This may be the most
bizarre book ever. Mad props
for the title, though.
Might be nice stories
without the heavy thwacking
of moral lessons.
Perfectly captures
the selfishness of pre-teens.
A winning debut.
P.S. "Grabowskys." "Grabowskys'." Or if you prefer, "Grabowskies" and "Grabowskies'." Just please, for the love of God, NOT "Grabowsky's."
Somewhere in here there's
a lightsaber/electroshock
therapy joke.
P.S. Happy birthday, Boy Scout!
The clues fly fast and
furious: a convoluted,
high-stakes muddle.
I read with interest this blog post over on Freedom to Tinker about the Google Book Search folks talking about finding and fixing errors in their giant catalog, metadata errors especially. The conversation seems to have largely started at this post on LanguageLog and gotten more intersting with follow-up comments from folks at Google. One of the things we have all learned in libraryland is that the ability to trawl through our data with comptuers means that we can find errors that might have otherwise stayed buried for years, or perhaps forever. Of course comptuers also help us create these errors in the first place.
What’s most interesting to me is a seeming difference in mindset between critics like Nunberg on the one hand, and Google on the other. Nunberg thinks of Google’s metadata catalog as a fixed product that has some (unfortunately large) number of errors, whereas Google sees the catalog as a work in progress, subject to continual improvement. Even calling Google’s metadata a “catalog” seems to connote a level of completion and immutability that Google might not assert. An electronic “card catalog” can change every day — a good thing if the changes are strict improvements such as error fixes — in a way that a traditional card catalog wouldn’t.
I-Am-Woman facts
and brio: good! Dippy
cheerleader tone: not good!
Didn't expect to
like this as much as I did.
Smart, wryly funny.
Two parts scary brilliance
to three parts School of Duh.
All hail marketing!
You'd think a Tony
would buy a better proof-
reader. (It's WILLson, folks.*)
* And this is only one example. In the same section, "My White Knight" becomes "My White Night" not two paragraphs later. [bangs head against wall]
Slap-happy Plum blows
up more cars, gets laughs. But is
she phoning it in?
308 pages.
Quebecois campers
teach feckless teen life lessons,
outdoor skills, curse words.
It's Graphic Novel Week at emilyreads!
Magician, acrobat,
unknown grandfather. Filmmaker
seeks and finds.
Remarkably fresh
take on autism from an
atypical boy.
The fact that I knew
the story did not make this
any less awesome.
Didacticism
wrapped in a clever little
magical package.
Scholastic/Levine, 2008, 128 pages.
Nothing new under
the sun -- or the projection.
Sharp but unfinished.
Notaro profits
from our collective schaden-
freude. Snorty fun.
Charming and sweet (if
hard to read objectively).
Grace nails emotions.
Gosh, I wanted to
like this more than I did. Just
take a Xanax, eh?
Doopsie drama rocks!
But Rapkin wears his contempt
on his snarky sleeve.
P.S. Seriously, did no one read this book? "Competetion"? "Songrwriters"? "Cecilia" spelled two different ways IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH?
How do you know when
sumer is ycumen in?
Stephanie shows up.
P.S. "Excrutiating"? "Garbonzo"?
Back from the ABC studios where I was interviewed for Triple J -- it'll be up as a podcast for those of you who were either asleep or not in Australia (which is most of you): http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/ is their website, and I'll put up a link when they send it to me.
Congratulations to everyone else who won -- the complete list of winners and nominees is here (and I'm thrilled that Guillermo got the script Nebula for Pan's Labyrinth, just as I'm sorry that Stephen Moffat didn't get it for Blink, and that Gene Wolfe didn't get it for Memorare -- which you can read at http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/gw01.htm, and which I really, really hope gets the Hugo) (Gene Wolfe has never won a Hugo award. I'm just saying.)
I'm slowly catching up with things I've promised people, one thing at a time. Todd Klein asked if I would do the signed Todd-lettered print after the Alan Moore one, and there was no way I could say no. Then I kept him waiting on tenterhooks until I had an idea, and then I made him tenterhook longer while I worked on it, but eventually I finished something called Before You Read This, which begins
Before you read this familiarise yourself
with the text. Note the position of the escape hatches,
the candles that will light in the event of a forced landing
to show you the way out. The author will make an announcement.
and goes on from there. I'm looking forward to seeing whether it works when read aloud. Todd's got the work-in-progress version of the print up at
Since you're travelling I'm willing to bet this message will get lost in the shuffle, but here goes.
So I'm reading the excellent "Lonely Werewolf Girl" which I'm loving, more than "Good Fairies of New York" I think, but I have a bone to pick. Once I started keeping track, I've counted six typos in the first 233 pages. Maybe this seems like a small number of typos but I find it five typos too many! Don't people get paid specifically to ensure that doesn't happen?! It's driving me bonkers...
Anyway, not meant to be any slight against this wonderful, whimsical, punk rock, wolfy book, but seriously; what's up with that?
-J.
Speaking as someone currently proofreading
The Graveyard Book, who is only certain of one thing: that typos will lurk and creep and scuttle on the edges of the text and, despite my best efforts, jump out and wave furiously at everyone as soon as I'm done, all I can do is sympathise. But you know, the magic of the internet is that Martin Millar, author of both the above books,
has his own blog. It's at
http://martin-millar.blogspot.com/ and
he has his own website at
http://www.martinmillar.com/, where not only can you ask him what's up with the typos, but if you give him a list of them, he can pass them on to his publishers and then they won't be typos in the next edition. Such is the magic of the internet. (Also, you can buy signed books directly from the author at
http://www.lonelywerewolfgirl.co.uk/. Which is very nice of him.)
...
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
These are some very simple questions: Do you ever listen to music when you work on something or does it distract you? Have you ever been influenced by a song or peice of music to write a scene?
And last but not least: What are you listening to these days?
Thank you much,
John
Yes, I often write with music on. It doesn't distract me. Anything that makes me more comfortable and keeps me writing is good. And occasionally I'll reread something I've written and know what I was listening to when I wrote it. (I think it's a good bet that Iggy Pop's song
Passenger was on repeat a lot when I wrote
Sandman 5, for example.) As for what I'm listening to these days, It's mostly up at
http://www.last.fm/user/neilhimself/. Here are a couple of Last.fm widgets that might or might not work -- one of songs that seem to have been played more than other songs in the last month, and the other the Last.Fm "My Radio Station", of songs it knows I enjoy...
The Oxford History of The United States series has won two Pulitzer Prizes, a Bancroft and a Parkman Prize. The newest addition, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe, looks at the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War. Howe’s narrative history shows how drastically America changed in thirty years. Below Howe, Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, looks at how October 22nd resonated throughout America.
On October 22, 1844, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand people gathered in groups all over the United States to watch the sky. They stayed up until after midnight, straining to see Jesus Christ coming out of the heavens. A Vermont farmer named William Miller, undeterred by his lack of knowledge of Hebrew or Greek, had applied his naive ingenuity to biblical study. Calculations based on prophecies in the Book of Daniel had convinced him and his disciples that the long-awaited Second Coming of Christ would occur on this day. (more…)
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By: Emily,
on 11/23/2009
By: Jessamyn West,
on 9/4/2009
Two parts scary brilliance
By: Neil Gaiman,
on 4/28/2008
By: Rebecca,
on 10/22/2007
Mmm thwacking. :)