BOOK RIOT

And then there was the time iTunes featured our podcast in the...

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:55:19 -0400

And then there was the time iTunes featured our podcast in the “New and Noteworthy” section on its homepage. Listen to the latest episode here.

slaughterhouse90210: “Stopping was death. Stopping meant you’d...

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:01:40 -0400

slaughterhouse90210:

“Stopping was death. Stopping meant you’d given up and turned the keys of the world over to other people. The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.”

—Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

"I hope you have a book like this, a book that makes you feel sane when other forces conspire to..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:31:23 -0400

“I hope you have a book like this, a book that makes you feel sane when other forces conspire to loosen your bearings, a book that values what you value, a book that makes you laugh and nod and gives you comfort. If you think that books don’t have the power to confer validation upon their readers, then I’m afraid we’ve had very different experiences. Because although of course validation comes from a dozen other places in my life, books have their own way of reaching those hard to scratch places right in the middle of my soul (sometimes when I don’t even know that there’s a place in need of a scratch) in a way few other things can. They are intensely personal in this way, these books, and one that speaks to me with power and clarity might sound tinny and distant to you. This exclusivity is one of the reasons they’re so powerful: it sometimes feels as though they were written with us in mind.”

- When a Book Gets Everything Right

Bookish lamps are the best lamps. See the whole collection.

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:01:29 -0400

Bookish lamps are the best lamps. See the whole collection.

The Well-Readheads' Summer Reading Forecast

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:30:38 -0400

The Well-Readheads' Summer Reading Forecast:

What’s on tap for you this summer?

Win a set of 14 Virginia Woolf books in this START...

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:01:54 -0400

Win a set of 14 Virginia Woolf books in this START HERE giveaway!

5 Books for Baz Luhrmann’s Next Adaptation

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:30:29 -0400

5 Books for Baz Luhrmann’s Next Adaptation

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:00:55 -0400

““At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.””

- Alberto Manguel (via thelifeofabookjunky)

Critical Linking: May 21, 2013

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:33:28 -0400

Our daily round-up of bookish links. Tastes great with coffee.

The only type of paid review that Amazon supports is an editorial review. An editorial review is a more formal evaluation of a book usually written by an editor or expert within a genre, but can also be written by family and friends. If you have received an editorial review of your book that you’d like to post to the Editorial Review section of your book’s detail page, please visit our Author Central Help Page.

This is a weird little part of Amazon’s review policy. Editorial reviews written by family and friends can be submitted for the editorial review section, but are not allowed in the customer review section. Odd.

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The publisher suggests that customers pay $10 for the download, but there is a drop down option to pay other amounts including: nothing, $2, $5, $25, $50 or $100.

Brave. Hope it works out for them.

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“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue stream that is still growing.”

Gotta ask yourself, though, how many other successful business decisions has the NYT made recently. Still, good for them.

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Amis is one of the finest stylists alive, but I thought “Lionel Asbo” was a bad novel. A really bad novel. In fact, my review of “Lionel Asbo” was a finalist for the Hatchet Job — a prize given for the most negative book review of the year. And yet, on the new paperback — on thefront cover, no less — appears this ringing endorsement from The Washington Post: “Amis is a force unto himself… . There is, quite simply, no one else like him.”

All true. But caveat emptor. That line is drawn from a review of “London Fields” that my colleague Jonathan Yardley wrote … 23 years ago.

This is pretty embarrassing stuff from the publisher.

4 days and just a little over $5K left to go in our Kickstarter...

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:01:05 -0400

4 days and just a little over $5K left to go in our Kickstarter to publish START HERE, Vol. 2! Back it or bust.

slaughterhouse90210: “She had a peculiar way with young men,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:30:37 -0400

slaughterhouse90210:

“She had a peculiar way with young men, Ursula noticed, both maternal and flirtatious at the same time (where once she had simply been flirtatious). It was rather disturbing to watch.”
—Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Commencement Speech Real Talk

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:01:28 -0400

At this moment, you are more open-minded than you will ever be again. As you get older, your interests might deepen, but the range will almost certainly narrow. Fight this as hard as you can.

Over the next decade, you will probably be able to count on one hand the number of times you will sit in a room with people that are not your friends and talk about ideas. Find ways to have conversations with people who don’t think like you do.

Most of you will try to hold on to your youth for the next 10-20 years. The longer you try, the more painful and hindering it will be. Nothing ages you faster than trying to be something you are not.

You will never feel like you know what you are doing, so don’t wait for it.

Outside of your small circle of family and close friends, no one cares what you wear, what you do, what you read, or what you watch. This can be both liberating and terrifying. Choose liberating.

The more you enjoyed your time here, the more the memory of it will sting.

