Roundup
Here Are Some Things
Francine Prose writes a bit of a follow-up to her essay, A Scent of a Woman’s Ink. Little, she notes, has changed.
Bookforum offers a great essay on American bestsellers.
Qiu Xiaolong offers a five book introduction to classic Chinese poetry (via Bookslut).
Samuel Jackson reads Go The Fuck to Sleep.
At The Good Men Project, the best LGBT books “of all time.”
How does Shakespeare affect your brain? Someone is trying to answer that question.
More thoughts on E-book pricing.
The Guardian compiled a list of the 100 Greatest Nonfiction Books.
The Playboy Bunny employees manual is a fine read.
Poets & Writers came up with a list of 33 Twitter feeds worth following.
Here are five reasons why ebooks won’t supplant physical books.
The Paris Review is going digital and I, for one, am thrilled and ready to purchase the new digital issue.
There are new issues of The Collagist and Revolution House (debut).
Tupac would have turned 40 today.
No lie I listened to Samuel L. Jackson telling me to go the fuck to sleep at least six times last night. It didn’t work.
Roxane? Qiu Xiaolong, yes!
Very impressed by the work in Revolution House. They just need to get rid of the PDF format. I hate having to open a PDF to read a journal online.
Love the whole “go the fuck to sleep” phenomena.
Kinda bummed that David Levithan didn’t get a nod on the LGBT list. I know Boy Meets Boy is considered YA, but it meant a lot to me, and it’s a really great book.
I’m torn about the ebook pricing. 4.99 seems low, but I understand their point at the end about maybe it will get someone to buy another book at full price.
A few of the points on the other ebook article irritated me. Like “you can’t keep your books all in one place”–well with the Kindle I get all my books on every device whenever I want. And no lugging a huge backpack around. And you can add notes. The thing about “you’re not reminded to read it” seems silly, like the only reason you’d read a book is because you see it sitting around. I know there’s a small “out of sight out of mind” thing at work, but the book must not be that great if you literally forget about it entirely just because it’s not on your nightstand. I did like the point about interior decorating with books, though. I would love to have books on every wall.
Bookmarking some of these Twitters, and going to read that “bestsellers” article soon.
Great post Roxanne. And full of content!
Fabulous round-up, Roxane. I loved that Bookforum essay.
The Good Men Project’s compilation is amaaaaazing
This is good. The Guardian list is bad.
[…] of the Pack: American-Bestselling, offers a little history lesson on best-sellers. (Hat tip: htmlgiant) An excerpt: The best seller is caught in a peculiar paradox: Its popularity can be understood as […]