Buffybot ,'Dirty Girls'
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."
Heh. I noticed that new Merry book out in the bookstore the other day and picked it up....and put it back down. Glad to hear it was the right thing to do! :)
My fave used bookstore in the DC area is in Gaithersburg--one of those "it's cramped and crowded and you keep going around a corner and finding out that there's a whole other room!"
The Book Alcove!
Er, I assume? Because if there's another one out here, I need to know about it immediately.
Heh...the Book Alcove is very close to where I live. It's cool, and I've wandered around there a few times.
Yeah, Book Alcove. Sorry--when I was writing that, I'd forgotten the name! I figured saying "tucked behind the pho place, and they build bookshelves" probably wasn't needed.
Is it just me, or are there fewer used bookstores than there used to be, though?
Interesting article
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oprah, save us, we can't get by without you.
That's the message from a group of published and award-winning novelists in an open letter to influential television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, begging her to resume picking new novels for members of her popular book club.
"There's a widely-held belief that the landscape of literary fiction is now a gloomy place," Word of Mouth, a loose alliance of women's authors, wrote. It said fiction sales began to plummet when the The Oprah Winfrey Book Club went off the air in 2002 and stopped featuring contemporary authors.
So, is Oprah the savior of modern fiction?
I used to love those shows though...another reason to hate that Franzen geek, though his mean-spirited and aimless fiction is way reason enough. How do I feel, right?
Franzen? I don't do Oprah, so I'm unfamiliar with how her club works.
Connie, Jonathan Franzen is a moderately talented writer of literary fiction who bitched when his novel was picked for the Oprah book club because he doesn't see himself as an Oprah kind of writer. She suspended the club the next month.
The thing is, though, Oprah should have been able to blow Franzen off like a gnat, both because she's infinite times more famous and because public opinion was on her side. I suspect she was looking for an excuse to quit the club anyhow, and he provided one.
That must be why they're focusing on classics. Dead authors don't bitch.
Has anyone read Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz? I just finished it last night and it broke my heart.