Books/Mags/Blogs

Sure, we’re lucky, living in a major metropolitan area. Finding decent book coverage is as easy as opening up the Los Angeles Times every Sun–oops, scratch that (for more details on our faux pas, check out The Elegant Variation, link right over there). By necessity, book review sections are limited in scope. Newsprint costs cold, hard cash, you know. Also, they are limited by the editor’s taste. We (barely) got past our amusement at the fact that industry professionals had to sit down at a discussion about reviews to agree that, yes, reviews are subjective. We do not understand why […]

So, as is our wont, we have been thinking about blogs quite a bit lately. Specifically, our thoughts have rested upon the differences between cheese sandwiches blogs and purpose-driven blogs (sorry, couldn’t resist). We believe the former have an important place, but the latter have potential. For example, history buffs could look to the example we found via LA Observed: Imagine a blog that does nothing but noirishly count off the days in 1947 Los Angeles, felony by bloody felony. Stabbings, gunshots, suicides, interspersed with photographed visits to the scenes of the crime today. 1947 (Yeah, we’re gonna make you

We look forward to our weekly issues of the Powell’s newsletter — we cannot help but be entranced by the journeys and trials of Fup, Store Cat. No, we don’t immediately scroll down to the latest installment…sometimes we stop and read the other stuff, too. Like this article, which begins in such a lovely, self-effacing manner: I may look like your normal bookstore employee — facial stubble, nerd glasses, untucked shirt, jeans, scuffed shoes, the little red sticker that says “INFO” on it — but I do much more than serve customers and shelve books here at Powell’s. I get

There is something wrong with this world. Or maybe there’s something wrong with Newsweek. Possibly both. We were fascinated by their coverage of the Japanese trend of blogs-to-novels (or as we like to think about them: True Confessions, blog style) right up until the moment that we finished the article and allowed our roving eye to latch upon the next short item. Tom Perkins, ex of Danielle Steel, had an idea for a novel. Wait, we must begin at beginning. Tom Perkins was invited to participate in a reality show (something like Who Wants to Marry a Billionaire). It all

We cannot pinpoint the source of our excitement, but this story about The New Yorker’s “spots” piqued our interest. Hmm, much in the way that series of coffee commercials, when we realized it was a series, made us look more closely at the television (we got over this). Perhaps it is the sense that you’ve caught the inside joke before anyone else. Because, after all, how many people the New York Times? Ten? Twenty? Now all we have to do is slip another magazine into our teetering pile without the husband noticing (apparently we’re “cutting back” — we have no

We have long held a theory we call the Cookie Jar Effect. Quite simply, it is that people want what they are told they cannot have. There are many corollaries to this theory, including the one that suggests opposition increases revenue. People are more likely to try to read, watch, or hear art that someone feels is offensive. Our more cynical side often thinks such controversies are nurtured by the artists, but that may be because we have so little faith in the kindness of strangers. Maybe this is why we immediately wonder if Chinese censors are secretly working for

There is a writing exercise — we’re sure you’ve all played along — where the class is given three items and instructed to construct a story (or at least a paragraph) including all items. The last time we participated in this, there were exploding fish and dead bodies. And those weren’t even on the list of three items. Naturally, the point of the exercise is to illustrate that authors, even when given the same elements, will construct vastly different scenarios. Let us take a moment to admire the human brain. Surely a weirder creation has never been invented. This was

It is a rare day when we can combine two of our favorite things into a single post. Such is our excitement, we have held off all day, hoping the thrill would diminish. It did not. Thus, we bring you Edward Wyatt profiling Dan Brown. You read that right. If we didn’t have a mandate to live to age 113, we would die happy right now. They discuss, via email, the pressures a certain book has placed on the author. Darn those higher expectations, the problems with celebrity (hey, we sympathize), and the fact that characters don’t give a rip

Lest some think we’re cranky this morning (not cranky, just reeling from the screw-up at Yahoo! during our fantasy league’s two screwed up drafts this weekend; suffice to say that somehow Yahoo! placed our keeper and team captain, Albert Pujols, on our team, as is proper, and three other teams. We do not share well.), we will express our delight in this essay about ghostwriters. It is a fine morning for sarcasm, and we are responding accordingly: But in recent times a cloud has begun to hang over the deliciously vaporous world of ghostwriting. This is because greater transparency about

Guesting over at Beatrice, Jennifer Weiner takes up Ron Hogan’s offer to continue the conversation started last week (or the week before that, we can’t say which week) by Meg Wolitzer. After dismissing her mea culpas without a trace of guilt, Weiner addresses Wolitzer’s faux guilt over deriving pleasure from chicklit. After all, Weiner sometimes picks up titles from a category she calls The Gray Ladies: Unlike chick lit, which typically arrives swathed in pink with a pair of high heels kicking up on the cover, Gray Lady lit immediately lets you know the gravity of its intentions: Austere fonts