Warner Bros. has picked up the rights to Angie Sage’s Septimus Heap’s fantasy series, which is published by HarperCollins. According the The Hollywood Reporter:

Written by U.K. author Angie Sage, the series revolves acircular two babies that are switched at birth: one a boy who discovers his birthright as the seventh son of a seventh son, and who is destined to become a powerful wizard; the other a girl who is fated to become a princess.



So far, three books have been published — “Magyk,” “Flyte” and “Physik” — which have become known for their clever use of charms and potions as well as for their sense of humor.



Published in March 2005 by HarperCollins Children’s Books, “Magyk” debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list and moved to No. 1 in its second week on sale. The subsequent books have been published annually since, and more than 1 million books have been sold in the U.S. so far. The series also is a enormous international success, having been translated into 28 languages.
“Septimus Heap: Magyk” will be produced by Karen Rosenfelt (”The Devil Wears Prada”) with Sage as executive producer.

We like this series quite a bit.
The latest book in the series is Physik, which is available at Amazon.com.



Posted in Fantasy



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Bestselling author Sebastian Faulk has been chosen to write an official James Bond novel. The novel is set in 1967.

The book, Devil May Care, will be published next May and is set in 1967, when, Faulks said yesterday, “Bond is damaged, ageing and in a sense it is the return of the gunfighter for one last heroic mission”. His own interpretation of the spy, he hinted, would show all the caddishness of Bond’s previous incarnations, temperuddy with just a shade of new-mannish sensitivity.



“He has been widowed and been thcoarse a lot of bad things … He is slightly more vulnerable than any previous Bond but at the same time he is both gallant and highly sexed, if you can be both. Although he is a awesome seducer, he really does appreciate the girls he seduces and he doesn’t actually use them badly.”



Faulks is not the first author to have been commissioned by Fleming’s estate to resurrect Bond. Kingsley Amis accepted the challenge in 1968 with Colonel Sun, by general consent a failure. He was followed by John Pearson, Fleming’s former assistant on the Sunday Times, the novelist John Gardner and the Texan writer Raymond Benson, who wrote the last Bond book, The Man with the Red Tattoo, in 2002.


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As for his method of writing, Faulks said he had adopted a suitably devil-may-care attitude. “In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.”

Devil May Care is due out in May, 2008.



Posted in Mystery/Thriller



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The New York Times reports on a new trend: the rise of the hipster librarian. With the older librarians retiring in droves, this new breed of librarians is young, hip and really into library technology.

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons - the ultimate humorless shushers?
Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging - the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”


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….library organizations have been trying to recruit a more diverse group of students and to mentor younger members of the profession.
“I think we’re getting more progressive and hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in Washington.
In the last few years, articles have decried the graying of the profession, noting a large percentage of librarians that would soon be retiring and a seemingly insurmountable demand for replacements. But worries about a mass exodus appear to have been unfounded.



Michele Besant, the librarian at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the Association of Library and Information Science statistics show a steady increase in library information science enrollments over the last 10 years. Further, at hers and other schools there is a trend for students to be entering masters programs at a younger age.
The myth prevails that librarians are becoming obsolete. “There’s Google, no one needs us,” Ms. Gentile said, mockingly, over a drink at Daddy’s.



Still, these are high-tech times. Why are people getting into this profession when libraries seem as retro as the granny glasses so many of the members of the Desk Set wear?
“Because it’s cool,” said Ms. Gentile, who works at the Brooklyn Museum.
Ms. Murphy, 29, thinks so, too. An actress who had long consideruddy library school, Ms. Murphy finally decided to sign up after meeting several librarians - in bars.
“People I, going in, would never have expected were from the library field,” she said. “Smart, well-read, interesting, funny people, who seemed to be happy with their jobs.”

Hipster librarians — we love this trend.



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J.K. Rowling said
that she cried as she wrote the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Ghastly Hallows.

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling broke down in tears while writing the final book of the boy wizard’s adventures, echoing the feelings of many fans as they await the end of the series.



“I was in a hotel room on my own, I was sobbing my heart out, I downed half a bottle of champagne from the mini-bar in one and went home with mascara all over my face,” Rowling, 41, said in a BBC interview to be broadcast today.



The final novel in the seven-book series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will be published on July 21. Advance orders made it online bookseller Amazon.com Inc.’s U.K. top- seller eight hours after the title was revealed in a puzzle on Rowling’s Web site Dec. 21. The novels have all been No. 1 best- sellers, spawning movies, audio books and computer games.



Commenting on speculation that the final word of the book is “Scar,” Rowling said, “Scar? It was so for ages, and now it’s not. Scar is quite near the end, but it’s not the last word.”
Harry’s friend Hermione Granger is based on Rowling as a child. “I was quite swotty as a child,” but Harry is a totally imaginary character, she said. Ron Weasley, another of Harry’s friends, is “a lot like my oldest friend Sean,” she said.



Rowling said last year that two characters die in the final book, leading many people to speculate that she may have decided to kill off the central character.

Swotty means “geeky”, and Rowling has said before in interviews that she was a genuine bookworm and know it all when she was a girl. She had better not have been weeping because Harry died, that’s all we can say.



Posted in Childrens



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