinburgh West, exercising one vote between them.The Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armitstead, who chairs the judging panel, said: "This brilliant shortlist reflects one of the year's big literary themes – how to tell stories in our new era. Each of these books provides its own very different answer, and it is thrilling that our judges and the Waterstone's reading groups have chosen five such rich and challenging works."One of the shortlisted novels, Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy, has already appeared on the longlist for this year's Orange prize for fiction as well as the shortlist for the John Llewellyn Rhys award. Written in homage to the author's father, and partly based on interviews with him, it tells of a boy's epic journey across Africa in the 1930s, drawing on the African griot or "praise singer" tradition of delivering history.Another title, Ned Beauman's darkly funny murder mystery Boxer, Beetle, offers the reader an inventive narrative featuring what Armitstead called "bravura post-modern flights of imagination". The story, related by a collector of Nazi memorabilia with a chronic sweat problem, is set partly in contemporary times and partly in the East End of London in the 1930s. ... Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:05:02 +0100 882342 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/10/28/ethics-and-science/ For the Go Big Read this year the UW picked The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This book, containing many layers, could appeal to a wide array of readers, each for different reasons.  The story focuses on the history of African-American Henrietta Lacks and her cells, while also detailing related progress in the field of science and medicine, the struggle of her family, and quest for knowledge which resulted in this book.  Author Rebecca Skloot coherently connects the pieces of several stories to come up with this successful non-fiction piece which explores ethical issues in science and poverty. The book jumps right in, reminding me of an action movie in which new ideas are constantly being brought to the table.  Skloot keeps the reader’s attention, and is effectively able to interweave the strands of a story that she methodically gathered over several years.  Comparisons she draws between the Lacks family’s case and other pertinent health issues that have been brought to light over the years help the reader to become more informed about the medical field in general, giving this book much more of an appeal to the non-medical or non-scientist than previous books in the area may have had. While I cannot say that I enjoyed this book, it was definitely more interesting than most of the non-fiction I encounter, and most people who I spoke with did recommend the book.  Not only will it prompt your brain into action on several important issues, it will lead to thoughtful discussions with those who have read it. If you’re interested in discussing the book you can check our book discussion calendar for a group meeting near you. (Source: MADreads) Thu, 28 Oct 2010 22:42:11 +0100 882395 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/27/kate-mosse-top-10-ghost-stories From Henry James to Susan Hill, the author of Labyrinth selects tales that deliver 'the fun of the shudder'Kate Mosse is the bestselling author of five novels, two books of non-fiction, short stories and a play, Syrinx, which won a Broadcasting Press Guild award in 2009. The first novel in her Languedoc Trilogy, Labyrinth, won Richard & Judy's Best Read award in 2006 and topped the bestseller lists for six months; the second, Sepulchre, was also an international bestseller; and the third, Citadel, will be published in 2011. Her current novel, The Winter Ghosts, is published in paperback this week.Buy The Winter Ghosts from the Guardian bookshop"Spirits and apparitions, headless monks and white ladies, the traditional ghost story still exerts a hold on our imaginations. Their habitat is ancient woods, ruined abbeys, isolated old houses and crumbling monasteries. But what makes a ghost story? Though purists might quibble, I'd say there are three distinct types of ghost story – as opposed to tales of horror, which have a different dynamic and purpose, or novels that have ghosts in them, such as Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Ben Okri's The Famished Road."The traditional ghost story is often inspired by folklore and a sense of decaying history, and is similar in tone to the Gothic novels that came before it. In the psychological ghost story, the emphasis is on the mental state of the victim rather than the actions – the existence, even – of the ghost or poltergeist. These stories implicitly, sometimes explicitly, question the reliability and sanity of the heroine or hero, and often reference social or political issues of the day. Finally, there's the antiquarian ghost story which is associated with a certain sort of Edwardian Englishness. Like their traditional counterparts, they draw on old mythologies and folklore, but are rooted in realism and the sense of the ordinary disrupted or made extraordinary. ... Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:24:03 +0100 881972 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/26/libraries-ebook-restrictions Library organisations have criticised potential ebook regulations though publishers claim they may help prevent copyright abusesFor libraries facing dwindling borrowers and brutal budget cuts, the ebook seems to offer an irresistible opportunity to reel in new readers and retain old ones too busy or infirm to visit during opening hours.A third of libraries across the country have embraced the new technology, allowing members to check out electronic literature without setting foot in the building.But following abuse of the system – with China-based readers attempting to circumnavigate copyright laws by joining British libraries and plundering their virtual collections for free – publishers have now threatened to prevent libraries from accessing ebooks. It's a move described by one library boss as "regressive" at a time when they are trying to innovate as they fight for survival.But the Publishers Association (PA) claims that "untrammelled" remote lending of digital books could pose a "serious threat" to publishers' commercial activities. That is why it has just announced a clampdown, informing libraries they may have to stop allowing users to download ebooks remotely and instead require them to come to the library premises, just as they do to get traditional print books – arguably defeating the object of the e-reading concept.Most UK libraries offering ebooks use the US supplier Overdrive, which also supplies ebooks to WH Smith and Waterstones. Under the Overdrive system, library users can access a website remotely, from their home computer or from e-reading devices while on the move, and download ebooks by using their library card and a pin.Readers do not need to remember to take their books back on time, a perennial problem for many consumers, because the digital book is automatically deleted from their e-reader once the loan period is over. ... Mon, 25 Oct 2010 23:05:03 +0100 881616 http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/edward-albee-foundation-retreat-2011.html Known as "The Barn," the Albee Retreat is an artist's retreat in Montauk, New York, that accepts up to five guests at a time for stays of 4-6 weeks from May to October. No application fee and no charge to stay at the retreat, but space is limited and admissions are highly competitive. Non-fiction applicants submit three essays or articles, a resume, a one page "artist's statement", and two (Source: NewPages Blog) Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0100 882784 http://santafelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/10/lifelong-learning.html Without throwing double-digit dates around, it's been awhile since I've had to deal with a required reading list for a class. To me, that's a good thing. I'm surrounded by books all day, every day, and it's an occupational hazard to have so much to read and so little time.When several Slate writers posted their own recommended summer reading list for first-year college students, I thought I'd go through and order anything that the library doesn't have, and perhaps pick up a book or two along the way. After all, this list is directly geared towards young people at this overwhelming junction in their lives, not someone already advanced in a career and fairly entrenched in reading habits. Alas, in the three pages of short reviews, I found only a few books to order, but many, many more to read. The titles range from Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft to Zadie Smith's White Teeth. It's a blend of fiction and non-fiction, humorous and brutal. While I'd like to dive into at least five from the list, the one that jumped in my hand first is McSorley's Wonderful Saloon by Joseph Mitchell.While I'm still quite pleased that my college years and recommended reading lists are far behind me, I'm thrilled that the next time I'm in doubt about what to read, I've got a nice list of suggestions waiting for me. Even better, without being half-way through a semester course load, I've got all year or decade to get through them all. What about you? What book would you require a new college student to read? (Source: ICARUS... the Santa Fe Public Library Blog) Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0100 881560 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/23/steven-poole-non-fiction-choice-review Words and Money by André Schiffrin | Begat by David Crystal | The Queen's English and How to Use It by Bernard C LambWords and Money, by André Schiffrin (Verso, £12.99)Words and money are of course the two things that writers care most about, and not necessarily in that order. This is a kind of sequel to Schiffrin's excellent The Business of Books, and he tells here some eye-watering recent stories of people buying and selling publishing firms like so many beans. His main purpose, though, is to make recommendations for the future, surveying effective European models of public subsidy for small presses and small bookshops, or even (as in Norway) a large public programme to buy new books for libraries.Making a rapid detour via the French film industry, Schiffrin then considers journalism, whose decline he attributes partly to publishers themselves (the New York Times' vanity skyscraper, failure to address concrete issues facing young people). A not-for-profit or licence-fee model, aided by a Google tax, might be just the thing. "The debate on the division of media spoils is as important as past debates over other national resources," he concludes admirably. Perhaps the text's routine confusion between the letter l and the numeral 1 is a typesetters' joke playing on the title.Begat: The King James Bible & the English Language, by David Crystal (OUP, £14.99)Words and money combine, of course, in the parable of the talents, and perhaps at OUP, where they hope with this book to cash in on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. The supernaturally prolific linguist David Crystal ("the world's greatest authority on the English language," it says here, no lights hiding under bushels) wants to find out how many modern idiomatic English expressions come from the King James Bible. ... Fri, 22 Oct 2010 23:06:36 +0100 881008 