Received this link from Chris G. with a request for any thoughts I might have on what makes a bestselling book. Coincidentally, this weekend I also happened to read a column by Stephen King in an issue of Entertainment Weekly exploring the same issue. And it also makes a nice follow-up to my last FFL […]
I just came across this image of one of the world's most popular (and longest) books where the main character's fate is being hotly debated today. Does he die? Or does he live? Don't say I didn't warn you!
“In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors.” Just in time for the biggest book release in the history of the universe, a contrarian view from the Washington Post. It’s out tonight at midnight but rumours of leaks have been happening for the past few days. […]
The author of the popular Freakonomics book looks at the question, “If public libraries didn’t exist, could you start one today?” “But here’s the point I’m (finally) getting to: if there was no such thing today as the public library and someone like Bill Gates proposed to establish them in cities and towns across the […]
LibrarianActivist has highlighted a couple sites in the past that offer free e-book downloads but this page has a comprehensive list of all the options online for getting free e-books and tree-books. (I love that the title of the post where I saw it on MetaFilter is “The Best Place To Get Free Books” and […]
A classmate wrote recently and mentioned in passing that I should read The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed. This made me realise it might be interesting to do an open post asking my readers (most of whom are librarians, writers or book industry types) what books they're reading and/or would […]
There are a number of astounding stats about The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan which came out during Saskatchewan's Centennial in 2005. Most pages of any book ever published in Saskatchewan. Most contributors. Most illustrations. Longest gestation time. Heaviest. The print edition is an amazing book and now, the CPRC has put the whole thing online for […]
Dave Margoshes is a Regina-based writer who's originally from the States. He sent the following anecdote to the Sask Writers listserv and has kindly allowed me to reprint it here. Since there's been a lot of Vonnegut talk recently, I thought I'd toss this in. I was at Iowa in the late '60s, overlapping with […]
Britain’s biggest specialist book chain, Waterstone’s, asked its 5,000 staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982, the date Waterstone’s opened its first store. The list features the cream, both male and female, of the modern international literary world of the last quarter of a century – from Umberto Eco and Bill Bryson […]
Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get […]
