What I'm Reading: Audiobook Reviews Round-Up
11 hours ago
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Allison Janney Joins Cast of The Help!
Signed to play Skeeter's mom in the film version of The Help, award winning Allison Janney joins the star-studded cast of The Help which will start filming this summer!!
Monday, June 14, 2010
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
The Trouble With Recommending Books
We've got an app for that----it's called a Readers' Advisor!!
The Trouble With Recommending Books
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The Trouble With Recommending Books
Thursday, June 03, 2010
How the Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel
What They Didn't Teach Us in Library School
The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless
Reports say that Emelio Estevez is making a movie based on this article about the homeless characters in the Salt Lake City Public Library!!
The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless
Reports say that Emelio Estevez is making a movie based on this article about the homeless characters in the Salt Lake City Public Library!!
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Insiders' View of Format Wars in eBook Publishing Industry
“Our fondest wish is that all the devices become agnostic
so that there isn’t proprietary formats and you can read
wherever you want to read,” Shanks told Reuters. “First
we have to get a standard that everybody embraces.”
so that there isn’t proprietary formats and you can read
wherever you want to read,” Shanks told Reuters. “First
we have to get a standard that everybody embraces.”
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
E-Reader Applications for Today, and Beyond [The New York Times]
Here's the NYT's explanation of the ever-changing field of e-reader (not to be confused with eAudio Book) apps.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Lowdown on Audio Downloads
Pretty good and easy-to-understand overview of down-loadable audio books in the library---and all the confusion with DRM, AAC, mp3.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The Art of the Review by John Bloom
Hilarious and snarky complaints about book reviews and best-selling books he doesn't like. Well worth reading!
May 21, 2002, 8:45 a.m.
The “Art” of the Review
Brilliant Sri Lankan novelists, go home.
By John Bloom
id you ever notice that the books in the airport reading rack — the books that everyone actually reads — are never the books that are reviewed in the big Sunday book sections?
If they're even mentioned, like the occasional piece on Danielle Steele or Stephen King, it's always with a little bit of a sneer, with words like "potboiler," "formula fiction," "genre fiction" or, the ultimate insult, "best-seller."
They don't do this in any other section of the paper. The movie critic seems perfectly capable of praising Spiderman without thinking that it somehow demeans his critical reputation and makes him unfit for reviewing the next Merchant-Ivory saga about old ladies in India. In fact, when a Spiderman or a Bruce Willis thriller or a George Lucas popular epic arrives, the critics celebrate it, hype it, promote it, interview all the principals, treat it like a huge national event.
Compare that with the release of a John Grisham or a Tom Clancy book. "Here's the latest Grisham." "Here's the latest Clancy." That's about all you're going to get. And you can forget entirely the guys at the next level, the mid-list mystery and thriller authors who sometimes have one book out of ten reviewed by a major newspaper.
Instead, what have we got in the book-review sections? Sri Lankan coming-of-age novels. Slice-of-life multi-generational family sagas about the Idaho back country. Painfully personal memoirs about single motherhood. Last week I read a review of a book called Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood by Nega Mezlekia. It had everything a book-review editor wants — exotic to the point of obscurity, internationalist, multicultural (by virtue of the translation), with the promise of making us all Better People by condescending to understand the agonies of a Third World situation that we don't really know diddly squat about.
But is it a good story? You'll never find out by reading The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, or any of the other Sunday supplements. Some of the reviews don't even bother to Describe the book, much less tell us why we would want to read it in the first place. Instead they go on about "new voices in East African fiction." My question is, "I don't really care that much about East African fiction. It's not high on my list of priorities. Will I like this book in spite of that?"
Over time I've learned the secret code words of book reviewers who don't really want you to know what they're talking about. "Coming of age," for example, means "self-involved young person agonizes over sophomoric minutiae." "Internal odyssey" means nothing happens. "Introspective" means psychobabble.
