I don't have the patience with books that I had when I was younger and had a lifetime of reading stretching so far ahead of me that I didn't feel that I was wasting my time by finishing a book that I really wasn't enjoying. These days I'm willing to test drive a book for something around 50 pages. If it doesn't grab me in 50 pages, I'm willing to bet that it never will. And sometimes it's a book that I had really high hopes for that turns out to be one of the ones that I toss aside unfinished.
This is Charles Dickinson's first venture into the time travel genre, and he has succeeded in creating a charming adventure with somewhat of a jarring surprise ending. One day Josh Winkler, living happily with his 15-year old daughter and doctor wife, accidentally manages to project himself back in time about 15 minutes. That's enough to shake him up but his wife really doesn't believe his story. Things take a more disturbing turn for everyone when a young girl from 1908 turns up at the same spot that Winkler first lost his grip on time.
Sterling Publishing in New York recognized the disparity between the number of new titles for teenage girls and that for teenage boys and decided to do something about it. I don't have any boys of my own in the 11-15 age group so I can't give an opinion on the gap that Sterling Publishing says is out there, but I do know that I see what seems like countless new titles for girls in that age group and not nearly so many aimed at the boys. So, to me, the question becomes one of those "chicken and egg" types...do teenage boys not read because they don't want to or because there's nothing new and flashy enough to get their attention (Harry Potter and company aside, of course).Getting some boys to curl up with a good book often isn't easy, with so many social, athletic and high-tech distractions vying for leisure-time attention....
So this past summer, Sterling Publishing in New York, in collaboration with books packager Flying Point Press of Boston, introduced its Sterling Point imprint with eight books, all nonfiction, aimed at a share of the market they say "has been notoriously difficult to reach" - boys between 11 and 15.
This is an especially important age for young readers. "Studies indicate that kids determine whether they are readers or not by the time they are 11 or 12," says Frances Gilbert, editor in chief of Sterling's children's division. "But if you put a really good book in front of a kid, he'll be reading."
Some of the first eight, as well as future books in the series, were originally Landmark Books, a series of more than 100 nonfiction titles published by Random House between 1950 and 1970. Hill, 57, was an avid young reader of Landmark Books and still has some in his personal collection. The Sterling Point editions feature new looks, including covers, maps and, in some cases, updated text and even titles.I suspect that many children decide that they are "readers" a lot earlier than eleven years of age, but I'm all for grabbing the rest of them while they are teens. Reading, and doing it well, is one of the keys to their future and we need to do everything that we can as a society to make sure that youngsters grab that key on their way to adulthood. Bravo, Sterling Publishing.
Eight additional volumes are planned for this spring, including one brand-new book, the first-person account of a bomber pilot who was captured during World War II; and biographies of two adventurous women, Amelia Earhart and Sacagawea.
Hill notes that one of the series' goals was to find worthy heroes besides "music stars and athletes" for kids to admire.
We're required to go to a computer or dig out a globe because the publisher wouldn't provide a map?
Which is, of course, the real matter here: the stinginess of publishers. They would have to pay Rand-McNally for the right to reprint a map or hire a cartographer to draft a new one. And then there's the extra cost of printing it.
Thus, when a color map is clearly what's called for, readers find a smudgy, black-and-white one. When two maps are needed, we get only one. And if we get both, they're crudely done.
This is a Norman Mailer book, which means it's grandly ambitious, another wild swing at the fences, another long, loud, foul ball.
Country singer Dolly Parton created the Imagination Library in Sevier County, Tennessee to provide free books to children in the county from birth through the age of five when they start school. The concept for the program came from the fact that children who are not around books before they start school find it very difficult to ever catch up with those children who were lucky enough to have books in their lives from the beginning.Linebaugh Library director Laurel Best said Imagination Library and the state of Tennessee’s Books from Birth program matches funds with Rutherford Books from Birth to provide monthly books to about 6,278 preschool children in the county who registered. Projections show some 13,000 children under age 5 live in Rutherford County.
Best and former County Mayor Nancy Allen discussed the idea of the program in the county. Hunter and Linette McFarlin led the drive to raise matching funds to launch the reading program last February.