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/nQdKAgUJtzI/2010-walkley-book-award-long-list.html The Walkley Foundation and the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance have announced the long-list finalists for the Walkley Book Award. The Walkleys are Australia's most prestigious media accolades across print, radio, television and photography, as well as publishing. The Walkley Book Award celebrates excellence in non-fiction literature and long-form journalism. More than 60 books were entered this year, and the subject matter ranged from true crime and war to biography and investigative journalism (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:52:43 +0100 880854 http://bhplnjbookgroup.blogspot.com/2010/10/diy-friday.html Browsing the New Non-fiction shelves turned up these three do it yourself (D.I.Y.) crafts books. Sue Havens' Make Your Own Toys, sew soft bears, bunnies, monkey, puppies and more! makes me remember the sock monkeys of my childhood. You could make one of the Simple Gifts, 50 Little Luxuries to craft, sew, cook & knit by Jennifer Worick in time for the holidays. Make it Wild! 101 things to make and do outdoors by Fiona Danks and Jo Schofield includes projects for ice lanterns, tie dying, go cars, natural paints and more.Related websites: Sue Havens' craft website including a no excuses instructional video!Jennifer Worick's website in which we learn she also has several humor blogs.Going Wild website: 'making outdoors fun with Fiona Danks and Jo Schofield'And finally a personal favorite of mine. If you try to make these or any craft and make an awful mess instead, just post it on or read about others at CraftFail the brainchild, or maybe evil stepcraftingchild, of Heather Mann, creator of Dollar Store Crafts.OK, blogophiles, you've got the whole weekend, get crafting or just lie on the sofa and peruse these and other arts and crafts books from BHPL. I know what my plan is.PS: if you really have time to kill, Google Sock Monkey and you will be amazed at the cult of Sock Monkeys that exists on the internet. http://www.sockmonkey.net/OK, really, that's all, folks. (Source: Berkeley Heights Public Library Book Blog and Buzz) Fri, 22 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0100 882185 http://www.frbr.org/2010/10/22/last-week-in-frbr-34 FRBR work-centric, faceted UI demo developer sought There’s a short-term contract available for someone to hack on a FRBR interface for the Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC), but the deadline is today. Get your name in if you’re interested. (I was away at a conference last week and didn’t do the weekly update. Sorry for the short notice, but you probably already saw this on a mailing list anyway.) OLAC (Online Audiovisual Catalogers) has been investigating the potential of the FRBR model and a work-centric approach to improve access to moving images for some time. We are looking for someone to make a basic but functional demonstration end-user interface for moving images that is focused on FRBR works and that offers faceted navigation using sample data for 143 moving image works, 210 manifestations, and 297 items. Ideally, this will be developed with open source tools such as MySQL, Solr and Lucene. I have some ideas about what the interface might look like (see link below) and am looking for someone to put up something quick and dirty, but functional and interactive so people can get a better idea of how this might work. This may not turn out to be anything like what would work for a final user interface, but I am hoping that it will make the potential for a FRBR-based, faceted approach clear and make it easier for people to understand the kinds of searching options we want to provide. OLAC has agreed to fund $1500 to be awarded to the individual(s) who successfully completes this project. More information on and the sample data for this project are available at http://www.olacinc.org/drupal/?q=node/437 If you are interested in taking this project on, please contact me at kelleym@uoregon.edu via email by Friday, October 22 with a list of your qualifications, a suggested timeline, and any other information you think it might be helpful for us to know. ... Fri, 22 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0100 880921 http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/the-rise-of-the-enhanced-e-book/ On FutureEBooks, Sam Missingham has posted a brief article by Neil Ayres, Web Director for Creative Review magazine and author/producer of the The New Goodbye appbook that I covered here.Ayres talks about a new effort by Quark, maker of desktop publishing app Quark Xpress, to create an extension for its software that will allow it to create multimedia-enabled appbooks by directly exporting the Quark file—similar to Adobe’s development environment which was to be used to create the Wired e-magazine (and that was blocked from access to the app store for several months by Apple’s no-thirty-party-IDE policy).But Ayres notes that this is going to be pricey, because Quark Xpress is pricey—not something that a lot of small independent writers and publishers are going to be able to afford. He hopes that someone will come up with an ad-funded or freemium model that will let people do the same thing less expensively.So-called “enhanced” multimedia e-books are becoming more popular, and more discussed. Over on Publishing Perspectives, there are a couple of pieces today looking at this fact. Alex von Rosenberg looks at the way that new media evolve out of being direct transcriptions of older media to take advantage of the full capabilities of the new form. He uses as an example the way that TV shows were originally nothing more than filming people doing radio shows or stage dramas, etc., but subsequently developed more cinematography because just filming people doing stuff is boring.von Rosenberg draws the comparison to e-books, which are currently just a direct transcription of printed books, but hastens to explain that he does not expect “plain old” e-books to go away.In terms of classic fiction and some non-fiction I believe publishers will very much have the freedom to keep the written word sacred and to render it near the original book form on a wide range of elegant, portable, digital devices without hesitation or apology. ... Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:40:09 +0100 880458 http://biblioragazzi.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/thumble-book-library-recensione/ Vi avevamo parlato di Thumble Book Library, ci hanno concesso un trial e vi raccontiamo la nostra esperienza. Descrizione: E’ un aggregatore di ebook per bambini (loro li chiamano animated, talking picture books) che comprende sia fiction sia non fiction, creato da una casa editrice canadese. Si parte da libri già esistenti di alcuni editori (per [...] (Source: biblioragazzi) Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:56:10 +0100 881335 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MsvuLibraryBlog/~3/v5DMplDHY_A/celebrating-writing-contest.html Do you have a poem, a short story, or a creative non-fiction piece that deserves recognition?  Enter this year's creative writing contest for a chance to win $100. E-mail your work to writing@msvu.ca  by Friday, November 12, 2010, and help celebrate the Mount's Writing Week! Visit the Mount Saint Vincent University Library website. (Source: MSVU Library Blog) Mon, 18 Oct 2010 18:48:10 +0100 880236 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/15/tony-blair-bad-sex-award Former prime minister's memoir nominated for prize dedicated to clumsy erotic scenes in fictionTony Blair has received a double insult from the Literary Review, with the nomination of his bestselling autobiography, A Journey, for its bad sex award. The slight is not only to his skill at bedroom prose, but also to his claims to historical accuracy, since the award is dedicated to clumsy clinches in fiction.The magazine's deputy editor Tom Fleming today confirmed the genre-busting nomination for the prize, which celebrates "poorly written, redundant or crude passages of a sexual nature". According to Fleming it is the first time a work of non-fiction has been up for the award. "It's absolutely unprecedented," he said. "He's groundbreaking in every way."The former prime minister is nominated for a purple passage about the night spent with his wife Cherie following the news of the Labour leader John Smith's sudden death. "That night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me. On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct," Blair wrote.Although the judging process is at an early stage, Fleming suggested that Blair would be a strong contender in a "good year" for the award, with Ian McEwan's Solar and Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow already under consideration for the shortlist.The shortlist for the Bad sex award is due to be announced next month, with the prize no author wants to win due to be awarded on 29 November.Blair's nomination is not the first time that his autobiography has been classified as fiction, as bookshops have reported customers with anti-war sympathies repeatedly reshelving the book into the crime section, following a Facebook-led campaign. Now it seems, A Journey may be moving into erotic fiction. ... Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:15:23 +0100 879185 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/4rhB-B9PerI/2010-national-book-award-finalists-usa.html The 2010 National Book Award finalists have been announced: Fiction * Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf) * Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.) * Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.) * Lionel Shriver, So Much for That (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers) * Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press) Non Fiction * Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group) * John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq (W.W. Norton & Co/The New Press ) * Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers) * Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) * Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday) Poetry * Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press) * Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin) * James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press) * C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press) * Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books) Young People's Literature * Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown & Co.) * Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird (Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group) * Laura McNeal, Dark Water (Alfred A. Knopf) * Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers) * Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers) (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:00:03 +0100 878913 http://mblc.state.ma.us/jobs/find_jobs/rss.php?job_id=6426 Assist patrons at the main desk. Responsible for patron registrations. Maintenance of Foreign Language, Media, Non- Fiction and summer reading collections. Assessment of donations and composing donation letters. Crate displays, signs and forms. Responsible for inventory of media date due cards, stationery, registration supplies and bus schedules. Assist with pick list, in transit reports and collection weeding. And other duties as