News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Book News
- Christmas Week Sales Jump 7% Over 2016 (Publishers Weekly)
- S&S was concerned about the content and quality of Milo Yiannopoulis’s autobiography well before the publishing house pulled the plug on it, court documents reveal. Yiannopoulis is suing the publisher for $10 million for breach of contract. (The Guardian)
- Ta-Nehisi Coates quits Twitter after public row with Cornel West (The Guardian)
Literary Losses
Sue Grafton, author of the bestselling Kinsey Millhone alphabet mysteries, died Thursday, Dec. 28, of cancer. She was 77. According to her Goodreads page, “Grafton was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, the Ross Macdonald Literary Award, [and] three Shamus Awards,” plus several other awards.
The Kinsey Millhone series, which began in 1982 with A is for Alibi, made it almost all the way through the alphabet; the 25th book, Y is for Yesterday, was published in August. Per Grafton’s wishes, the series will end there; she stated that she did not want a ghost writer to continue writing in her name.
Obituaries and tributes: The Guardian; Los Angeles Times
Bibliography and Biography: Goodreads; Wikipedia
Worth Reading/Viewing
- What Archaeologists and Historians Are Finding About the Heroine of a Beloved Young Adult Novel (Smithsonian) “New scholarship reveals details about the Native American [woman] at the center of the classic Island of the Blue Dolphins.”
- New Year, New Goals, New and Improved Reading Log. Rachel Manwill of BookRiot has created the ultimate reading log. It tracks everything, from the usual title, author, setting, genre, and number of pages statistics to challenges and even a variety of diversity characteristics (gender, sexuality, race, and nationality of authors and characters, among other things.) And she has made it all available on Google Docs. You can, of course, customize the log, which also compiles statistics for you. It’s more than some readers want or need, but for those who want more specificity than Goodreads offers, it’s a godsend. (Links to a blank copy of the log in the article.)
- From feminism to broflake: the words of 2017, as chosen by a number of different dictionaries. (The Guardian)
- 5 Mantras for Getting Rid of Books. For those of us who need to make room for our newly-gifted tomes. “If I need this book in the future, I can find it, for the Internet is vast and libraries are plentiful” is a more precise version of my sister’s “Let the universe store it.” (BookRiot)
Free Fiction Online
- A Child’s Christmas in Wales, read by Dylan Thomas himself
Awesome Lists
- The Best Science Books of 2017 (Robin McKie, The Guardian)
- The Best Children’s Books of 2017, British edition (Imogen Russell Williams, The Guardian)
- Best Children’s and YA Books of 2017, American edition (Publishers Weekly)
That’s it for this week!
