Let's hit it:
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Redefining a Little Library is a recent article in the NYT about a miniature book collector. I love miniatures and, obviously, I love books so I find this irresistible. Wouldn't you love to browse through his dollhouse library?
Speaking of miniatures, did you know that UNL is home to The Kruger Collection of Miniature Furnishings and Decorative Arts?
I wonder where they get the little stands that hold the dimes.
My #fridayreads this week is Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. I've loved her books ever since my boss at the bookstore put Behind the Scenes at the Museum in my hands and just said, "You have to read this."
What are you reading?
She ranks My Antonia among her top 3-5 favorite books of all time.
Oh Wow. Can I do this? This is a list that's always in flux. Dubliners. The Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney. Pale Horse Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter. My Antonia by Willa Cather. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Ask me next week and the list will be different.
I recently read and enjoyed her novel Fever, based on the life of Typhoid Mary.
I'm drawn to the extremes—my favorites are either the clean, minimalist rooms or the most cluttered.
This is neither, but Charlotte Bronte!
And I could sit here all day:
Maria Gagliano of Slice Magazine shares her experiences as an editor as part of the Encounters in Publishing series.
But for all the heartache that manuscripts can cause, I never imagined my biggest battles would have nothing to do with what lies between the pages. The real woes, the ones that have made me question my life choices, usually revolve around one thing: the cover.
(via Shelf Awareness)
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This is a great project. Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl started a site called Go Mighty so that people could post and share their lists of life goals. Goals cover just about anything you can think of—from redecorating a room to learning the trapeze to writing a thank you note to your favorite author(s).
. . . Closing the book, I felt overcome. I set it on my chest and felt the weight of it while I breathed.
I chase that feeling when I read. The one that makes me want to find the author, pour them a drink, and leave them to bask in the glow of their efforts. Damn.
(via MightyGirl)
My #fridayreads this week is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. I love her books! One of the highlights of my life was the conversation I had with her (ok, we tweeted, but that still counts, right?).
What are you reading?
Flavorwire gives us Fascinating Photos of Famous Authors as Teenagers.
GalleyCat started a list of books that make people cry. Books make me cry all the time. In fact, I'm much more likely to cry while reading a book than while watching TV or a movie. One book that really made the tears flow is The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg. I read Berg's book way back before Nooks and Kindles and iPads. Back then I used to read on my Palm Treo, and no one sat around coffee houses reading on their Treos. Except me. It must have looked like I had gotten a really sad email or text.
This has been around for a long time, but it's always fun. Add yours in the comments area.
Instructions: Copy list
Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
Add <3 to your faves (I added this).
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte <3
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee <3
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte <3
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger <3
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck <3
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Caroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis <3
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood <3
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez <3
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett <3
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In French)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
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In case you don't already know, FridayReads is about sharing the title of whatever book you are currently reading. It was started by Bethanne Patrick (aka @TheBookMaven aka @JustBethanne) with the #fridayreads hashtag on Twitter, but there is also a Facebook page for it.
Because we believe that reading makes the world a better place, every Friday, thousands of people post what they're reading to celebrate and encourage reading.
If you're on Twitter, I encourage you to scroll through all of the #fridayreads. It makes me happy to see all those people reading all those books and maybe it'll make you happy, too.
This week my #fridayreads is A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy. It's the last book she wrote. I'm hoping that I've missed one of them along the way just so I have the possibility of more of them to read.
Amazon's list includes new ones by Kate Atkinson and David Sedaris that I can't wait to read. I don't see Mary Roach's new book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, on there. I'm definitely looking
forward to that one.
Of course, I'm also eager to read some of our books: Haven's Wake by Ladette Randolph, From Society Page to Front Page: Nebraska Women in Journalism by Eileen M. Wirth, Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior by Brandon R. Schrand, and Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich. And I really could use a copy of Your Midwest Garden by Jan Riggenbach.
(via this Tumblr. Warning: occasional NSFW language)
Alan Rinzler edited Toni Morrison, Hunter S. Thompson, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Ludlum, Dee Brown, and the list goes on and on. He also writes a blog called The Book Deal: An Inside View of Publishing. Many of his posts give advice on writing and getting published. However, in my opinion the best part of his website is what he calls "author scrapbooks"—behind-the-scenes stories about working with these famous authors.
