About Books & Literature

Shining Girls is getting a lot of buzz, and sounds fascinating! - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

All fantastic books (I downloaded Shining Girls for my extremely short summer reading list and have already burned most of the way through it...oops). - Hookuh Tinypants

"I'm a writer who does a bit of comedy, a bit of journalism, a bit of reviewing and a few other things. And from 2003 until 2008 I wrote six novels for erotica "by women for women" imprint Black Lace Books using the pseudonym Mathilde Madden. Three of those novels were a trilogy about werewolves and werewolf hunters and their tragic, forbidden, hairy love. The books did OK, which at this level of publishing is almost indistinguishable from them sinking utterly and without trace. And they gained a tiny number of (mostly) dismissive reviews on Amazon. But I liked them, I was proud of them and that was that." - Jessie from Bookmarklet

what are the chances someone will pick this up for a new TV series? ;-) - Halil

"Whatever the success of Taipei, publishers and the media won't come beating a path straight to Alt Lit's most exciting poetry. But perhaps Pandora's box will be open just enough for all the Alt-evils kept therein to come flooding out anyway. I hope so, because Alt Lit poetry has the potential to deliver a shot to whichever arm performance poetry hasn't got to first." - Jessie from Bookmarklet

"Alt Lit poetry plays fast and loose with form, and is as much at home with image macros, screen captures and gifs as with lines of connected text. It is a movement that has taken the lid off the technological toy box and decided to have a proper play, pressing every button out of curiosity. It is the willingness to borrow, copy, cut, paste, click and remix that may prove to be the most... more... - Jessie

"Malorie Blackman, the prize-winning author who has become Britain's first black children's laureate, believes education secretary Michael Gove's proposed new history curriculum is "dangerous" and risks turning black and minority ethnic children against education. "It's a mistake to get very inward-looking and say if you're doing history we're going to concentrate on the royals or Winston Churchill," she said of the draft curriculum published earlier this year that focused strongly on Britain. "I understand you need to learn about Henry VIII but when I was young I wanted to learn about something that felt more relevant."" - Jessie from Bookmarklet

I haven't read her books but she sounds awesome. - Jessie

"The great works of the Eastern world have provided inspiration for this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list. From those you have probably heard of (like the Kamasutra) to those you may not have (such as The Recognition of Sakuntala), these classic works provide a window on the classical worlds of India, China, and the Middle East." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Sayings of the Buddha, edited and translated by Rupert Gethin Buddhist religious and philosophical beliefs derive from the teachings of Gotama the Buddha, a wandering ascetic in India during the fifth century BCE. One of the main sources for knowledge of his teachings is the four Pali Nikayas, or ‘collections’ of his sayings. Written in the ancient Indian language Pali, which is closely related to Sanskrit, the Nikayas are among the oldest of all Buddhist texts." - Maitani

"Myths of Mesopotamia, edited and translated by Stephanie Dalley The ancient civilization of Mesopotamia was located between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The myths collected here, originally written in cuneiform on clay tablets, include the Creation and the Flood, and the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of a man of great strength, whose heroic quest for immortality is dashed through one moment of weakness." - Maitani

"As Marion Shurtleff was on her way out a bookstore in San Clemente, Calif., she remembered that she had meant to buy a few extra Bibles for her Bible study group. Shurtleff, 75, asked an employee if the store had used Bibles and he pointed her in the right direction. There were four or five versions, so she quickly picked two, paid and left. She noticed later on that one of the Bibles had some folded yellow papers inside but thought nothing of them until about two months later when she found herself with some free time and decided to take a look at the papers. What she found floored her." - Amira

"I opened it up and on the inside facing page...I started shaking," Shurtleff told ABCNew.com. "There was my name and my telephone number and I recognized my handwriting." There were three pages of thin yellow paper with a Girl Scout essay written in pencil. Shurtleff wrote it 65 years ago when was 10 years old. (...) Covington is more than 2,000 miles away from San Clemente. (...) She... more... - Amira

