The Librarian Next Door

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but the northeast is facing a humidity wave that’s making me crazy. Thank goodness most books can double as fans. While I cool off, here’s this week’s book news.

• A couple of weeks ago, The Millions posted an in-depth interview with Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist who was jailed for six months on trumped-up espionage charges. Thanks to international diplomatic pressure, she was spared from having to serve the eight-year sentence she was given. In the interview, Saberi talks about her new book, which details her ordeal. I had the great pleasure of listening to her speak in April at Simmons College’s leadership conference. She read from the book, which is very well-written and fascinating. Worth a read for sure.
• Kindle users, rejoice! Last month, J.K. Rowling and her agents confirmed that they are – finally – “actively” looking into various e-book options for her beloved Harry Potter series. Rowling was (and technically still is) one of the more prominent and favorite authors on the “no e-books” list. While there’s no deadline for when or if the Harry Potter books will appear, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
• Thanks to a fellow book lover on Twitter, I came across this multimedia graphic from the New York Times, which highlights the different places of literary New York. Favorites like Stuart Little and The Catcher in the Rye all mention the Big Apple – this map very handily gives you a glimpse at all the literary mentions of the city. Sometimes the most memorable character in a book isn’t a person at all.
• The New Yorker magazine recently released it’s somewhat regular “20 Under 40″ list of the best young fiction authors. It’s a list that’s published roughly once a decade and while most literary bloggers and critics probably recognized the names, I only found a few that I had heard of before. So either I’m really out of it or these people write stuff that few people read. And just for fun, The Millions decided to speculate about what such a list from 1970 or 1999 might look like, as if to try to determine where the current 20 under 40 might be in 30 or so years.
• So that’s how it’s done! Rebecca of The Book Lady’s Blog wrote a guest post for The Book Case in honor of the first-ever Book Bloggers Convention, offering advice to neophyte book bloggers looking to make their way in this world. She offers a lot of practical tips and suggestions, some of which I had heard before and some I hadn’t. It’s a really great “how-to” for those fledgling book bloggers like me, hoping to find their niche in an ever-increasing part of the Internet.
• Curiouser and curiouser. It’s a book…that’s also a chair. Intriguing, except I don’t think it’s a book that you can actually read. Regardless, I think I want one.

Enjoy your weekend, bookworms!