My favorite part of my apartment is my wall-length bookshelf. When I look at it, I think of all the time I spent reading and accumulating its contents. I feel I’ve earned it, which is why I’m slightly insulted by Juniper Books’ $3,000-$100,000 “collection-development service,” a program designed for “people who want a library but haven’t had the time or inclination to amass a collection of books.”
Ersatz Intellectualism
Jacqueline Woodson, Ambassador
Year in Reading alum Jacqueline Woodson has been named the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Gene Luen Yang was the previous ambassador. The program is sponsored by the Library of Congress and the official ceremony is January 9th. Congratulations Jacqueline!
Penguin Postcards
If we were to buy ourselves a gift this year, it would be Penguin's "One Hundred Book Covers in One Box" postcard set.
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NYPL Gets Trippy
The New York Public Library has bought psychedelic guru Timothy Leary's papers. The 335 boxes contain journals, videotapes, photographs and thousands of letters from avid trippers, including Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and, yes, Cary Grant.
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The Best of the Best
Theoretically, it pays to get a novel on Amazon’s best seller list. In reality, though, a bestselling novel doesn’t make as much in cold hard cash as you’d think.
Talking Truth to Power
“Steinem welcomed them all—the rich, the celebrities, the climbers for the cause. She was a radical but, consciously, never an outsider. She enjoyed the world where she plied her trade as an entrepreneur of social change, and, with her mouth spray at hand, she had long since mastered the subterfuges of talking truth to power. You could call it consciousness-raising—on a wider canvas.” The New Yorker profiles Gloria Steinem in anticipation of her latest release, My Life on the Road.
Where to Begin
What’s the best book to introduce someone to the late Terry Pratchett? The Color of Magic, his first Discworld novel, is an intuitive choice, but it may not be the right one. In The Guardian, Sam Jordison kicks off a debate about the ideal entree to Pratchett’s work. You could also read our tribute to the author.
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I’ll sell mine for 100,000
There is, of course, nothing new about this. The rich have always wanted to look educated. Don’t you remember this part from Gatsby?:
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real–have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and– Here! Lemme show you.”
Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too–didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
http://books.google.com/books?id=EFi2RVvX3wsC&lpg=PT51&dq=Absolutely%20real–have%20pages%20and%20everything.&pg=PT51#v=onepage&q=Absolutely%20real–have%20pages%20and%20everything.&f=false
What a joke.
Yikes. I mean that’s absolutely awful but I definitely would not mind doing that for a living…