What to Read Next?

Booklovers everywhere can find themselves vacillating between two poles: the pole called So Many Books, So Little Time – and the pole we could call Whatever Shall I Read Next That’s Going to Be As Wonderful as This Book I’ve Just Finished?

Our anxiety about finding a really good next read can cause us to forget that other readers have read - and loved – some really great books! And while there’s no accounting for taste when it comes to what you, specifically, might enjoy, another bibliophile’s fave can pan out to be one of yours.

The Internet, of course, is one source of reader recommendations. For example, you can find FlavorWire’s list of ten famous writers’ favorite books here. There are thousands of similar book lists on the Internet, which Mr. Google can help you find.

There are also plenty of books devoted to valorizing particular titles, such as the 2007 title whose cover is featured here. This book features summaries of 544 different titles cited by 125 different writers. A compilation of simiar book-recommening titles can be found sprinkled throughout the Atlanta Booklover’s Blog’s  ”Books about Books“ section. You don’t have to buy these books: you can borrow them from your local library.

Finally, there are databases available that try to identify books with similar locales, writing styles, time periods, etc. One of the best is NoveList, available  to anyone with an Atlanta-Fulton Public Library borrower’s card. (You’ll find a list of databases on the library system’s website.)

With all these resources – plus whatever you may have scribbled down onto (or input electronically into) your own personal TBA (To Be Read) list – we hope you’ll never have to wait too long between One Amazing Read and The Next One.

No More Printed Britannica

Most Americans have probably already learned that earlier this month Encyclopedia Britannica announced that the current printed edition of the encyclopedia will be the final one. Mr. Google will point you to a host of news articles and commentary (like this one from the blog of The New Yorker).

Britannica is neither the first nor the last familiar encyclopedia to abandon the codex for the computer. The rationale for digitizing time-sensitive reference works like encyclopedias is ever more irresistable, and it’s hard to argue with the sheer ecological argument of refusing to fell additional trees for subsequent editions of an encyclopedia that’s required numerous revisions since it was first published in (wait for it:) 1768.

Still, we felt it somehow necesssary to register here at the Booklover’s Blog this heartbreaking-if-inevitable turning point in the history of the book, if only because for many bibliophiles, perusing (in addition to referring to) Britannica is among the fondest memories of our early reading careers.

Britannica’s nostalgic value among readers (well, readers of a certain age, perhaps) is so strong that we predict that booklovers (and second-hand bookstore owners) are going to be snarfing them up from library book sales any time a public library divests itself of whatever edition it happens to own. (Lucky the booksale browser who stumbles upon a discarded set of the highly-regarded 11th (1911) edition!)

In any case, the death of the printed Britannica feel like another omen of the End of An Era (in this case, the Gutenberg one). Let us hope the marketing gods keep the licensing fees for the Britannica’s electronic versions within the range of public library budgets.

4/18/2012 Postscript: Britannica put together this nifty compilation of the media coverage of its announcement:

An Homage to Dickens on Dickens’ Bicentenary

At Salon.com, writer Pauls Toutonghi explains why he regrets not having read Dickens earlier in his life, and what he’s been doing lately to cope with that oversight.

Should this inspire any reluctant or procrastinating Dickens reader to make the plunge himself/herself, the easiest and cheapest way to get hold of a (printed) copy of one of his books is to make a visit to your nearest public library….

2012: The Dickens Bicentenary

Fans of Charles Dickens – especially those who can travel to England – have an abundance of events to choose from that will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth. (A Google search on “Charles Dickens Bicentenary” yields almost a half-million results.)

Meanwhile, maybe 2012 will be the year that you finally pick up one of Dickens’ famous (or not-so-famous) novels, or decide to re-read one of your favorites?

Most public libraries will have several Dickens novels (and movies inspired by them) on hand for the casual browser, and of course you can always place on Hold any particular novel (or film) that doesn’t happen to be on the shelf the day you visit and are smitten with an impulse to find yourself some Dickens. Dickens’ literary output is also available electronically, via the library or otherwise, for those who prefer to read Mr. Dickens that way.

Found via Raven-ous

First the Mona Lisa, Then Stonehenge, Now Oscar Wilde’s Tomb

The heirs of Oscar Wilde have placed a wall of glass around the Wilde’s tomb in Paris’ Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

The hordes of tourists to the tomb often mark their visits in various ways (graffiti, lipstick stains, etc.). Wilde’s grandson decided to erect the barrier as part of a recent restoration costing over $55,000.

The New York Times has the details.

On Giving a Put-Aside Book a Second Chance

For whatever reasons, we abandon novels. We leave them half-finished; we discard them after only twenty pages, we drift apart from them after the first hundred. Often we’ll never pick up where we left off. Sometimes it’ll be a season or two later, sometimes a year, a few years, when the book nudges it way back into our line of sight, begging to be reconsidered….

I am not convinced that we ever understand why a book reaches us—how it snags us at one time, but not another, or misses altogether. Words on a page are illuminated by something inside us, or else they remain just that….

