Culturegeeks

The most excellent Maine company LibraryThing has hit upon a fabulous holiday idea: Secret Santa for bibliophiles:

“The idea is simple. Pay $25. You play Santa to a random LibraryThing member, and buy them up $20 worth of books, based on their library or a short description. Someone else does the same to you. LibraryThing orders the books and pays the shipping, so no addresses are exchanged.”

This idea is fantastic on several levels. For recipients, the element of (educated) surprise is pretty intriguing. Your Santa will choose books for you based on what’s already in your library and what you tell them about your literary preferences. Even if you don’t want to participate financially, you can still help Santa choose books for other people. And you can make a gift out of participation — you pay the fee and your friend/boss/cousin gets the books. Registrations are due by noon tomorrow, though, so get your Santa hats on while there’s still time…

With the upcoming release of the film version, Catholics and apparently now Mormons too have been getting their knickers in a twist over Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. According to the Telegraph, the Catholic Herald has said that the book should be burned, and now school boards in Canada and the U.S. are self-righteously pulling it off the shelves. I might have just been asleep for all these years, but where was all this outrage when the books were first published? The trilogy has been at the top of just about every recommended reading list for kids, and many for adults as well, for years now. It seems rather intellectually lazy to suddenly be upset about the themes of the story now that it will be in a visual medium instead of a written one.

So, Sony and a few others have had eBook readers for awhile…what’s the big deal about this one? Two things, apparently.

1) Amazon is behind it, meaning they’ll probably have more content. All NYT bestsellers and new books are $10. Presumably older books will be cheaper.

2) It uses frickin’ cell phone technology. That’s surprising, to say the least. No subscription fees (that’s why the thing costs $400) and you can shop for books anywhere you can get a cell phone signal.

It’s definitely not the hit out of the park that Amazon’s mp3 store is, but it’s not bad. Still too pricey, and…hello, fugly. I don’t want a keyboard on my book to remind me that I’m not really reading a book. I imagine that making the eInk screen look as good as it does and be touchscreen is out of the realm of possibility now, but if anything begs to have an onscreen keyboard, it’s this. You basically only want to be able to search for books to download. And maybe to search for the dirty parts in Forever…

The excellent YA book site Spinebreakers has treats for Nick Hornby fans this week: Nicholas Hoult reading the first chapter of Hornby’s new book aloud, an interview with the author, and a bunch of other fun bits.

Rovidica resident getting some print space.

This weekend I read The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket. My friend Becky recommended this book as being “for people who loved Heathers“, and her prediction was spot-on. Flannery Culp is a mesmerizing, if not thoroughly reliable, narrator. Handler’s barely-veiled references to pop culture phenomenons like “Winnie Moprah” and “Stephen Queen” cracked me up, as did Flannery’s acid commentary on her friends, schoolmates and teachers. Despite the precocity of the characters, Handler still captures the essence of teen angst over things like sex, body image and the often-dubious ties of friendship between adolescent girls. As soon as I reached the end of the book, I went straight back to the beginning to reevaluate what I thought I knew about Flannery and the rest of the gang. I’m still not sure I fully grasp all of the plot threads, but I’ve thought of little else since I finished it, so Handler has at the very least created a memorable, nay, haunting book. If your book group is the kind that drinks a lot and doesn’t mind stories with sex, drugs, violence and profanity, The Basic Eight will give you much to discuss.

I just read The Dog Says How by Kevin Kling, and it was awesome. Don’t hold his NPR background against him, he’s a great storyteller.

I stumbled across this book thanks to a Google ad which tempted me with a link to these yummy-sounding Fig Cookies. It seems like I’m meeting more and more people with wheat/gluten tolerance issues. Like the whole peanut allergy epidemic, it makes me wonder: what the hell is wrong with modern wheat, or has modern medicine just improved its ability to diagnose this particular problem?

I’m also wondering if this recipe can be easily modified for those of us who do eat wheat. That list of ingredients for gluten-free cookie dough is intimidating, and expensive. Yeah, sure, substitute regular flour for their mix of sorghum and xanthan gum, but would I also have to change the amounts of butter or sugar to maintain the consistency?