See also: The Things Found in Books | Flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups... - Amira

"When Constantine Cavafy died on 29 April 1933, his 70th birthday, his work was little known beyond Greece and Alexandria, where he spent most of his life. In 1935, with the publication of the first substantial collection of his poems, he began to receive the critical attention his genius merited. His foremost, lasting admirer was another great Greek poet, George Seferis, who observed: "Outside his poetry Cavafy does not exist."" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"That was in 1946, when several of Cavafy's friends and acquaintances were still alive. Yet the remark is not a harsh one, because the artist he was referring to was the least self-assertive of men. He worked for 30 years as a civil servant in the ministry of irrigation, sometimes making extra money as a broker in the Alexandria stock exchange. His lovers, golden youths who needed money to buy clothes, have all disappeared into the nameless history that accounts for the majority of the human race." - Maitani

"Who's that trip-tapping across my Google+ profile? A child with the face of one of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. Thankfully this isn't a strange, social-networking nightmare fuelled by one-too-many views of Goat Lucky on YouTube. It's a new application created by book publisher Penguin and ad agency BBH, running on Google+ and using the latter's Hangout technology to make children and their parents part of the famous fairytale. The app uses their computer's webcam to place them in the story, then overlays masks of the characters on top, with the aim being for kids and parents to act out the story while reading it." - Jessie from Bookmarklet

"The Google+ app follows Penguin's experiments with tablet and smartphone storytelling. For example, the publisher worked with UK startup Made In Me on Ladybird Classic Me Books, an iOS app where parents and children could re-record the narration with their own voices. There is also a wider trend in children's apps to use devices' cameras for storytelling purposes. Nosy Crow's... more... - Jessie

"Your mentor – a father, a family friend… – tells you, and then writes a series of stories where you are the hero. You can’t help but notice, however, that said mentor spends more time at the typewriter than reading these stories to you: the first bad sign? Then the publications appear and you see you, but not you, in some crass illustrations in a 4×8 book. Then, Disney start negotiating over the films rights and the nasty boys and girls at school go to the cinema to see ‘you’ running off with the fairies or making a house in the Never Ever Tree. Bad days follow. For the rest of your adolescence every time that someone holds up one of those damn volumes you feel nauseous. Yet that is what you are and you nothing you do will allow you to cut the ball and chain of your childhood fame." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Put in these terms it cannot have been easy to be, say, Alice Liddell or Christopher Robin Milne. In the case of Christopher Robin at least we have a little window into the human test-tube: for CR wrote a book describing the hell of being Christopher Robin, The Enchanted Places (1974). In this book Christopher Robin describes how his father first wrote the poems and the books. The... more... - Maitani

"It was to the detriment of Maupassant's work – although not his bank balance – that his career coincided with a demand from French newspapers for stories of around 1-2,000 words. Jostling with news and faits divers, these stories were by necessity laconic and attention-grabbing, and Maupassant, whose severe economy was a model for Hemingway, had a great facility for producing them. The irony, however, is that Maupassant's best works are much longer. The spareness, learned in his youth from the poet Louis Bouilhet, is still there – as in the opening of "Hautot & Son" (1889), where, as Sean O'Faolain writes, "the scene is brilliantly and swiftly painted, with three lines for the countryside and six for the sportsmen" – but the stories' scope helps avoid the glibness that can mar his shorter work." - Jessie from Bookmarklet

"The bleakness of "Boule de Suif" is typical of Maupassant, who considered life "brutal, incoherent, disjointed, full of inexplicable, illogical and contradictory disasters". He is fascinated by seamy details, describing lovemaking just so he can get to the dribble of saliva flowing from a lover's mouth the next morning ("A Parisian Affair", 1881), or envisioning a barroom as an... more... - Jessie

