Author name: Booksquare

Grumpy Old Bookman (via Susan Gable, who might just be promoted to research assistant if she doesn’t watch herself) points us to another in our series of “Look At That, The Girl Can Think” stories. In today’s episode, on a show called University Challenge, the Romance Novelists Association (the British version of Romance Writers of America, or perhaps it’s the other way around) firmly trounces the team from Wisden, which is the cricketers bible and run by people with, and we quote, “…an astonishing memory for obscure facts and statistics. And, naturally, they are all educated chaps.” Despite such a

We work this morning with the powerful sense that finding book-related news would be as easy as, well, opening our laptop. Wrong. It is as if the world took the entire weekend off. We cannot understand what could be happening — it seems like something should be catching our attention. In unrelated news, it appears that reading is on the rise. If you factor out high schoolers (and there is a small but vocal group who strongly believe that this is the least one should do during these difficult years). Though it is entirely possible that another study, completely contradicting

Sometimes, we think that the Los Angeles Times believes that pop music isn’t real music. After all, there are sections called “Music” and “Pop Music”; jazz doesn’t really get its own section, per se, but sort of tags on the end of pop. This has always been confusing. In the wake of tragedy, Charlotte Church singing about being a Crazy Chick can seem at best an irrelevance, at worst a trivial distraction, but people don’t just listen to music to salve their souls and ease their consciences. Pop is there to raise a smile, to give us something to dance

We have to admire those who put themselves out there. We prefer to hide our embarrassments, but, according to those nice folks who invented the Meyers-Briggs test (we presume they came from the fine Meyers and Briggs families, though we’re not entirely sure have our information straight), it’s not our fault. Thus we live vicariously through the struggles and triumphs of others. Like Thomas Shess, who not only wants to sell his novel, but also wants to take us along as he tries: he second week of my search for a publisher or a literary agent for my novel was