Bulletin Board
- Believing the spirit and intent of Festivus should be year-round and not just one day, I’m adding a new item to Weekend Edition: the airing of grievances. As this week’s first entry shows, it will include not only people who have disappointed me but also inanimate objects. Thus, my inaugural grievance: snowblowers that refuse to function for the first time ever only following “the storm of the century.”
Blog Headlines of the Week
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Bookish Linkage
- Both Minneapolis lost it’s number one ranking to Seattle in the annual list of America’s Most Literate Cities while St. Paul also dropped, although the Twin Cities easily remain in the top 10.Seattle regained the top spot.
- What’s the point of book blurbs?
- An e-book buyer’s guide to privacy.
- The Daily Beast has started a column in which William Boot reviews bestselling novels to see which, “if any, are readable.” He says that if the books are “semi-readable, I’ll tell you which pages to skip.” He kicks off with “Do I Have To Read Sue Grafton?“.
- Chad Post has updated the translation databases at three percent. He says that generally the number of translated fiction titles remained about the same, with the most translated languages being Spanish (59), French (51) and German (31).
- Meanwhile, Chad and Open Letter Books get some deserved attention from the NYT.
Winter is nature’s way of saying, “Up yours.”
Robert Byrne
