The New York Times is conducting a survey of reading habits while riding the subway, the results to be published tomorrow.For those, however, who live in areas without subterranean transit, we at Book Patrol seek your solutions to the reading à go-go issue.Books (novels, non-fiction, serious or popular), magazines, newspapers, scripts, poetry, crossword puzzles, laundry lists, the Lord’s Prayer – whatever you need to make it from point A to point B, we’d like to hear about it and your mode of transportation while doing so: bus, car, bicycle, ferry, skateboard, kayak, jitney, taxi, rickshaw, surrey-with-the-fringe-on-top, whatever.Post your responses to...
The 6 O’Clock News with William Shakespeare
The Bard of Avon as Elizabethan talking-head anchorman?"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears - you wont believe what's goin' on! But if I tickle you, will you not laugh?Jon Lajoie is a Montreal-based comedian who, after graduating Dawson College’s theatre program in 2001, became a hit man to supplement his non-existent income from acting. “Between 2001 and 2007 [he] assassinated (in a ninja-like fashion) an estimated 40,000 people, and an estimated 9,000 fish. (In early 2004, demand for assassination was low, so for three months he held a part-time job as a fisherman)."That averages out to 15.65 human and...
Religious and Spiritual Books Bring Zing Back to Delhi Book Fair
The woes of the recession have turned into wows at this year’s Delhi Book Fair.Attendees are grabbing religious and spiritually-themed books off the shelves as if they were Kali, the multi-armed Hindu goddess of time and change, and redeemer of the universe, who has, apparently, redeemed an Indian book market hit hard by the global recession.Books on the philosophies and meditation techniques of spiritual gurus, general religion, self-help guides and Indian mythology are leading sales at the Delhi Book Fair, now in its fifteenth year.Just Say No To Crime and FictionThe boom in religious books trade at the fair, say...
Book Store Provides Speed-Shrink Psychotherapy
Wednesday nights in lower Manhattan’s SoHo district have gotten a little saner. The Housing Works Bookshop Café, which donates 100% of its profits to Housing Works, Inc., a social enterprise, is offering psychotherapy to its customers and neighborhood denizens in three-minute doses for those whose therapists are on vacation or who require a quick jolt of personal problem advice.You’d think that three minutes wouldn’t allow enough time for introductions much less delving into the dark recesses. But Jonathan Fast, one of the eight psychiatrists and psychologists who staff these Wednesday nights and who is also a professor at Yeshiva University,...
Bookworms and Boxers Battle Back!
"You've been tagged in a note on Facebook."Everyone on that social networking site--and at this point who isn't?--has read this message with a mixture of flattery ("My online friends want to know more about me!") and dread. ("Who the heck has time for this stuff?").A popular note is entitled "The ABC's of Me," a straightforward trip through the alphabet, each successive letter revealing, theoretically, a fascinating fact about the friend. I must confess I never completed this work-out, throwing in the towel at the end of Round 2 with the letter "B."For any librarian, of course, "B" is for for...