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Summaries of chats and announcements are posted to the right. Use them to add to your own TBR piles and for collection development.
Links on the far right of the site offer information useful to readers advisors.
Hope to see you during our next chat,
GalleyChatters
The faux picture book phenomenon, Go The F**k to Sleep, gives parents a chance to vent their frustrations with their recalcitrant offspring. But why should parents have all the fun?
Be honest; you’ve felt this way on at least one occasion:
The above is a panel from “Learn to F*cking Search” on Emily Loyd’s comic blog, Shelf Check.
Earlier this week, we highlighted what we thought was one of the funnier of the Royal Wedding books, Knit Your Own Royal Wedding (Andrews McMeel).
Turns out it’s been one of the biggest-selling titles in the UK and is currently out of stock in the US. The staff the Everett Public Library in Washington State actually took up the challenge and knitted the entire wedding party. The resulting display gained coverage from the local newspaper as well as CNN.
Compare the photos below — we think the Everett Public Library knitters’ results are even better than those in the book.
Photo Credit: Everett Library staff
Of course, it was tough to predict exactly what the family would wear, but the knitters got one thing right — Kate Middleton, confounding expectations, wore a tiara.
Take a break from all you have to do before tomorrow and watch this inspired piece (be sure the sound is on!):
We wish we had gotten it together to create a fun holiday greeting. We didn’t, so we’ll just steal this one from those creative folks at Chronicle Books (love the use of the company logo and the dancing CEO).
Happy holidays to all our wonderful EarlyWord readers (try to imagine the EarlyWord bird swooping into the scene).
Starring the Chronicle staff, in order of appearance:
Laura Bagnato, Marketing Designer
Alex Sheehan, Special Sales Manager
Nion McEvoy, Chairman & CEO
Ben Laramie, Industrial Designer
Dean Burell, Managing Editorial Director
Anna Carollo, Marketing Design Coordinator
Jack Jensen, President
Emily Craig, Marketing Designer
Kelly Abeln, Marketing Design Fellow
If you want to find out more about the creation of this stop motion video, check Chronicle’s behind the scenes blog post.
UPDATE: We’ve received several correct answers — these are all based on movies. However, we are looking for a more SPECIFIC answer!
HINT: These movies based on books are tied together by a person who will receive a major award on Jan. 22
To take your mind off all you have to do between now and tomorrow’s feast, we offer the following quiz.
Below is a list of books. If they were in a display, what would tie them together (other than the obvious)?
Bonus question: Why would this display be particularly relevant right now?
Please try to answer without the aid of reference books or Google (in this case, we DON’T want you to cite a source!)
Compare your picks of the most overrated contemporary writers with critic Anis Shivani’s list of 15 in the Huffington Post (you can also vote on his selections).
Number 15 is NYT Pulitzer Prize winning critic, Michiko Kakutani.
Up next, Shivani promises to list the most underrated authors.
Merriam-Webster is highlighting their incredibly knowledgeable staff in a series of Ask the Editor videos on YouTube.
Try memorizing each one to astound (or irritate) your friends (subscribe here).
Here’s hoping this one has a positive effect on my own grammar (via HuffingtonPost.com):
What’s the most over-the-top book blurb you’ve ever read?
The UK’s Guardian has their nominee, one that they call, in a bit of understatement, “strikingly effusive.”
It comes from Nicole Krauss (recently named one of the 20 best writers under 40 by the New Yorker, she is the author of The History of Love and the forthcoming Great House) for David Grossman’s To the End of the Land,
Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.
The last line prompted critic Scott Esposito to write on his blog, Conversational Reading, that he thinks he can live without having the place of his own essence touched.
The Guardian is running a contest for readers to create an outrageous blurb, for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. They chose that title because, “…we don’t want to make it easy for you by letting you blurb a book which may actually be good, like Grossman’s. ”
No winner of the outrageous blurb award has been announced yet. Our vote goes to the following, which manages to match the tone of Krauss’s blurb, in far fewer words,
I was so enamoured, beguiled and enraptured at the thought of reading the The Da Vinci Code, I decided not to. Therefore, I also urge you not to, lest the spell is broken.
Meanwhile, The Guardian says that, apart from the blurb, David Grossman’s book sounds “extremely interesting. The story of an Israeli mother, Ora, who sets out for a hike in Galilee with her former lover in order to avoid the ‘notifiers’ who might tell her of her son’s death in the army…”
The book will be published here in September. There are no prepub reviews so far.
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