Thursday, August 02, 2007

The weekly bookish roundup

What bookish news has piqued my interest this week? Not much, as EVERYTHING still seems to be revolving around Harry Potter. When will it end? Thankfully, I've managed to glean a few non-Potter articles that you might also find interesting. If not, I tried.


Hooray! A new Poet Laureate will be announced today. Ted Kooser is my all-time favorite Poet Laureate, but I'll give Charles Simic a go, especially since he has a new collection coming out next year. Simic is the fifteenth poet to be named to the position, and he "has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as essay collections, translations and a memoir."


Now we turn from good writing to bad: if you suck at writing, you can still be a winner -- at least, next year you can, because this year's winner of the worst writing contest has already been announced. The Texas Pages BookBlog covers more samples of this bad writing here, if you care to read more.


Moving from bad writing to bad covers (and some good ones also), it seems book covers were all the rage this week, as I found more than a few articles focusing on them.

  • First, PaperCuts examines the best covers of the year, or you can go right to the source for many more.

  • This blog, however, is a funner (yeah, I said it, funner) place to go for bad book covers.

  • And, last but not least, The Guardian has an interesting article on musicians designing covers.

What about a book without a cover? Is it still a book? What if the "cover" only exists online? Jacket Copy ponders whether a book is still a book if it’s online. What do you think? (I say no. Well, maybe. Aw, hell.)


Finally, his? her? whatever's book Sarah was aiight (except I gave it away, which tells you something), but who knew a stunt would cause an author this much trouble? This will teach you to be dishonest. Or avant-garde. Or insane, whatever the case may be.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

hahah- funny bad writing dude. I think he was in one of my early writing groups.