Tag: books and authors
Sunday Salon: So Many Books, So Little Time……
…and yet, I keep adding to the stacks. For those of you who are interested in that sort of thing, the current count of inmates in TBR Purgatory stands at 517. I think that number is overstated, to be honest, because I’m reasonably certain I’ve purged some books without taking them out of my LibraryThing catalog…but I can’t say exactly how overstated it might be. One of these days (it may require two, or even […]
Authors Are Rockstars! Or, the Last Chapter of The Rock Bottom Remainders
After 20 years of once-a-year togetherness, the Rock Bottom Remainders have called it a career, and played their last two shows this past weekend. The finale was a private performance for attendees at the American Library Association annual conference in Anaheim on Saturday night, but they played for a full house at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles the night before. You might know the Remainders better through their literary efforts than their musical […]
Sunday Salon: Books For My Father
Happy Father’s Day to all of you dads–and your dads, and your kids’ dads too (if you’re a mom)! I’ve always appreciated the fact that I had two parents who read. My mother and father had different reading tastes, but they both spent much of their free time with books–and at the age of 83, my dad still does. There’s always a stack of books on his kitchen table, and he volunteers two mornings a […]
Sunday Salon: Back From #BEA2012, with Books!
A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that my experience at Book Expo America 2012 might not be all about books. And I guess that technically it wasn’t, since I cataloged slightly fewer books in a “Books from BEA” collection on LibraryThing this year than I did in 2011, but I brought back more than I’d expected to. And unlike last year, I actually did bring the books back home with me; they made my […]
Armchair BEA: Best Books, BEA 2012 Edition
Today is the big Giveaway Day at Armchair BEA Central! Those of us who are not hosting giveaways today (sorry!) have been asked to give up the names of some of our favorite books of 2012…books we’ve already read, and/or books being featured at Book Expo America this week that we can’t wait to read! As it happens, three of my best reads so far this year have a BEA connection, even if it’s not to […]
Sunday Salon: A Books Report
Happy Mother’s Day to all of the American moms! If your wish for the day is some quality time alone with a book and your preferred beverage, I hope your family gifts you with that. Since my March NaBloPoMo adventure ended, my posting frequency here has dropped to about three times a week, and I’ve gotten surprisingly comfortable with that. However, I’ve just realized it’s been about six weeks since I last did a Reading […]
So Christopher Moore wrote a book about the color blue…
…and this is its very artistic cover. (It’s actually just part of the cover–it’s wrapped in a half-jacket that the author calls a “censor band.*”) I haven’t read it yet, but Tall Paul and I went to Vroman’s Bookstore a couple of weeks ago to listen to him talk about it. He didn’t read from it–Christopher Moore never reads at a “reading”–but he had plenty to say about the book and the research that went into it. This […]
At the Festival of Books: A Conversation with John Green
The organizers of 2012 LA Times Festival of Books knew exactly what they were doing when they teamed John Green and Lev Grossman “in conversation.” The two authors had a bit of a mutual-admiration-society thing going on. Grossman’s Time Magazine review of Green’s latest young-adult novel, The Fault in Our Stars (my “book of the year-so-far”), described it as “damn near genius,” and he really nailed it with this observation: “One doesn’t like to throw […]
At the Festival of Books: A Conversation with Judy Blume
In her conversation with Los Angeles Times columnist Mary McNamara at the 2012 Festival of Books, Judy Blume noted that YA literature “didn’t really exist” at the time she began writing it. If that’s true, she helped bring it into existence. I have pretty clear memories of frequenting the young-adult sections of my local library and bookstores during my middle- and high-school years–they may not have been very large compared to YA collections now, but […]
Festival of (Books) Loot!
I did a little shopping this past weekend at the LA Times Festival of Books, doing my part to support several if our local indie bookstores. Many thanks to the folks from Vroman’s and Book Soup for the fine selections offered at their booths. If you’re having trouble making out the covers, here’s a list: Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds The Submission: […]