Book light

"The 'Book' light and 'Octave' bag are part of Studio MS's Octagonal Series."Via Inside Out blog

Dostoyevsky: The Devils manuscript.

Via Libraryland

The 10 Greatest Apocalyptic Novels Of All Time

The 10 Greatest Apocalyptic Novels Of All Time:

"If this list doesn't get you thinking on the quickest way stock your basement full of water, canned goods and rifles, I don't know what will! Enjoy!"

Top Ten of Covers of the ’00s

"This collection is little more than a representation of my own tastes, but I tried to choose works which were representative of their respective years." Book Cover Archive blog

Goodnight Keith Moon

Goodnight Keith Moon

Going West

Andersen M Studio did this fabulous animation for the New Zealand Book Council.
Via Nag on the Lake

The London Of Sherlock Holmes...Mapped

The London Of Sherlock Holmes...Mapped - Londonist:

"Some interesting patterns emerge. Naturally, there's plenty of action around the Baker Street area, but Holmes never once set foot in nearby Soho. Zooming out, there's a surprising cluster of incidents around Crystal Palace. The reason is elementary when you know that Conan-Doyle lived for a time in South Norwood. We haven't plotted the numerous out-of-town locations mentioned in the books, but you can get a sense of Holmes' peregrinations by noting which rail stations he used most. Southern stations Charing Cross and Waterloo are visited a combined total of 16 times, while King's Cross and Euston are only blessed with the detective's patronage on four occasions."

Dutch Book Covers

Hillebrand recently joined flickr to showcase his goldmine of Dutch pulp covers from the 30s and 40s.

Via A Journey Round My Skull

Unfriend Has Been Faved

The New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year is.... UNFRIEND.That's right, the negation of the verbification of 'friend'. Well, it's not quite as cringe-worthy as some of the runners-up... Teabagger?!? And previous winners of this honor were Hypermiling (2008), Locavore (2007), Carbon-Neutral (2006) and Podcast (2005) (links include each year's finalists, including frugalista, staycation, bacn, mumblecore, Islamofascism, funner, lifehack and squick). Best comment about the WotY (so far)? "an unreliable yet fascinating barometer of tech".

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Brief Encounters With Che Guevara

I admit that I bought this book for its lovely cover but Ben Fountain's stories lived up to the jacket's promise. The characters, mostly disillusioned idealists, all struggle to be good: the kidnapped ornithologist, the over the hill golf pro, the American soldier smitten by a goddess who ignores his sex-starved wife, poor fishermen trying to cash in on the drug trade, the aid worker who makes a nasty deal to save lives, the observer who smuggles Haitian art, the brilliant pianist with an extra digit and Che. The protagonists are confounded by the third world as they view it from the flip side. The stories are set in remote places but are mostly about the role America plays in keeping the third world down. The final story, Fantasy For Eleven Fingers,  set in pre-WWII Germany seemed  out of place in this collection but perhaps I'm missing something.
Fountain writes outsider fiction that reminds me a bit of Graham Greene, ironic and compelling.

In Cold Blood, half a century on

"Fifty years ago, Holcomb, Kansas was devastated by the slaughter of a local family. And then Truman Capote arrived in town . . ."
More at The Guardian

Donald Barthelme’s Syllabus

There was a time when I fought against an impatience with reading, concealing, with partisanship, the fissures in my education. I confused difficulty with duplicity, and that which didn’t come easily, I often scorned. Then, in my last year of college in Gainesville, Florida, I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them,” which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.

More of Barthelme's Syllabus
Via clusterflock

United States of Literature

Contiguous United States Bookshelf

Famous Authors Narrate the Funny Pages.

Garfield
by James Joyce

Stately plump Garfield hated Mondays and lasagna I said lasagna I will Lasagna.

See more here
Via

Sniff test to preserve old books

"The key to preserving the old, degrading paper of treasured, ageing books is contained in the smell of their pages, say scientists."BBC NEWS

How to Write a Great Novel

Junot Diaz, Anne Rice, Margaret Atwood and Other Authors Tell Us How They Do What They Do
"Richard Powers lounges in bed all day and speaks his novels aloud to a laptop computer with voice-recognition software. Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel 'The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,' shuts himself in the bathroom and perches on the edge of the tub with his notebook when he's tackling a knotty passage. Hilary Mantel, whose Tudor drama 'Wolf Hall' claimed this year's Man Booker Prize, jumps in the shower when she gets stuck. 'The number of pages I've got that are water marked, I can't tell you,' Ms. Mantel said."

Siegfried Sassoon: Declaration against the War

Siegfried Sassoon: Declaration against the War

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

From First World War Poetry Digital Archive

World War One book drive

This picture shows the results of a book drive in World War One--bundles of books on the steps of New York Public library. The actual poster urging people to bring books to libraries 'for our men in camp and 'over there'' is hanging in the background- a jumbo size version. It is by Charles Buckles Falls and came out of a poster project at the Division of Pictorial Publicity, part of the Committee on Public Information; the campaign was lead by Charles Dana Gibson, the creator of of the Gibson Girl image and those charming large white illustrated books. Bookride

You expected to be sad in the fall.

