AOL's Book MavenI'm reading as fast as I can...A Thing to Flout- November 29, 2006 I'm sure many of you are familiar with 'Outwitted' by Edwin Markham: "He drew a circle that shut me out-- Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!" Well, I have "a thing to flout" this week, and it's the new Thomas Pynchon novel. 'Against the Day' is "the mysterious author's" first book in ten years. Like many Important Novels, it received not..http://journals.aol.com/bookmaven2005/blog/entries/2006/11/29/a-thing-to-flout/2594 Holidays 2006: Gift Choice 1 for Bibliophiles- November 28, 2006 I found this via Gawker, but wanted to share the original link: Penguin Books has come out with a new line called 'My Penguin' that allows readers to design their own covers for six different titles (all rather highbrow ones, including 'The Picture of Dorian Grey' by Oscar Wilde and 'The Waves' by Virginia Woolf). There's an online gallery, too, which I found irresistible mainly because the first entry is by a five-year-old...http://journals.aol.com/bookmaven2005/blog/entries/2006/11/28/holidays-2006-gift-choice-1-... Cyber-Monday!- November 27, 2006 I'll have my Holiday Gift Books List up later today (I talked about it on WABC-TV NY last weekend, and I have to tell you -- just buy the Scharffenberger chocolate book -- you won't be sorry!). I have a lot of different things on it and am already thinking of the many books I couldn't include, overlooked, etc. Sigh. Such is the Thanksgiving holiday of a book maven, who visits her friends' and families' homes mainly to prowl their bookcases. However, it's "Cyber-Monday," that media-coined..http://journals.aol.com/bookmaven2005/blog/entries/2006/11/27/cyber-monday/2592 Plagiarists' Plague- November 22, 2006 If anyone else wrote these words before, I don't want to know; but I will probably find out. Because now there is a way to know. While reporter Paul Collins shows that the likelihood of sentences being accidentally replicated winnows with length, I still believe -- having studied enough medieval and Renaissance authors who tore hunks of each other's manuscripts off as freely as Henry VIII did turkey legs -- that the real problem is not with copied words, sentences or paragraphs -- it's with...http://journals.aol.com/bookmaven2005/blog/entries/2006/11/22/plagiarists-plague/2587 |