from http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/
The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign’s blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. Read the rest of this entry »
By Kathleen Parker
People who read books are different from other people. They’re smarter for one thing. They’re more sensual for another. They like to hold, touch and smell what they read. They like to carry the words around with them — tote them on vacation, take them on train rides and then, most heavenly of all, to bed. Read the rest of this entry »
I was in the Educational Book House yesterday, reading The Economist. A man enter the shop with his son. The son went to the comics section and picked up a few comics and showed it to his father. Father turned his head, left-right, left-right and said, “No comics, no comics.” I wanted to go up to them and say, “What harm is there in reading comics,” but didn’t. Most of the readers graduate to books after reading comics. why do we then discourage children from reading comics? is it because they are lo-brow, trash. are they? really?
this is what Michael Ondaatje said in an interview
Join a group of writers about the same age. Meet often and read each others work and give and be able to take criticism. And enjoy the essential pleasure of re-writing.
Kabita Parajuli wrote an article on the reading habit in Kantipur yesterday (Baisakh 10, on World Book Day) in which she makes a very sweeping comment that the reading habit in Nepali is on the decline. Is it? No, we don’t think so, even though we ourselves don’t have hard evidences (like the comparative study of book purchasing or library going trends over the years) to support our claim. We see frequent comings and goings of people in the bookshops in
Kathmandu. Libraries at the British Council,
American
Center and
Nepal-India
Cultural
Center are chock-a-full with readers most of the time. We hear about informal reading and writings groups coming up. Many young people have inquired about our book club over the phone and many others have come to the office wanting to know what and how to read. These we think suggest that there is growing interest in reading. Don’t you think so?
A FORUM FOR AND BY KITABI KIROS READING IS FUN. WRITING ABOUT WHAT ONE HAS READ EVEN MORE SO. LET US NOT JUST HIDE BEHIND THE PAGES OF BOOKS AND WRITE ABOUT THE BOOK WE HAVE LIKED OR DISLIKED. LET US ARGUE AND BICKER OVER BOOKS.
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The Man Booker International. The |
Lit Weights
What could be more vulgar than this: a prize fight to decide who’s the world’s lit champ? The Man Booker International award will decide in June which of the world’s living writers across the planet deserves to wear the world’s literary crown. None of the fifteen contenders who’ve made it to the last round—Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Amos Oz, Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Carlos Fuentes, John Banville, Peter Carey, Michel Tournier, Harry Mulisch—is complaining (as yet). NB: the judges for the inaugural award two years ago wisely took the heat off themselves by picking an unknown Albanian writer Ismael Kadare over Atwood, Lessing, McEwan and Roth.
Who’ll Get the
Orange?
There’s an unwritten rule that a Booker prize winner doesn’t win the
Orange prize, but that hasn’t stopped Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss moving to the shortlist of the women-only Orange Prize. Expectedly, though, Desai’s novel is not a frontrunner for the £30,000
Orange. The favourites are bestselling Half of a Yellow Sun by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Anne Tyler’s Digging to America.
