Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

I’ve been wanting to read a book by Harry Stephen Keeler for years, ever since I stumbled across him at Find a Grave. (Yes, I’m morbid, but I was just looking for famous people buried in Chicago–turns out he was buried a few blocks from where I was then living.) Having discovered that the McSweeney’s [...]

An update from Marianne Goss, who reports that there are now more than 100 novels listed on her site, Positively Good Reads, “An upbeat reading list for people who often find serious novels depressing.” Some readers may remember my original post, “How about a downbeat reading list for people who find comic novels amusing?” in which [...]

Oh, great.
More thoughtful.

Still catching up with my blogging backlog. Bloglog? Backblog? First the current stuff…
The good news: the NEA believes that, for the first time in a quarter century, grown-ups are reading more fiction than they used to (”Fiction Reading Increases for Adults,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times).
“There has been a measurable cultural change in society’s [...]

Bah, humbug! On Salon (”Read it and weep“), Jason Boog writes about “the end of days” for the publishing industry:
“There were hedge fund guys with no background in publishing buying up publishing houses,” says André Schiffrin, founder of the New Press and author of “The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and [...]

This just in: men and women lie about they read. (Men, naturally, are twice as likely to do so.) But there’s a perfectly good reason for it: reading the right stuff helps you succeed with the opposite sex. (Which is why men . . . never mind.) A survey conducted by England’s National Year of Reading [...]

Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio, speaking at the Swedish Academy (Le Clézio uses Nobel lecture to attack information poverty,” by Richard Lea, The Guardian):
“To provide nearly everyone on the planet with a liquid crystal display is utopian,” he said. “Are we not, therefore, in the process of creating a new elite, of drawing a [...]

It’s fun following the threads of a blog conversation through cyberspace, even when I have to do it backward. In the Wall Street Journal (”Still on the Shelf“), Book Lover Cynthia Crossen gave herself the following challenge: “to save money by reading a book that I own but have never read.” Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
As I scanned [...]

There’s a nice post by Anne Trubek on the GOOD blog, seconding James Gleick’s NYT Op-Ed (”How to Publish without Perishing,” also linked Monday). Gleick wrote:
Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered. Go back [...]

To avoid unintended merriment at my expense, I’ll keep this short: Cynthia Crossen thinks A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz, is too long (”A Book in Need of a Good Editor,” The Wall Street Journal):
But the blurbers and reviewers were so enthusiastic — Mr. Toltz was compared to Mark Twain, John Irving, Martin Amis, Tom [...]