Book Tantrum! ! !: fiction

Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts

What is President Obama Reading?

According to the New York Times, President Obama is heartily sick of dense briefing books. While filled with facts and figures that demand solutions, required presidential reading does not fire up the imagination. Joseph O'Neill remedied all that with a ready to go book. Netherland: A Novel is what Obama reads in his new Treaty Room office digs inside the private residence.

It is a meaty novel from an Irish author who explores the complexities of diversity in an immigrants traumatic life who shares his thoughts with some one so unlike himself that shares the immigrant experience. Layered atop that is a touch of tilting at cricket windmills as the protagonist rebounds from the bumps in his life journey. Book sales for the award winning book ought to jump significantly with the Obama acknowledgment. Not sure yet of Obama will give books an Oprah-like swarm affect. The book is older than the Obama puppy by about 6 months. In the past year several awards accrued to Netherland.

Not exactly sure where the book Hugo Chavez gave him falls in the line up. One thing is clear, President Obama would have to get an English version if he was so inclined.

Other nonfiction books by Pultizer Prize Winner Steven Coll and Fareed Zakaria's latest, The Post-American World, have been seen in Obama's hands. Click here for books that shaped Barack Obama's youthful thinking while living the life that led to his own Grammy-winning memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Book Festivals & Book People

Bibliophiles come in all sorts of skin bindings, page palettes and an assortment of thicknesses and tallness. Gathering book people together happens when local folks organize to put on a book fair or festival. Those come in all sizes and genres too. Even the current First Librarian Lady gets into the gig with her big event on the Washington mall named the national Book Festival. For the past eight years, this event kicks off for the bow tie and formal gown bookies with Laura Bush inviting a host of authors - this final year including herself and her daughter, Jenna, to present works at various pavilions.

On the other side of America, the 7th Annual West Hollywood Book Fair has 400 authors playing to an erudite, hipster laid back LA crowd in a park. In San Francisco, home of the West Coast cultured literati and big earthquakes comes the aptly named Litquake. Litquake morphs into Litcrawl then deigns to visit the outpost of Manhattan.

Book gatherings of this sort are manna for booklovers like me for the panel discussions. It affords the deeper understanding of author intent and displays the scope of detailed research that goes into penning book, be it a novel or footnoted seventh wonder of the nonfiction world. The other bonus is being around authors and seeing how their forceful writing may come from somebody who mumbles. Great stuff.

Brisingr: The Inheritance Cycle Opening Day

Science Fiction and Fantasy make for some of the greatest books ever written or read. The line divider from good book to great novel is the amount of an author's fired up imagination allowed to light great sparks in a reader's mind. Montana teenybopper Chistopher Paolini unleashed the gift with a teenage boy and his blue iridescent dragon, Saphira with the plague of King Galbatorix and his evil minions in Eragon. Saphira is a law unto herself and quite the conversationalist telepathically.

Formerly, Paolinis' books were to be three in the Inheritance Trilogy, which magically morphed into the Inheritance Cycle. Hormones, sacrfice and sibling rivalry marked Eldest as Eragon becomes elven in his pursuit of justice among friends and foes. Good stuff. Potter people say their stuff is better. Paolini fans think great first start in a kid who invented a whole world complete with maps, a la Tolkien.

Whatever happens, I shall wait interminably until enough people hit my tip jar to get my own copy of Brisingr. The name will make no sense whatsoever to the Inheritance virgins. Its elven, meaning fire - which is blue when it come s from Eragon, not Saphira, who is perfectly capable on her own of blowing smoke rings.

Unfortunately, the movie divebombed - though I liked it well enough.

Sex and The City Goes High School Retro

Ugh, after leaving high school one way or another, you relive it every day for the rest of your life. At work, the ever present suck ups were first class apple polishing brown nosers as students, the smart kids wearing geeky glasses and corduroy nerd smurfs are the ones everybody reads about later amid the consternated who knew diatribes. Bullies become bosses and wimp whining is about somebody who missed saying a daily hello. Now, Candace Bushnell wants to give obsessions with zit facial placements on today's cool kidz, raging teenage hormones and the beginnings of a designer shoe fetish as a prequel with Sex and the City-like style.

As a TV show, it was an amusing look at a very vanilla group of four women with sex on the brain just inside the outer edges of chi chi Manhattan's "it" circle. It's coming with a real grabber of a title - The Carrie Diaries. Wow, just imagining reading about her first Mr. Big for some hapless 14 year old could spark some prickly discussions as her dénouement was in a family rec room after smoking a joint with an 11th grader.

Bushnell, 49, has signed a deal for the books, which will be titled The
Carrie Dairies, with the children's division at HarperCollins. The
publisher said they would take "readers back to Carrie Bradshaw's formative years in high school, giving an inside look at Carrie's friendships, romances and how she realised her dream of becoming a writer".

HarperCollins promises the books will be on the Young Adult shelf in 2010 because
the goal is a crossover audience - teens and boomer matrons - known as their moms. Yep, that's a demographic female grouping with a lot in common.

Heather Mills More Fiction Tour

Heather Mills is an ex-everything. Now the ex-wife of one of the Beatles is setting her clutches on a keyboard to turn herself into a celebrity novelist. I can't wait for the official ex- on that chapter of her life either as her first try was her now hopelessly out of date memoir.

