Casting for Josh Boone’s movie adaptation of John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars is coming together nicely. This past week, it was announced that Laura Dern has joined the cast as the mother of Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley). Production is set to begin next month. A few months back, our own Janet Potter wrote that, “besides a small infinity of other things, [this book] will make you cry.”
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POTUS Picks
For its November issue, Wired asks guest editor President Obama for a list of his 10 essential books. The magazine estimates that reading all of them, including James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Katherine Boo‘s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, will take only eighty-nine hours.
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Colum McCann Reads
Listen to National Book Award winner Colum McCann read from Let The Great World Spin and discuss his prize-winning novel with Wellesley’s “reggae novelist” Colin Channer.
“The pull of the East, of Islam”
“Part of the allure of Bosnia for westerners, I think, has been the surprising nearness of the East. To put it more bluntly, and problematically: in Bosnia the East is tamed, less scarily dogmatic.” Elvis Bego draws a parallel with Madame Bovary at Bookslut.
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It’s Official: U.S. Poet Laureate Signs In
This past Wednesday Tracy K. Smith officially began her term as the new U.S. Poet Laureate. After adding her name to the guest book traditionally signed by poet laureates upon the start of their one year term, she read aloud from previously published poetry collections and introduced new work. Ron Charles from the Washington Post reports “[a]mong her most powerful new pieces were ‘found poems’ constructed from archival letters that African American veterans sent to President Lincoln asking for pensions they were owed.” Smith is the first poet laureate appointed by the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. Stay tuned for her upcoming efforts to engage rural communities in poetry discussions.
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Today’s Culture of Reading
In 2007, Buzz Poole wrote an article for us about Bob Stein‘s Institute for the Future of the Book, and now he’s catching up with Stein about “his take on today’s culture of reading.”
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