Home add your blog Archives Search Contact RSS FEED

This site is an rss/xml news reader containing our favorite feeds. All articles are the copyrighted material of the blogs that wrote them.

A Quick, Non-Bookish Interruption

post from A Striped Armchair on 03 November 2009 06:00:58 PM. © A Striped Armchair

Hi guys! You know I don’t normally double-post, but I was surfing around the fashion blogosphere (remember that I told you I love clothes!), and came across a wonderful giveaway. The blogger behind Effortless Anthropologie is celebrating her first year of blogging by giving away a $100 gift certificate to Anthropologie, a store I [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://astripedarmchair.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/a-quick-non-bookish-interruption
/

Digg this

Teaser Tuesday: Have Mercy on Us All

post from A Work in Progress on 03 November 2009 06:00:00 PM. © A Work in Progress

Yesterday I mentioned that I hadn't yet met the sleuth, or in this case the detective, in Fred Vargas's Have Mercy on Us All. Well, today I have. In a comment on a recent post another reader called Fred Vargas's mysteries 'quirky' (but very readable) and the more I read, the more I think I have to agree with that description. There's something weird going on in the story and I think it's going to get weirder.

Joss Le Guern is a modern-day town crier. I had heard of such a thing, but didn't realize they might still exist. For a small fee Joss will read out notices that people leave him. Three times a day, every day, he returns to the same spot close to the Gare Montparnasse and reads out announcements of things for sale, love letters, general annoyances, whatever someone wants to share with the neighborhood. Joss takes these requests and separates them into two piles--the "can dos" and the "better nots". Some messages are fine for general consumption and others are better left unread. But there have been some odd messages turning up as well--not really fit for either pile, but they get read anyway. Messages referring to the Black Death.

So that's a bit of the backstory. Still no crime has been committed, though a resident of a local neighborhood is frightened to see a strange symbol painted on all the doors in the complex where she lives. They are the number "4", written backwards and notches through the outer leg of the cross. At the moment there is no connection between these odd messages and the black painted numbers, but it's been brought to the attention of the Brigade Criminelle, which is where we find Detective Commissaire Adamsberg. Sorry, a bit of a build up to my teaser, but it seemed like it needed a little explanation. A picture is forming in my mind:

"In his early youth, just when he'd left the Pyrennees, he'd discovered that there really were people who lived on paper, and he'd quickly come to regard them with considerable awe, a degree of pity and boundless gratitude. Adamsberg mostly liked to walk, muse and act, and he knew that his tastes inspired little awe and much pity in many of his colleagues."

His partner Danglard notes he's solved "a score and more mysteries through his walking, dreaming, straggly-thinking method" getting "surprising results of his impenetrable mental meanderings." And how about some visuals from the woman who found the odd "4" painted on her door:

"The man was short and dark, and he looked like a pig's breakfast. His hair was all tousled and he'd rolled his jacket sleeves halfway up his unshirted forearm. Looked like a guy with troubles to tell, just like she had."

Now I'm intrigued. I'm guessing he looked like a "pig's breakfast" means he's not an especially fastidious man. But he can obviously solve crimes, so I'll be following events closely. I usually like to start reading msyteries with the first book rather than jumping in somewhere in the middle, but things have been pretty clear so far. One review on the back cover called this "eccentric", but eccentric is good sometimes!

Read The Full Article:
http://danitorres.typepad.com/workinprogress/2009/11/teaser-tuesday-have-mercy-on
-us-all.html

Digg this

X and Y

post from Light reading on 03 November 2009 05:59:00 PM. © Light reading

The one-track mind of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Read The Full Article:
http://jennydavidson.blogspot.com/2009/11/x-and-y.html

Digg this

Hazlitt on Poetry

post from NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS on 03 November 2009 05:46:43 PM. © NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

self portrait, 1802 ish" Many people suppose that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nigelbeale/yxOu/~3/cCWqAXvhp0A/

Digg this

Who said Ottawa was Ugly

post from NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS on 03 November 2009 05:29:42 PM. © NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Copyright: Brian Lynn. Wish I’d taken this photo. Evening shot…only at certain times of the year does the sunset hit so many windows just so…love the way the gold shimmers and streaks across the water…makes it look so…wet. And the way those wires follow that pink cloud across the sky…(incidentally, this picture wasn’t taken today…or [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nigelbeale/yxOu/~3/u1bN78oT5Go/

Digg this

Pictorial Websters by Quercus Press

post from Classical Bookworm on 03 November 2009 04:57:00 PM. © Classical Bookworm

Watch as John Carrera of Quercus Press transforms engravings from 19th century Webster?s dictionaries into a handmade work of bookish art.

