... for people who have trouble slogging through the information on book jackets or feel intimidated by the title and cover itself.Dan Wilbur retitles famous novels to give you the lowdown on them. Above are are a couple of my favourites. (Of course you spotted that they were of A Clockwork Orange and Ulysses, respectively.)
The Mediocre Gatsby
The Rough Sketch of Dorian Gray
The Raisins of Irritation
Infatuation In the Time of H1N1
Charlie and the Carob Factory
The Faucet-Head
A Wind-up Tangerine
Perdido Street Railway Platform
The Damien Hirst Code
A Farewell to Cuticles
The Detached-Retina Assassin
The Korma Sutra
Skype With the Vampire
The Liger, the Wiccan and the Laundry Basket
the builder of dreamsand how the author's works helped to form him as a writer. There have been several pieces in the newspapers about Bradbury lately, but this one is particularly heartfelt.
Umapagan Ampikaipakan reviews a book that sounds a must-read in The New Straits Times : Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin.There it lies, cunningly clad in those horizontal bands of orange, and white, and orange. Penguin-ed. As if to dupe us to its credence, or credibility, or creed. The sheer audacity of that ampersand between their two names. The heart-wrenching horror of truncating centuries of sublime and (almost) metrical composition into something that is less than one long, deep, audible exhalation. The premise sounds downright appalling. The idea of condensing 60 of literature’s greatest works into little nuggets of twitterese — short statements bound by a 140-character limit — sounds like the perfect 4am activity. It is a pursuit that usually follows the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol and the statement: “You know what would be really fun?” And it is fun. But more than that, it is also clever.
From Hamlet: WTF IS POLONIUS DOING BEHIND THE CURTAIN???
From Dante's Inferno: I'm havin a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Shoulda brought my iPhone.
From Oedipus: PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF.
From Paradise Lost: OH MY GOD I'M IN HELL.
Or a board game? (The object of this one is to beg, borrow or steal 6 books!) :
The rich smell of a very old copy Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (because it was a very French symbol and "about travelling in a very surreal way") was analysed, and ("because the smell of the book was too regressive, too clamouring") amber, vanilla, jasmine and iris were added to the mix to create LM01.A book is a symbol of chic, culture and discovery. It could be a photography book about a country or a region or something. Obviously that can be chic and culture intensive. You can learn and discover things from books. If you are curious, you don’t have to travel. Just pick up a book and look at the pictures.
First there was the mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now Quirk Books proudly introduce Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters written by Ben H. Winters, which grafts together classic novel and horror story.
Why does Jane Austen have such enduring appeal?There is a kind of violent desire to go in there and to mess things up a bit.
Eeleen Lee's Facebook note about literary cocktails made me smile so broadly I thought I'd slip it in here. I mean seriously, we should open a bar! :1. The Master And MargaritaCan you punsters out there think of any more?
2. The Turn of the Screwdriver
3. Oliver Twister
4. White Russian Fang
5. Love In the Time of Kahlua
6. Atonicment
7. Cider With Rosies
8. A Clockwork Orange de menthe
9. The Last Mimosa
10. Treasure Island Iced Tea
11. Of Mice and Menthe
12. Death In Venice (a title that would make a great cocktail name..)
... every time I walk into a bookstore, stacks of newly published titles warmly greet and cajole me with their shiny grins and lilting chirping, making them impossible to ignore. ... The entrance is, naturally, where bookstores tend to display their latest titles, which makes this area the most “deafening”. Attractive and bright in colour, these new books tweet and cheep energetically, each attempting to outshine one another. It is rather vexing to have to ignore Charlaine Harris’ Dead and Gone, but my heart yearns for crafters of beautiful sentences and weavers of enchanting stories. Stride on! ... The purring, barking, roaring, and quaking start even before I get to the children’s books section. From afar the animal characters can smell me, a sucker for picture books who will buy anything that makes my daughter laugh.Phew I'm not the only person who thinks that books are very noisy things - but what Abby Wong fails to mention in her piece in StarMag today is that the cacophony doesn't stop when the books are back home and sitting on your shelves.
Sometimes ... there are two books with the same title. When I was editorial director at Faber, Peter Carey delivered his first novel under the title "Waiting For the Barbarians". Publication plans were well advanced when we discovered that JM Coetzee was launching his new novel with that same quotation from Cavafy. Eventually, Carey's novel was published as Bliss. It did very well.The Telegraph has been featuring a series of short articles by Gary Dexter about how some very famous books got their names, including Conrad's Lord Jim,Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, and Moon Palace by Paul Auster. Fascinating!
Following the shock-horror-gasp revelation the other day that women are better readers than blokes, and Jean Hannah Edelstein's plea on The Guardian blog, Bookninja is announcing a contest to "remasculate" books in order to repatriate male readers.Perhaps the Kama Sutra might help out poor, repressed Jane Eyre, and she'd realise there's more to life than Mr Rochester. And if Juliet had been following The Rules (wait at least three dates before you sleep with him) would it all have gone so wrong?And your favourite characters? What would they be buying?
Scarlett O'Hara, I think, would have adored chick-lit, so let's load her up with Marian Keyes and Jilly Cooper. (She'd also be a closet fan of the misery memoir – reading about dreadful childhoods would no doubt have made her feel better about her own problems).
I can see Atticus Finch relaxing with John Grisham. And I bet Sherlock Holmes would have got on well with a good Agatha Christie - although maybe he'd have preferred to steer clear of cosy mysteries in his time off, testing his vast intellect with something a little more erudite – The Savage Detectives, perhaps?
One of the great joys is to go to a restaurant you can’t afford and sit and eat with a book.Restaurant critic and author A.A. Gill, quoted in this New York Times piece by Leannie Shapton about a book as the perfect dinner companion.
It doesn't actually exist yet, but it should! It's the brainchild of David Friedman :... some people see the treadmill as a good place to get some reading done. I see them struggling to figure out how to place a book or magazine on the machine without it falling, and even with a Treadmill Book Holder, it can be awkward to turn the pages. ... how about adding an eBook reader to the list of treadmill features?As Carolyn Kellog says on the Jacket Copy blog :
It seems like an obvious pairing. And just think, you could choose to read a haiku for a very, very short workout, or call up some Dickens for a marathon. ...The best part of all is David's name for his invention: the tREADmill.
