BookLamp.org is a new website that is similar to Pandora — it creates algorithms and breaks down your book preferences by main themes. For instance, if you liked White Teeth, then Booklamp discerns that you’re into: Culture, Life/Death/Spirituality, Extended Families, Explicit Language, and “Elements of Time.” This results in some odd recommendations, such as The Cestus Deception (Star Wars: Clone Wars) by Steven Barnes. (Really? Because we are just never going to be in to that.) However, another suggestion was The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis, which makes some sense. So click through and see what hilarious, interesting, and arguably accurate choices we found on our trip through the site.
Read More »
Otto Penzler’s new anthology The Vampire Archives is a collection of 86 of the scariest vampire tales of the past few hundred years; the book pulls pieces from an eclectic group of writers who range from Lord Byron to Stephen King. Inside you’ll find classic tales (Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest”) mixed in with lesser known works, and few contributions that might surprise you.
“I think one of the best stories in the book is a Gahan Wilson story, ‘The Sea Was West As Wet Could Be,’” Penzler explains. “But Gahan Wilson is famous for being a cartoonist. He does a cartoon for every issue of Playboy and just about every issue of the New Yorker. Wonderful, horrifying cartoons. And hilarious.”
More of what Penzler has to say — about everything from Neil Gaiman’s foreword to the reason why tweens love Robert Pattinson — after the jump. Read More »
Continuing last week’s emphasis on the now cliched vampire romance genre, we saw yet another copy of Twilight, and yet another hideous Charlaine Harris cover, this time on Dead to the World. The designer could take a cue from Kelly Link’s first two collections, which feature creepy but beautiful covers painted by Shelley Jackson. When we saw a young woman reading Stranger Things Happen, we had to restrain ourselves from squealing and accosting her to demand if she’d gotten to “The Girl Detective” yet.
More on what New York commuters are reading after the jump.
Read More »
Seen on the subway this week: a high schooler reading Club Dead, the third book in the Southern Vampire Mysteries series by Charlaine Harris, which HBO’s True Blood is based on. We read the first in the series, Dead Until Dark, last weekend as part of a personal campaign to understand popular and profitable fiction, and enjoyed it more than we expected. Vampire boning aside, Sookie Stackhouse is no Buffy Summers (she’s a 25 year old virgin — at the beginning, anyway — and spends more time thinking about her clothes than a member of the Baby-sitter’s Club), but she IS telepathic, and can kick some ass when the occasion calls for it. That said, upon seeing Club Dead, we realized that Kindle had made our pleasure possible — there is no way we could have gotten past the super fug cover art on the paperbacks. Preventing judgment by cover is a unsung benefit of e-reading!
More Big Brother Book Clubbing after the jump.
Read More »
As it has only been available since October, we weren’t too surprised we hadn’t spotted a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 on the downtown 1 train; even though Farrar, Straus, and Giroux can boast of what seems like unprecedented buzz for the title. We can’t think of a recent novel that has titillated the literary community this much, and this rapidly. It took Harry Potter and Twilight a few years to catch on, right? Bolaño’s popularity in the United States has gradually risen over the course of the past couple of years, but anticipation for 2666 mounted months before the release.
Read More »