Happy Friday!
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This has kind of been everywhere lately but it's so lovely that I thought it was worth posting. I think this is my favorite:
That's the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. UNP happens to be the publisher of founder Sylvia Beach's book of the same name. The New Yorker said that
Miss Beach's book is intimate, not scholarly, and thus full of interesting information. Her reminiscences are literally an index of everybody in the twenties, and she knew them all.
(from Maggie Appleton's tumblr)
I think this sounds fascinating (both the fact that he picked the subject out of a hat and the book itself):
Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten picked the subject for his next book out of a hat. Literally.
Blue Rider Pres will publish One Day in 2015, “a non-fiction account of the events of a single day, chosen at random, in American History.” The book will focus on the randomly selected date of December 28, 1986.
Sketchbook, February 2013 from Seb Lester on Vimeo.
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BoingBoing calls it "possibly the greatest ad for books, ever." I don't know about that, but it is pretty cool.
(click through for the full image)
I learned about this site from Twitter, specifically from @ljndawson and @ChrisKubica. Chris Hughes (@ChristofHughes) created a website that
breaks down the novel ‘Dracula’ into dozens of tiny pieces, and then strings them together again over a map, connected with the story’s internal timeline. . . . you can watch Dracula gradually move towards England, just as Mina is wondering what has happened to her husband-to-be. Which is fun.
The tagline reads "search. discover. read. share." I'm a sucker for book recommendation sites. However, I'm very lazy and I'm not going to enter all of the books I've ever read in order to get a recommendation. It's one of the reasons I'd be interested in a service that could mine all of my online activity in order to recommend books (as I mentioned in a previous post).
Bookish was founded by Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group (USA) and Simon & Schuster. One thing I like is that you can browse the site without creating an account. Obviously if you want to save lists of books you've read or quotations you'll have to create one.
I tried out their recommendation feature and I think the results were pretty good. I'd use it again. One disappointment was that one of my favorite books, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, isn't on the site at all (there are currently just over 250,000 books listed). I was surprised the number was so small given the quality of the results.
Here is an example of the results. I used the book A Sandhills Ballad by Ladette Randolph:
Not bad. As you can see, you have the option to click "more like this" under each suggestion to refine your results.
Do you browse books on Pinterest (or pin them)? I didn't at first but a while ago I added a Books board. It's currently a mishmash of bookshelf/library pictures, books I like, and quotes. I should probably split them up into separate boards.
The University or Nebraska Press has a Pinterest account and my coworker pointed out a while back that looking through our books on there is a really nice browsing experience. Maybe it's the nice, big covers. I like browsing by season but there are boards organized by subject as well. Formidable Females is another favorite.
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"small, warped, and bookish" -- What could possibly be better than that?
Marc Giai-Miniet is a French artist who makes creepy and fascinating dioramas that tend to feature reproductions of human organs, crime scenes, submarines in basements, and, wait for it … libraries.
“Three Machines Want to Know”
Eugene G. Schwartz has put together a helpful list of publishing conferences along with descriptions of each.
Best Tumblr ever?
Joe Wikert points out that
Just because I’m Facebook friends with you doesn’t mean we have the same reading interests. In fact, I’d be willing to bet my reading interests don’t map very well to any of my friends, real or virtual. . . . We try to take one aspect of our lives and have it spit out book recommendations. That model is doomed to fail every time.
In a way it sounds scary, but I'm also attracted to the idea of a service that could mine all of my online activity in order to provide book recommendations.
Library ladders and spiral staircases galore!
(via @Weegee)
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Let's start with some bookish links of the local variety . . .
I remember how highly anticipated the new books in this series were back when I worked in a bookstore. We always had standing orders for these (the only other series I remember having standing orders for was UNP's Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition). Anyway, the final book became available this month. It's called A Memory of Light and you can see what it looks like being printed and assembled in a photo essay on the Tor website.
After it was hinted that Chuck Hagel could been nominated for secretary of defense, author Charlyne Berens's phone started ringing. Here she is talking about what the last few weeks have been like for her. (Hint: pretty busy)
Her biography of Hagel has just been released in paperback. You can find it wherever fine books are sold. :)
GalleyCat has kindly pulled together a bunch of links so we can read free samples of all of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) finalists. I was happy to see some University Presses on that list--congrats to University of California Press, Harvard University Press, University of Chicago Press, and Northwestern University Press.
