Book News Round-Up

Hey there, bookworms and wormettes, it's time for another installment of the Librarian Next Door's Book News Round-Up.

• It's about time! Barnes and Noble recently announced it would finally offer free wifi in stores. This comes on the heels of the launch of the new B&N e-bookstore, a venture aimed at taking on main competitor Amazon.com, no doubt. I'm still wary about e-books, but you can bet my Macbook that I'll be using the free wifi.
  
• Someone does not like Peter Jackson. The would-be wizard who brought the world the Lord of the Rings movie (and did a great job at adapting them, in my opinion) is now getting ready to film an adaptation of Tolkien's The Hobbit. But Tolkien's heirs want to stop production on the film and claim they are owed millions of dollars in profits from the previous films. Personally, it sounds like sour grapes to me, but maybe that's just because I really want to see what Jackson and Co. can do with this book, after their succcess with the others.
  
• The Globe is coming, the Globe is coming! The acting company for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London will tour in the U.S. this fall. The theater, a near-perfect replica of the theater Shakespeare himself worked in, is located on the Thames and the company performs Shakespeare's play in the authentic Elizabethan open-air theater. The tour will perform Love's Labours Lost throughout the U.S. from October to December. The closest it gets to me is Holyoke in December and you better believe I'm going to try to get there.
  
• A long list of finalists for the 2009 Man Booker Prize was released earlier this week. The Man Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best full-length novel published in English by an author from Ireland or a British Commonwealth nation. The long list includes A.S. Byatt, who won previously for Possession. Other previous winners include Salman Rushdie and Iris Murdoch.
  
• It ain't over till it's over. The legal battle over the "sequel" to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is far from resolved. Earlier this month, a judge blocked publication of the sequel, saying it was too similar to Salinger's own work. Now, the Swedish author of the sequel has appealed that ruling, claiming the judge went too far in saying that the copyright extended to characters and character names. You'd think that if you pissed off the author you're trying to emulate, that would be a clue to back off, right?
  
• Last, you have to check out the trailer for Tim Burton's live-action Alice in Wonderland movie. While I enjoy the Disney cartoon version just fine, this movie looks so visually stunning and fantastic, I can only hope Lewis Carroll, wherever he might be, approves.