Once upon a time, Heather Mills, a former semi-working model was married to

a knighted multi-millionaire songwriter chap named Paul McCartney after the tragic loss of his first wife and soul mate. That cantankerous coupling sank to the bottom of a spittoon of vitriol as accusations and courtroom theatrics supplied by the ex-Dancing With the Stars on one prosthetic leg contestant used publicity-seeking crocodile tears to weave a fantasy tale of being an abused and neglected wife. Her McCartney excited to get rid of the drama queen settlement of £24.3 million or almost $45 million dollars will not fill the hole in her 10 sizes to small heart. Heather Mills bragged, claimed, boasted that she would finally earn her philanthropic cred by donating most of her ill gotten marriage gains to Adopt-A-Minefield. She's an ex-donor promise keeper now.

Now The Sun has uncovered Mills hasn't handed over a penny, since receiving the windfall six months ago.

A source revealed to the paper, 'They have waited in vain for their millions. She's had plenty of time but sadly it's yet another untruth by the queen of lies.'

Heather Mills ex-PR flack suffered suffered a long delayed attack of the Revenge of the Rented Publicity Flacks conscience, stating Heather made the stuff up about Sir Paul to get on American TV. Mills untruths hawked by Michele Elyzabeth proved so cha-ching tempting to Heather that the gray ethical line imprisoning her from speaking of her ex-mate magically disappeared with her agreement to imagine a fictional treatment of her ex-wonderful life that supposedly will just wow us huddled masses into paying for book tripe masquerading as truthful fiction from a really rich hanger on who lied to a charity and was basically called a liar by a British judge.

Parenting Advice From Britney Spears Mom Shapeshifts to Memoir

Spare me. Save trees. Do not expend brain cells on the pageant of irony

that a bound non-comic book, distributed through a Christian bookstore, about parenting from Britney Spears' Mom would bring a reader. The aptly named cotton candy of how to parent books, Through the Storm: A Real Story of Fame, Family in a Tabloid World, streaks onto the stage amidst a seeming turnaround from her eldest daughter's serial tragic life. From being a ten year old Disney Mouse person, pop princess, a 55 hour Vegas marriage, annulment, KFed & his prior baby mama drama, marriage, Madonna kiss, babies, divorce, custody fight, ticket, child welfare investigation, rehab, baldness, rehab, court, tickets, fender bender, the saddest TV musical comeback followed by a besotted brainless press corps acknowledging her appearing normal as a ditsy receptionist on The Office. She is only twenty something and her father is her court appointed conservator. Britney is bouncing back.

Mommy Spears learns in the midst of Britney's drama saga, that her other Disney daughter is preggers at 16 and she delivers a baby girl, Maddie, at 17. Lynne gets a new granddaughter and it is deemed safe to release the book before anything else happens. Now it's a doorstop masquerading as a memoir rather than a tome on parenting after all that success. We are so in for a prank, Pulitzer or fireplace fertilizer starting on September 16, 2008.

Ludlum Franchise Fritters Away Bourne Legacy

The quill of Robert Ludlum developed a style that made him a legend in his lifetime of the spy thriller. After his departure to a permanent heavenly psyops, the Ludlum Enterprise hired folks to write under his banner - blech. They should have just become a publishing company and offered an endorsement and let the author rise or fall off a cliff from their own lack of merit. One of Ludlum's iconic characters, now a Jason Bourne movie franchise, exists on a one dimensional monetary plane that isn't taking off for this reader.

Ludlum once lamented the draconian and dreary traditions of the staid publishing prison that decreed fast writing reflected poorly and too many books in a certain amount of time must be kept in abeyance to protect the public from becoming bored. There's a reason publishers get into trouble, their thinking is still remains lodged in controlling a Gutenberg press and who gets to use it. Ludlum or his heirs sped this disaster along by letting his name be used sort of like ghostwriting in reverse. Please make them stop after releasing the one from last week. If you have it at the beach, take mercy on it and leave it buried in an abandoned sand castle.

Eric Van Lustbader have you no pride or imagination for your own brand or styling yourself as original. Killing Bourne's life anchors to scribble a new story arc was predictable. I really hate the Bourne books now. My respect remains for the Bourne books Robert Ludlum wrote and has only his name on the jacket. Whether with a speed typewriter or painstakingly, I appreciated his work.

Twilight, Teens & Vampires

Completely missed, ignored or insanely oblivious to the whole brouhaha happening in damp Forks, Washington. No worries because Harry Potter wasn't working for me until Order of the Phoenix. Jordan, Edward mix it up over a teenager character named Bella with a bit of a Goth twist in a rainy landscape. Some book people and editors at Entertainment Weekly have completely fallen out of the trees onto their pointy heads hyping the Twilight series as the next Harry Potter, uh no. It does have just under 2,000 people gushing over it on Amazon.

Bringing the funny to the comparison is the Edward Cullen actor in the Twilight movie was Cedric Diggory in the HP movie, making that the only tie between the two media entities. Bella burgers and midnight parties are rare with few authors drawing crowds to offset the event costs. In September, Brsingr the third installment of the Christopher Paolini fantasy series will bring out a fair few fans too.

Movie kickoff for Twilight holds a last choice in a 3 for $20 sale DVD appeal. However, the artistic book jacket for Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyers kicks ass. Supposedly it's the last one in the series, we will see after everybody finishes counting their filthy lucre while seeing the clamor from the bitingly committed teen girl fan base.

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