"It is regrettable that Maupassant should be known less for indelible moments like this, and more for the twist or "trick" ending of "The Necklace" (1884), the final line of which arrives with the boom-tish of a club comedian's punchline. That story's great fame has had a distorting effect on the rest his work, abetted by every ignorant commentator – and there are plenty – who has identified it as typical." - Jessie

"Pop culture is a goldmine of neologisms, and science fiction and fantasy is one rich seam that has been contributing to English for hundreds of years. Yes, hundreds: because what is Gulliver's Travels but a fantasy satire of 18th-century travel novels? And what is Frankenstein but science fiction? The name of Mary Shelley's monster lives on both as its own word and as a combining form used in words like "frankenfood". And Swift's fantasy novel was so evocative, we adopted a number of words from it, such as "Lilliputian", the tongue-twisting "Brobdingnagian", and – surprise – "yahoo"." - Jessie from Bookmarklet

"Savvy writers of each genre also liked to resurrect and breathe new life into old words. JRR Tolkien not only gave us "hobbit", he also popularized the plural "dwarves", which has appeared in English with increasing frequency since the publication of The Hobbit in 1968. "Eldritch", which dates to the 1500s, is linked in the modern mind almost exclusively to the stories of HP Lovecraft.... more... - Jessie

"Writing a novel (or a story, for that matter) is confusing work. There are just so many characters running all over the place, dropping hints and having revelations. So it’s no surprise that many authors plan out their works beforehand, in chart or list or scribble form, in order to keep everything straight. After the jump, you’ll find a mini collection of those planning papers, so you can take a peek into the process of some of your favorite authors, from James Salter to J.K. Rowling." - Amira

"The agency's Sydney office packaged together a 10-book box set of previously published paperbacks "specifically edited to last just as long as each of Qantas's key routes." It's a fun idea, and Droga is playing the nostalgia factor to the hilt. "In this world of Kindles and iPads, it seems that the last bastion of the humble paperback novel is actually at 40,000 feet," says David Nobay, creative chairman of Droga5 Sydney. "You only need to look at the bulging shelves at any airport bookstore. Maybe it's the fact that everything seems so far removed from the real world up there."" - Jessie from Bookmarklet

Clever! - Jessie

"Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick. Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2-1608) is one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. She is renowned for her reputation as a dynast and indomitable matriarch and perhaps best known as the builder of great stately homes like the magnificent Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. The story of her life told to date typically emphasises her modest birth, her rise through the ranks of society, her four husbands, each of greater wealth than the last, and her ambitious aggrandisement of her family. Bess's letters bring to life her extraordinary story and allow us to eavesdrop on her world. The letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life as she weaves a web of correspondence that stretches from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Fans of magical prose and magical worlds, take heart. Titan Books has recently released a special limited edition version of steampunk legend James Blaylock’s The Aylesford Skull, a classic from one of the genre’s trailblazers. To celebrate the release, Blaylock has put together a list of forgotten or ignored works of literature that have inspired his own writing, and should be must-reads for anyone interested in science fiction or the fantastic." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

"This object was in common use in medieval libraries, even though very few survive today. It’s a bookmark - and a smart one for that matter. As with our own bookmarks, it tells you where you are in the book: the rope was attached to the binding and placed between two pages. The reader subsequently pulled down the marker along the rope to the line where he had stopped reading. Since an open medieval book often presented four text columns, the reader then turned the disk to indicate in which column he had left off. In this case we read “4” in medieval Arabic numerals - the column on the far right. So this tiny piece of parchment marks it all: page, column and line. That’s what I call smart. Source unknown, likely 13th or 14th century." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Other kids’ dads had hidden stashes of porn — we giggled and made sure not to get caught looking. My dad was a pornographer. He supplemented his income with freelance camera work, and in addition to shooting head shots for aspiring models, he took pictures of people having sex." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"I discovered this sideline a few years ago when I inherited hundreds of negatives that had been in storage since his death in 1977. My dad had spent his life trying to succeed as a photographer. He’d had some early achievements as a filmmaker in Trieste after the war; his short documentary about that city won an award at the Venice Biennale. But after immigrating to the States in 1958,... more... - Maitani