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. - Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Mark's Scrapbook of Oddities & Treasures

In Like a Lion: New York Public Library Logo Facelift

"Noble, wise, genteel: the aging lion was an apt metaphor for the sagacity and permanence of the New York Public Library, especially its grand Carerre and Hastings-designed home in Bryant Park. Even old warhorses need an upgrade in These Modern Times, however, and the lion is now looking a little perkier after a logo upgrade by the library’s in-house art department."

Biblioburro

Luis Soriano, a teacher in the small town of La Gloria, Colombia, has spent the past ten years bringing books to children of the rural communities on the back of his donkeys.

Via

Trench Literature

Trench Literature – Reading in World War I

"The literature generated from World War I is well documented and will hopefully serve as a reminder of how the world can fall apart. From Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the poetry of Sassoon, Graves, Brooke, and Owen to All Quiet on the Western Front, there are numerous examples of acclaimed writing inspired by the Great War.

But what did the ordinary soldiers of World War I read on a daily basis during life in the trenches? Reading material was in heavy demand from the men living in cramped conditions in a war that was static for long periods of time."

Following Chekhov to 'Hell'

In 1890, 30-year-old Anton Chekhov was already a Pushkin Prize winner with hit plays swooning Moscow’s elite when he pulled a Dave Chappelle. He turned his back on fame and packed for a penal colony north of Japan on Sakhalin Island, a place he’d later call “hell.” Unlike so many other Russian writers, he wasn’t going in chains, but as a tourist.

See more at World Hum

My house is in an uproar

We're doing minor renovations but every room is a shambles. I'm stressing .

My House Looks Like A Bookstore

This is the entrance from the family room to the bathroom. I am keeping IKEA solvent.

Teeny Weeny Russian Books

Teeny Weeny Russian Books
Via

Downsides of the Ebook...

1. A printed book is a delight to handle, it doesn't need a battery and it has worked well for 555 years. Call it low technology.

2. If you are on the move a paperback is easier to carry around.

3. You can't wedge a ebook under a wonky bed or table.

4. You can't throw it across the room in disgust (actually you can but it's an expensive gesture.)

5. You can't press leaves and flowers between the pages.

See more at Bookride

Knit me a story

Olympia Le-Tan's knitted book covers
Via

61 essential postmodern reads

An annotated list of the 61 essential reads of postmodern literature. It's annotated with the attributes below -- the author is a character, fiction and reality are blurred, the text includes fictional artifacts, such as letters, lyrics, even whole other books, and so on.
Via

Love Poem With Toast

Love Poem With Toast
Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.
—Miller Williams

Mark's Scrapbook of Oddities & Treasures.

After the Falls by Catherine Gildiner

My friend, Cathy, talks about her most recent book, After the Falls.


BookLounge.ca | Books | After the Falls by Catherine Gildiner

On The Road

"This drawing was done by Kerouac himself, to suggest the cover for the book."Libraryland

Advertise with Flies

"To promote their literary works at the Frankfurt Book Fair, publishing company Eichborn deployed 200 flies, each attached temporarily to an ultra-light banner."davidthompson

Alligator

Lisa Moore's first novel reminds me of old Robert Altman films in which we are introduced to individual characters who eventually converge in one dramatic climax. It also resembles the alligator, slow moving until it snaps in one fleet and deadly motion. 
The story takes place in St. John's Newfoundland. These are the main  characters to whom we are introduced one chapter at a time:

• Colleen, 17 year old aspiring eco-terrorist
• Frank, a lonely boy grieving the recent death of his mother and trying to protect the hotdog business that he worked so hard to buy
  
• Madeleine, Colleen's aunt and big time filmmaker working on her last, most glorious piece
  
• Beverly, Colleen's mother, still mourning her beloved husbandyears after he is gone
• Isobel, an aging actress who returns home to star in Madeleine's film
  
• Valentin, a reptilian psycho Russian criminal

We are doled out little nuggets of their lives as the story slowly builds. Moore's use of language is descriptively exquisite. They have all lost someone important in their lives and are unable to move on; they are lonely; they are sad; they are as reckless as the man who placed his head in the mouth of an alligator.
This is not for fans of the plot-driven novel. Would I recommend it? You bet.

On This Day - Nov. 2, 1994 - First Giller Prize Awarded

The winner of the first Giller Prize, Canada's new award for English fiction, was revealed today. In this CBC Radio clip, literary giant Mordecai Richler announces that M.G. Vassanji gets the $25,000 prize for his third novel, The Book of Secrets." CBC Archives