For mystery lovers who know what they want – and for those who haven't a clue!
We asked authors what they read, hear and watch in quarantine. Here’s Charles Finch’s diary
Op-Ed: If marijuana is essential during the coronavirus shutdown, why not books?
10 crime writers to read while under house arrest
James Patterson sets up fund to help indie booksellers (and why is Patterson the only BIG NAME AUTHOR who does this???)
Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist in history.
A Few 19th-Century Parlor Games to Amuse You While You’re Stuck at Home
Posted by Lee Goldberg this 26 minute, black and white TV show yesterday. It’s well cast.
Kurt Kasznar stars as Nero Wolfe and William Shatner stars as Archie Goodwin. Seven years before ‘Star Trek’, Shatner is good as Archie, capturing his light style of patter with a layer of metal just below. Born in Vienna, Kaszner is also good as Wolfe, with an actual accent that allows his Wolfe to have an international touch. He may not be quite as large as Wolfe was, and you can’t tell if he’s wearing a yellow shirt due to the black and white filming, but he comes off as an imperious figure.
There are none of the other characters. Wolfe has Archie gather everyone in the office and solves the murder in one episode, but he does so without Cramer being there. Archie delivers Wolfe’s breakfast to him, so there’s no Fritz – though Wolfe compliments him for the meal. And, it must be said, the office is all wrong. Maybe it would’ve been corrected if pilot had been bought. There were two or three episodes filmed. Let’s hope the others turn up as well!
But had the pilot been bought and the show a success, would there have been a Captain Kirk?
Enjoy!
from Lithub, March 20, 2020
“On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 18, 2020 I stood in an empty bookstore and cried.”
Did Amazon Throttle My Sales After I Criticized Them in the New York Times?
Danny Caine on the Transparency and Responsibility of the World’s Largest Bookstore
In Amazon’s Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third Reich
The retailer once said it would sell “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Now it has banished objectionable volumes — and agreed to erasing the swastikas from a photo book about a Nazi takeover.
From the UK:
Why Amazon Knows So Much About You
On “Frontline”:
To read through our earlier posts on SPECTRE from our old blog, click on that link. The posts started on June 22, 2011 and went to June 21, 2017. Scroll down to the bottom and click on the tiny arrow to move backward through the earlier posts.
Bookselling Without Borders is a global partnership of independent publishers that supports travel to international book fairs and residencies for booksellers. It is currently accepting applications for 2020 fellowships.
BWB connects booksellers to the international book community through all-expenses-paid trips to the world’s premier book fairs. This year, the program is expanding to include the Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair and the Bogotá International Book Fair, in addition to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the Turin Book Fair, and the Frankfurt Book Fair. Participating booksellers will be treated to customized itineraries of specially developed panels, meetings, seminars, and receptions with publishers, authors, and other booksellers.
Booksellers interested in diverse and international literature and in fostering relationships with the international literary community are encouraged to apply. The application period ends February 16.
See the article in Lithub for the full story and details!
These sorts of lists are really pointless. I look at the lists from others – lists of books, lists of movies, lists of albums or songs – and I rarely agree with them. Hell, in the Rolling Stone‘s lists I don’t even know who most of the singers are – but then I’m now in my 60s and never was very hip…
But they are a way to look back on what you read and to see what stood up to time. Books that may’ve been on my Best of the Year some time ago don’t hold up to others that were also on one of the lists.
Then, too, it is often impossible to tease out one title from ten years of a favorite author’s books. So I’ll cheat and include some authors whose title really stands in for the entire decade’s worth of books.
And then it is also the case that favorite authors don’t appear on the list because the book of theirs that you really loved was before 2010. That’s the case with Winslow, O’Connell, Estleman, Kerr, Lehane, and Ellroy for instance.
In typing this out I noticed a gap in the center of the decade where no books are listed. That could’ve been an effect of our battles to save the shop and how that colored my enjoyment of what I was reading, and that I did a lot of re-reading of old favorites for comfort.
So, by year published:
2011: Urban Waite, Terror of Living
2011: Peter Spiegelman, Thick as Thieves
2011: Craig Johnson, Hell is Empty
2012: Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
2012: Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
2013: James Lee Burke, Light of the World (would’ve been the perfect end to the series)
2013: Roger Hobbs, Ghost Man
2019: John Connolly, A Book of Bones (but, really, each book is just a chapter of a greater story)
2019: Mike Lawson, House Arrest (stands in for a consistent decade of great works)
Then a few non-fiction titles –
2011: Bill James, True Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence
2015: Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
2019: Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Last thought – I don’t have a Best Book of the Decade. Guess I don’t think like that any more!
