Once Upon a River – Diane Setterfield
Summary: On a dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, an extraordinary event takes place. The…
Category: Books
Full Throttle by Joe Hill, Subterranean Press (2020)
[This article is from The Book Blog contributor Timothy Booksker with photos from Yegor Malinovskii.] Today I’d like to talk…
41. The Tower of Life
The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town In Stories and Photographs. Chana Stiefel. Illustrated by Susan Gal.…
bookshelves of doom: BIG CHANGES AFOOT.
Due in part to all of the issues Typepad has been having lately, The fear that I’m going to wake…
Roald Dahl’s Books Are Rewritten to Cut Potentially Offensive Language
LONDON — New editions of the works of Roald Dahl — the best-selling British novelist whose children’s classics include “Charlie…
Today Book Club Selects The Bone Season as First Pick
The Today show has launched a book club, called the Today Book Club. The first pick is The Bone Season, the first novel by 21-year-old Oxford University graduate Samantha Shannon. The novel is set in 2059 where clairvoyance has been outlawed and a security force, the Scion, is in charge of major cities, including London. The heroine, Paige Mahoney, is a dreamwalker, a rare type of clairvoyant. Paige is arrested and sent to a voyant prison run by an alien race, called the Rephaim. The Bone Season is part of a seven book series. Film rights for the series have already been sold. Paige was interviewed by Today’s Natalie Morales. Take a look
Pro-File: ROBERT J. RANDISI
Pro-File: Robert J. Randisi1. Tell us about your current novel or project. GREAT QUESTION! It’s been a good summer for my books. The second book in my ROPER western P.I. series, THE RELUCTANT PINKERTON is out. Also, the 8th Rat Pack book, YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO DEAD, which features not only the Rat Pack, but Elvis. And the book I’ve been waiting for, the first in a new Nashville based P.I. series called THE HONKY TONK BIG HOSS BOOGIE. This book was supposed to be published last August as The Session Man, which means it would have predated the successful Nashville t.v. series, but the publisher went belly up and I had to …
Grading Aimee Bender’s THE COLOR MASTER, Story by Story
You know how some people feel about Neil Gaiman? Or Joss Whedon? Or Alan Moore? That level of evangelical-superchurch-backwoods-speaking-in-tongues fandom? That’s how I feel about Aimee Bender and her short stories. They’re the weirdest and most wonderful modern fables. Any one could be a Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie before both gentlemen jumped their sharks. That said, I was a little nervous about reviewing Bender’s new collection of short stories. I was afraid all my fan-girling would get in the way of my journalistic whatever-you-want-to-call-it. That didn’t happen. This collection was a …
Buy, Borrow, Bypass: August 26, 2013
Fear in the Sunlight by Nicola Upson Mystery novelist Josephine Tey is spending her 40th birthday in the resort town of Portmeirion with Alfred Hitchcock and crew, taking a holiday while they film a movie adaptation of one of her books. Then someone is murrrrderrred. Twenty years later, someone else is murdered on the set of another Hitchcock film. Coincidence?! Hitchcock and Tey involved in a murder mystery is an awesome set-up for a book. Unfortunately, in my opinion Upson squanders it. Judging by this novel, if Upson has ever seen a Hitchcock picture or read a Tey mystery—which I doubt—she gained absolutely no lessons on how to write OR tell a story while doing…
John Searle Makes A Forceful Case for Studying Consciousness, Where Everything Else Begins
Consciousness is the single most important aspect of our lives, says philosopher John Searle. Why? “It’s a necessary condition on anything being important in our lives,” he says. “If you care about science, philosophy, music, art — whatever — it’s no good if you are a zombie or in a coma.” Searle is one of today’s preeminent philosophers of mind. Author of the famous “Chinese Room” argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence, Searle has been a persistent thorn in the side of those who would reduce consciousness to computation, or conflate it with behavior. Despite its intrinsically subjective nature, consciousness is an irreducible biological phenomenon, he says, “as much subject to scientific analysis …
Nick Cave Monday #50: “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side”
Earth is a bleak planet and the majority of humanity is selfish, each following the compulsion of their id.All you need to do is look out the window to be disgusted at the theater of the human race.Yet, leave it to Nick to create a beautiful, romantic ballad to capture the essence of our world of shit.Ah the optimistic woman. Both a blessing and a curse. She sees the beauty of the world. Yet the man witnesses the cesspool of degenerate creatures. She explains to him that he needs to let go of that, God doesn’t care for his judgements. Her optimism becomes sorrow. The man smiles.Single white melancholic …
Sun Moon Daughter by David D. Fix
Hey before I get to today’s review… did you see it? ‘What’ you ask?? The little widget on my side bar. The Accelerated Reader one? Well, if you look at it, it took me two days into the school year to reach my sixth grade requirement of 50 points. Of course I am a loooong way away from beating my personal goal of 1505 points, but keep watching! I am REALLY excited this year because there are a bunch of kids in school telling me they want to beat me! I say – ‘BRING IT ON!‘ It is AWESOME that …
China: When the Cats Rule
Ian Johnson In his novel Cat Country, Lao She produced one of the most remarkable, perplexing, and prophetic works of modern China. On one level it is a work of science fiction—a visit to a country of cat-like people on Mars—that lampoons 1930s China. On a deeper level, the work predicts the terror and violence of the early Communist era and the chaos and brutality that led to Lao She’s own death during the Cultural Revolution. Cat Country is often called a dystopian novel, but when Lao She took his own life, it was an uncannily accurate portrait of the
Sophie Barnes Celebrates Her Print Debut with a Blog Tour and Extravagant Giveaway
Sophie Barnes’ print debut, THE TROUBLE WITH BEING A DUKE, comes out tomorrow (on 8/27), and to celebrate, anyone who comments on one of her blog tour stops will be eligible to win a lavish prize pack!