"Did he enjoy photographing cats? Was it aesthetically appealing? As appealing as snapping pictures of pussies? Or did freelance work really just add up to more money at the end of the week? I’ll never know. He died when I was ten; my memories of him are sweet and self-absorbed. Some days he’d bring me with him to his darkroom in the city. At Government Center we’d get take-away donuts... more... - Maitani

"As Herbertson said herself, in the notice that she edited into the top of her review, she’s got a following of maybe one hundred. Rice’s fandom would likely never have found her review if the author herself hadn’t posted a link it on her Facebook page with the words ‘Punishing Pandora And A Surprising Opinion on Anne Rice” by Miss Articulate is a review by some one who loathed the book so much she cut it to pieces. Comments most welcome.” Welcome by whom, is the next natural question, since the first comment on the post is now an all caps scream calling Herbertson a hag and wishing that she’d contract a venereal disease. Rice also quoted from Herbertson’s bio page in the comments on her Facebok post, a tacit and well taken invitation to her followers to lambast the blogger there as well." - Jessie from Bookmarklet

unless Rice intended releasing the Dogs of Words, she's commiting "Streisand Effect" on herself and she's ummm #smarterthanthat - WarLord

"The new edition is timed with the 3-D film adaptation, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Mr. DiCaprio, that will arrive in theaters on May 10. So far this year, sales of the paperback with the original jacket art — a glowing cityscape and a pair of floating eyes — have been extraordinary. On Thursday, it was the top-selling book on Amazon.com. At Barnes & Noble stores last week, no other paperback book sold more copies. It has landed on best-seller lists for independent bookstores." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

I'm OK with it. It helps move copies of a classic. - Eric - Too Hot

"Wikipedia has a category for "American novelists", but it runs to so many names that the site has said "pages in this category should be moved to subcategories where applicable". Yesterday, the authors – and females – Amanda Filipacchi and Elissa Schappell noticed that editors had begun moving women "one by one, alphabetically, from the 'American novelists' category to the 'American women novelists' subcategory", wrote Filipacchi in the New York Times. "If you look back in the 'history' of these women's pages, you can see that they used to appear in the category 'American novelists', but that they were recently bumped down. Male novelists on Wikipedia, however – no matter how small or obscure they are – all get to be in the category 'American novelists'."" - Jessie from Bookmarklet

Ugh. - Heather

"Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, and died there seventy years later of throat cancer. The uneventfulness of his life would have made the strictest of New Critics happy. Cavafy was the ninth child of a well-to-do mercantile family, whose prosperity went into rapid decline with the death of his father. At the age of nine the future poet went to England, where Cavafy and Sons had its branches, and he returned to Alexandria at sixteen. He was brought up in the Greek Orthodox religion. For a while he attended the Hermes Lyceum, a business school in Alexandria, and some sources tell us that while there he was more interested in classical and historical studies than in the art of commerce. But this may be merely a cliché in the biography of a poet." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"In 1882, when Cavafy was nineteen, an anti-European outbreak took place in Alexandria which caused a great deal of bloodshed (at least according to that century’s standards), and the British retaliated with a naval bombardment of the city. Since Cavafy and his mother had left for Constantinople not long before, he missed his chance to witness perhaps the only historic event to take... more... - Maitani

"Cavafy knew ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Arabic, French; he read Dante in Italian and he wrote his first poems in English. But if there were any literary influences—and in the book under review Edmund Keeley sees some in the English Romantics—they ought to be confined to that stage of Cavafy’s poetic development which the poet himself dismissed from the “canon” of his work, as... more... - Maitani

"News that an unfinished manuscript by children's illustrator Richard Scarry is to be coloured up by his son and published this autumn may not immediately thrill the children of today, but it will provoke waves of nostalgia in those of us who grew up with his busy anthropomorphised beasts." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"The book will feature one of Scarry's best-loved and most ubiquitous characters, the alpine-hatted, singly-shod Lowly Worm, who drives an apple and was probably the first worm in space. The unfinished book of sketches and text, devoted to the cheerful invertebrate, was discovered among Scarry's papers, and his son Huck, also an artist, is colouring and completing it. Appropriately,... more... - Maitani