Hunter McFarlin said his mother read to him, making school easy for him. Linette read to their children from the womb. They are now accelerated students. “We got involved because we are convinced this can transform our culture and our society by putting books in the hands of the children before they get to school,” McFarlin said.
Kindergarten and first-grade teachers know students who are not around books before school never catch up.
“It’s our mission and Dolly Parton’s mission to make sure that books reach children before they get to school,” McFarlin said.
Originally, Books from Birth received start-up funds from Nissan, other organizations and Rutherford County Chamber of Commerce members. For the program to continue, it needs funding.
“Our critical need right now is money,” Best said.
Folks over at So Many Books have been discussing just how many books they are juggling at any given time...how many books, and what types, they are generally reading. It seems that most dedicated readers, at least the ones reporting in there, read several books at a time and have no problem keeping them all straight until they are completed.
In 1992 at a swap meet in Long Beach, Calif., he saw a book for sale - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. He bought it for 50 cents....
A couple of months later, he saw a magazine that listed valuable collectibles. His 50-cent book had a listed value of $10,000 (now $18,000).
Shapiro began researching Baum, a former journalist (like Shapiro), who wrote 14 Oz books between 1900 and 1919, when he died. Shapiro bought books, board games, posters, trinkets - anything related to Baum.
He retired from teaching in 2001 and devoted most of his life to finding all things Baum.
Shapiro said he uses winnings from his other passion - horse racing - to pay for memorabilia.
He says he now owns two first-edition, first-state books. (Those "first-state" books were created on the first run of the presses before corrections were made.) A mint-condition first-edition, first-state Wonderful Wizard of Oz book has a $35,000 to $45,000 price tag at AbeBooks.com and BookFinder.com....
"I've seen other Baum books offered for $37,000 or $39,000, and they're not in the condition his are," said Mark Kirchner, a hand bookbinder in Newport Beach, Calif.
"His are better."
He wants this story to spread the word. Maybe someone from a museum will call and offer him some space. Maybe an elementary school will set up a tour.Shapiro has put together an amazing collection, no doubt about it. Now he's reached the point (at 60 years of age) that he's starting to wonder what will become of the books when he's gone. In the meantime, he wants to enjoy them by sharing them with others who will appreciate what he's accomplished. Well done, Mr. Shapiro.
Maybe someone will tell him what he's supposed to do with all this stuff. Baum's spirit, as powerful as it is, hasn't written an ending yet.
I've always been intrigued by books that center on time travelers and all of the complexities involved in that kind of fiction. I'm a history buff, primarily of the American Civil War period and the couple of decades before and after that tragic war, and I've often daydreamed about what it would be like to be able to go back in time to actually witness some of the events that I've read so much about. I look at those old pictures sometimes and really wish that it were possible to visit that period in American history. Anyway...that gets me to thinking sometimes about my favorite "time travel" books and how difficult it can be to find good ones amongst all of the junk that gets written in that sub-genre.
This little book (weighing in at only 84 pages) contains four essays and several different lists-of-ten-books that explain how and when Anna Quindlen became a reader and what a major impact her reading has had on her life. In one of the essays, Quindlen shares her memories of the excitement she felt when she first figured out that each letter of the alphabet actually represents a sound, each little group of letters, a word, and all of them together tell a new story. Most avid readers will be reminded of their own excitement at finally "cracking the code" and becoming independent readers. The other essays recount things like the evolution of her reading list, the impact that watching her parents react to books with both laughter and tears had on her, and the future of books.
I know this story shouldn't have put a smile on my face, but...how often do you hear of anyone stealing a bunch of books? At least these U.K. burglars realized that books have some monetary value and that there is a market for them on the "street." Thousands of Harry Potter books written for Comic Relief which had been due to be recycled have been stolen.
Two pallets containing 3,000 copies were taken from The Recycling Company at Port Talbot's docks.
Fantastic Beasts and Quidditch Through the Ages were written by JK Rowling to raise funds for the BBC Red Nose Day charity appeal.
They were contained in red-coloured plastic satchels which police believe may now be offered for sale.
