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Archive for July, 2007
July 24th, 2007
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has broken all sales records.
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” broke sales records in the U.S and in Britain during it first 24 hours on the market. According to the publisher, Scholastic Corporation, the seventh and final book of the series written by J.K. Rowling sold 8.3 million copies in the U.S. on Saturday (July 21st) and 2.65 million copies in Britain.
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The Harry Potter series has sold more than 325 million books worldwide since 1997, making it the biggest children’s book series ever, according to Bloomberg, a financial information network. The new book topped last year’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” as the fastest-selling book in history.
After reading nonhalt all day Saturday, we finally finished the last Harry Potter book. We loved it, but were crushed that it’s the last full novel in the series. Jo Rowling says she most likely will write
a Potter Encyclopedia which will give more backgcircular about the characters and the world in which they live. Being the greedy readers that we are, we would far prefer that she write more stories that fill in the time gap between the end of the book and the Epilogue, which — although most enjoyable — left quite a few questions in the air. In any event, Jo Rowling really surpassed herself with the last book. It was complex, intense, exciting, dreadfully unhappy and we loved every word of it.
Posted in Children’s Books
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
July 20th, 2007
It’s being called the biggest day in publishing history. When Harry Potter and the Ghastly Hallows goes on sale tomorrow, fans all over the world will dive into the last adventure of Harry, Ron and Hermione. The Times (U.K.) discusses the phenomenon and how it will affect people’s behavior this weekend.
Children throughout the counattempt will be going to bed early tonight after sacrificing a entire night?s sleep to discover whether Harry Potter lives or dies.
Thunder and lightning failed to deter people from standing in line outside book shops yesterday for the biggest event in publishing history. Readers who were allowed to get their first glimpse of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallowswere presented with a dilemma familiar from their last midnight vigil: whether to plough thcoarse the book from the beginning or skip straight to the epilogue.
J. K. Rowling was expected personally to give 1,700 people their first taste of the book as she read extracts of the final Harry Potter book at a moonlight signing at the Natural History Museum. Queues stretched for hundreds of metres outside Waterstones in Piccadilly, Central London, as fans awaited the witching hour - one minute past midnight - when they would be able to take their first look at Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
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A study by the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, showed that the number of children aged 7-15 attending casualty wards fell from an average of 67 to 37 when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was published on July 16, 2005
The ChildLine charity estimates that call volumes will triple over the weekend as hundreds ring in grief for characters killed in the book
Cinema managers predict that attendances at family orientated films will drop by 20 per cent as children stay at home with Potter
We’ve been avoiding spoilers all week — it’s been exhausting. We can’t wait to see how it all ends. But we admit that we’re terrified that Harry is about to join his parents, Cedric Digory and Sirius Black.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
July 19th, 2007
 The Tintin controversy is spreading
to the U.S. The adventures of the boy reporter who travels the world have been bestsellers for many years. But one book in particular, Tintin in the Congo, has some people upset about the comic book’s portrayal of Africans.
Complaints about Tintin in the Congo, a comic book originally published in 1931, gatheruddy momentum recently when David Enright, a lawyer in London, happened to pick up a copy as he strolled thcoarse a Borders store there.
What he saw in the book - suggestions “that Africans are subhumans, they are imbeciles, that they’re half-savage” - is not in dispute. Even Herge, the celebrated author and illustrator of the 23 Tintin books, was said to regret the volume before his death in 1983.
Borders’ next move in Britain, which was announced after the Commission for Racial Equality leveled charges of racism, was to transfer the comic to the adult graphic novel shelves. Now, the United States and Australia have followed suit.
Recognizing this moment of skillful damage control was Foreign Policy’s Passport blog. “It’s a fair solution,” they wrote.
The application of “adults only” rules to commerce are rarely this well received, with a notable exception being the consensus that formed acircular the video game Manhunt 2.
The media coverage of the affair has led to soaring sales of the Tintin in the Congo on Amazon. As for who is buying them, well-meaning Tintin fans will hope they aren’t “laughing for the wrong reasons,” a suspicion that helped Dave Chappelle decide to abruptly end his lucrative TV show that addressed racial issues in comedic sketches.
The Tintin series is more popular in Europe and Australia than it is in the United States, but the controversy has raised awareness of the series. It’s interesting that the author publicly regretted the tone of this particular book before his death. Originally written in 1930 (and published in book form in 1931), the comic reflected the racist attitudes of the time. Borders UK’s solution to the issue was to place the book in the adult section of the bookstore, presumably because adults could read the book and comprehend the context, where as children would not.
Posted in Comics
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
July 19th, 2007
 St. Martin’s © 2007, 384 pages [amazon]
Precious (Preshy) Rafferty and her cousin Lily Swan have never met. Both women happen to own antique stores, but they have little else in common. Precious is an American living in Paris, single but surrounded by supportive friends and family. Lily is Shanghainese, and she is wed to her work, driven by her desire for wealth after having grown up in poverty. She supplements her income by trading in stolen antiquities, a risky business that involves handing wads of cash over to hoodlums in the middle of the night. She has few friends, and the person she most relies on, her assistant Mary-Lou Chen, proves to have been poorly chosen. The lives of these three women, Preshy, Lily, and Mary-Lou, are all affected in the course of Elizabeth Adler’s novel by one particular antique–a necklace whose pearl was stolen from the grave of the Dowager Empress of China–and by the charming sociopath, Bennett Yuan, who will do anything to get his hands on it.
[INSET TEXT: She supplements her income by trading in stolen antiquities, a risky business that involves handing wads of cash over to hoodlums in the middle of the night.] Meet Me in Venice may not be the best book you’ll read this year. Adler’s villains are two-dimensional, and she tends to spill her characters’ back story onto the page without awesome subtlety.
“While Lily’s father played the tables, her mother attempted to make a living selling cheap copies of antiques. Somehow the family scraped by. When she was sixteen her father died and Lily left school and took over the business. Her mother died five years later. Lily was alone in the world with no one to rely on but herself.”
I found references to Preshy’s friend Daria’s “Super Kid” cringe-inducing. And I wonderuddy at Adler’s decision to give her main character the name “Precious”: it is so unusual that one cannot help but be reminded of another literary Precious, Mme Ramotswe of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. (It’s rather like naming a character “Sherlock.” You’re certain to distract readers by calling to mind that other Sherlock.)
I came away from Adler’s novel, however, reminded of how delightful an elude reading can be. Meet Me in Venice is a solid romantic mystery, light on character, perhaps, but with a decent plot. Adler makes you root for her protagonists and boo her bad guys and hope that the right people wind up together in the end. I’m happy I read it.
Tags: books, mystery, romance, Meet Me in Venice, Elizabeth Adler, book reviews
Original post by Debra Hamel
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