Monthly Archives: August 2012

Issue of August 26, 2012

Come and join our columnists Elizabeth Creith (with her wacky sense of biblio-humor), Nicki Leone (a reader’s reader), Katherine Hauswirth (a lover of readerly connections), and me, a reader about town for our latest contributions.

Almost everyone who is a passionate reader as an adult was a passionate reader as a child, and it is those books that we so often look back on with affection. Nicki Leone recalls her books and her childhood through her own bookshelves in Reverting to Childhood: Recreating My Childhood Bookshelf, or All My Favorites That No One Has Ever Heard Of.

There are nerd groups and there are book groups, but who knew there is a book nerd group. Elizabeth Creith is a proud member of such a group and here she reveals some little known facts and puts to bed one unfounded rumor (or so she says) in Book Nerdery.

Poetry is sometimes said to be a finer house than prose, but this week Katherine Hauswirth found that a novel led easily not to the author’s poems it referenced but to the poems of Sylvia Plath who shared the devastating end to her life as the novel’s protagonist in Constant Companion.

A book that is shared can often create bonds between the lender and the recipient. But in the case of Lauren Roberts who, in Sharing a Book, talks about how a special volume that wove its way among three people has left behind it memories “deeply embedded in the pages of that book regardless of whose library it currently graces.”

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Issue of August 19, 2012

Memories of one’s first book, of beloved book festivals, of books loved and kept fuel this week’s issue of BiblioBuffet. But we have more, and I strongly encourage everyone who checks us out to look at all our new columns. A brief description of each with a link to it follows. I know you will enjoy each one. Have a good week!

Writing is a dream job for many people, but as Carl Rollyson shares in The Business of Biography it may encompass more difficulties than editing the manuscript, getting an agent, and selling the book. It is a business, no question, and especially for biographers it takes a strong commitment to self as well as sales.

When one lives with 6,000 books (not including e-books), what happens to one’s home? Gillian Polack has, with encouragement, disclosed what it looks like at her home with those books that appeal to her wide-ranging interests stashed and stored in all manner of style in How Do I Love Books, Let Me Count the Ways.

We all have them—the book that made us first fall in love with written stories. For Lev Raphael, that one is The Three Musketeers, but a recent rereading proved that even faithful language translations are not necessarily better than visceral ones to get across the story as intended: No Starch, Please.

They are alive but not necessarily well. This week, Lauren Roberts used her recent updating work on the database that fuels the book festival pages of BiblioBuffet to explore what there really are, where they are, and why supporting them is essential in Celebrating the Festivals.

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Issue of August 12, 2012

Things are hot! Not just with the weather, but with books too. And each of our columnists up this week has some great suggestions. Look us all over and see if you find something just right for your summer reading.

When couples commute together what do they talk about? If they are both readers, it is likely their current books. If, as happened to Elizabeth Creith, one spouse happens to be reading about bacteria then the realization where humans are on the bacteria scale can breed the diverse but apparently not incompatible humble and snarky responses she finds in Thank You, Stephen Jay Gould.

In an unusual combination of books read this past week—one a classic piece of fiction, the other a graphic adaption of a controversial science text—Katherine Hauswirth, in In the Beginning…, found a common thread: that “we must be we must be careful about what we choose to create, and we must be responsible for the products that spring from us. Both books remind us that, regardless of how life started, it must be a thoughtful, wise, and connected system that allows it to thrive.”

People have, at various points in their lives and sometimes for vastly different reasons, used rivers to find their way through their lives at difficult times. In a review of a new midlife-crisis-to-river-trip book, Nicki Leone finds a man who learned, above all, to “listen” in Dipping Your Hands into the River.

Pets and books have a certain relationship that often causes the cats and dogs to view them as chewing toys. At least in Lauren’s household, and now, it appears in Nicki’s as well. Lauren Roberts shares both her annoyance and her gratitude for those small mementos embedded in the cardboard and leather volumes that become more than just holes in The Literary Pet.

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Issue of August 5, 2012

In this, the first week of the last full month of summer, the reading is flowing hot and heavy with our contributors. If you want some new ideas for worthy reading, check us out.

Cataloging comes naturally to librarians but how about to bookmark collectors? Yes, if they happen to be librarians—or simply want an effective way to organize their collections. Laine Farley details the system she set up as well as how and why it works for (and will work for others) in Cataloging and Classifying Bookmarks.

Where do the fairy tales and folk tales so many of us remember from childhood fit in speculative fiction? Gillian Polack explores the complex and sometimes unusual roles they play with three different international writers in Modern Approaches to the Fairy Tale.

Martha Gellhorn may be more well known for her marriage to Ernest Hemingway but in truth she is one of the most remarkable writers of the twentieth century. She has fascinated Carl Rollyson for a long time, and in A Tale of Two Biographies he shares not only how she impacted his own career but contributed a “vital element” to a “significant period of history.”

As you know if you read her editor’s letter regularly, Lauren Roberts adores adventure books, the more miserable the journey the better. Well, she found a new one went beyond the desired misery and offered up an unexpectedly brilliant elegance in the realm of African history: In the Heat of the Book.

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