The Saturday Spotlight~Featuring Augusta Blythe and Giveaway of Public School Princess
Welcome to the Saturday Spotlight, a weekly feature that shines the light on Indie and Debut authors. This week I have the pleasure introducing readers to: AUGUSTA BLYTHE ~Author of Public School Princess~ **Today Im thrilled to welcome back author Augusta Blythe to the blog. I featured her a few years ago with her wonderful Indie Winterborne, its time to catch up and hear about her latest adventures. Hi Tina. Thanks for having me back in the Saturday Spotlight. (CC) ALANDD Today I’m writing about fish out of water, a theme in my latest book. Public School Princess revolves around Her Royal Highness Hollister Bucksey-Breiten, an entitled celebutante who finds herself far out of her privileged L.A. comfort zone and smack dab in the …
So Much Time, So Little Change – Thomas L. Sullivan
Summary: Life is full of strange and awkward events seemingly designed to annoy us. To Thomas Sullivan, these trials and tribulations are actually meant to entertain us. Within these pages you’ll encounter a guy who finds humor in:•Searching for a cozy, old-school barber in a gentrifying neighborhood, but landing at a frantic corporate salon that smells like a meth lab.•Running late for a flight, only to find himself on The Terrorist Watch List.•Watching The People’s Court with a stranger in the world’s gloomiest bar.•Surviving condemnation from the hard-working folks at the Department of Motor Vehicles.•Fixing up a house when he knows nothing about home improvement.•And much, much …
Travels With A Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson (1957)
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s earliest works, written while he was still in his twenties and published in 1879. It chronicles a twelve-day, one hunderd and twenty mile hike he took through the south of France with his donkey Modestine. The route that he took has since become very popular, and there’s actually a little tourist industry in the Cévennes that caters to hikers who want to retrace Stevenson’s route on the trail, now known as GR70. It’s considered a pioneering classic of outdoor literature and Stevenson’s ‘sleeping sack’ influenced modern-day
Cultural Olympiad 2012
It is a year today since the London 2012 Olympics opened with its spectacular rendition of the history of this island past and very present. Difficult to remember now how so much of the coverage of the Olympics in the previous years had been so negative and intentionally destructive. The organisers and contributors welcomed the global sports people from all over the world and delivered a sporting extravaganza that is now itself a collective golden moment of British history.Despite at that time living less than a mile from the Olympic Park, I watched it all on the TV. I did however see Michelle Obama’s entourage move through …
The Never List – Koethi Zan
I was about ten pages into this book and almost put it down because ha ha, I do not read books about torture, THANKS. But the Sarah is like, Blah blah blah that terrible thing I did to survive, and I am like, DAMMIT, fine, you got me with your foreshadowing.And really, the only reason I made it through was because the torture isn’t specific and detailed or even that strongly implied. It isn’t the Theon scenes from Game of Thrones, is what I’m saying. You get the general idea, enough to be COMPLETELY APPALLED, but nothing lovingly painted for you by a bloodthirsty author. Torture is sort of my Thing That I Cannot Stand….
Two More "You Wouldn’t Want To" Books
You Wouldn’t Want To Be A World War II: Air Battles You Might Not Survive. Ian Graham. Illustrated by David Antram. 2009. Scholastic. 32 pages. [Source: Library]Last Monday, I reviewed two books in this series, You Wouldn’t Want to Be in Alexander The Great’s Army and You Wouldn’t Want to Be Joan of Arc. Today I am sharing two more books with you. The first is You Wouldn’t Want To Be A World War II Pilot! This nonfiction picture book would be a good introduction of the subject for young readers. Older readers would probably want to know even more.From the introduction: “You are 16. Home is …
WME Signs ‘Gone Girl’ Author Gillian Flynn
The agency will rep the prolific journalist-turned-author in film, TV and book to film deals.
Donation of the day.
Today, I'm donating* my copy of Sarah Zettel's Dust Girl: I loved everything on the inside of Dust Girl. It’s a great read, full stop. It’s not ultra deep by any means, but it’s thrilling, thoughtful, imaginative and fun. The basic premise is a familiar one—girl discovers that she’s half-fairy and also the main player in a major prophecy—but it still feels fresh. A good part of that is due to Callie’s engaging, honest voice. She also uses enough idiom and slang to create a ’30s flavor, but never so much that she feels over-the-top or forced I'm donating a copy of the hardback, which has the cover I've included in this post, but check …