I’m Reading a Book – Julian Smith
The theme-song for those of us who REALLY HATE being interrupted when we’re reading a book:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuRuwR2JSXI
The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World
Guillame de Laubier
WHOA! It’s library porn! Seriously, there are huge center fold out with *drool* spiral staircases, grilled shelves, tromp l’oil ceilings and (oh baby!) rare manuscripts housed in little nooks and alcoves. I think I need to lie down.
Bizarre Books
Russell Ash and Brian Lake
Ash and Lake have collected a mass of truly awful, useless and poorly titled books. Many owe their amusement factor to terms that have changed through time: Girls of the Pansy Patrol and The Gay Boys of Old Yale. Others are bizarre simply for their topics: The Supernatural History of Worms and A Nostalgia for Camels. Still other titles are so truly inane they could only have been printed at a vanity press: How to Avoid Work and How to Cook Roadkill. HI-larious.
Stump the Bookseller
This month was excellent for books. I found three new novels by some of my favorite authors, plus another couple really excellent titles. I also happened to run across a web page called Stump the Bookseller at Loganberry Books (http://loganberrybooks.com/stump.html). For $2, you can send them a short synopsis of the plot. They will then post it and help you find the title and the actual book. I posted 2, one of which they found within a day. Turns out the bizarre sci-fi book I read in middle school was actually a Quebecois title, translated to English in the 70s and finally ending up in our dinky library. Already more half-remembered plots are bubbling up in my mind.
Neil Gaiman in Madison
I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub and Gary Wolfe speak at the Wisconsin Book Festival last weekend. Hot damn, Neil Gaiman rocks in so many ways. The official title of the talk was something on the lines of “The Evolution of Horror and Fantasy: Genre Fiction and ‘The New Wave Fabulists.” Straub and Wolfe immediately launched into a schpiel on how all the authors hate the bizarre genre title of “New Wave Fabulists”. Wolfe mentioned “When I think of waves, I think of something nasty washed up on the shore.” Straub went on in this vein for a good 20 minutes before saying “I said we should be...
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