"Delicate" means you're going to have entire paragraphs describing the dew in the rose garden. The dread "Austenesque" means blabbermouth women are going to sit around the kitchen playing matchmaker. "Echoes of history" means you should run screaming out of Starbucks because somebody's going to tell you about his ancestors.
The strangest term the reviewers use is "unassuming prose." They say it in a goodway, as though the best prose is unassuming. So how come they never review a book with assuming prose? I don't like my books unassuming. I want them to assume something. I want the prose standing on its head like a Chinese acrobat and doing back flips.
But there's a very special place in the Ninth Circle of Hell for one kind of book in particular, the book I'll call "My 16th Century Farmhouse in Provence." This is a genre that flourished in the 90s — I think the first one was called Under the Tuscan Sun — and it's universally praised by book reviewers everywhere. It's usually a first-person narrative of going to Europe and finding (a) an old house on the Scottish moors, (b) a rundown apartment in the Marais neighborhood of Paris, (c) an Alpine villa in shambles, and then fixing it up. End of story.
That's it. The rest of the book is just sappy musings about "the clash of the modern and the traditional," "the rhythm of provincial life," the color of the native vegetables, and the local peasant legends that no one quite remembers anymore because there are no longer any peasants.
Here's my question about these books. Why is it always Americans going to Europe? Why couldn't you write the same book about going to, say, the Catskills and remodeling a summer camp for Jewish teenagers? Why does a Frenchman never move to West Texas and fix up a pig ranch? And all of those picturesquely colorful local guys who hang around the public market in Grasse?
We have those in Salina, Kansas, too. They're called Old Farts.
Of course, sometimes my code system fails me entirely, as in a recent New York Times review of a Portuguese novel called The Return of the Caravels by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Describing the author, the reviewer said, "He is profoundly Portuguese." I was online with Barnes & Noble within the hour, grateful to have finally found a writer who wasn't lying about his birthplace.
At other times, the reviewer seems to be daring you to endure as much psychic pain as possible, as in the review from Newsday that said, "This first novel treats family ties, erotic longing, small children and prolonged deaths from AIDS and cancer with a subtlety that grows from scrupulous unsentimentality."
Well, doesn't that sound like something to take to the beach this summer.
Did you know that there's a whole genre now called "pregnancy narratives"? (Just go ahead and ram bamboo sticks under my fingernails. I'll enjoy it more.) Did you know, in fact, that there are entire libraries of titles that should be subtitled "Males Go Away"?
Take this blurb from Crow Lake by Mary Lawson: "Set against the wild terrain of northern Ontario, Crow Lake is a triumphant story of a young woman coming to terms with her past, and the strength of family love." Can I just wait for the Lifetime movie? At least we'll have a scene with Treat Williams as the creepy boyfriend who beats her up.
But why punish yourself? Just keep the following definitions in mind, and you too will be able to avoid long hours of mind-numbing, brain-deadening torpor: A book of "literary snapshots" means nothing happens.
"A lyrical small-town reminiscence" means nothing happens.
"Full of wry insight" means nothing happens.
A "rumination," a "pastiche," a "twinkling little jewel of a novel," "a quiet catharsis," "a journey through memory" or a "poetic elegy" all mean nothing ever happens.
Beware of the "auspicious debut," the "promising first novel" and the "dazzling maiden performance." This means we're waiting for the second novel to see if this turkey can write. Has there ever been a book reviewer in history who has said: "Let's hope this person doesn't ever write again — once was enough"?
What's the deal with the "freebie" first-novel review? We don't cut any slack for filmmakers when they bomb right out of the box.
And what's with all the verbiage from India? The next time I see a work of fiction described as "an inquiry into the consequences of colonialism" invoking the "rich spiritual traditions of a mysterious sub-continent" with a "postmodern sensibility" I'm going to personally seek out the Berkeley apartment building where all these writers-in-residence sponge off the Rockefeller Foundation and assault it with a sound truck blaring Nine Inch Nails at 3 a.m. Please make a pilgrimage to New Delhi in search of a plot, people.
