Category Archives: round up

May 05, 2015   sharon   reading, recommendations, round up, suggestions  
0

Summer Sizzlers

 New York has skipped right over Spring and rushed straight to summer – it’s a sunny 80 degrees outside and our office’s air conditioning is scrambling to get back in action. So of course my thoughts turned to summer reads, especially because I am going away this weekend. Here are a few of the non-agency/client books on my TBR pile that I am most eager to have time for! 

Invasion of the Tearling by Erika Johansen True devotees of the DGLM blog will remember how much I loved Queen of the Tearling, which I scored at BEA last year. So I can hardly wait to get my hands on this sequel!

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
Will reading about the origins of flight be good or bad for my plane anxiety? I’m willing to find out.

–More Happy than Not by Adam Silvera
Full disclosure: this author is a good friend of mine, and I’ve read an early version of the manuscript. It’s just that good that I am dying to read the finished product!

Madam President by Nicole Wallace
Hopefully a woman president will move from fiction into real life someday soon, but until then this novel of the White House’s very public pressures and very private secrets sounds THRILLING.

If you’re looking for more ideas for your own must-read list, here’s a great list from Publisher’s Weekly with even more ideas.

Then tell me in the comments what you’ll be taking on vacation this summer!

 

November 20, 2009   DG&B   e-books, Lauren, round up  
2

Where has the week gone?

by Lauren

It’s been a busy week around these parts, with Sarah Palin’s book hitting the shelves; publishers ignoring potential breakout hits in a neverending search for obvious frontlist; and debate on Harlequin’s branching out into self-publishing territory. We answered questions on fiction credentials and platform building; admitted to guilty pleasure reading; explained publishing; practically wrote your letter to Santa for you; analyzed the reading habits of youth; asked for short story suggestions; and Chasya told you why she’s here in the first place.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog posted a covers contest so challenging that even previous winners Jim and I couldn’t get ‘em all. (Seriously, people, what are #2 and #4? They haven’t posted the answers yet, and it’s driving me a bit nuts.) They also interviewed a seriously awesome 4-year-old on his love of books and monsters. Everyone talked about the eminently deserving Colum McCann’s win of the National Book Award. Eric at Pimp My Novel pointed out that we’re writing a lot of books about people’s daughters lately. Michael Cairns at PersonaNonData analyzed e-book pricing. The author behind Belle de Jour, blog-turned-book-turned-TV-show about a prostitute in London, turned out to be a research scientist. And Nathan Bransford made a pretty compelling argument for the eventual supremacy of e-books because people gravitate toward efficiency (on the one hand, I dream about one day having a home library with rolling ladders to reach the higher shelves; on the other, I’m kind of an efficiency nerd).

And now I’m off to figure out how to efficiently fit a library large enough to require rolling ladders in a New York City apartment.

September 04, 2009   DG&B   fun, Lauren, round up  
2

In praise of the internet and in memory of Summer Fridays

It’s the Friday before Labor Day, marking the end of the publishing industry’s grandest tradition–Summer Fridays–until next Memorial Day. (For the uninitiated, Summer Fridays are half-day Fridays in the summer and one of the few things left over from the more civilized bygone days of three-martini lunches.) Let’s all shed a tear and distract ourselves with some of what the wide internet world has to offer:

Shelfari via Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing shows us why we should be jealous of Neil Gaiman’s library.

The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog brings us a few gems: Sivers.org’s explanation of Kurt Vonnegut’s explanation of drama queens–in handy graph form!

And a link to the Telegraph in the UK with their story about books most often left behind in UK Travelodge hotels–#2 is our very own Dreams from My Father! (Second only to what must be the most important book of our time, the latest memoir by the trashtastic Katie Price/Jordan. We just don’t do fake celebrity like they do in the UK!)

And a post in praise of risky covers with which I heartily agree! The cover they feature, for Black Cat’s The Hole We’re In by Gabrielle Zevin is phenomenal.

Some practical (but amusingly communicated) advice from Pimp My Blog, a blog by someone in the sales department at a major trade publisher, on blogging. I’m not sure I can really get behind #10, but I think we could all learn something from this post as well as the rest of the entries.

And to finish up, the Pimp My Novel Friday roundup (written by a “recovering publishing insider”, not the aforementioned sales team member) points to a piece on the Guardian Books Blog about not finishing books. I’m on board, generally, because there are very few books I’ll struggle through if I’m not loving them since I rarely find it worth it in the end, but I’d suggest that skipping out on the second half of Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost is a mistake. I’ll admit I had trouble with parts of it, but because Michael praised it so heavily I kept going and was happy to have done so.

Happy Final Summer Friday everyone, and have a great weekend!

-Lauren