Citizen Reading: 6 March 2017.
06 March 2017
A weekly selection of reading and book news, sometimes with completely inappropriate commentary.
Thoreau's classic Walden...to become a video game.
What topics really get books banned?
Another independent bookseller is hoping to withstand the new bricks-and-mortar version of Amazon.
How a mother-daughter duo helped prison inmates read with their kids.
Book recommendation bots still don't get the job done. Of course they don't.
The March 1 issue of Booklist: ALA's 2017 book lists and a look at women's fiction. Go look at it now; it's freely available for the next week or so only.
Ezra Jack Keats book awards: Winners.
Novelist Paula Fox: Obituary; novelist and biographer Nicholas Mosley: Obituary.
J.K. Rowling teases the Fantastic Beasts 2 script.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan will publish a new novel this year.
British comedian and actor Miranda Hart has a deal to write a children's book.
Call for chapters: for a new book called Library Services for Online Patrons.
RA for All offers a helpful post on book discovery service to homebound patrons.
YouTube is now going to offer YouTube TV, a subscription service meant to take on cable, for $35 per month.
Is someone FINALLY telling it like it is about The Shack (even if they're saying it about the movie version)? Here's a line from a review of the new movie: "This film version of Young’s book, which runs an interminable 132 minutes, is an offensively simple-minded, pseudo-religious sham that relies on kitschy imagery to put across its inane message of forgiveness." AMEN.
MMMMmmmmm...the smell of old and rare books.
NONFICTION BOOK NEWS
I want to read this: The Complacent Class. Although: maybe not. Here's what I read about the author, Tyler Cowen, when I looked him up at Wikipedia: "In 2012, David Brooks called Cowen one of the most influential bloggers on the right, writing that he is among those who "start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way." David Brooks, ugh. Bloggers from the right, double ugh, broadly libertarian premises, super ugh.
Gillian Anderson (Scully!) has co-written a book titled We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere. (Related: Novelist Chimamanda Adichie has written a book on a similar subject, titled Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions.
A new trilogy of books about FDR is expected.
Alec Baldwin to be a co-author on a satirical book about President Trump.
A new "professional development" title for librarian types that looks good: Nonfiction in Motion: Connecting Preschoolers with Nonfiction Books Through Movement.
Barack and Michelle Obama both have new book deals.
Patricia Cornwell will not stop insisting that she knows who Jack the Ripper was.
New York Times: Stalin and his relationships with Russian scientists; YUMMY: a book on food and culture and history, and it's illustrated!; Kay Redfield Jamison tells poet Robert Lowell's story "through the lens of his bipolar disorder," Jamison is a noted expert on the topic of bipolar disorder; a new biography of Elizabeth Bishop; following a variety of women as they go walking in cities; on the "surprising role of Jesus in Islam"; a new look at Pontius Pilate, just in time for Lent and Easter (what Christian doesn't know this line from good old Pontius: "Truth! What is Truth?" Pontius could have been talking about the nature of nonfiction); a new book on physics (that I will not understand even if I read it).
BOOK LISTS
IndieBound: Bestselling books the week of March 2.
Bustle: the 9 best fiction books coming out in March. I can't wait to read the new Jami Attenberg title; I LOVED her novel The Middlesteins.
Library Journal: Best reference titles of 2016.
PBS Newshour: 5 books that will "make you think about what it means to be human." Here I want the book by a guy named Chuck Collins, titled "Born On Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good."
Flavorwire: Must-read books for March.
Amazon: Ten best books of March.
School Library Journal: 37 stellar new titles for March.
Ten Spanish-language authors you need to check out.
Not a book list but still a lot of fun: 15 most underrated genre TV shows of the last decade.
MY READING NOTES
CRjr got a new book on sharks this week so we've paused on reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "Farmer Boy." CRjr could read about sharks until the cows come home.
I, on the other hand, re-read Wilder's "These Happy Golden Years" and "The First Four Years." The second book, about the first years of Laura's marriage to Almanzo Wilder, holy cow, what an unrelenting tale of misery and hardship on unforgiving farm land in South Dakota. And yet she managed to end it on an up note. When she talked in the end about farmers being optimistic, it made me remember my dad (a farmer) and cry.
Looking for something lighter, I am making my way through David Simon's (he who created the TV show "The Wire") investigative look at homicide detectives working in Baltimore: "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets." It's so sad, I can't read it at my usual speed; I have to break the bleakness up into twenty-page chunks or so. And this is coming from someone who reads a lot of True Crime! Mr. CR suggests that perhaps my sense of "lighter" reading is a tad messed up.
AND NOW, YOUR OBLIGATORY NEIL GAIMAN POST
Neil Gaiman has signed a "first-look TV development deal."