I'm a big mystery fan so I always look forward to the Edgars. I loved Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and I think that's the only one on the list that I've read. Based solely on the titles and covers, I have added two of the nominees to my TBR list. The first one is All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley (ok, this one is also based on the author).
The second is More Forensics and Fiction: Crime Writers' Morbidly Curious Questions Expertly Answered by D.P. Lyle, MD. (holy moly is this right up my creepy alley). Here is the description
How do hallucinogenic drugs affect a blind person? Will snake venom injected into fruit cause death? How would you perform CPR in a helicopter? What happens when someone swallows razor blades? How long does it take blood to dry? Can DNA be obtained from a half-eaten bagel? D. P. Lyle, MD, answers these and many more intriguing questions. . . . From traumatic injuries to the coroner’s office, the questions and answers are divided into five parts, making it a compendium of the incredible information that lies within the world of medicine and forensics.
Sadly, the Goosebumps series came after my time. Little Jana would have loved those books. (Instead, I had The Three Investigators. Oh, how I longed to have a junkyard headquarters!)
If that video left you confused, here is R.L. Stine explaining it to you.
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Happy New Year! Let's get started . . .
The University of Chicago received a package addressed to “Henry Walton Jones, Jr.” Once they realized who that was they set to work trying to figure out exactly what they had and who sent it to them
The package contained an incredibly detailed replica of “University of Chicago Professor” Abner Ravenwood’s journal from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It looks only sort of like this one, but almost exactly like this one . . . The book itself is a bit dusty, and the cover is teal fabric with a red velvet spine, with weathered inserts and many postcards/pictures of Marion Ravenwood (and some cool old replica money) included. It’s clear that it is mostly, but not completely handmade, as although the included paper is weathered all of the “handwriting” and calligraphy lacks the telltale pressure marks of actual handwriting.
The mystery was eventually solved.
BookRx recommends books and categories that you might find interesting by analyzing your Twitter activity. It was created by Shawn O'Banion and Larry Birnbaum at Northwestern University's Knight Lab, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
Here are some of the recommendations for me (@jfaustus):
(via Phil Bradley's weblog)
In Director Dish, Donna Shear recently posted about some of her favorite words. The Atlantic Wire gives us the opposite--a list of the worst words coined or overused in 2012. Personally, while I'm sick of hearing the word "artisinal" I don't mind the word itself. However, I really hate "baby bump" and I'd like to add "adorkable" to the list.
Oh, I like this very much.
As if from nowhere from Orla Reynolds on Vimeo.
(via unclutterer)
You've seen blurbs even if you didn't know what they were--they're those quotes of praise that appear on book covers and jackets. Shteyngart is such a well-known blurber that he has a Tumblr and now a short documentary:
He is also the author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story.
(via GalleyCat)
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In case anyone is looking for a Christmas present idea for me, here you go (posted by A Novel Idea Bookstore):
I've been good, I promise. :)
LitRagger gathers the best small press literature has to offer into one convenient space for people who love great fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Our titles consistently publish work featured in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies.
The collection includes Prairie Schooner.
(via Galleycat)
Charles and Jenny used it to print the covers of their wedding programs.
They went from this: To this:
You can see the step-by-step on their blog. (via IKEA Hackers)
Maggie Koerth-Baker, the science editor at BoingBoing.net wondered the same thing. Check out her post--it includes a link to short audio commentaries on the winter of 1880-1881.
I'd never had a real clear idea of what "the train can't get through" really meant, not being totally clear on how to adjust snow-clearing expectations from today back to the 1880s. But, as it turns out, when the train company said they couldn't get the trains through, they were not messing around.
I know I'm not the only one obsessed with giant squid.
Mankind finally confronts the greatest mystery of the deep as the first-ever footage of a live giant squid in its natural habitat is revealed in Discovery Channel’s Monster Squid: The Giant Is Real, which premieres on Sunday, January 27, 2013 at 10/9c as the season finale of Curiosity.
Greatest mystery of the deep!
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