Borders Books bankrupt

I used to drive a milk cart, pulled by a horse.

Those were the good old days.

I used to enjoy lounging around in book stores like Borders, browsing the travel section, browsing magazines. Enjoying a coffee. (… Libraries didn’t allow coffee, back in the good old days.)

Borders is selling at least 200 of their 500 Superstores. The company is going the way of the milk cart.

There should be some pretty sweet bargains … right?

We should swoop down on the corpse. … right?

… At the Borders Group Inc. store on Broadway near Wall Street, box sets of Stieg Larsson’s best- selling “Millennium” trilogy, including the “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” sat on a table near the door last week on sale for $69.39 — a liquidation markdown of 30 percent.

The set costs half as much on Amazon.com Inc.’s website, where it was listed for $34.58 — with free shipping. Amazon’s Kindle e-book editions were even less, priced at $27.97. At Wal- Mart Stores Inc.’s website, the three books sold for $34.96. …

Businessweek

Even in death, Borders can’t compete.

Last week I took my Mom into a Borders to look at the Kindle. … But the e-reader display wasn’t set up. Nobody on staff would have been able to explain it, in any case.

Borders deserves to die.

Why didn’t they rebrand to become an entertainment / food / drink venue, with high mark-up product on the side. That could have worked. We’d go there for book readings, poetry readings, public meetings, etc. … Something like an Apple store.

Hey, isn’t Borders the big, bad company that killed the neighbourhood bookstore in the film You’ve Got Mail (1998)

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Some of the local bookstores will survive, I predict. Happy that big box Borders is gone from their city.

The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen (1972)

A perfect moment. …

Sitting in the outdoor hot tub looking out over Pismo Beach. Listening to classic Matthiessen as an audio book.

Africa in the 1960s

On the great East African plain it is the human who feels himself the intruder. Here, and perhaps only here, the world is that of the animals. It is they who belong, as humans do not. In the more sensitive traveler this evokes a feeling of being privileged to observe ancient forms, settings and behavior that have survived intact from pre-history.

“Matthiessen has the language to express this feeling of awe…Matthiessen also goes into the relationships between humans past and present in East Africa’s great fauna with many a flash of insight into the instincts each has bred in the other…This is the Africa book par excellence.”

(Saturday Review)


Amazon

Here’s where Matthiessen first met famed field biologist George Schaller, the man he’d join in the Himalayan adventures documented in The Snow Leopard, one of my very favourite books.

Both Schaller and Matthiessen are still alive. In fact Matthiessen in 2008, at age 81, received his second National Book Award for Shadow Country, an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s. (41hrs audio)

social networking for booklovers

There are many options out there (Goodreads, Shelfari, Google Books, Anobii, WeRead), including some good ones for sharing only with Facebook friends.

About 20min research leads me to believe that the best of the bunch is LibraryThing.

It got a great review on PC Mag. And by a user jameswharris.

Check it out at librarything.com.

Sadly, I still find LibraryThing too crude. Having no widget for this WordPress.com blog is a deal breaker. … I’ll wait until something better comes along.

Leave a comment if I’m missing the perfect social network for books.

P.S.

I saw a number of warnings about one competitor, now owned by Amazon – Shelfari. … Avoid.

Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible (1998) is a bestselling novel about a missionary family, the Prices, who in 1959 move from Georgia to … the Belgian Congo …

… to save African souls.

Like most readers, I love how the narrative alternates between the four daughters.

Adah is my favourite.

Adah Price (14 at start of the novel) – Hemiplegic from birth, Adah is silent, brilliant in math and languages, witty, skeptical, sarcastic, envious of her twin sister, and prone to self-pity.

She reminded me a little of the brilliant Norma Cenva, a congenital dwarf, mathematical genius. One of the most important characters in the entire Dune franchise.

And Owen Meany, the malformed dwarf, “God’s instrument”, one of the great characters of fiction.

In some ways the book is cliché, though. I immediately thought of Mosquito Coast (1986) and the brilliant film, The Gods Must be Crazy.

Yet it kept me going strong right up to about page 500. When the women flee after one of the daughters is killed.

The author lived in Congo as a child. The details feel real.

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist about my age who often writes about social justice.

In 2000, she established the Bellwether Prize to support “literature of social change.”

In the late 1990s she was a founder member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock and roll band made up of published writers. Other band members include Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry, and Stephen King. (That must have been fun.)

official website: kingsolver.com

Leave a comment if you liked the book. It’s really got me thinking.

David John (le Carré) Cornwell

Shout out for the most sophisticated and skilled author I read.

John Le Carré is “one of the finest writers of espionage fiction in 20th century literature”.

The former MI5 & MI6 operative published his first novel in 1961. He’s still going strong.

A pseudonym was required, way back when, because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish in their own names.

In 2008 he named his best books:

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The Tailor of Panama
The Constant Gardener

For some reason The Little Drummer Girl is his novel I best remember. Perhaps because I liked the movie with Diane Keaton, too.

I recently listened to Absolute Friends (2003). Every 2-3yrs I feel obliged to read one of his books, to up the intelligence quotient of my average. (The Dune Franchise books are like kindergarten readers, by comparison.)

Next for me is The Mission Song (2006) as I want to learn more about the Second Congo War. (25 armed groups, 5.4 million dead).

I hear the narration of that book by David Oyelowo is superb.

In real life Cornwell’s a harsh critic of the Iraq War.

why are novels so long?

I listened to two audio books lately:

• Under the Dome ~ Stephen King (1088 pages)

• Magic Street ~ Orson Scott Card (416 pages)

Both successful writers, obviously.

I can’t particularly recommend either novel. Both I enjoyed. But both were too long. Long sections that didn’t add anything to the story. Filler.

Novels these days are mostly 80,000 – 120,000 words. But why?… Is it some legacy of the dead tree publishing industry?

As an audio book fan, I’d like to see more concise novels. Shorter novels.

On Audible.com you can search their collection by number of hourse, “Running Time”.

100 Books! Have you read them?

this is a Facebook meme … I’ve read about 40.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. …

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Azimov version)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger … movie
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot … I read the other Middlemarch
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (in French) … only in English
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

iPod Nano watch

This is the best watch band designed to fit the new Nano I’ve yet seen.

It’s not available now. But I’m expecting to see them in the Apple store by early 2011. $40.

I’ll be back to wearing a “wrist watch” after many years wrist naked.

details

Johnny Cash – American Legend

I really enjoyed listening to Johnny Cash: The Life of an American Icon by Stephen Miller.

That’s surprising, since I never liked Johnny Cash. … Not until Rocco insisted I listen to one of his last albums, one of the Rick ReubenAmerican Recordings“.

The original DJ of the Beastie Boys, and co-founder of Def Jam Records, Reuben was the last person one might guess would decide to rejuvenate the failing career of a has been.

After his success with Johnny, …

… MTV called him “the most important producer of the last 20 years.” In 2007, Rubin was listed among Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. …

… Rubin introduced Cash to Nine Inch Nails‘ “Hurt“, and the resulting cover version of it on The Man Comes Around would become the defining song of Cash’s later years….

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

That biography and all the Rubin produced songs are highly recommended. Especially if you’re prone to reflect on death and loss. Cash is incredibly eloquent.

be happy – by Monica Sheehan

… the illustrations and the captions are from the book “Be Happy: A Little Book to Help You Live a Happy Life.” by Monica Sheehan, dedicated to Andrew Kroon …

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube