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We have a friend (she shall remain nameless) who collects pictures of girls with guns. She thinks Uma Thurman should do more movies like Kill Bill (so does our husband; perhaps we should set aside our aversion to violence and check this movie out). She likes tough, strong women. She’s not alone — and for […]

The most interesting aspect of this New York Times article on online research is, paradoxically, missing from the headline and the lead (is this what they call sexing up the news?). Of course college kids use Google to do research. It opens up lots of free time to download music. Seiously, why the “Gee Whiz” […]

Did we mention the highly commercial nature of children’s books? Not, of course, that we’re suggesting anything of the sort is the reason behind the new partnership between LEGO and Scholastic. That would be cynical. After all, it’s easier on the kids of they already have pre-written stories about their LEGO characters rather than making […]

We once attended a conference where, in separate sessions, Allison Dickens of Ballantine and Stacey Creamer of Doubleday suggested the publishing industry looks to other media for trends. This, by the way, should not be news, and they were talking about “hot” topics for fiction. But that’s another posting. Now it appears publishers (and agents […]

Book reviews are weird. We only have to look at the weekly review section in The Los Angeles Times to know this (yes, we are talking about the fact that they simply cannot review any of the books that appear on their bestseller lists…it’s like an allergy or something). And readers we know tend to […]

“I want more than anything else in my life to be published – to read my reviews and to see people buying my book. That would be a thrill on a par with losing my virginity, getting married and getting my first job.” (from Pile ’em High by Simon Trewin, The Independent) Yeah, writers are […]

Okay, we do; we simply thought this story would die a rapid death. We never imagined it would flare back to life over the weekend. Let us begin with a tale of two books, both on our shelves. Both in distribution. Both sporting the same title. A rapid scan of Amazon reveals the title, in […]

We were hot on the trail of the Slate story on bestseller lists last week (we felt we had something to add to the knock-down-drag-out…oh wait, we never even read it). Imagine our frustration in being unable to access the story. Especially since everyone in the world had read it. It turns out the story […]

Okay, seriously, we’re agog. Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman work in the same room. We would kill our husband if forced to endure such circumstances. That’s not true. We wouldn’t have the opportunity to commit murder. He would surely snap first. Unless the commencement of our room-sharing experiment coincided with the airing of Seven Second […]

One of the things we find most amusing in life is Harlequin bashing by those who’ve never read romance. We freely admit to a wide and varied library and even more wide and varied tastes, and we don’t discriminate against any type of reading material (except, perhaps, dubious celebrity “autobiographies”). We won’t try to change […]