... h20boro lib blog

Check out The Reader’s Advisor Online Blog. Looks like it was launched in June, and already there are lots of interesting stories for readers (Nonfiction Reading . . . Without All That Pesky Nonfiction Reading), writers (Where Has the Mystery Mid-List Gone?), and librarians (Under the Radar: How Do You Find Out What People Are Reading?) alike.

Besides the feature articles, there's also a Bestseller Mashup of Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction (the kind of non-fiction that feels more like fiction), and a list of books coming out this week. Diana Tixier Herald, of the well-known readers' advisory tool Genreflecting, is one of the contributors.

How has thriller writer Robert Ludlum published "no fewer than 12 new bestsellers in the six years since his death? ... Ludlum practically cornered the market in dense, paranoid, meticulously researched thrillers for 30 years. By the time of his death in 2001, he had sold 210 million books. ... This summer, the hottest property at the cinema box office is likely to be The Bourne Ultimatum, the third instalment of a $500m-grossing movie franchise based on Ludlum's best-known character, ... starring Matt Damon as an amnesiac spy.

"Yet for all the sales figures and superlatives, it is somehow fitting that a novelist who specialised in complex conspiracy theories and international espionage should have left behind a conundrum to baffle even Bourne himself. In the years since his death, 12 new works bearing his name have hit the bookshelves and beach-towels of the world. None was penned by Ludlum himself –- and at least three have not been credited to any other writer. These include The Bancroft Strategy, published last year, which sold 102,000 copies in hardback alone."

The Independent explores the mystery.

An article in the Baltimore Sun today says that some bookstores, like some Barnes & Noble and Borders locations, are ousting comfy sofas, cozy chairs, and other seating designed for browsing books at leisure. Apparently "homeless squatters, overly enthusiastic young lovers, food trash left behind," and perhaps primarily, "people staying for hours and hours and not necessarily buying books," has done them in.

You'd think public libraries would be the place for cozy browsing, but apparently they face the same issues: "Libraries are designed to be inviting -- but again, the challenge is not to get people too comfortable.

"'It's a topic we wrestle with in every project,' says David Michaels, an Arizona-based interior designer who most recently worked on Enoch Pratt's Southeast Anchor Library in Highlandtown. Unlike the sparse soft seating at the main library, the new city branch on Eastern Avenue is furnished with habitable chairs."

Michaels then comments, rather mystifyingly, that "a public library should be every man's country club."

Labels: book buying, bookshops, bookstores, maine

Labels: bestsellers, books, children's books, harry potter, rowling, YA fiction

CA Barron in the Guardian blog suggests that book publishers dispense with uniformly hyperbolic blurbs on their books and instead move to a rating system like that of Rotten Tomatoes for films or Robert Parker for wines: "To have 2005's 206,000 books published in the UK, and 172,000 in the US, all shrieking superlatives at us seems counter-productive. Let us first savour and judge books -- like films and wine -- with our own brains, hearts and palates."

Commenter BillyMills likes the idea, and also suggests more honest blurbs, such as: "This is XXX's second novel. Due to contractual stipulations, it's much like his/her first novel" and "This is our entry in the great 9/11 novel sweepstakes." He also finds refreshing the candidness of some historical reviews, as "'One would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage'. -- Voltaire, 1768 (of Hamlet)."

Labels: book reviews, book selling, guardian, publishing, rankings, ratings

Joanne Clarey (pictured), mystery and thriller writer, former Portland resident and now Maine summer resident.

Portland native and resident, Down East columnist, journalist Elizabeth Peavey

Labels: clarey, columnist, journalist, maine writers index, mwi, mysteries, peavey, thrillers

Labels: deaths, maine author, maine poet, maine writer, obituary, philip booth, poet

An article at OregonLive names emergency reading material that people apparently keep in their vehicles, including: a scuba diving manual, books about railroads and circuses, 40 pounds of string quartet music, dictionaries in various languages, a manual for presiding over last rites and a book on growing camellias (both carried by priests), books about tractors and sake, comic books, a book on the history of zero, and Backpacking With Mule or Burro, for its chapter on persuading one's wife to do so. Bibles, books by Dr. Seuss, and overdue library books were the most common books stashed in cars and trucks.

via Free Library Blog

Labels: book reviews, crime fiction, crime novels, thrillers

Labels: amnesia, book list, book reviews, booklist, joyce carol oates

Labels: author, deaths, obituary, romance, woodiwiss