It’s The Books

There’s an essay in the NYT today by Rachel Donadio, It’s Not You, It’s Your Books, about “literary taste [as] a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.”
As Bookslut blogger Jessa Crispin says, “if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my […]

New Books This Week

The Reader’s Advisor lists “sure-to-sell” books due out this week.
Fiction titles include Susan Wittig Albert’s latest China Bayles crime novel, Nightshade; Nevada Barr’s latest Anna Pigeon crime novel, Winter Study; Dorothy Cannell’s Goodbye, Ms. Chips, latest in the Ellie Haskell series; Barbara Delinsky’s Suddenly; Eric Jerome Dickey’s Pleasure; Karen Robards’ romantic thriller Guilty; and the […]

Wet Book Care

The University of Delaware Library offers tips for drying wet books when a Conservation Lab isn’t handy.
Cornell University Library also offers tips for drying wet pamphlets.

Deadly Words of Book Reviewing

Fun essay in the NYT’s Papercuts by Bob Harris, listing his choices for the seven worst words frequently used in book reviews. The comments are even funnier.

RA Rundown

Don’t forget to check out the weekly RA Rundown at The Reader’s Advisor Online Blog. (If you add the weblog to your RSS aggregator, you won’t have to remember.) Here’s this week’s, with news of Wally Lamb’s first new novel in 10 years, problems for print encyclopedias, and of course mashups of the hottest books […]

Author Obit: Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died in in Sri Lanka on 19 March 2008, which, for those of us in the U.S., is tomorrow, which seems appropriate somehow. Clarke was 90 and had published more than 100 fiction and non-fiction books, and the short story The Sentinel, which was made into the film […]

Online Photo Tools

Swiss Army Librarian offers a lightly annotated list of photo sharing and editing tools, and some photo archive sites. I’m not familiar with some of the sites — maybe you, too? I’m on Flickr and I’ve found Picnik to be nice and easy for photo editing.

Christian Books (Mostly) Don’t Sell Sex

In Publisher’s Weekly this week: “Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder: Christian sex books sell, even when no one is having sex” by Jana Riess: “It’s a truism in publishing that sex sells. What’s unusual in Christian publishing is not that sex sells, but that even books telling people not to have sex sell.”
The article […]

Oprah’s Online Class Starts Tonight

A 10-week classroom webcast , hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle, begins tonight, March 3, at 9 p.m. ET (8 CT). They’ll be teaching Tolle’s book, A New Earth: Awakening Your Life’s Purpose. Sign up to participate here.