Spike ,'Smile Time'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
The endless non-fiction whale chapters are actually very funny. You have to imagine Ishmael saying everything in such a dry droll way that you're almost, but not quite, certain he is kidding.
Count me as another Catalog of Whales fan.
now I'm sitting here wondering why it took 6 years to release the next book when it sounds like it was already written 6 years ago
It was almost finished 6 years ago. "Almost" being, it seems, an entirely subjective term.
The Snapper is the other movie in the trilogy, iirc.
George R.R. Marting had alot of book 6 years ago but then he or the publisher decided it should be two books which meant, not just cutting off his writing where he was at but a bunch or rearranging and rewriting and addition of chapters. He talks about the process here - if you're interested.
ETA: I should say that there is information about what POV characters are in ADWD and which ones are not.
I love Roddy Doyle, though. TB, good point. You know, I tried, with Moby Dick, cause y'all(and David Simon) list it as a favorite. I at least waded in, which is better than the whole looking-at-it-and-deciding it's boring thing I did before. Points for effort?
There were a couple books publishers were really pushing on Tuesday at BEA, and three of them might be of interest:
Eoin Colfer's first adult novel, Plugged. (He is adorable, small, with bright white hair and a beautiful Irish speaking voice, by the way.)
The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles, a first-time novelist who seems terribly Back Bay. It's about a young woman in 1938 Manhattan, and looks really good. Beautiful cover, too.
The Snow Child, by another first-timer, Eowyn (!) Ivey, a native Alaskan. It's set in 1920s Alaska, too.
At my first BEA in 1999, they were handing out a new book by an author nobody had heard of: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Four months later, it hit the #1 on the bestseller list.
Back Bay?
Old Boston money, in other words.
Thanks. Suspect that past a certain distance from Boston not a well known phrase. This California boy (who lived in Houston and currently lives in Washington State) never heard it before. So the "Back Bay Books" imprint was boasting of the wealth of its founders? Which come to think of it is not very Back Bay... Or maybe it was founded by working class Bostonians who were being ironic.