You were taught principally by people who have no idea how business works, though most of you will spend your professional lives outside of academia.

The difficulties ahead of you will make what you have faced to this point seem trivial.

It is easy to make decisions about your life without even knowing you are making them. You will regret the decisions you did not make a hell of a lot more than the decisions you knew you were making.

You don’t deserve anything. Your passion, effort, and creativity may not pay off. But you still have to try.

The things you care strongly about now might mean nothing to you in five years. And that’s OK. You haven’t failed or given up. You will just care about different things.

The pursuit and maintenance of health insurance will govern far more of your life than art.

Do not think that because you dated a lot in college you have any idea what it means to be in a healthy relationship. Most of this education is still in front of you.

What you will turn out to be will probably not bear much resemblance to what you thought you would be. Try not to mourn this overmuch.

If you pay attention and exert enormous effort, you might be able to mitigate some of your flaws, but this will be an on-going effort.

There are exponentially more possibilities than you can imagine.

Your favorite song right now is likely to be your favorite song for the rest of your life.

Favorite songs will matter to you less and less.

If there is an art to living, it is knowing when to be hard on yourself and when to go easy on yourself. This is more difficult than it seems.

The small patch of understanding and meaning you can create for yourself will be the anchor of your happiness. Grow and guard it.

What to read and what to skip? Refine your TBR list with Buy,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:30:33 -0400

What to read and what to skip? Refine your TBR list with Buy, Borrow, Bypass.

The library in a noted 1920s doll house. More on miniature...

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:01:14 -0400

The library in a noted 1920s doll house. More on miniature libraries here.

"Reinterpreting myths, fairy tales, and folk tales is way more than a cottage industry—a castle..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:30:25 -0400

“Reinterpreting myths, fairy tales, and folk tales is way more than a cottage industry—a castle industry?—in publishing these days. From literary fiction (The Tiger’s Wife) to YA (Robin McKinley’s books, Runemarks) to graphic novels (the Fable series, The Sigh) to humor (Gods Behaving Badly), authors are picking up and reimagining bits and pieces from millennia of human story-telling. This is, of course, not entirely new; as long as there have been stories there have been reinterpretations of them. But the purposefulness and the politics do seem to have shifted in interesting ways over the past several decades, as feminist and LGBT/queer authors rethink these stories for a new world.”

- Reimagining Folk and Fairy Tales (with Kink, Joy, Nudity)

"Bad guys who jump off buildings: 1 Deaths: 4 Reminders that Robert Langdon is a symbologist:..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:02:07 -0400

“Bad guys who jump off buildings: 1
Deaths: 4
Reminders that Robert Langdon is a symbologist: 16
Portentous dreams: 1
Dwight Schrute-style declarations of facts: 1”

- Dan Brown’s INFERNO by the Numbers

Kick off your morning with cuteness! 8 Animals as Bookish as You...

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:30:45 -0400

Kick off your morning with cuteness! 8 Animals as Bookish as You Are

Just a few days left to enter to win the t-shirt, tote bag, and...

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:30:37 -0400

Just a few days left to enter to win the t-shirt, tote bag, and notebook of your choice from Out of Print!

Critical Linking: May 18, 2013

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:01:59 -0400

Our daily round-up of bookish links. Tastes great with coffee.

I thought I’d take a look at the SAT Subject Test in literature as a mini case study. I chose the Literature test because it’s a subject I’m supposed to know something about. After all, I have a B.A. and a PhD in English. I have spent the last 25 years thinking about, writing about, talking about, and teaching literature. A one-hour subject test designed to test high school students on their reading comprehension should be a cakewalk.

Well, I was wrong. Or, at least, the high number of incorrect answers on my answer sheet suggested that someone or something was wrong.

Of course she didn’t do well. She was taught how to think, not how to take a test.

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Qworty has destructively edited the pages of other writers. He has made numerous edits to his own page while obsessively hiding his true identity. And yet there have never been any significant consequences for his actions. For those of us who love Wikipedia, the ramifications of the Qworty saga are not comforting: If Qworty has been allowed to run free for so long — sabotaging the “truth” however he sees fit, writing his own postmodern novel — how many others are also creating spiteful havoc under the hood, where no one is watching?

And this is why English teachers everywhere tell their students that Wikipedia is not a valid source for their research papers.

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Do women writers get asked this more than male ones? Bet your buttons they do. The snaps and snails and puppy-dog’s tails are great for boys. The sugar and spice is still expected for girls. Up to a point.

No one is better than Atwood at a snappy comeback.

The Book Riot Podcast, Episode 2: Pillow Talk with Robert...

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:30:31 -0400

The Book Riot Podcast, Episode 2: Pillow Talk with Robert Langdon