assigned. (Source: MBLC Job Listings) Thu, 14 Oct 2010 03:30:02 +0100 878757 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/oct/12/mfk-fisher-overcooking-books It's a hard but essential lesson for writers that there comes a time when you have to stop revising your workI first came to MFK Fisher as an eater, not a writer – assured by my most food-savvy friend that Fisher was the all-time doyenne of culinary lit. But beyond the arch recipes in the second edition of Fisher's treatise on eating through austerity, How To Cook A Wolf, lies an insight into the way writers relate to their own work which makes it an essential volume for anyone who writes, regardless of their interest in a recipe for sludge (take all the vegetable and meat scraps you have; boil; add "whole-grain cereal"; serve to someone you dislike). How to Cook a Wolf was first published in the US in 1941 as a text for wives trying to make ends meet on the home front. Unsurprisingly, when they came to print a second edition in 1952, seven years after the end of the second world war, Fisher and her editors decided to overhaul the text – but their approach is remarkable. Rather than incorporating seamless changes, Fisher's edits are presented throughout as commentary in square brackets. And anyone who has ever taken a stab at editing their own writing won't be surprised that what's contained within those brackets is often uncomplimentary."It is important" begins one sentence, followed in the second edition by "[not too important, I have decided with the inevitable and perhaps cynical laissez-faire of Time]". "There are two ways to boil rice correctly," Fisher writes later, to which her older self responds: "[How arbitrary can you be? I should have said, 'I think there are...!']." And of one simple dish, she writes: "But it is dressed for the fair, in its most exciting clothes, and it can be the mainstay of a poor family's nourishment or the central dish of a buffet supper for 20 jaded literary critics with equal nonchalance. [One of the most painful things about X's annotating X is a sentence like this. ... Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:13:27 +0100 878311 http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/call-for-editor-nominations-best-of-web.html Dzanc Books' Best of the Web series is a yearly anthology compiling the best fiction, poetry, and non-fiction published in online literary journals. Previous editions have been guest-edited by Steve Almond, Lee K. Abbott, and Kathy Fish, and have published award-winning writers such as Chris Bachelder, Robert Olen Butler, Dan Chaon, Kim Chinquee, Elizabeth Crane, Brian Evenson, Amelia Gray, (Source: NewPages Blog) Sat, 09 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0100 877802 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/web2learning/YOVk/~3/TzI5SjhABHs/4160 There seem to be two schools of thought on the ebook reader front. The first is “I love my books I don’t need a computer to read them” and the other is “Woo Hoo! How did I live without this?” I am in limbo between the two and so I figured I’d go through the back and forth I keep hearing in my head and let my trusted colleagues push me one way or the other. First, I am in love with my books – the fact that my boxes of books took up like half of our moving truck is a testament to that. On the other hand I’m a total techie and love gadgets. I can see the practical uses for an ebook reader when it comes to non fiction titles, but do I really need it for my fiction titles? Then I think, do I want an ebook reader or a tablet (aka iPad or Android tablet). I know that the ebook reader has the eInk and is readable in all kinds of light, and the tablet isn’t, but the tablet can do a lot more for me than just let me read books. There’s also the fact that I travel all of the time and have to decide what books to bring based on how much they weigh instead of what I really want to read. As you can see I’m a bit scattered in my thoughts on this and I’d love to hear what you all think of the devices you have – or don’t have! Related posts:Sony Reader Sony Reader – Part 2 Kindling My Interest (Source: What I Learned Today...) Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:23:42 +0100 876811 http://www.slis.indiana.edu/careers/view_job_specific.php?job_id=7909 State: Louisiana Librarian II, Assistant Acquisitions Librarian Full-Time SUMMARY: Under administrative supervision, this is responsible professional library work, which involves the application of professional library techniques and procedures in the Acquisitions Departments. Performs related and other work as required. REQUIRED TRAINING AND EXPERIENCE Attainment of B.A. or B.S. from an accredited university/college; attainment of a graduate degree in Library and/or Information Science from an ALA-accredited university. REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE, ABILITIES AND SKILLS Good knowledge of professional library principles and practices. Demonstrated ability to: (1) handle both routine operations and long-range planning; (2) establish and maintain effective working relationships with the public and other staff; (3) supervise, train, and evaluate support staff; (4) schedule department staff and work flow for maximum effectiveness; (5) communicate effectively, orally and in writing, to groups and individuals; (5) use application software. Knowledge and experience with integrated library systems, especially SIRSI, is preferred. GENERAL DUTIES  Participates in all areas of work in the Acquisitions/Collection Development Department; might be acting department head in the absence of the department head if designated  Responsible for Juvenile and Audiovisual acquisitions.  Compiles and maintains purchase lists on vendor databases for: juvenile and young adult fiction and non-fiction books, juvenile and adult DVDs, music CDs and books on CD.  Selects and orders downloadable media through Overdrive system for e-books, audio books, music and film for juveniles and adults.  Maintains budgets for each branch within the above materials areas.  Composes “Invitations to Bid” for various formats of books, media and electronic media; communicates with City of Shreveport Purchasing Department concerning bids, contracts and vendors. ... Mon, 04 Oct 2010 16:50:02 +0100 876379 http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/digital-sales-up-for-second-quarter-according-to-bowker/ Publishers Weekly is reporting on a Bowker PubTrak Consumer analysis of second quarter market trends. Here are a few highlights. Go here for all the details.Digital sales accounted or 3.2% of unit purchases in the second quarter, up from 2.5% in the first quarter and from 1.9% in the 2009 second period. Books per buyer dipped from 2.7 in last year’s second quarter to 2.4 in this year’s second quarter. This figure includes ebooks. Ebook sales represented 5% of unit fiction sales, up from 3.5% in the first quarter. Ebooks have had less of an impact on non-fiction and juvenile sales.[donotprint]Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. [/donotprint] (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:37:14 +0100 876491 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/textundblog/~3/1NQdywXSbk4/ Die Frau auf dem Festivalplakat, deren Foto in Donostia omnipräsent war, ist die Berliner Designstudentin Charlotte. Ein Geheimnis, welches das Festival erst am letzten Tag lüftete. Wie schön es in San Sebastián ist, macht dieses Video deutlich, das ihr euch getrost auch anschauen könnt, wenn ihr kein Spanisch könnt. Der Film mit dem Titel «San Sebastián, La Ciudad del Mar» (Die Stadt am Meer) zeigt in wunderschönen Bildern den Reiz dieser außergewöhnlichen Stadt im Norden Spaniens: Direktlink YouTube Ich war, wie berichtet, zum 16. Mal in Folge dort, wegen des Filmfestivals. Hier nun endlich, eine Woche nach Rückkehr, mein Bericht. Ehe ich zum Festival selbst komme, hier meine Bilder: San Sebastián gehört neben Cannes, Venedig und Berlin zu den wichtigsten europäischen Festivals. Für mich ist und bleibt es das schönste, auch wenn dieses Jahr der Wettbewerb eher schwach besetzt war (wie überall zu lesen war, zum Beispiel in der Süddeutschen). Doch ein Festival besteht nicht nur aus dem Wettbewerb; Donostia (so nennen die Basken ihre Stadt) überzeugt gerade in den Nebenreihen. Einen Überblick über das aktuellste spanische Kino liefert «Made in Spain», den Blick nach Lateinamerika richtet «Horizontes Latinos». Zabaltegi (Perlen) zeigt aktuelle Filme, die bereits auf anderen Festivals liefen. Und nicht zuletzt überzeugt San Sebastián auch durch die beiden perfekt komponierten Retros (dieses Jahr Don Siegel und unter dem Titel «.doc – New paths of non-fiction» den Dokumentarfilmen gewidmet). Dem Sparzwang geschuldet soll es in Zukunft wohl nur noch eine Retro geben. Das ist zwar schade, doch wenn schon auf eine der Reihen verzichtet werden muss, dann ist mir die Reduktion auf eine Retro immer noch lieber als der Ausfall einer der anderen aktuellen Sektionen. Ich habe in 9 Tagen 49 Filme gesehen. 5-6 Filme pro Tag. ... Sun, 03 Oct 2010 20:40:49 +0100 877295 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/03/books-autumn This autumn brings a satisfying selection of books for serious readersxThis year, the sound of the publishing machine cranking back into gear after the summer hiatus echoed far and wide, with autumn's first two non-fiction big hitters – Tony Blair's A Journey and Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design – both breaking out of the literary ghetto and making the leap into the news pages.Either book would pass the time as you wait for the next episode of Mad Men – but if the thought of spending a long winter evening in the company of our former prime minister (or, for that matter, M theory) sends you leaping for the remote, fear not: the fiction shelves are well-stocked too this autumn. You may be dimly aware that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was published here recently (although as Franzen says, that version was an old draft; the "real" Freedom is only available as of Monday). But what else should be on your must-read list?After missing out on the Booker in 2009, Colm Tóibín is back with a beautifully turned short story collection, The Empty Family. And Philip Roth's latest novel, Nemesis, in which he returns to Newark to tell the story of a 1944 polio epidemic, will be available from Thursday.Another heavyweight producing perfect fireside fare, Peter Ackroyd delivers twice over: first with The Death of King Arthur, a retelling of the legend of Camelot; second with The English Ghost, a collection of ghost-sightings over the centuries.If all of this still feels too frivolous, turn to The New Nobility, an inside look at the KGB by a pair of fearless Russian journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Charting the organisation's heyday, decline and creeping return to power, it promises to raise the hairs on your neck as effectively as Ackroyd's ghost stories. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child" runs Corinthians 13:11. "When I became a man, I put away childish things. ... Sun, 03 Oct 2010 18:59:01 +0100 876213 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/02/steven-poole-nonfiction-choice-review The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick | Computer by Paul Atkinson | Blackberry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion by Rod McQueenThe Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick (Virgin, £11.99)Is Facebook's unofficial motto "Don't be lame" a more trustworthy ambition than Google's "Don't be evil?" Experienced tech-industry reporter Kirkpatrick has interviewed all the principals to tell the history of the website with more than half a billion users around the world – from its legendary beginnings in a Harvard dorm in 2004, to its current desire to "assemble a directory of the entire human race". There is much Silicon Valley local colour (programmers working among food detritus; obscene murals on bathroom walls), and a lot of well-dramatised cloak-and-dagger negotiation. As reporting, it is a triumph: thrillerishly readable, if at times appalling.Weirdly deadpan at the book's centre is Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg (or, as the author likes to call him in reverent tones, "the young CEO"), who claims to be committed both to users' privacy and to encouraging increased "transparency". The two aims are flatly contradictory. Kirkpatrick is occasionally mildly critical, but in writing that Zuckerberg "wants to rule not only Facebook, but in some sense the evolving communications infrastructure of the planet", he must have been trying deliberately to scare us. Right?Computer, by Paul Atkinson (Reaktion, £16.95)Facebook is only one of the world-shattering applications of what people used to call "electric brains". Atkinson tells the story of the computer as a designed object, from fearsome room-sized mainframe to desktop to laptop to PDA to smartphone and iPad. ... Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:06:03 +0100 875781 http://biblioragazzi.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/e-book-per-bambini-tumble-book-library-e-bookled/ Tramite il bel resoconto di Laura Armiero dell’ALA annual virtual conference 2010 pubblicato su AIDA, veniamo a sapere (tra le tante cose interessanti, leggetelo tutto!) dell’esistenza di TumbleBook Library, collezione di ebook per le scuole. Dalla presentazione del progetto si evince che sono degli ebook di fiction e non fiction arricchiti di funzionalità di lettura [...] (Source: biblioragazzi) Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:12:29 +0100 876101 http://epist.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/short-history-of-myth/ Karen Armstrong. A Short History of Myth, 2005 First book done!  for 12 Books, 12 Months I am SO glad I started 12 Books, 12 Months with this one.  It was the only non-fiction book in my list but it paves the way for much of the fiction that I’m planning to read this year (and into next).  I started with Short History of Myth because it is the first title in the Canongate Myth Series — books by different authors, from different countries, retelling a myth from their culture.  I heard about this series because Philip Pullman’s latest book is the latest addition to the series (The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ).  But I have this thing about putting my media consumption in chronological order, whether it be movies, books, or TV series.  I can’t start Buffy in the middle or end, I have to see it from the pilot episode, moving forward… for example. With the Canongate Myth Series, I am making an exception because: 1) I can’t get all the books anyway since a couple of them have not been translated yet, as far as I know, and 2) I really don’t want to wait that long to read Philip Pullman’s book, man.  And besides 3) I only have the Pullman book from my local public library for another week, so I have to start reading it, like, now. It also helped that Mark happened to own a copy of Karen Armstrong’s book already. The book is a nice, short introduction to mythology — just 150 pages long.  In such a small amount of space, it would be hard to really do justice to any particular aspect of mythology so I have to give Armstrong some credit for summing things up as well as she did.  My biggest problem with the book was in the second and third chapters when she is describing the development of mythology and religion during the Palaeolithic and Neolithic Periods. ... Wed, 29 Sep 2010 23:29:57 +0100 876374 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/29/east-end-gilda-o-neill Bestselling author of novels and non-fiction drawing on her background as an east LondonerBestselling author Gilda O'Neill, who chronicled the history of the East End of London in her novels and non-fiction, died on Friday after a short illness, her literary agency Curtis Brown has announced.Born in 1951 in Bethnal Green, O'Neill was brought up in the East End, the granddaughter of a Thames tug skipper and a pie and mash shop owner. She left school at 15 but went on to take three degrees as a mature student, turning to writing full time in 1990.She hit the bestseller lists with her history of cockney London, My East End, following it up with Our Street, about East Enders during the second world war, and The Good Old Days, chronicling the underbelly of London in the 19th century.O'Neill was also the author of 13 novels set in and around the area she grew up, from her most recent second world war-set Secrets of the Heart, in which 16-year-old Freddie is conducting a secret relationship with a girl from the local Chinese community, to Sins of the Fathers, about East End crime family the O'Donnells."Gilda O'Neill was a generous, loving and popular person whose writing and life touched all those came into contact with her," said Curtis Brown in a statement. "Her works of oral history were held in high regard and widely read."FictionHistoryAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:03:09 +0100 875028 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/28/anthony-bourdain-graphic-novel