A couple of times lately I’ve had to explain to people how I have certain “comfort books” which I read in times of trial. If I’m really upset or stressed, and I think I won’t be able to sleep because I’m so het up, I get out a comfort book. A comfort book is one [...]
“Book-love, I say again, lasts throughout life, it never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.” (Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania) How can one judge how much one loves a book when one also loves the author? This question has been raised by the recent debacle in which an anonymous [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Academia, England, History, Internet, Law, Literature, Media, Society
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Tagged Amazon, anonymous reviews, book reviews, history books, Orlando Figes, Rachel Polonsky, Stephanie Palmer
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I laughed so hard I cried at this one: a blog devoted to Awful Library Books. Basically, the authors find library books which are seriously out of date and need to be chucked out of the library, then write a post on said book, accompanied with excerpts and pictures of the book. Gems include: Out [...]
Books with a heavy philosophical component don’t usually sell well, and publishers tend to avoid them for that reason, but when they do, they can sell very well indeed, and it can be very difficult to explain why. Over at Catallaxy, Sinclair has a thoughtful piece on Ayn Rand, whose books sell by the pallet load, [...]
December 21, 2009 – 6:11 am
I’ve just read The Pin Striped Prison by Lisa Pryor (2008, Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney). Pryor was a law student who now works as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. Pryor is exploring a number of questions: what drives young people to want to become lawyers? Why do many lawyers decide it is [...]
December 10, 2009 – 7:45 am
If this headline means nothing to you, it’s because you haven’t yet discovered this site, which is a thing of beauty, wonder and sunk costs. Yes, you read that right. It’s so amazing it represents sunk costs in advance, which is supposed to be impossible, but I know exactly what will happen to those of [...]
October 9, 2009 – 6:59 am
Now this is seriously cool, friends and neighbours. I tracked down this YouTube advertisement for Scott Westerfield’s forthcoming novel Leviathan via Perry Middlemiss’ literature blog Matilda. As friends of mine know, I’m a fan of steampunk — in part because I like its visual aesthetic — so it’s interesting to see someone marry steampunk with the biomechanoids [...]
… And all of ‘em are in Homer. Well, that’s the story, anyway. Sometimes the magic number is eleven. Sometimes the magic number is three. Sometimes it’s something else. Sometimes Virgil gets a look-in, but usually Homer gets the blame for the sum total of basic plotlines in Western Literature. I used to think this [...]
A radical Muslim who dressed his baby daughter in a hat with “I love al-Qaeda” on it tried to firebomb the home of the publisher of a controversial novel about the Prophet Mohammed. Ali Beheshti, 40, along with Abrar Mirza, 22, have admitted conspiracy to recklessly damage property and endanger life after they poured diesel [...]
By DeusExMacintosh
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Also posted in England, Free Speech, Funnies, Law, Literature, Personal liberty, Politics, Religion, Terrorism
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Tagged crime, islam, jewel of medina
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Every year, British magazine The Bookseller runs a competition for the oddest book title. The winner for 2008 is “The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais”. It costs $795 on Amazon. I was wondering how there could possibly be a market for a book like this, or why anyone would write it? [...]
