Looks like Amazon and the New York Times have crossed wires in the blogosphere.Over at the new Amazon blog, Omnivoracious, they have a "new series asking musicians about the books they're into--new, old, and influential."while at Paper Cuts the blog of Dwight Garner, senior editor of the NYT Book Review we have their weekly feature "Living With Music" a series presenting a "playlist of songs from a writer or some other kind of book-world personage."Both have a little global touch this week with Omnivoracious asking members of the Australian rock band The Church whats on their bookshelfand Paper Cuts asks...
Pull the Plug on Book TV
or at least let's change the name. How about Books and History; Books and Washington; Non-Fiction for the Masses.Book TV has as little to do with the diverse culture and life of books as the Bush administration has to do with democracy.Before you throw the book at me for this one head over to the Guardian to read Daniel Kalder's piece Literary TV to put you off reading forever.He amusingly reminds us how downright ridiculous much of Book TV is and how extended viewing can be seen as a low grade form of torture guaranteed to ruin your weekend.Book TV...
Review: The Little Red Fish by Tae-Eun Yoo
"JeJe's grandfather was a librarian at an old library in the middle of the forest" is how Tae-Eun Yoo's stunning debut begins. From here Yoo takes us on a magnificent illustrated journey with JeJe as he explores the library with his little red fish at his side. Soon JeJe falls asleep and when he wakes he finds that his comrade has disappeared into the biblio-ether of the library. To find his fish JeJe must dive head first into a book, entering a magical new world in pursuit of his little friend.The soft elegance of the sepia-toned illustrations carry us along,...
Fabrication Rebate. It Still Pays to Fib
1,729 readers of James Frey's concoction A Million Little Pieces will receive $15.82 each to soothe the pain they encountered upon finding out that Frey's book included a bit of fabrication.As part of the settlement, Random House has also agreed to include a warning in the book that not all portions of the book may be accurate. Does this mean they can still call it a memoir?In addition to the $27,348 to settle the claims Random House will pay $783,000 to the lawyers in legal fees, $432,000 for publicizing the settlement (basically an additional marketing expense) and $180,000 to be...
Words Divide, Images Unite: A Visual Language Celebration
We are a couple of weeks away from Utrecht Manifest's 2nd Biennale for Social Design and one of the main events is an exhibit titled Lovely Language: Words Divide, Images Unite honoring two of the titans of visual language, Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz. These two pre-Tuftian kings of envisioning information created their own language of textless pictograms as a way of conveying quantitative information with social consequences. They called them Isotypes. "It was an organized attempt to use graphical design for the purpose of achieving changes in society, primarily through visual education of the masses, and especially by presenting...