Sunday, December 31
The end of the year
Seems like I should say something profound.
I guess that counts.
I guess that counts.
Thursday, December 28
More print on demand
Another peek at the future? The Espresso is a $50,000 vending machine with a conceivably infinite library that prints books on demand. The machine can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes, including full-color laminated covers. Crazy? Or crazy/brilliant? I wonder if I can slip my novels into their hard-drives?
Wednesday, December 20
The Blizzard of Ought-Six
Tuesday, December 19
Book of the year
OK, it's three years old, but I finally got around to reading it: Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. I think this is a great book. It's got scope, scale, amazing/beautiful detail, vivid set pieces and a collection of empathic, sympathetic characters spanning three generations of immigrants from Greece who land in Detroit and survive as that city changes from the 1920s to the 1970s. The plot keeps moving, it covers a lot of ground and nearly every character is mostly likeable. It's big, it's ambitious and it works. It fairly earned its Pulitzer Prize because it's a great novel about America. Here's a Powell's interview with the author; another interview by JSF (see below) and a Salon interview. And his Bloomsbury author page.
I read some 35 books this year, and this one stands out as the best. My honorable mentions would have to include Lamb: the Gospel of Biff, Christ's Childhood Friend, the best of the seven or eight Christopher Moore's I read this year, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, which might be the first book I've ever immediately read through a second time after finishing it the first time (which I did back in April) (half of his Everything is Illuminated made me laugh out loud, too).
I read some 35 books this year, and this one stands out as the best. My honorable mentions would have to include Lamb: the Gospel of Biff, Christ's Childhood Friend, the best of the seven or eight Christopher Moore's I read this year, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, which might be the first book I've ever immediately read through a second time after finishing it the first time (which I did back in April) (half of his Everything is Illuminated made me laugh out loud, too).
Friday, December 15
Questions, anyone?
The editor of the Times Book Review answers readers questions. Thanks to Nick for the heads-up.
Friday, December 8
Print on demand
Study up, young authors, what the techno-brainiac Kevin Kelly says: "As commercial book publishing crashes, personal book publishing is booming. Personal book making entails printing high-quality books in very small quantities, including quantities of one. New technologies permit anyone to print one copy of a softcover or hardcover book, including all-color photo books. These printed-on-demand books are indistinguishable from commercially printed books. In fact, some of the books you buy on Amazon are manufactured with this same technology. You just can't tell the difference." More.
Tuesday, December 5
Whew
Saturday, December 2
Blogger beta
So, I guess I was an idiot and moved all my blogs over to Blogger in Beta, as they were begging me to do. And now I've lost all my WYSIWYG editing tools, so I can't upload photos, make easy hypertext links, and so on. I can't even edit the text size as before, so now it looks like I've written this post for kindergartners.
Sorry.
And sigh.
Sorry.
And sigh.
Friday, December 1
Video of the day
