Books/Mags/Blogs

If you are to poll women about men in fiction (which you don’t have to do, because, helpfully, this has already been done), you will find, not surprisingly, a large number of votes for Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Cherry Potter, writing for the Guardian, thinks this confuses modern men — and perhaps modern women. We doubt women are mislead, but we feel it incumbent upon us to explain life as we know it: there is reality and there is fiction. Reality often involves verbal faux pas and laundry. Fiction involves verbal faux pas intentionally and laundry if it’s […]

Better minds than ours have sliced and diced the Kirkus paid reviews decision. Questions like are they crazy, won’t this destory their hard-earned reputation, and is this an ethical approach have been debated and answered. We won’t bother with our thoughts. Okay, we will. Is it our fault we were born with an opinion on everything? First, to answer the question posed by the Christian Science Monitor: no. When one pays a lot of money (and, given the income to output ratio in self-publishing, $350 is a lot of money), one doesn’t want to be trashed in the process. To

Sarah Weinman’s crime fiction review column has debuted at the Baltimore Sun. Not that we’re surprised, but her reviews are honest and succinct — just enough to intrigue, not so much that reading the book will be anti-climatic. And she’s strengthened our resolve to try the Sujata Massey series as soon as we can. Murders in big cities; violence in small towns (Note: registration required. Sigh.)

If you’ve ever spent time in certain conspiracy theory circles, the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail is mentioned. Curious, you might read it. Perplexed, you might wonder how it is that so much history went unreported. Well, there are lots of versions of history. One could spend many lifetimes tracing them all out. Not being any sort of scholar, we cannot advise on the historical accuracy of anything. We can say that sales of certain books are certainly increased by the sales of other books. As always, this joyful news is greeted with a lawsuit. We applaud modern courtesy, though

We broke up with our local news a little over a year ago. It was painful — especially when we said goodbye to Mark Thompson, our beloved weather dude. We still long for glimpses of him, so much so that sometimes we see really bad movies because he’s often hired to play, well, weathermen. They say time heals, but we aren’t sure. We do know it was a relationship that had to end. We spent far too many nights shouting at the television. They say you shouldn’t go to bed angry; we did, far too often. We hear that this

See, the truth is, we’re not always all worked up about things. For example, right now, we’re very happy to note that Tim Rutten has been promoted and, as part of his new duties, will be overseeing the Los Angeles Times Book Review section. If we weren’t so pleased about this (and we are because we enjoy Rutten’s columns), we would note that this might actually get us to read some of the words in the Book Review instead of our usual looking-at-the-pictures approach to the whole thing. Rutten upped

We’re off to pay tribute to the Meeting Gods again and our city is anticipating the Fall equinox and, with it, the start of Awards Season — how amazing is it that the ancients predicted the demarcations of seasons so accurately way back then? News is light today, probably (because if it were up to us) a four-day weekend seems quite logical for many. The good news is we have a nice, long rant to post later. The joy, the joy. Speaking of ancient, why does book distribution still follow old models? With some effort (you call it coffee, we

If you are looking to us for breaking news, we have a confession: sometimes we hold back on stories for days or weeks. Like last week, when we heard that science fiction was given last rites. Oh yes, we could have gotten the news to you right away, but our intensive research (yes, we went into a bookstore and looked around) indicated the situation was not nearly as dire as indicated. We made the decision, perhaps it was a bit too parental of us, to hold the news back from you. If this affected your life in any way, we