Monday, March 2, 2009

Shorts

  • We're now 6 days in the Lenten season and I haven't bought any books so far. Woohoo! I am still the master of my domain. Just 34 agonizing days to go!
  • All you Ian McEwan fans, you can now get his latest work For You at A Different Bookstore. For You, one his shorter works, is a libretto. Nevertheless, fans won't be disappointed. All the trademark McEwan tricks are here. And like any McEwan novel, novella, or short story, you know that something bad is going to happen.
  • It seems that the book industry is not immune to the economic crisis as some people believe. Lonely Planet, the travel publisher, is cutting down 10% of its staff.
  • And speaking of the economic crisis, it seems that sales of used books are up. If you're in the Makati mall areas, however, getting your hands on used books may be quite difficult. The only Booksale near Glorietta, the one in Goldcrest, has closed because of building renovation.
  • Collections of letters sent and received by prominent novelists are publishing events in themselves. With today's generation of novelists relying more and more on emails for their correspondences, will publishing a collection of emails be a reality anytime soon? People think that this idea isn't so far-fetched. We can finally get to see what kind of spam Rushdie receives.
  • Metacritic, my favorite site when I want to check out reviews of movies, TV shows, and music albums, used to have a section on books. That section mysteriously disappeared. (I'm guessing that it didn't have the critical traffic needed to survive.) Anyway, there's a new site called CultureCritic, which has a decent list of reviewed books.
  • I'm still waiting for pictures of your bookshelves. I've already collected quite a few. I'm thinking of calling my collection "The Bookshelf Project." Hopefully, this will show the world that people like keeping (and occasionally reading) books.

1 comments:

Mark David said...

Oh this ought to be good :)

It's interesting what you say that with McEwan, something bad is bound to happen. I never thought of his works that way. Perhaps it's because I've only read 3 of his magnificent works so far. But I think you're right, it does seem like so now that I think about it. I guess for me I never gave that detail any particular note since the traditional literary format makes it almost a requirement that something bad happens so that the hero can have something meaningful to do for the rest of the story ;) In any case, McEwan seems to never fail in presenting his stories in an absorbing fashion, may they be traditional or not :)