This is … um. An interesting way to promote literacy. I mean, burning books isn’t, really, the FIRST thing I think of when I’m contemplating what book to read next. But hey, maybe they’re thinking of the omelet analogy. Or. Uh. Burning books.
Pic is small. Click for much larger.
How that ad brain-storming session probably went down:
Ad Exec 1: I’m hungry.
Ad Exec 2: You know what would be great?
Ad Exec 3: I’m kind of hungry too.
Ad Exec 4: Are we talking about lunch?
Ad Exec 1: I was thinking about it. You know what I did last night?
Ad Exec 2: We should promote reading by showing pictures of burning books.
Ad Exec 1: I drank a whole gallon of pork gravy last night.
Ad Exec 3: That is so cool. I am jealous.
Ad Exec 4: A WHOLE GALLON?! God, you’re awesome.
Ad Exec 1: I know! I’m thinking of doing it again tonight.
Ad Exec 2: All right, I just called down to the art department. Should be done by Friday.
Ad Exec 3: Do you think we can get a box of bacon delivered right now?
(pic via PFTompkins on Twitter)
Filed under: books | Tags: Designer Bookbinders International Competition, guadian, oxford
The Guardian UK has a great little slide show of the Designer Bookbinders International Competition. You only get to see 13 of the short list, but they are fantastic looking. I also happen to agree with the winner they picked. Kudos all around, though. I am highly impressed and wish I could jaunt off to Oxford for the week.
Filed under: books | Tags: criterion guy talking about ebooks, discussion about ebooks
We need more of it. Less freakouts plzkthnxbai.
Follow link: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-07/WhatIf.html
Read. Hypertext away from it all!
A happy birthday shout-out goes to Franz Kafka who was born on this day in 1883. Boy, Franz, you sure knew how to make everyone depressed.
He is, of course, famous for writing The Trial, The Castle and The Metamorphosis, among others.
You know what else he was good at? Creating a genre descriptor of himself: “Sure is Kafkaesque.”
So celebrate his birthday by reading a story of his, OR become mired in some brainless bureaucracy downtown.
Never forget!
Filed under: books | Tags: 50 books to understand our times, books bring meaning, newsweek
NEWSWEEK, in their latest issue, has a great article about 50 books that you should read, or reexamine, to gain insight into our troubled (depressed?) times.
Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Anthony Trollope, Lawrence Wright… they will tell you something.
We have most of these books because the majority of the list is sort of a who’s who of classic societal fables. But, you know, it’s never a bad idea to brush up on why some things are going to hell in a handbasket.
Onward and Upward!
Filed under: books, reviews | Tags: abdellah taia, evan fallenberg, gay books everyone should read, gay pride 2009, gay titles, joel derfner, light fell, salvation army, swish
In honor, or Honour as the Brits say, of Gay Pride 2009 and the 40th anniversary of Stonewall here are some delightful newish gay titles that you should be reading. Maybe not this weekend because who has time for reading a book when there are so many other things going on but soon afterward. After the headache goes away.
Here are three that you should keep in mind … among others.
SWISH: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever by Joel Derfner
Robert had this to say: “Dang, I thought I was pretty darn gay: show tunes, no interest in sports, oh, and a sexual interest in men, but Derfner clearly has me out-ranked, and these hilarious, compulsively-readable essays place him immediately on the shellf with the best of Sedaris, Burroughs, Dan Savage, and their fab ilk.”
SALVATION ARMY by Abdellah Taia
Ed highly recommends: “Salvation Army is a short, but compelling, autobiographical novel by Moroccan Abdellah Taia, told very powerfully and effectively in the first person. Sensually and sexually evocative vignettes depict an uncertain journey of sexual and cultural self-discovery embodying the complex hopes and fears of a gay Moroccan ex-patriot. “
LIGHT FELL by Evan Fallenberg
Ed loved: “Light Fell takes place at the dangerous intersection of homosexuality and orthodox religion – an Israeli man leaves his family for another man (a rabbi, no less!) and now, 20 years later, is about to reunite with his five grown sons on his 50th birthday. Author Fallenberg does a good job humanizing what I found to be an unlikable main character (and his equally unlikable children) while exploring the family dynamics of “gay”, as well as the many taboos and hypocrises demanded by organized religion, and the consequent self-loathing and narrow-mindedness it engenders.”
Filed under: books | Tags: a monster's notes, collins library, curious men, frank buckland, knopf, laurie sheck, mcsweeneys
A Monster’s Notes by Laurie Sheck looks interesting in that way that a monster telling his side of a story that stretches far longer than the life of Mary Shelley will illuminate more than just what a simple monster might be contemplating over his years.
Here is some publisher marketing:
What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein’s monster but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother’s grave, and he came to her unbidden? What if their secret bond left her forever changed, obsessed with the strange being whom she had discovered at a time of need? What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century?
This bold, genre-defying book brings us the “monster” in his own words. He recalls how he was “made” and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him. He ponders the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with that of Mary (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates) in this riveting mix of fact and poetic license. He takes notes on all aspects of human striving–from the music of John Cage to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own–as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find his own freedom of mind.
In the course of the monster’s musings, we also see Mary Shelley’s life from her childhood through her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley, her writing of Frankenstein, the births and deaths of her children, Shelley’s famous drowning, her widowhood, her subsequent travels and life’s work, and finally her death from a brain tumor at age fifty-four. The monster’s fierce bond with Mary and the tale of how he ended up in her fiction is a haunted, intense love story, a story of two beings who can never forget each other.
And look at that cover! Creepy. It will compliment the Collins’ Library (number 6 by McSweeney’s) book Curious Men by Frank Buckland that I reading at the moment. A Monster’s Notes was released today from Knopf and is available for $30.
Filed under: books | Tags: jane austen, janespotting, loving jane austen, pride and prejudice and zombies
“Yet this writer who enjoyed only moderate success while she was alive has had a miraculous cultural afterlife. No other author, except perhaps Shakespeare, has been as adapted, appropriated and aped as Austen.”
This article is a few days old at this point, but, BUT, it’s worth a read given that our bestseller for the 1000th week in a row is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
We all know a Janespotter in our lives. Won’t you help them by reading an Austen classic/Genre-based mashup today?
Filed under: books
While this debate is nothing new … This blog and the blog that it is responding to feel the act of reading needs to be encouraged no matter what. What is genre fiction anyway?
So read your Pattersons and your Hamiltons. It’s about being happy not being snobbish.