But I continue to wonder about all those subtleties (and they are cultural, developmental, emotional, historical, random) that tint the lens through which we regard a book, no matter how well it was written. Do books choose us?…

- Decatur book blogger Murray Brown, upon recently rediscovering Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

A Brief Sampling of Reading Recommendations from Shelf Awareness’s “Book Brahmins”

Alert readers will have noticed that one of this blog’s favorite sources of information is Shelf Awareness.

Not only does Shelf Awareness have its ear to the ground for recent developments in the great wide world of bookstores, but it regularly features one of the best resources we know of for garnering intriguing ideas for any avid reader’s Must-Read list.

“Book Brahmin” is what Shelf Awareness calls this treasure trove of interviews with various individuals in the printed story-telling business – mostly authors, famous and otherwise. What’s unique about this running series of interviews is that the set of questions is always the same, and many of those questions are satisfyingly specific about the interviewee’s favorite authors and books.

Taken together, the highly-regarded books and authors treasured by the interviewees constitutes a perfect Mother Lode of considered book recommendations.  And the other information included in these interviews – including the other questions and answers - are also consistently interesting, as are each interviewee’s remarks about why he/she regards a particular book or author so highly.

Hoping this feature might lead you to either sign up for the Shelf Awareness newsletter or to make the Shelf Awareness website one of your Internet Favorites, below is a sampling of what several selected questions in some of the most recent interviews revealed. You can check the website for its archive of additional “Book Brahmin” interviews.

Joseph Epstein (interview posted 11/30/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Leon Tolstoy Marcel Proust Willa Cather Max Beerbohm George Santayana	Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno; Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard; Arlene Croce’s Dancing in the Dark
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Henry James’s                The Princess Casamassima	Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
Lawrence Dorfman (interview posted 11/28/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Jim Harrison Tom McGuane Richard Price T.C. Boyle Stephen King	BOOK by Robert Grudin
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
God Bless You,                 Mr. Rosewater                  by Kurt Vonnegut	The Stand by Stephen King
Dennis Cooper (interview posted 11/18/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Of all time: Maurice Blanchot Arthur Rimbaud Alain Robbe-Grillet the Marquis de Sade Raymond Roussel Contemporary: John Ashbery David Foster Wallace Pierre Guyotat Steven Millhauser Gary Lutz	Agota Kristof’s trilogy          The Notebook / TheProof /   The Third Lie, known collectively as The Book of Lies
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Arthur Rimbaud’s               A Season in Hell	The Present and the Past       by Ivy Compton-Burnett
Jacqueline Carey (interview posted 11/16/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
For historical fiction: Mary Renault Robert Graves For modern literature: John Steinbeck For fantasy fiction: Guy Gavriel Kay For gritty contemporary novels: Dennis Lehane	The Horse of Selene by Juanita Casey
	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
	Little, Big by John Crowley
Paul Russell (interview posted 11/11/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Joyce Proust Mann Woolf Nabokov	Mark Merlis’s An Arrow’s Flight
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles; Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks; J.L. Carr’s   A Month in the Country; William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow	Finnegans Wake
Michael Cannell (interview posted 11/9/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Erik Larson Robert Caro Tom Wolfe David Halberstam Hampton Sides	Rules of Civility                    by Amor Towles
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Robert Capa: A Biography by Richard Whelan	Hemingway’s                       The Sun Also Rises
María Dueñas (interview posted 11/4/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
J.M. Coetzee    “…and 499 writers more”	The Corrections                    by Jonathan Franzen
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier	A World for Julius by Bryce Echenique
Mary Curran Hackett (interview posted 11/2/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Dave Eggers Alice McDermott Colm Tóibín Charles Dickens Tobias Wolff	What Is the What                  by Dave Eggers
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Sharon Salzberg’s Faith	A Tale of Two Cities               by Charles Dickens

Hats off to Shelf Awareness for being so book reader-friendly with its carefully-crafted and extremely useful set of  ”Book Brahmin” questions. We predict you’ll find plenty of personal booklist fodder therein – especially if your reading tastes run to titles other than the ones that happen to constitute the current bestseller lists.

Six Famous Dead Authors Captured on Film

If you’ve ever wondered what Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, or George Bernard Shaw looked like, now’s your chance to see them in this series of separate bits of rare film footage posted at Booklicious.

Found via Shelf Awareness

Mark Twain Postage Stamp Debuts Tomorrow

According to a Los Angeles Times story, Mark Twain is being honored (for the second time) on a U.S. postage stamp.

The story also mentions the publication earlier this year of the bestselling – and massive – first volume of Twain’s Autobiography, which is currently available in public libraries. As are, of course, the many books – fiction and nonfiction – that Twain wrote.

Found via Shelf Awareness

“Why I Hate Audiobooks”

Tim Patrick, aka The Well-Read Man, explains why he prefers putting books into his brain via his eyeballs than via his eardrums.

Incidentally, The Well-Read Man’s raison d’etre is Tim’s determination to begin, on July 1, 2011, a year-long project of reading (vs. listening to) Fifty of the Most Important Books Ever Published – and to tell us about it/them. He’s spending his time before July winnowing down to a final 50 the 1,000+ titles that one authority or the other has decreed as Extremely Important. For those of you who’d like to follow along with Tim’s progress on this commendable project, we’ve added a link to The Well-Read Man to the blogroll of the Atlanta Booklover’s Blog.

Found via Baby Got Books