Melting Pot of Literary News

Insert mass amounts of money here please, but wait, for a book?!?!

According to Bookslut, Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier will be getting paid "$8 million, 17 NFL teams, and the state of Delaware for his new novel, Thirteen Moons." The real question is, what NFL teams, that would be the difference maker for me if I were signing a book deal. But seriously, wow, and this coming from a guy who had to self publish Cold Mountain and sell it to Indie bookstores before it was picked up by the big guys. I'm very excited to present you with Thirteen Moons' first review by Kirkus, in which Kirkus states that Thirteen Moons is "One of the great Native American, and American stories, and a great gift to all of us, from one of our very best writers." This book has been on my Amazon Wishlist since June when I first heard of it, I loved Cold Mountain and the setting and plot of Thirteen Moons sounds too delicious for me to have to wait until October for (*insert pout here).

Beware! The more you know, the more you are permanently harmed.

As seen on The Millions, the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." This list was constructed by the conservative weekly Human Events and has left some distaste in my mouth by some of their choices. As The Million says, "That the list also lumps books like Mein Kampf together with The Feminine Mystique should also make people queasy." The top ten include:

1. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Tse-Tung
4. The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey
6. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes

I also like the comment on The Millions, "I have to assume it wasn't a mere oversight that Ann Coulter's books didn't make the list." Hmm, I would think not.

Here are some interesting comments about these "harmful" books.

It's like your inside a real bookstore, but you're not. Ah, virtual bookstore, that's the word I'm looking for.

Browse inside HarperCollins' books with their new "Browse Inside" feature. This will allow users to flip through pages of books online, starting with titles by Isabel Allende, Geraldine Brooks, Paulo Coelho, Bernard Cornwell, Michael Crichton, Karen Kingsbury, C.S. Lewis, Lisa Scottoline, Robin Sharma, and Rick Warren, but the plan is to roll it out to all of the publisher's titles.

In the future, authors will be able to link to "Browse Inside" pages from their blogs, and HarperCollins also hopes to allow users of social networking sites such as MySpace to link to pages from favorite books.

Reading's so dirty!

Please vote for your favorite Naughty Reading Entry over at Edward's Champion's Return of the Reluctant. You know I did!

Wog Girl Meets Flash Flood.

A great interview of Amra Pajalic on Flash Flood's blog, two of my favorite bloggers! Check it out.

The End

That's all I've got for now, I may add more later, but since it's 4:30pm it's not very likely.