Why is it that so many people are allowed to drive without having enough insurance to cover the victims of their bad driving? In this age of computers I can't imagine why it is so difficult to link insurance policies in state databases to car registrations and driver's license information. What follows (From the Bastrop Daily Enterprise in Bastrop, LA) is a case of one uninsured person being allowed to do injury to a whole town and its children.A year ago, a car plowed through the front of the Dunbar Branch of the Morehouse Parish Library....
Remodeling the building only took a few months, but replacing the books destroyed in the accident is a task far from complete.
The library has an empty feeling to it, and indeed many of the bookshelves stand starkly empty. Many of the books the library has left are in tatters. It's enough to make branch manager April Jones shake her head in sadness. The building may be whole again, but its collections are not.
Unfortunately, replacing the books is likely to take a long time. Head librarian Mary Hodgkins said it will take two to three years to get the shelves at Dunbar full again. The library board received no insurance money from the accident, as the driver was uninsured and the deductible on the library's own policy was $50,000-- the amount it took to repair the building....
The library board only has a $50,000 annual budget for books, and that must be divided between all the branches in the system.
The library once had an extensive children's section, but that section was hit the hardest by the accident. Jones said that where she once had nine shelves chock full of books, she now has only two shelves that are mostly empty. A small bookshelf against the front wall holds what few new books the library has received since the accident.
"All the books you see, that's what I salvaged," Jones said, pointing to the sparsely filled bookshelves. "I picked through what I could, and this is what's left."
This cleverly crafted novel from Jim Crace is one of the most unusual books I've read in recent months. In short order, the two main characters are dead and the book begins to twist and turn around the event of their death from several directions until their whole story is finally pieced together.
I want to share one of my favorite little books because, though a book of only 255 pages, it contains much of the practical knowledge to be had in 1893 when it was published. I've spent several hours wandering around inside this book since I received it as a gift from a friend in New York, and I expect to spend several more doing the same.To Clear Your Dwellings from Bed-Bugs
Corrosive sublimate and the white of an egg, beat together, and laid with a feather around the crevices of the bedsteads and the sacking, is very effectual in destroying bugs in them. Tansy is also said to be very effectual in keeping them away. Strew it under the sacking bottom. Common lard, or equal quantities of lard and oil, will destroy or keep them away. The best exterminator is black hellebore pulverized. It is a deadly poison to them. Place it where the bugs will be apt to crawl.
I'm one of the lucky ones, at least for the time being, whose daily commute to the office is only 15 minutes each way. For that reason, I've been kind of slow to take advantage of all of the Books on CD that my local library has on offer these days. Fifteen minutes really doesn't allow me enough time to make much progress towards completing one of these "books on tape," and I generally find myself listening to them a bit at home in the evenings just so that I can get them returned on time.
Obviously, anyone who looks forward to spending time on half-dozen or more book blogs each day has a reading problem...and that's a good problem to have. We not only read 50-100 books every year, we want to know what perfect strangers are reading and what they think of the books we've read. We're so afraid to miss anything that we find ourselves drawn to any article that has the word "book" in it. We feel about our favorite writers the same way that others might feel about movie stars or singers; they are celebrities to us, be they dead or alive and no matter in what century they lived. When I started in this profession five years ago — I used to teach English — I presumed that librarians were mostly united in their attraction to books. But as I moved along in my library science program, I found that books weren't really our focus. Information management, database networking and research tools claimed the largest share of the curriculum....
In other words, literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.
Students are still checking out the standard research fare — the Thomas Jefferson biography, the volume of literary criticism on Jane Austen — but few read it. The library checks the books back in a day later, after the students have extracted the information vitals — usually an excerpt or two to satisfy the requirement that a certain number of works be cited in their papers.
Conventional wisdom has it that teenagers don't read because they're too busy. Only after high school, sometime midway through college, do young adults reconnect with their childhood love of reading and make books their partners for life. I don't think so anymore. The 2004 Reading at Risk report by the National Endowment for the Arts concluded that literary reading was in serious decline on all fronts, especially among the youngest adults, ages 18 to 24, whose rate of decrease was 55 percent greater than that of the total adult population.
I've long admired Walter Mosley's "Easy Rawlins" series of books and I've enjoyed his non-Rawlins books almost as much. The fact that the man has such a successful track record with me probably explains my surprise and disappointment in Fortunate Son.
