Wintry Literature for a Snowy Day Reason number one zillion why we love NPR, and their Book Notes... had to pass it along. "Those of us living in snowbound Washington, D.C., this past week have found ourselves starting to run out of words to describe all the white stuff that's buried the city, shut down the federal government and paralyzed a big swath of the East Coast. So we decided to turn to writers who have described snow in especially evocative ways over the years — in the hands of a good storyteller, snow can be magical, or monstrous... Read more... | Comments (0)

Love and War and EBooks With all the heated debate over ebooks these days, I've been doing some soul searching about where I stand in all of it. I've done my research, watched the videos, reads the articles and blogs, listened to book groupies, commuters, and casual readers. I've rolled my eyes at the relentless marketing (Ebooks for Valentine lovers...the romance!), the competition, the justifications, grandstanding, and chicken-littling about the end of reading as we know it. At the same time, I respect that there are some great changes afoot as paradigms shift like tectonic plates in the publishing and book selling worlds... Read more... | Comments (0)

JD Salinger Every year, when I taught THE CATCHER IN THE RYE to my ninth graders, my kids finished it overnight and always said, "I didn't know you could write like this." Salinger was so open, so close to the bone. So conversational. Holden wrote "to" someone he'd never met as if he were talking to someone he'd always known. Holden could tell a secret publicly and it would still be a private secret. He revealed the most profound emotions in the simplest language; in fact, it was more effective to do it like that because then the writer got out of the reader's way. The smallest gestures could reveal all you really needed to know about a character. Humor and pain could exist on the page beside each other, if not inside each other. Read more... | Comments (0)

Top 10 rock'n'roll novels.... In todays Guardian, Tiffany Murray chooses her spot-on top 10 rock'n'roll novels.... Tiffany Murray's first novel Happy Accidents was shortlisted for the Bollinger/Wodehouse prize for comic writing. Diamond Star Halo, her second, was published earlier this month. Check out her full list, below.... Read more... | Comments (0)