Author of Kitchen Confidential promises his tale of 'ultraviolent food nerds' will be a cross between Eat Drink Man Woman and A Fistful of DollarsIt will be kitchen knives at dawn when celebrated chef and author Anthony Bourdain makes his first venture into graphic novels next year with the "gourmet slaughterfest" comic Get Gyro.Bourdain, author of the explosive behind-the-scenes memoir Kitchen Confidential and follow-up Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, is currently hosting the foodie travel show No Reservations. But the chef is also planning a move into more graphic culinary territory in 2011 after signing a deal with DC Comics, he has revealed."It's about ultraviolent food nerds. It's a gourmet slaughterfest, sort of like Fistful of Dollars meets Eat Drink Man Woman," he told the Omaha World Herald. In another interview, he described the comic as a combination of Kurosawa's 19th-century Japanese gangster film Yojimbo, Big Night, the story of two Italian brothers starting a restaurant in New Jersey in the 1950s, and Danish film Babette's Feast, in which a Parisian refugee plans a culinary banquet to thank the twin sisters who took her in. "[Get Gyro is] an ultraviolent slaughterfest over culinary arcana," said Bourdain.The move isn't Bourdain's first foray into fiction: he is also the author of a handful of crime novels, including Gone Bamboo, "a feast of murder, hitmen, and the hitwomen they love", Bone in the Throat, about a junior chef who "unwittingly finds himself a partner in big-time crime", and The Bobby Gold Stories, as well as his non-fiction books. "The next book will be a crime novel, just to take a break from writing and talking about myself. I think that will be a healthy departure," he told the Omaha World Herald. "It's displaced New Yorkers in the Caribbean doing bad things to each other. Food will be involved. ... Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:40:51 +0100 874898 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/25/et-cetera-steven-poole The End of Discovery by Russell Stannard, The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal and Einstein by Andrew RobinsonThe End of Discovery, by Russell Stannard (Oxford, £14.99)Are there some facts about the universe that might remain forever unknowable? So supposes an eminent nuclear physicist, who argues that our "age of scientific discovery" will one day come to an end. There might never be good scientific explanations, he argues, for the existence of consciousness, for the exact values that must be plugged into the Standard Model of particle physics, or for what time and mass "really are". He dismisses M-theory, recently endorsed by Stephen Hawking, as "pure unverifiable speculation".The smallest mystery here, though a vexing one: why does one of the great university presses produce books that are so poorly copy-edited? Ill-served by his publishers in that way, Stannard has nonetheless composed an admirably enthusiastic text of knotty philosophical interest, attempting to outline what may be said about the "world-in-itself", and to reconcile a belief in "free will" with the existence already of all past and future time (what he calls the "block model" of the universe). I don't think the latter attempt works (it claims that spacetime can be a "record" of freely willed future actions, yet the idea of a "record" surely assumes a vantage point directed only at the past), but Stannard's overall aim is fulfilled: some questions are really exceedingly hard.The Age of Empathy, by Frans de Waal (Souvenir Press, £18.99)Another question to which definitive answers seem improbable: what is "human nature"? The term is an inevitably political construct, to which primatologist De Waal here appeals occasionally even as he seeks to undermine some popular notions about it. ... Fri, 24 Sep 2010 23:06:08 +0100 874022 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/23/danielle-steel-romance-fiction-novels Bestselling author Danielle Steel denies her blockbuster novels are romantic fictionDanielle Steel's book titles might range from Passion's Promise to Matters of the Heart, from No Greater Love to Now and Forever, but the blockbuster author is adamant that despite their appearance, they're not romance novels.Author of 113 books – she publishes three a year – with sales of 590m copies, Steel is known for her bestselling stories of strong women struggling through difficulties to find contentment and love. One of her best known, The Promise, tells of the enduring love between a young orphan, Nancy, and the heir to a business empire, Michael, separated on their wedding day by tragedy and deception; another bestseller, Crossings, is about a beautiful American woman, Liane, who discovers a "love that can no longer be denied" during the second world war: "Would the voyage seal her love for ever, or leave her stranded on the shores of heartbreak and despair?" The more recent One Day At a Time "explores love in all its guises", according to its publisher, telling the story of law school dropout Coco and her unexpected romance with British actor Leslie Baxter.But, interviewed on CBS television's Early Show, Steel insisted that her books aren't romantic fiction. "They're not really about romance ... I really write more about the human condition," she said. "[Romance] is an element in life but I think of romance novels as more of a category and I write about the situations we all deal with – loss and war and illness and jobs and careers, good things, bad things, crimes, whatever."The interviewer pointed out that love always triumphs in her novels, but Steel wasn't convinced. "Hope even more than love [seems to get us through]," she said. ... Thu, 23 Sep 2010 11:50:07 +0100 873578