Tag: novels

Books Connect the Human Race (Part 1 of 2)

Robin Jeffrey

We live in an age where there is a vast multitude of ways to entertain ourselves. Of the hundreds of channels on TV, most run programming twenty-four hours a day. Newspapers are delivered daily to households across the world; the internet never turns off. And of course, there are books. According to the American Library Association, in the United States alone there are over 117,000 libraries. “Since 1776, 22 million titles have been published”, and as of 2004, there were over 2.8 million books in print (Para Publishing).

Why?

What’s the point? In terms of technology (and in this day and age, what isn’t looked at in terms of technology?), books are outdated. An old, slow, difficult way of obtaining information and entertainment that only isolates people from the ‘mainstream’. With the popularity of websites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook…

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I (and my family) Read Banned Books!

Eleventh Stack

This is the time of year that your librarians are getting ready to school you on the fact that there are many books challenged or banned by the public every year, and some of these attempts are even successful at getting books pulled off the shelves of your favorite library. Public, school and higher ed. libraries will be putting up displays on tables, in cases and on websites alerting users to the annual event,  Banned BooksWeek (September 21-September 27). You may even come across the Library Bill of Rights, which many of you outside the world of librarianship may not even know exists, but which many libraries and librarians ascribe to, which helps in the purchasing of materials, the planning of programs, and is the foundation for this very important week.

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The wonderful thing about the annual Banned Books Week, is that it is an event promoted…

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Film Review: The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

A Little Blog of Books

The Hundred-Year-Old ManLast week, I was lucky enough to attend a special screening of the film adaptation of ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared’ at the Soho Hotel in London ahead of its general release on Friday. Thanks to the likes of Steig Larsson and Henning Mankell, Sweden is generally more famous for producing atmospheric crime fiction. However, the comic novel by Jonas Jonasson has been a worldwide hit and has been translated into more than thirty languages with more than six million copies sold since 2009. The film is likely to match the book’s success across the globe this summer having already broken box office records in Sweden when it was released last December.

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On Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway

Interesting Literature

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was published on this day, 14 May, in 1925. In honour of this, we thought we’d offer a few little facts about this novel, and about Woolf herself.

The action of the book takes place over just one day – a ‘moment of June’ in 1923 – although there are flashbacks to events that occurred in the characters’ lives over the previous five years, in the immediate wake of WWI. The original title of the book was ‘The Hours’, a title that Michael Cunningham would go on to use for the title of his novel about Woolf, which weaves together events from Woolf’s own life and events from Mrs Dalloway. The book was filmed, in 2002, starring Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman (the latter of whom famously wore a prosthetic nose to portray Woolf).

Woolf stampMrs Dalloway wasn’t the only novel Woolf wrote the action of…

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Neil Gaiman: “Crossover Artist” or simply a good “Storyteller”?

The Book Wars

Neil Gaiman – made popular by the macabre comics The Sandman but who has said that he really began writing with picturebooks that never got published – is a self-professed “crossover artist”. With textual works that vary from adult fiction/fantasy like American Gods to the Carnegie and Newbery Award winning The Graveyard Book. Pushing even farther into crossover Gaiman wrote Coraline the text that inspired a stop-motion animation film, he has written episodes of Dr. Who and, he co-wrote the script for that oddity of a film Beowulf and, yes, ALSO Batman comics!

Whew. Need a breathe. I’m sure I’m missing things…

Gaiman, as evidenced by the above paragraph, has inspired many a post here on The Bookwars and all four of us are fans of his works and, though this impressive resume could inspire a many more a post (“many a more post” ?), I think that…

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Spotlight + GIVEAWAY: The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Wow, I was floored by the intense interiority in Olive Kitteridge. I’m looking forward to The Burgess Boys.

Reflections of a Book Addict

tbbesThanks to Simon & Schuster UK, I’ve got a copy of Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys, due out in paperback in the US on April 8th, to give away to one lucky winner. Check out the book description and author information below, then read on to see how you can enter to win!

Jim and Bob Burgess return to their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls, many years after they first escaped its narrow confines following the death of their father in a freak accident. They have been asked back by their sister Susan, who needs help with her troubled son, Zach.

But as the Burgess brothers return to the landscape of their childhood, the long-buried tensions that have shaped and shadowed their relationship begin to surface in unexpected ways that will change them forever.

In The Burgess Boys, Elizabeth Strout again demonstrates the brilliant storytelling, exquisite prose and remarkable insight…

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