The handmade editions are expensive, naturally, but a trade edition is available from Chronicle Books for $35. Chronicle Books is also giving away one of the leather-bound editions?enter the contest here before November 15th. See sample pages and more about the project at Quercus Press.

via phantasmagorical

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/Bookworm/~3/IDJQSp_ocOg/pictorial-websters
-by-quercus-press.html

Digg this

Maureen Corrigan on Lacuna

post from The Millions on 03 November 2009 04:28:23 PM. © The Millions

NPR’s Maureen Corrigan applauds Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna for “single-handedly keeping consumer zest alive for the literary novel,” as “the only literary novel caught in the cross hairs” of the price wars waged by Wal-mart, Amazon, and Target against booksellers (the others being genre novels). As for the book itself: “I wish I could say she [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/themillionsblog/fedw/~3/oI62UaTcoXo/maureen-corrig
an-on-lacuna.html

Digg this

To Build a Paywall or Not to Build a Paywall

As newspapers, literary journals, and digital publishers debate the future of content, one issue looms large: do we need paywalls to earn money for our content? According to The New York Times' public editor, executive editor Bill Keller has said that the paper will decide "within weeks" whether to erect a paywall--setting the pace for everybody from online literary journals to hometown papers.

Last week Five Chapters editor David Daley confessed his own uneasiness with his free journal's role in the publishing economy: "I'm not always sure it's good for the overall reading culture," he said. What do you think? Our blog network is running a poll to find out what all the different media types in the audience think about this crucial topic. Add your answer below...

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/trends/to_build_a_paywall_or_not_to_build_a_
paywall_142115.asp?c=rss

Digg this

Pistache

I've never read a pastiche of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and I would like to, but I have a feeling that she might be one of those authors who'd defy spoofing. Her characters are so intentionally stylised and unnaturalistic, that a parody might appear only imitation. But the same cannot be said for those targeted in Sebastian Faulks' witty collection Pistache [sic, if I may] which my lovely friend Lorna gave me for Christmas 2006. It's been a while since I read it, but I do remember enjoying curling up with it on Boxing Day. Each pastiche is about a page and half long, and most began life on Radio Four's The Write Stuff, though they have been edited and polished, apparently.

This is the perfect book for anybody who's ever wondered what The Waste Land would look like as a limerick, how Emma would fare on an 18-30 party, or how AA Milne could be altered for this grittier age:

Hush, hush, whisper who dare,
Christopher Robin has gone into care.

As always, with this sort of thing, it only works when you're familiar with the author being pastiched. Sections on Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Raymond Chandler etc. left me cold, because I've read nothing by them - but, for the most part, they're authors you're likely to know. Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, Geoffrey Chaucer, PG Wodehouse... all the old staples, really. My two favourites were Dan Brown at a cash-point and Virginia Woolf at a hen-party. The mind boggles, doesn't it? But I shall give you a taste, and type out the Dan Brown section (which is longer than most, actually). This is for everyone, like me, who wasted hours of their life reading The Da Vinci Code...

The world-renowned author stabbed his dagger-like debit card into the slot. 'Welcome to NatWest,' barked the blushing grey light of the screen to the forty-two-year-old man. He had only two thoughts.

NatWest is a perfect heptogram.

Scratching his aquiline head, frantically trying to remember a number, the sun came up at last and rained its orange beams on Dan Brown. 'What do you want to do?' asserted the blinking screen. His options were stark for Brown, more than ever now. 'Get Mini Statement'. 'Withdraw Cash'. 'Change PIN.' For what seemed an eternity, trying to remember his PIN, the screen mocked the famous writer.

Someone somewhere knows my four-figure PIN.

Whatever my PIN was once is still my PIN and in some remote safe someone somewhere still knows it.

In Paddington Station, an iconic railway terminal with a glass roof like the bastard offspring of a greenhouse and a railway station, a line of fellow travellers was waiting on Brown. Brown frowned down at his brown shoes and for the hundredth time that morning wondered what destiny may have in store for the Exeter, New Hampshire graduate.

The sandy-haired former plagiarism defendant felt his receding temples pounding in his guts. Four figures. Four figures, you halfwit, he almost found himself murmuring in Brown's ear, close at hand.

Tentatively his fingers pounded their remorseless melody upon the NatWest keyboard, numerically. He watched his fingers work with sallow eyes.

He type in anything, literally anything, desperately. He didn't know what affect it may have.

The headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland resides in a hydraulically sealed ninety-eight-storey building guarded by hair-trigger sensitive nuclear firedogs at 4918, 275th Street in Manhattan, America, whose security protocol is known to only six elves whose tongues have been cut out for security by the Cyrenian Knights of Albania, the capital of Greece.

In an instant, the famous writer remembered their bleeding skin from barbed wire.

Of course. They must pass on the secret PIN. An unbroken chain whose links are not forged (not in that sense).

9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . .6. His fingers pronounced the Sigma number. The Sigma number was almost impossible to fake, whereby the Liberace Sequence was quite easy to forge for prominent author Dan Brown.

The cash machine cleared its throat and breathed in with a rasping exhalation that seemed to shake its very belly. Then finally it expectorated wheezily up twenty-eight million dollars into the fingers pregnant with expectation of the forty-two-year-old man.

'Take you cash now please,' pleaded the mocking screen, no longer mocking.

It's like giving candy to a baby, it occurred to the universe-celebrated prose stylist.

It's like shelling eggs.