Library Steps Sale: Pictures

The bimonthly steps sale is just a tip of the iceberg compared to Friends of the Library’s annual book sale in September. Books at the steps sale are not organized in categories or genres. You have to go through all the tables on which three rows of books are shelved with spines facing up. Most [...]

Library Steps Sale

If finance is not a factor (so is storage space for some), bibliophiles and readers would shop until they fall at the bookstores. What if all books are $1 each and the money will benefit the public library? Summer sees the return on the public library’s bimonthly steps sale. Do you bring a list of [...]

The Distance from Popularity

This week’s musing asks: What do you think of books that receive a lot of hype? (think of the “Twilight” saga, or “Harry Potter”, or “The Da Vinci Code”). Do you read them? Why, or why not? If you have the Wii game console, you would be familiar with the weekly poll of trivia questions [...]

’10 Favourite Reads Highlight

As per the the recent post on rating, and the halfway mark of the year calls for a mini review of books read in 2010, I’m looking through the right sidebar-ful of books and ask myself a simple question? What do I remember about this book? Since it’s irrelevant (and almost unfair) to compare books [...]

How to Use Reviews

Do you read book reviews? Do you let them change your mind about reading/not reading a particular book? The book blogging community has become my primary source of book reviews since I started blogging about four years ago. Until that point I relied on the book sections on newspapers which actually showed the first sign [...]

[296] The Hour Between – Sebastian Stuart

” I wanted to live in safe little rooms like that, busy with small domestic chores, away from the pull of my fevered needs and confusion of my future. ” [11:93] The Hour Between reads like an amalgam of different coming of age stories. Set in 1960s New England, the charmer of a novel is [...]

[295] The Sea – John Banville

” I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational consideration, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will [...]

Top Favorite Genres

This week’s musing asks: Name your top 2-3 favorite genres (the ones you read most from). My top genre, of course, as I have discussed and reiterated, is literature/literary fiction. Although this blog does not review literary fiction exclusively, my goal to to draw a distinctive line between popular fiction and literature. Next to literature, [...]

Thoughts on Rating

I read an interesting and thoughtful post on rating a book and I like to share my thoughts. Rating (i.e. 5 stars and so on) it self is a subjective matter. The experience in reviewing books on Amazon (which requires a rating of up to 5 stars) brought to awareness that such a rating system, [...]

[294] The Gospel According to Jesus Christ – Jose Saramago

Tribute to Jose Saramago (1922-2010) I mourn the passing of one of my favorite novelists, Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who died on June 18 at the age of 87. A provocative thinker and inimitable stylist, Saramago often polarized public opinion. His works, which often feature ordinary people in [...]