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(Has anyone ever gone over to your bookshelf, picked up a book, and said, “What is this doing here?” This series of blog posts explains some of the more curious findings on one Booklister’s home shelves.) Way over on my lowest, leftmost shelves (right next to the cookbooks, for some unsanitary reason), rests Sex, the [...]

(Has anyone ever gone over to your bookshelf, picked up a book, and said, “What is this doing here?” This series of blog posts explains some of the more curious findings on one Booklister’s home shelves.) Visitors to my stately personal library sometimes scoff at the condition of my David Mamet section. Not because they [...]

(Has anyone ever gone over to your bookshelf, picked up a book, and said, “What is this doing here?” This series of blog posts explains some of the more curious findings on one Booklister’s home shelves.) Look at this thing. Just look at it. This thing is a battered piece of crap. To the trash [...]

(Has anyone ever gone over to your bookshelf, picked up a book, and said, “What is this doing here?” This series of blog posts explains some of the more curious findings on one Booklister’s home shelves.) In my defense, anyone’s history collection is going to be filled with some oddball volumes that make you look [...]

Here’s a very cool do-it-yourself reading lamp from HOWTO (via BoingBoing, via Red Ferret).  

In “Before the Flood,” Margaret Atwood describes what made her go back to the dysopian future in “The Year of the Flood” (by Guy Dixon, The Globe and Mail): One of the things people are working on now, and were working on in 2001 when I was actually halfway through Oryx and Crake, is the [...]

You’ve got to hand it to Quirk Classics. The publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters may be riding their one-trick pony into the ground, but they’re doing it with style. Bloggers, this one included, seem constitutionally incapable of not linking to every new development, from the announcement of the newest [...]

I finally made time to read Jonathan Mahler’s profile of James Patterson (“James Patterson Inc.” New York Times) — since it was published, two weeks ago, Patterson has already written three more books and signed a contract to publish 38 more. I kid, I kid. But, certainly, this profile of the prolific Patterson’s powerful publishing [...]

Seven months ago, four Booklist editors were shown up by the book-themed board game It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. Seeing how our scattered egos were approaching reassembly, it was time for another round of humiliation. That’s just how we roll. Thus: Bookchase. The box claims as its audience everyone from “people who have [...]

It used to hold that one of the reasons you became a writer was that you were the sort who ducked out of photographs and preferred to communicate through quill-written correspondence. These days, though, these Salingeresque avoidance techniques won’t win you much love from your publisher–and probably won’t push many books, either. So Penguin’s the [...]