Anything called a "three-generation family saga" will have a scene in which the bastard child of a ruthless entrepreneur is delivered by a midwife in a slave cabin.
Anything that "deftly evokes" — take your pick: turn-of-the-century Scotland, medieval Bavaria, Paris in the 20s — means the author read a book on period costumes and invented some adorably quirky dialects.
Anything involving "a woman's search" — take your pick: for the love she never had, for the source of her emotional identity, for the ghosts that lurk in her past, for the meaning behind her grandmother's poems found in a dusty attic — is going to include a lot of spontaneous weeping.
Beware of the word "anomie." The book will undoubtedly "resonate" with it. Even more ominous, it will probably be "Chekhovian."
Anything a professor does — returning to his rural home, facing his mortality, suffering from "ennui," enduring a middle-age crisis — should be banned by constitutional amendment.
Images will always "leap off the page" (usually in an attempt to escape). Families will always be "unconventional."
Expatriates will always be "disillusioned with their homeland."
Tenderness will always be found amid the devastation of war.
"Emotional transactions" will always be "genuine." And the "strange internal logic" of a narrative will always "take on a life of its own."
Collections of short stories, which nobody reads, will always display "a remarkable range." (News alert! All the stories are about different things.) Poetry collections, which have press runs of a thousand copies, will always be "evocative" of something or other. (Yep, they don't call it poetry for nothing, do they?) And collections of correspondence will always reveal "a remarkable mind, grappling with everything from the ephemera of day-to-day life to the mysteries of the universe." (Come on, it's a bunch of letters.)
Where is the book-reviewing school where they learn all this stuff? Wherever it is, I'm sure it's a poignant and wise place, blending fact, memory, and imagination in highly literary ways, so that the intensity of emotion can be revealed in finely crafted prose that resounds with a welter of imagery, affirming that our only true subject — yes! — is the earth itself.
Then again, some books are just bad.
—John Bloom is a columnist for United Press International, for which he wrote this piece; it is reprinted with permission.
May 21, 2002, 8:45 a.m.
The “Art” of the Review
Brilliant Sri Lankan novelists, go home.
By John Bloom
id you ever notice that the books in the airport reading rack — the books that everyone actually reads — are never the books that are reviewed in the big Sunday book sections?
If they're even mentioned, like the occasional piece on Danielle Steele or Stephen King, it's always with a little bit of a sneer, with words like "potboiler," "formula fiction," "genre fiction" or, the ultimate insult, "best-seller."
They don't do this in any other section of the paper. The movie critic seems perfectly capable of praising Spiderman without thinking that it somehow demeans his critical reputation and makes him unfit for reviewing the next Merchant-Ivory saga about old ladies in India. In fact, when a Spiderman or a Bruce Willis thriller or a George Lucas popular epic arrives, the critics celebrate it, hype it, promote it, interview all the principals, treat it like a huge national event.
Compare that with the release of a John Grisham or a Tom Clancy book. "Here's the latest Grisham." "Here's the latest Clancy." That's about all you're going to get. And you can forget entirely the guys at the next level, the mid-list mystery and thriller authors who sometimes have one book out of ten reviewed by a major newspaper.
Instead, what have we got in the book-review sections? Sri Lankan coming-of-age novels. Slice-of-life multi-generational family sagas about the Idaho back country. Painfully personal memoirs about single motherhood. Last week I read a review of a book called Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood by Nega Mezlekia. It had everything a book-review editor wants — exotic to the point of obscurity, internationalist, multicultural (by virtue of the translation), with the promise of making us all Better People by condescending to understand the agonies of a Third World situation that we don't really know diddly squat about.
But is it a good story? You'll never find out by reading The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, or any of the other Sunday supplements. Some of the reviews don't even bother to Describe the book, much less tell us why we would want to read it in the first place. Instead they go on about "new voices in East African fiction." My question is, "I don't really care that much about East African fiction. It's not high on my list of priorities. Will I like this book in spite of that?"
