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A quick compilation of recent reads before I head off to the holiday party… In “No sex, please, we’re literary!” Laura Miller takes aim at the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, calling it a “sniggering exercise” that “poses as a knowing blow against literary pretension while embodying the most retrograde prudery.” This is the only [...]

A quick roundup of the last week and a half before I don my camouflage coverall, smear my face with dirt, and go hunting for wild turkeys with my bare hands. Just kidding–who am I, Ted Nugent? Good old cranky Robert McCrum–why, he even scowls in his headshot! Last week, took books to task for ballooning [...]

Two weeks’ worth of weeklings here. Sorry! On Amazon, readers punish writers for their publishers’ pricing models–again (“Stars fall in Amazon protest about ebook prices,” Benedicte Page, Guardian). Authors found themselves in the firing line this week as fans furious at sudden rises in Amazon’s Kindle prices protested by giving their books one-star reviews on [...]

There sure are a lot of pieces about the relationship between books and paper, which makes sense. We need a lot of thinking to make sense of this changing media environment. Much as I had a hard time working up the energy to read yet one more take, I was glad I read Tom Chatfield’s “Do [...]

On Treehugger, Jaymi Heimbuch rounds up “7 Major Ways We’re Digitizing Our World, And 3 Reasons We Still Want Hardcopies.” It’s the latter 3 that get to me–take THAT, people who claim that paper books are bad for the planet!–and more fuel for my fear of all my information going up in a . . [...]

From the Department of I’m Shocked, Shocked, NPR reports that the NYTRB is mostly by and about white males (“Are ‘The New York Times’ Book Reviews Fair?“). Also on NPR.org (“Books Have Many Futures,” although I couldn’t find audio), Linton Weeks presents this amusing scenario: Other types of books are not only meant to be [...]

It’s a headline that will hearten the e-evangelists and terrify the p-book lovers: “Mass Paperback Publisher Goes All-Digital” (Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal). In response to declining sales, struggling Dorchester Publishing announced that it will print books on electrons, not paper. Publishers Weekly (“Dorchester Drops Mass Market Publishing for E-Book/POD Model,” by Jim Milliot) added [...]

On Slate, in “Judging a Book by Her Cover,” Mark Oppenheimer offers the following lament: ”Simply put, our gadgets give us too much privacy.” Someone should tell Cory Doctorow! Oppenheimer is talking about the charm of seeing what people are reading, rather than which e-book reader they own, of course — a sad turn aptly summed up in [...]

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 [...]

On Murderati, Tess Gerritsen asks, “Why the hell won’t they review my book?!!!” and pretty much answers her own question. My visit to the Inquirer was a sobering look at how tough newspapers have it these days, trying to keep up with all they have to cover.  Every author wants attention, but one look at [...]