I loved to show and read Richard Scarry books to my son. :-) - Maitani

"Fifty years after her death, Sylvia Plath continues to captivate writers and readers. But her role as a ‘casus belli’ in the battle of the sexes has also obscured the genius of this much-mythologised poet" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

“I have done it again,” declares Sylvia Plath in the opening line of one of her most famous poems – the tour de force that is “Lady Lazarus”. “One year in every ten I manage it.” What the speaker manages every decade is, like Lazarus, to return from the dead. Now, 50 years after this poem was composed, Lady Lazarus has done it once more, arising for a fresh generation of readers, as Plath has done regularly since her suicide helped transform her from poet to cultural phenomenon." - Maitani

"The last time Plath was big news was 15 years ago, when her husband Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters, the collection of poems he wrote to her ghost. When Birthday Letters came out, Plath had already been dead for 35 years – five years longer than she had lived. At the time of her death, in February 1963, Plath had published some poems in The New Yorker; her first collection, The... more... - Maitani

"The biggest teen success of recent times has been Christopher Paolini, who was 15 when he began Eragon, the first in his epic, bestselling Inheritance Cycle series, and 19 when it first hit the shops as a self-published title. By the time he was 22 he had a big publishing deal and was top of the New York Times bestseller list. Of course, not all publishing stories end as happily as that, but it demonstrates that there is no age restriction for authors." - Jessie from Bookmarklet

Yeah. When it first came out and everyone was talking about what a prodigy he was, I expected it to be good, at least. I didn't read past the first couple pages. Life is too short. - Katy S

"It feels harsh to give up on books — the accomplishment of completing an entire book is so vastly impressive that I almost feel guilt for implying anyone might have screwed the gargantuan task up. It suggests a failure on a rather large scale. Each time I relegate another half-skimmed paperback to the shelf, I also feel I must be some sort of ‘bad reader’ for not giving this creation the due respect of finishing it. The only solace I have found in response to this problem was in Linda Holmes NPR piece, The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything, which exactly articulates the need for all of us to Let. Go." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

confession: I never finished a book I didn't like. - Maitani

"The ring was probably found in 1785 by a farmer ploughing a few miles away within the walls of Silchester, one of the most enigmatic Roman sites in the country – a town which flourished before the Roman invasion, was abandoned by the 7th century and was never reoccupied. There are no details of exactly when it was found, but historians assume the farmer sold it to the history loving wealthy family at The Vyne. It was a strikingly odd object, 12g of gold so large that it would only fit on a gloved thumb, ornamented with a peculiar spiky head wearing a diadem, and a Latin inscription reading: "Senicianus live well in God". A few decades later and 100 miles away, more of the story turned up: at Lydney in Gloucestershire, a Roman site known locally as the Dwarf's Hill, a tablet with an inscribed curse was found. A Roman called Silvianus informs the god Nodens that his ring has been stolen. He knows the villain responsible, and he wants the god to sort them out: "Among those who bear the name of Senicianus to none grant health until he bring back the ring to the temple of Nodens."" - Jessie from Bookmarklet

"Lydney was re-excavated by the maverick archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who called in Tolkien in 1929 to advise on the odd name of the god – and also spotted the connection between the name on the curse and the Chute family's peculiar ring. It seems that Senicianus only got as far as Silchester before he lost his booty." - Jessie

"“My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer and I have my mind…and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much Jon Snow.”" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

“Artists and scientists analyze the world in surprisingly similar ways.” (...) “[The residual purpose of art is] purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” (John Cage) - Amira from Bookmarklet

"10 LGBT-Themed Novels That Every Student Should Read" - Shevonne from Bookmarklet