Being an ethical book buyer, ie. avoiding Amazon if at all possible, just got a whole lot more difficult: they're buying up The Book Depository.

One decent alternative I can suggest is BetterWorldBooks.co.uk. Any more suggestions are very welcome here.

Via the Guardian Book Blogs (and coth), we have a consideration of life as being stranger than science fiction and how SF tackles real life better than mainstream/realist literature. My point of view is mostly sympatico with Damien Walter's, but I have a problem with what seems to lie at the core of his argument: "Realist fiction's unquestioning ( Read more... )

The decade's best unread books, including Gollancz's Simon Spanton on Margot Lanagan's collection Black Juice and her utterly brilliant 'Singing My Sister Down'. One of those extraordinary stories that made me ask myself if I'd really just read what I thought I'd just read.

Slate on digital book banning and why we should be worried.

Quite.

OK, since my last post about The Education of Hyman Kaplan and Howard Jacobson's opinion that this is the funniest book ever, I've been wondering about other books that at any time may have been described as "the funniest book ever written".

The funniest book I ever recall reading was probably Cyra McFadden's brilliant The Serial (overdue for a re ( Read more... )

The Bookseller magazine has just announced the 2006 winner of the Diagram Prize, awarded annually since 1978 for the Oddest Book Title.

The winner: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
The runner-up:  Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan.
Other contenders this year were How Green were ( Read more... )