Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

When I started Book Trailer Thursday back in 1986, I was just a lad with an Apple IIe and a dream. Who could’ve guessed that 1,825 posts later, BTT would be the revered institution that it is today?
Okay, so I’ve only been doing BTT for a few months, but the response has still been darn [...]

Terry Pratchett’s Nation is so exciting and funny that’s it’s almost too easy to forget the tragedy at its center. Young Mau is paddling back to his tiny island nation after spending a month alone as part of his manhood ritual. When he gets there he finds that everyone has been wiped out by a [...]

From the book’s description:
In this no-holds-barred memoir, Levin shows how her tumultuous, inspiring, and passionate life led her on a quest for spiritual truth and authentic living. . . . Laurie relates ways to look into the reality of our present and future lives, and find lessons in our failures as well as our victories.
A [...]

When it came to making a book trailer for the series starter Leviathan, author Scott Westerfeld had more resources available to him than the usual $0.00 allotted by publishers. Or at least that’s the impression I get from this rather spectacular production, which is more exciting than the last 800 movie trailers I saw. The [...]

Picture-book trailers usually adhere to one formula: artwork  /  zooms   x  pans  +  music = trailer. There’s something soulless about this approach; by removing both the effort of reading as well as the interaction of parent and child, we’re left with a simulacrum of an experience, a readaloud as interpreted by a robot.
However! Occasionally elements [...]

This is what passes for big news in the world of book trailers: when a video teaser for Thomas Pynchon’s mystery novel Inherent Vice hit the internet recently, the literati started buzzing. Could that possibly be the famous recluse Pynchon himself doing the voice-over? All anyone had to go on was an old Simpsons episode [...]

It’s not often that a book trailer comes along that changes your life. This is just such a trailer.
That voice-over: how it chills the blood. The imagery: how it lifts the soul. By traveling to his home town to shoot the trailer for his novel The Monster Variations (Delacorte), author Daniel Kraus did the world [...]

Hey, punk. Yeah, you. That author with a camera in his or her hand. Put it down. Down, I say. What’s the freaking point? No book trailer you can create could possibly compare to the god-like gifts to humanity produced for Jessica Hopper’s The Girls’ Guide to Rocking.
The above infomercial is my fave–I can’t think [...]

I hereby encourage The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to increase their coverage of publishing and library news, that I may have an excuse to watch them during the work day.

The Colbert Report
Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Nailed ‘Em - Library Crime

www.colbertnation.com

Daniel Kraus, who usually patrols the video beat here on Likely Stories, was himself captured on video at ALA’s annual conference, at a reading he gave from his forthcoming novel, The Monster Variations. (He shot down my suggestion that I shoot video, then turned around and gave an exclusive to Greg Landgraf for AL Focus. He [...]