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
- #BookstoresAgainstBorders Raises $30,000 and Counting (Publishers Weekly)
- Audible’s Captions Program Stirs Fears, Frustration Among Publishers (Publishers Weekly)
Worth Reading/Viewing
- YA For Changing Times (Publishers Weekly)
- Should books include credits like films? (David Garnett, The Guardian)
Awesome Lists
- Writers to Watch Fall 2019: Anticipated Debuts (Publishers Weekly)
- 15 Epic Books Like The Name of the Wind. (The Portalist) OK, so nothing is really “like” The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss’s monumental and beautifully written picaresque fantasy novel (reviewed here.) But some of books on this list are amazing in their own right (The Last Unicorn, The Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, the Earthsea novels) and others are very good, if not quite in the same class (the Camber of Culdi trilogy)…and the rest I’ve heard good things about, though I haven’t read them yet.
- 50+ Must-Read Portal Fantasy Books (Book Riot) These books stretch the definition of portal fantasy a bit, but a lot of them sound (or are!) awesome.
- 10 Black Princess Books to Celebrate Halle Bailey as Ariel (Book Riot)
- Weird and Funny Questions Submitted to the New York Public Library Pre-Internet (Vintage Everyday)
- Jumpstart Your Romance Reading with a Completed Series (Book Riot) A diverse collection of completed romance series, from historical to contemporary, some featuring POC and/or LGBTQIA characters.
Really Cool / Just for Fun
Bookcase mural in Utrecht, by Jan Is Der Man and Deef Feed. Photo used with permission from Jan Is Der Man.
- Street Artists Transform an Ordinary Building into a Spectacular Bookcase . This looks amazing! I would love to see it in person. The mural was created in Utrecht by artists Jan Is Der Man and Deef Feed. They got community input on which books to include. (If you look closely, two of the book spines actually feature the artists’ names.) (Artists: Jan Is Der Man / Deef Feed )
Bookish Quote
That’s it for this week!
La La in the Library
Thanks for the links! There are several I want to read. ?✨
Have a wonderful week. ?
Lark_Bookwyrm
I hope you enjoy(ed) them!
Nicole
That is an awesome book mural! SO very cool.
I usually read the acknowledgments at the end of books, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t also at least skim credits if they were used instead.
I don’t approve of Audible Captions. I’m with the publishers on that one. I can see where reading and listening to something at the same time can be a great learning aid, but rights issues are a big factor here.
Nicole recently posted…The Omnivore’s Hundred tag
Lark_Bookwyrm
What I wonder is why it’s OK for Alexa to read your ebooks to you, but not OK for Captions to show you the words as they are read? (Of course, if the captioning is like the auto-captioning on TV news programs, it will be riddled with mistakes, which kind of negates the “learning aid” argument. So either Audible is slurping the text from an ebook, which would violate rights agreements, or their software is a lot better than whatever the TV news companies use.)
Rita @ View From the Books
Yep, your cat pic says it all 🙂 I get nervous when I finish a book and then don’t have another I’m into lined up 🙂
And that mural, just wow. I couldn’t tell if it’s a 3D diorama or trompe l’oeil! Amazing. And Bookstores Against Borders, bravo for taking a stand. “Be the change you want to see in the world”. Yes.
Lark_Bookwyrm
Even when I have a ton of books on my TBR pile, sometimes when I finish a book, I can’t figure out what to read next. I don’t know if it’s having too many choices, or just having trouble finding a book to suit my mood. And sometimes, it’s a book hangover; I can’t let go of the previous book/characters/world yet.