May
9
Here’s this week’s round-up of book news I though was interesting and newsworthy. Just consider me your very own personal gatekeeper to the world of book news.
- J.R.R. Tolkien’s legacy continues to live on via his son, Christopher, who has published several Lord of the Rings books (under J.R.R.’s name) based on his father’s old notes. The newest book, The Legend of Sigurd and Gundrun, is based on Old Norse myths and poetry and was written while Tolkien was a professor at Oxford, before he wrote The Hobbit.
- The thesis of Barack Obama’s mother will be published in book form. S. Ann Dunham’s anthropology dissertation from the University of Hawaii (titled “Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia”) will be published in December by Duke University Press.
- Want to be a book reviewer? The Book Publicity Blog has a great post about how bloggers can go about requesting complimentary review copies. It’s got a bunch of practical tips, as well as insight into what publishers might look for in a reviewer. (via the Inkwell Bookstore Blog)
- Just when I thought I was all caught up with gadgets and gizmos, Amazon introduces the Kindle DX – the “latest generation” of wireless reading devices with a nearly 10″ screen. What’s the point in making a wireless reading device bigger, if the whole point is that’s it’s smaller and more portable than a book?
- It seems my post on the collision of technology and literature came at an opportune time. The Readerville blog brings up a PC World article about how technology is changing literature. The article brings up the idea of the zoom narrative, “a visual story, with white text on a black background that makes the actual appearance of the words — whether blurred, twisted, or different sizes and fonts — integral to the plot itself, as you zoom in on it to follow the story through.” Stayed tuned for more about this, as the PC World article intriqued me and I’m likely to write about it in more detail later.
- The PEN American Center announced its 2009 literary awards last week, with the Career Achievement award going to Cormac McCarthy. Fun fact: McCarthy was born in Rhode Island, just like I was!
- Ammon Shea’s book, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, was released in paperback this week. Shea spent a year reading all 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary and discovered a number of fun and interesting words that have fallen out of fashion, including empleomania (“a manic compulsion to hold public office”) and zabernism (“a misuse of military authority”). The L.A. Times listed its favorites on its blog this week as well.