Over time I've learned the secret code words of book reviewers who don't really want you to know what they're talking about. "Coming of age," for example, means "self-involved young person agonizes over sophomoric minutiae." "Internal odyssey" means nothing happens. "Introspective" means psychobabble.
"Delicate" means you're going to have entire paragraphs describing the dew in the rose garden. The dread "Austenesque" means blabbermouth women are going to sit around the kitchen playing matchmaker. "Echoes of history" means you should run screaming out of Starbucks because somebody's going to tell you about his ancestors.
The strangest term the reviewers use is "unassuming prose." They say it in a goodway, as though the best prose is unassuming. So how come they never review a book with assuming prose? I don't like my books unassuming. I want them to assume something. I want the prose standing on its head like a Chinese acrobat and doing back flips.
But there's a very special place in the Ninth Circle of Hell for one kind of book in particular, the book I'll call "My 16th Century Farmhouse in Provence." This is a genre that flourished in the 90s — I think the first one was called Under the Tuscan Sun — and it's universally praised by book reviewers everywhere. It's usually a first-person narrative of going to Europe and finding (a) an old house on the Scottish moors, (b) a rundown apartment in the Marais neighborhood of Paris, (c) an Alpine villa in shambles, and then fixing it up. End of story.
That's it. The rest of the book is just sappy musings about "the clash of the modern and the traditional," "the rhythm of provincial life," the color of the native vegetables, and the local peasant legends that no one quite remembers anymore because there are no longer any peasants.
Here's my question about these books. Why is it always Americans going to Europe? Why couldn't you write the same book about going to, say, the Catskills and remodeling a summer camp for Jewish teenagers? Why does a Frenchman never move to West Texas and fix up a pig ranch? And all of those picturesquely colorful local guys who hang around the public market in Grasse?
We have those in Salina, Kansas, too. They're called Old Farts.
Of course, sometimes my code system fails me entirely, as in a recent New York Times review of a Portuguese novel called The Return of the Caravels by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Describing the author, the reviewer said, "He is profoundly Portuguese." I was online with Barnes & Noble within the hour, grateful to have finally found a writer who wasn't lying about his birthplace.
At other times, the reviewer seems to be daring you to endure as much psychic pain as possible, as in the review from Newsday that said, "This first novel treats family ties, erotic longing, small children and prolonged deaths from AIDS and cancer with a subtlety that grows from scrupulous unsentimentality."
Well, doesn't that sound like something to take to the beach this summer.
Did you know that there's a whole genre now called "pregnancy narratives"? (Just go ahead and ram bamboo sticks under my fingernails. I'll enjoy it more.) Did you know, in fact, that there are entire libraries of titles that should be subtitled "Males Go Away"?
Take this blurb from Crow Lake by Mary Lawson: "Set against the wild terrain of northern Ontario, Crow Lake is a triumphant story of a young woman coming to terms with her past, and the strength of family love." Can I just wait for the Lifetime movie? At least we'll have a scene with Treat Williams as the creepy boyfriend who beats her up.
But why punish yourself? Just keep the following definitions in mind, and you too will be able to avoid long hours of mind-numbing, brain-deadening torpor: A book of "literary snapshots" means nothing happens.
"A lyrical small-town reminiscence" means nothing happens.
"Full of wry insight" means nothing happens.
A "rumination," a "pastiche," a "twinkling little jewel of a novel," "a quiet catharsis," "a journey through memory" or a "poetic elegy" all mean nothing ever happens.
Beware of the "auspicious debut," the "promising first novel" and the "dazzling maiden performance." This means we're waiting for the second novel to see if this turkey can write. Has there ever been a book reviewer in history who has said: "Let's hope this person doesn't ever write again — once was enough"?
What's the deal with the "freebie" first-novel review? We don't cut any slack for filmmakers when they bomb right out of the box.
