Funds Raised for Global Literacy:
$10,184,799.20
Books Re-Used or Recycled:
63,271,794

Ready Set WriMo

Posted by Geoff on 10.31.2008 at 2:50 pm

Today (Halloween) is actually the eve of National Novel Writing Month (more affectionately known as NaNoWriMo). What is national NaNoWriMo you ask? Good question. NaNoWriMo is 100,000+ people around the world, each committing to write a 50,000 word novel in November. It’s like a support group for folks that don’t want to carry out their dream of writing a novel – with a crazy deadline.

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It's NaNoWriMo

Some facts about the event:
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News from the Front

Posted by Jack on 10.30.2008 at 2:49 pm

Your faithful blogger is at home after shoulder surgery and currently typing with one hand.  Anyone want to suggest a good Speech Recognition Program for me?

In the meantime, expect a podcast and some more book reviews coming your way as next week the blog gets regular posts from other employees including:
-CEO and President, David Murphy
-Co-founder, Xavier Helgesen
-Queen of all things Green, Kelly Franco
-The (interviewing) Voice of the Blog, Dana Barrett
-Resident Storyteller (and side splitter) Chip Boyes
and…
-The awesome group that is our Antiquarian, Rare and Collectable Division, headed by the enigmatic Rudy Reyes

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eReaders, continued

Posted by Jack on 10.29.2008 at 10:20 am

We’ve been talking quite a bit lately about eReaders, so I thought this particular article was germane.  We receive Fast Company at the office and this month’s edition appears with Robert Scoble talking about early adopters and, wouldn’t you know it, the Kindle.

Read more…

2 Comments » | Tagged Uncategorized, , ,

White Tiger wins Man Booker Prize

Posted by Jack on 10.28.2008 at 1:18 pm

The White Tiger, written by Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize.  From the website: “The Man Booker Prize promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year.  Adiga is the fourth debut novelist to win the prize.

Also from the site:
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Book Review: Lila by Robert Pirsig

Posted by Jack on 10.28.2008 at 10:30 am

Everyone has a favorite cult book.  Maybe it’s Fight Club, maybe it’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, maybe it’s something else.  For me, it’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Robert Pirsig does an amazing job of exposing the less philosophy educated, but interested, in a whole new way of thinking about the world.  As a young man brought up in a Catholic household, his concept of “Quality” as the divine, in its way, was racy and delicious.

Fewer have read his effort: Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.  Lila delves deeper.  In the same way Atlas Shrugged was used as Ayn Rand’s soapbox after priming the pump with the superb “The Fountainhead,” Pirsig knows you’re bought in to an extent, so he’s going to dive in deep.  At one point he chirps “Metaphysics is a diner menu with 30,000 pages and no food” and thusly seems to wash his hands to the need for food in the text.  He weaves around a story down a river, as opposed to on a bike, with his own morality in his sights and that of other characters, be they real or created for the vehicle of the story.

Fundamentally, the problem with Lila becomes not that it fails to entertain; it is dense but appeals to the inquiring mind.  Rather it is that this text is a kind of basis for the same mysticism based new-age philosophies that become relative and in their relativity become dangerous.  Although Pirsig thankfully shies away from “The Cloud of Unknowing” concept in which any attempt to attach names to “the Divine” furthers us from understanding it, he still clings to the fact that connotation refracts the light of knowledge and thusly obfuscates the reality of experience.  Even in his oft-cited example about a hot stove and the “low quality experience” of sitting on it, he muddles something tangible and physical with conclusions much deeper than “that was uncomfortable” opting instead for the “dynamic” nature of realizing the issue andb amending it and the consequent “static” nature of writing into your mental code “do not sit on hot stove.”

Regardless, Pirsig’s writing is clean and anyone interested in the concepts will be satisfied not only by his execution, but by his elocution.  And besides this is the stuff that dorm common rooms were made for.

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Week in Review: October 20-24

Posted by admin on 10.27.2008 at 12:56 pm

What you may have missed last week…

-We rolled out the red carpet for ambassador and representative alike
-It was all Greek to us
-We got down with the “World’s Biggest Book Drive”
-We got down again, this time with the Great American Book Drive
-Everyone loves Biblioburro! (except my boss who banned me from saying it again at work…)
-We love good Scotch, especially the Better World Books variety
-Can the movie ever live up to the book?
-Dana poured through Vince & Joy
-We listened to some economics a la Steinbeck
-We rd bks in txt, lols!
-We had our first Top Ten List.  “Best movies based on books.“

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Book Review: Practicing by Glenn Kurtz

Posted by Jack on 10.27.2008 at 11:30 am

When we get entrenched in something that takes so much of our day, be it work, a significant other, or the curious amalgamation of the two in the form of our “craft” (be it writing, playing music, dancing or whatever), we often fail to see anything else.  As someone who went to school for classical guitar and English, I picked up Glenn Kurtz’s Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music.  I figured “Hey, I lapsed from guitar too and need to return!  I like to write too!”  But even I, in my love of these simple joys have trouble at times delving into the indulgence of Kurtz’s writing.

His tacit statement of genius is part of the affect of the book.  I get that.  His descriptions of the music and practice are excellent, Read more…

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Top Ten Friday: Movies Based on Books

Posted by admin on 10.24.2008 at 3:55 pm

Today’s Top Ten list is best movies that came from books.  Brad came up with some fantastic rules for this so I’ll let him do the honors on that.  Oh, and there were 15, not 10, yes I cheated but it was way too hard to make this only 10:

-First, BOTH the book and the movie have to be great.  That eliminates such luminaries as Starship Troopers (same, by Heinlein:  GREAT book, but only a good movie.  Underrated, but still only good) and The 13th Warrior (Eaters of the Dead – Crichton: GREAT movie, but the book… not so much.)

-Second, it must be a book, not a short story.  Read:  The Shawshank Redemption (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, of course) and A Christmas Story (In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash – Jean Shepherd) are out.

-Third, I eliminated the Lord of the Rings trilogy because it’s a trilogy.  Felt like cheating.

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6 Comments » | Tagged Book Lists,

2 B or Nt 2 B?

Posted by Jack on 10.23.2008 at 3:09 pm

Going along with my previous Book Bench stolen post, an my love for conversing about the deterioration (or, ahem, development) of language, here is a brilliant effort from folks writing in with their text versions of novels:

Last week, we asked readers to e-mail us their text-message versions of great works of literature. We couldn’t quite decipher all the entries we received, despite consulting individuals half our age, but there were a number of laudable efforts. Among our favorites was this distillation of Herman Melville’s tale of the proto-slacker Bartleby the scrivener, penned—er, thumbed?—by Kate Laubach, of upstate New York. Note the woeful exclamation points:

Bartleby prfrs nt 2. B frm DedLetrOfice. !B! !Humanity!
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Economics and the Grapes of Wrath

Posted by Jack on 10.23.2008 at 1:06 pm


The following is an excerpt from an interview with John Steinbeck (as culled by The Book Bench at The New Yorker), concerning his mindset while writing the epic The Grapes of Wrath. One could argue that it is fairly germane.


When I wrote “The Grapes of Wrath,” I was filled, naturally, with certain angers—certain angers at people who were doing injustices to other people, or so I thought. I realize now that everyone was caught in the same trap. If you remember, we had a depression at that time. The Depression

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