Jeff O’Neal and Morgan Macgregor are both huge Tournament of Books fans. So, they decided to read all the finalists and do some running commentary as the tournament progresses. Check back weekly for our obsessive coverage. ____________________________ JO: Just two matches to kick things off last week, but the story from our end is the Lightning [...]
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So, we’ve gotten bookish married… now it’s time to get ready for that bookish baby. A big trend these days is the build-a-library baby shower, where people are asked to bring a book to add to the baby’s library (usually on top of a separate gift). Here are my problems with that — first, you’re [...]
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“Publishing shouldn’t have to choose between bricks and clicks.” Well, you might want to, lest someone else choose for you. ____________________________ “If Random House and the like can’t survive without setting a floor on prices, maybe it’s time for them to adjust their business models. After all, they’re not factory workers trying to unionize. [...]
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Am I nuts or does this look pretty OK? Am I not as jaded and dead inside as I thought? What is happening to me?
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Before I share this news… Are you sitting down? At your computer? Okay. Look at your keyboard. All those letters on the left? That’s your problem. As if our society wasn’t already too disturbingly divided between right and left, along comes a new study, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, which concludes that typing words [...]
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The most read stories from the last week in Critical Linking… “This is a timed test, but read at your natural pace and do not skim.” How did you do? ____________________________ “Titled The Booklovers Map of America Showing Certain Landmarks of Literary Geography and created by pictorial cartographer Paul M. Paine in 1933, the [...]
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Last night at about 1am Pacific Time, Bret Easton Ellis began a five-hour Twitter rave-session about his notes on a sequel to American Psycho. It began with a few ideas for plot before spinning to a catalog of what Patrick Bateman would think about contemporary culture. Here are few highlights. Ellis began with what appeared to [...]
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Here are the three most viewed book trailers on BookRiot.tv from the last week (Click on the cover to view trailer)
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Our most popular posts from the week that was… “The bound manuscript pictured top row, right is about as nondescript as it gets. Is it a book? A boring graduate school thesis? An even-more-boring report you’re reading for your snooze-inducing corporate retreat? It’s impossible to tell, and that’s a beautiful thing. No manuscripts lying around [...]
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“For people who own both a iPad and another ereader (Kindle/Nook/Kobo/Sony/etc), which do you prefer reading on? 81.9% eReader.” Two things. One, I think this number will go down after the new iPad and its sweet screen becomes available. Second, the question probably means “prefer reading [books] on?” Because some ereaders, say Kindle 2 [...]
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Stop!…Grammar Time is an occasional feature about grammar and style. Sometimes with 90s Top-40 references. Sometimes not. Today’s installment is going to like an old 45: two snappy, self-contained singles. Here we go. A Side: The Reason is Because Here’s a regrettable tic of spoken English that finds its paradoxical ways into writing. The reason people love [...]
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Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman Publication Date: January 11, 2011 Genre: Fiction (Short Stories) Publisher: Lookout Books Publisher’s Synopsis: In this sumptuous offering, one of our premier storytellers provides a feast for fiction aficionados. Spanning four decades and three prize-winning collections, these twenty-one vintage selected stories and thirteen scintillating new ones take us around the [...]
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At Book Riot, we’ve built charity into our DNA. Two percent of our revenue – no funny math, just 0.02 times total revenue – is gifted. Our leadership decided this prior to raising capital and prior to earning our first dollar. Our business plan states it. We’re committed. And we want you to be involved! [...]
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As this week has proven to us all, Jonathan Franzen is a crazy old man who lives in a box under the overpass. Or something. Anyway, he hates a lot of stuff, and people on the internet seem to like writing about all the stuff he hates including, somewhat ironically, the internet. But here at [...]
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This week saw the launch of Google Play, a new platform for selling books, movies, music, games and apps to Google users. Techcrunch reports that Google appears to have plans to include audiobooks, magazines, and newspapers in its offerings at some point down the road. It is a rebranding of the Android Marketplace, and it [...]
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This guest installment comes Alexandra Jacunski, a graduate student in Pharmacology at The University of Toronto. She also blogs about her studies, science, and science-related books at Exercises in Auxology. ____________________________ A book I read in the third grade, The Measly Middle Ages, began my slightly morbid obsession with illness. It described the bubonic plague from a [...]
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“This is a timed test, but read at your natural pace and do not skim.” How did you do? ____________________________ “Which 19-year-old Elvis Costello fan published his nihilistic debut in 1989 to instant acclaim?” So much about this question makes me angry. ____________________________ “Will literary fiction be the vinyl of publishing? Maybe.” Isn’t it sort [...]
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Do you ever feel like there’s a gap in your reading repertoire? Like you’ve missed some time period or style or genre completely and that you’re being left out of a conversation because of it? I ask because I’ve been having this weird craving lately to read or re-read a lot of the classic fiction [...]
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We start by giving you one clue, then one additional clue per hour through the afternoon. The first person to guess the author correctly wins a book of our choosing, and all other correct guessers will be entered into a drawing at the end of each month. You can submit your guess using the form [...]
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