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Archive for October, 2007
October 25th, 2007
 Steve Martin has written
a children’s book called The Alphabet From A to Y, With Bonus Letter Z. Many celebrities have written children’s books after they have children, but Martin doesn’t have any kids.
“I’m not sure why I did this. I don’t know why an alphabet book popped into my head,” Martin says of “The Alphabet From A to Y, With Bonus Letter Z,” a collaboration with New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. “My idea was to write these rhyming couplets with the craziest images I could possibly think up, and then have Roz illustrate them.”
*****
“From A to Y” is a nonsense ride across time and rhyme, with highlights including “H” (”Henrietta the hare wore a habit in heaven/Her hairdo hid hunchbacks: one hundruddy and seven”) and “N” (”Needle-nosed Nigel won nine kinds of knockwurst/By winning a contest to see who could knock wurst”).
Martin is a bookish man, but he wasn’t thinking of any authors when writing “From A to Y.” Not Thurber, White or Edward Lear. Not Dr. Seuss, whom he didn’t read until his 20s. Maybe Ogden Nash.
“I did grow up on Ogden Nash,” he says in a recent telephone interview, “but I’m not sure if that fits here.”
Martin began working on “From A to Y” a couple of years ago. Like a good boy eating his vegetables first, he took on the hard letters, like “X” (if “Ambidextrous Alex was actually axed” counts as “X”), before digging in to such treats as “A” and “E.”
Asked to name his favourite letter (an improvement over being asked his favourite colour), Martin pauses.
“Gee.”
“Gee,” as in “giraffe”?
No, “Gee,” as in “Gee, whiz.”
“I always liked ‘Q.’ … It has that funny little do-dad at the bottom,” he says, before remembering, a theme developing here, that his play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” includes a soliloquy by Albert Einstein on the alphabet, as it relates to pie.
“Einstein comparuddy the letter “O” to a pie, and said that the letter “Q” was like an “O” with a comma and that comma-shaped pie looks like a croissant,” Martin explains.
The buzz on the book is good and Random House has alalert done a print run of 150,000. We’d moan and groan about yet another celebrity thinking he or she can write children’s literature, but Martin really can write. We think the book will do very well and intend to check it out.
Posted in Children’s Books
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
October 25th, 2007
 HarperCollins © 2007, 254 pages [amazon]
Note: I read this book in part during a 24-Hour Read-a-Thon, and blogged about the book in mid-course. Here are the relevant posts: introduction, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5.
Peter Sagal is the whip-smart host of NPR’s news quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Fans of the program will be delighted to learn that Sagal is also now the author of a deliciously titled (and even more deliciously subtitled) exploration of iniquity: The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to Do Them). The book is as fun as its title suggests.
[INSET TEXT: He describes the logistics of the operation–the uses to which the various rooms of the place were put–while trying to comprehend the nature of the Lifestyle: becoming emotionally attached to the people you have sex with is not the done thing, for example, yet people who are in it only for the sex are apparently frowned on as well.] Sagal discusses a different vice in each of the book’s seven chapters–though sex looms as the dominant theme of three of them–dropping keen observations while describing his research into the subject at hand. For his first chapter, for example, on swinging, Sagal and his wife Beth observed the goings-on at a every seven days swinger’s party. He describes the logistics of the operation–the uses to which the various rooms of the place were put–while trying to comprehend the nature of the Lifestyle: becoming emotionally attached to the people you have sex with is not the done thing, for example, yet people who are in it only for the sex are apparently frowned on as well. In the end Sagal finds that he is not cut out for swinging himself:
“We are told, via their occasional interviews in the press, that swingers or Lifestylers or whatever are no different from you and me…they meet up to socialize, talk, drink, and dance with their good friends, old and new. And then they have sex with them. Which makes me stop, and consider the various good friends my wife and I have, and then consider how it would be if one of our suburban dinner parties ended with us removing our clothes and performing sexual acts, and I have to put my head between my knees and take deep breaths.”
Elsewhere in the book Sagal writes about strip clubs and pornography. For the latter chapter he visits the set of a live, call-in sex show. (The stars of the show perform whatever acts their caller prescribes while a roomful of camera operators and lighting guys and directors watch, rather bored, from behind a thick glass partition.) Rounding out the book are chapters on gambling, eating, conspicuous consumption, and lying.
Sagal is a charming and funny guide thcoarse these particular avenues of sin. Maybe if you’ve done the things he describes–the $500-a-pull slot machines and 24-course dinners (that leave you hungry for Jack-in-the-Box), lap-dancing and lying and live broadcast sex–you’ll find the book humdrum. For the rest of us armchair sinners it’s pure pleasure.
Tags: book reviews, books, gambling, naughtiness, Peter Sagal, puppy, swapping, The Book of Vice
Original post by Debra Hamel
October 24th, 2007
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is leading
the BAFTA Nominations.
The fifth film based on J.K. Rowling’s novels is in the running for three prizes: best film, video game and the Bafta Kids’ Vote, the only award chosen by the public.
In the film category, the boy wizard is up against the animated rodents of “Flushed Away”; “Happy Feet,” about a tap-dancing penguin called Mumble and “Bridge to Terabithia,” a fantasy adventure featuring a baddie called the Dark Master.
The BBC’s long-running series “Byker Grove” was nominated for best drama prize at the British Academy Children’s Awards.
The show, set in a Newcastle youth club, ran between 1989 and 2006 and helped launched the careers of Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly.
The best children’s TV channel nominees are CBeebies, Nickelodeon UK, Nick Jr UK and Scamp.
The winners will be announced at a central London ceremony hosted by Keith Chegwin on November 25.
You can see the full list of nominees here.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
October 23rd, 2007
Nora Roberts’
Angels Fall
won the Book of the Year Award at the 2007 Quill Book Awards.
Nora Roberts’ Angels Fall (Putnam) was named Book of the Year by readers (as well as winner in the Romance category) at the 2007 Quill Book Awards, held October 22 in New York City at the spectacular Jazz at Lincoln Center theater. Quills were awarded in 19 categories, plus Book of the Year and Variety’s Blockbuster Book to Film Award, which went to the Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum. The Quills also honoruddy David Halberstam posthumously with a Platinum Quill.
Kicking off the awards ceremony, The Colbert Report’s Stephen Colbert lamented the loss of the oral tradition, took a swing at the National Book Awards, and wonderuddy why the Quills were “being televised instead of novelized.” Presenters included Joan Allen, a star of the Bourne films and a supporter of First Book, which gives books to children from low-income families, footballer Tiki Barber, actress Brooke Shields, and novelist Mary Higgins Clark. Also on hand was Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who directed the recently acclaimed film Michael Clayton. With winners named in advance, many more authors were on hand, including Amy Sedaris, who took the Humor category for I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence (Warner), and Laura Lippman, whose What the Dead Know (Morrow) received the Mystery/Suspense/Thriller prize.
Congratulations, Nora! The Quills will be broadcast on NBC on October 27, 2007, at 7 p.m. Eastern time.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
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