And what's with all the verbiage from India? The next time I see a work of fiction described as "an inquiry into the consequences of colonialism" invoking the "rich spiritual traditions of a mysterious sub-continent" with a "postmodern sensibility" I'm going to personally seek out the Berkeley apartment building where all these writers-in-residence sponge off the Rockefeller Foundation and assault it with a sound truck blaring Nine Inch Nails at 3 a.m. Please make a pilgrimage to New Delhi in search of a plot, people.
Anything called a "three-generation family saga" will have a scene in which the bastard child of a ruthless entrepreneur is delivered by a midwife in a slave cabin.
Anything that "deftly evokes" — take your pick: turn-of-the-century Scotland, medieval Bavaria, Paris in the 20s — means the author read a book on period costumes and invented some adorably quirky dialects.
Anything involving "a woman's search" — take your pick: for the love she never had, for the source of her emotional identity, for the ghosts that lurk in her past, for the meaning behind her grandmother's poems found in a dusty attic — is going to include a lot of spontaneous weeping.
Beware of the word "anomie." The book will undoubtedly "resonate" with it. Even more ominous, it will probably be "Chekhovian."
Anything a professor does — returning to his rural home, facing his mortality, suffering from "ennui," enduring a middle-age crisis — should be banned by constitutional amendment.
Images will always "leap off the page" (usually in an attempt to escape). Families will always be "unconventional."
Expatriates will always be "disillusioned with their homeland."
Tenderness will always be found amid the devastation of war.
"Emotional transactions" will always be "genuine." And the "strange internal logic" of a narrative will always "take on a life of its own."
Collections of short stories, which nobody reads, will always display "a remarkable range." (News alert! All the stories are about different things.) Poetry collections, which have press runs of a thousand copies, will always be "evocative" of something or other. (Yep, they don't call it poetry for nothing, do they?) And collections of correspondence will always reveal "a remarkable mind, grappling with everything from the ephemera of day-to-day life to the mysteries of the universe." (Come on, it's a bunch of letters.)
Where is the book-reviewing school where they learn all this stuff? Wherever it is, I'm sure it's a poignant and wise place, blending fact, memory, and imagination in highly literary ways, so that the intensity of emotion can be revealed in finely crafted prose that resounds with a welter of imagery, affirming that our only true subject — yes! — is the earth itself.
Then again, some books are just bad.
—John Bloom is a columnist for United Press International, for which he wrote this piece; it is reprinted with permission.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Ultimate Best of the Best List for 2009
Neil Hollands, RA God at the Williamsburg Public Library in VA, has tweaked and 'completed' his best of the best list for fiction and non-fiction published in 2009.
Pretty amazing, really!!
Enjoy!!
Pretty amazing, really!!
Enjoy!!
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Movie!!
Although I don't know when, this movie is going to be shown at the Renaissance Theatre in Highland Park and the Century Theatre in Chicago.
I read one review (on a genealogy blog) and the reviewer gave it RAVE reviews!!
Field trip, anyone?
I read one review (on a genealogy blog) and the reviewer gave it RAVE reviews!!
Field trip, anyone?
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Katie Couric Interviews Kathryn Stockett
">Link
So I cleaned my desk while I listened to this interview---and if you think my desk at work is bad.....
Anyway, excellent interview. Kathryn Stockett is so gracious and wonderful. Also there are some book clubs chiming in AND if you watch the second half, Katie interviews some women who grew up in Jackson MS about their thoughts regarding race and The Help.
Four stars!!
Friday, February 26, 2010
Book, Movie & Gaming Reviews for Teens
If you ever have parents who are concerned about the "appropriate" content for their teens, this might be a good site toward which to point them. It looks like a voice of reason when it comes to alerting concerned parents about touchy topics and might help them guide their teens more comfortably.
Any feedback would be appreciated----I looked at it briefly and may have missed something.
Thanks.
Any feedback would be appreciated----I looked at it briefly and may have missed something.
Thanks.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Eulogy for Robert B. Parker by his Son David Parker
Poignant and enlightening. Worth reading even if you weren't a Parker fan!
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