Going to  my first Bouchercon mystery conference in Baltimore  is a bit like attending a convention of movie stars, albeit badly dressed ones. Never  before have I seen so many writers I have admired  from afar gathered in one convenient location, ready and willing to answer a devoted reader's many questions. There's Lee Child, taking a cigarette break outside the Sheraton City Center hotel. And there is the very tall Harlan Coban enjoying a coffee in the hospitality lounge. And stepping off the hotel elevator is the charming Ken Bruen. And look there S. J. Rozan, Alafair Burke, Brent Ghelfi, Jaso...Read More

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Yesterday's Op-Ed piece by David Brooks on our global economic instability refers to David M. Smick's new book, The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy as an "astonishingly prescient book."  

In LJ's review of it last month, Lawrence Maxted called it "first rate; highly recommended for all public and academic libraries."  Smick is founding editor of The I...Read More

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Abe Lincoln isn't the only birthday boy celebrating his big 200 next year. January 19, 2009 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Edgar Allen Poe,  and according to tradition,  Baltimore's legendary Poe Toaster, clad in a black cape and white scarf, will leave three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe's grave in the wee hours of the morning.

To honor the strange genius who shaped American literature and created the modern genres of horror and ...Read More

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He’s already turned Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into a freak show, and now director Tim Burton may be performing a similar act with another long-time kiddie fav, Alice in Wonderland. Variety reports that Burton will use a combination of Live action and animation (the film will be in 3-D) and is reteaming with favorite star Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. The biggest reason for Burton’s take on Charlie being so mondo bizarro is Depp’s interpretation of Willy Wonka as a combination of Michael Jackson and an Internet predator (give me Gene Wilder any day), so since Burton loves freaks, Depp’s Hatter will probably give people LSD flashbacks to the ‘60s.

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I hold in my hot little hands a galley for The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia by Steve Sansweet & Pablo Hidalgo with several contributors that hits shelves December 9. Sansweet first tipped me off to this title last April at the New York Comic-Com, and I;ve been anxiously awaiting it. The review galley is a 450-page sample of the final 1200-page, three-volume A–Z encyclopedia that draws from the six feature films and the hundreds if not thousands of novels, graphic novels, and other resources in the Star Wars expanded universe. Starting with the A-1 Deluxe Floater and ending with Zzzanmxl (that was a new one on me, too) this covers anything and everything from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The text is riddled with tons of illustrations of characters, ships, weapons, you name it (click through for pix. Trust me it's worth it.)
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This week the American Library Association is commemorating all the books that have ever been removed from library shelves and classrooms. NPR has an interesting profile of one of them, John Steinbeck's  The Grapes of Wrath. Although an iimmediate best seller when it was published in 1939, the novel touched a lot of nerves in its raw portrayal of one Oklahoma family's migration to California. Officials of Kern County, CA, where the Joad family end their journey, objected to their unsympathetic depiction in the book and voted to ban Steinbeck's work from county libraries and schools. Desp...Read More

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Forbes has a piece on the “The Worlds Best Paid Authors.” Looking at the list, the first thing that came to mind is that people really are reading a lot of crap these days—including me—but at least they’re reading at all. Not surprisingly, Jo Rowling is top gun, having raked in $300 million between June 2007 and June ’08. Yes, I said $300 million in a year!!! She’s brought joy to countless people worldwide and seems like a genuinely nice gal (just don’t infringe on her copyrights or she’ll sue your arse off), but it still makes me want to puke (according to a post on Bookninja, $300M in a year equals $571 ...Read More

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So much for being non-biased: Nobel Prize judge Horace Engdahl has crapped all over American literature to the Associated Press, so if you’ve got money on Philip Roth or John Updike to be the next winner, you’re going to lose. Engdahl thinks that American authors are “too sensitive to their own mass culture…the U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

What American books has this huckleberry read recently? The Swedish Academy seems to be run by a pack of snobs who’ve decayed the Nobel into a political prize, so if you’re not criticizing some government you don’t stand much of a chance of winning. The prize will continually...Read More

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One of my favorite Paul Newman movies is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and, of course, my favorite scene is the charming one  in which Newman as the outlaw Butch Cassidy gives Katherine Ross, playing the Sundance Kid's girlfriend Etta Place, a bicycle ride while the movie's theme song, "Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head" is sung in the...Read More

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We got an advance copy of the 2-disc special edition of Indy IV yesterday. I popped Disc 2 into my DVD player for a quick look at the Special Features. Some pretty cool stuff on there, including the typical making of featurettes and galleries of screen shots, production stills, and concept art, plus interviews with Spielberg, Lucas (George, you have no right having that much hair at your age, you bastard), and the cast.

What immediately caught my eye was the “Iconic Props” featurette. Alas, not as iconic as I hoped since it’s all Crystal Skull stuff and nothing from the previous Indy films except the Ark of the Covenant, which makes a cameo appearance. Still there’s a lot of great reference shots that prop heads are going to love.

It’s a no brainer that you’re going to have to stock this title. I’ll write...Read More

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With the help of booksellers and librarians, the  Shelf Awareness e-mail newsletter has compiled an excellent bibliography of business books to help consumers understand how Wall Street got into the current financial mess and what can be done to fix the problem. Among the highlighted titles: prominent investor George Soros'sThe New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means; Th...Read More

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I am generally intrigued by stories that involve relationships, especially romances, where the outcome is hopeful and optimistic. Tish Cohen’s Inside Out Girl (Perennial: HarperCollins) is more and less than I had expected. It is a wonderful read for anyone who finds life often serving up more “droppings” than we think we can manage.

Olivia Bean is ten years old and fascinated with all things rat-related, especially their elimination processes (or droppings). Olivia has NLD, nonverbal learning disorder. She depends...Read More

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