Summer Books Season

USA Today posts its lengthy interactive list of summer fiction and non-fiction. You can sort by title, author or release date, and look at all the books at once or only fiction or non-. Excerpts available for some. [22 May]
Politics and Prose Bookstore’s Summer Favorites 2008, with separate lists for hardcover fiction, paperback fiction, pb […]

Public Library Lore

Many e-handouts from the Public Library Association meeting that wrapped up last week, most in PDF or .doc format. Topics include Reaching Out to the LGBT Community; Creating Musical Storytimes to Encourage Emergent Literacy; Creating Dynamic Library Atmospheres; The Digital Revolution and Libraries - What’s Next?; Public Libraries as Community Problem Solvers ; Market Driven […]

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 […]

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.

Author Obit: William F. Buckley, Jr., 24 Nov. 1925 - 27 Feb. 2008

Conservative commentator, author and journalist (founder of National Review) Bill Buckley has died today at age 82 after suffering with diabetes and emphysema. Among his books are God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’ (1951), McCarthy and His Enemies (1954, with L. Brent Bozell), spy novels featuring Blackford Oakes, Right Reason: A […]

New Oprah Book Pick

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey has chosen Eckhart Tolle’s self-help book, A New Earth: Awakening Your Life’s Purpose (2005), as her next read. More at her site, where she explains that she and Tolle are teaching an ‘exclusive online course’ for ten Mondays at 9 ET beginning on March 3.

Non-Fiction: Sentence Length and Structure

** Geek alert **
Amazon has text stats that measure ‘average words per sentence‘ and ‘% complex words.” Non-fiction author Steven Johnson graphs his books’ text stats against those of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink), Steven Pinker (How The Mind Works, The Stuff of Thought), Seth Godin (The Dip, Small is the New Big), […]