June 2011 from Kensington:
Next book’s cover!
June 2011 from Kensington:
What a stack of 250 books looks like
I don’t love technology. If progress had stopped in 1985, when there were VCRs, answering machines, and IBM Selectrics, as far as I’m concerned the world would still be a whiz-bang place. I’ve been using a personal computer since 1986, but I’ve never been a cheerleader for the digital age. And I’ve always loved books, especially old books with their musty smell and brittle pages, and names of former owners written inside. The idea of ebooks always made me cringe. What would it be like to read Anthony Trollope on a computer, or the little screen of an ereader? Who would want to?
The joke is, for the past eight months, I’ve been freelancing for a digital publisher. In other words, I edit books that will probably never be read on anything other than a screen. And so I have been absorbed into the digital dark side, and I wasted much free time dithering over which kind of ereader would be best, or if I even wanted one at all. This past summer the question was decided for me when I was given a Kobo ereader.
From the moment I pulled it out of its box, I’ve had a crush on this little gadget. I’ve read everything from Little Dorrit to the latest pulp horror novels on its non-glare screen. I spend my spare moments finding free ebooks to download onto it. It now has about 250 books, mostly classics from gutenberg.org’s spectacular library of public domain titles. It is small, light, and easy to use. Best of all, I can now walk around town like an ambulatory library, effortlessly toting 250 books in my purse.
Carina Press is open for business!
An all-new all-digital book publishing venture:
I am interviewed at Once Upon a Book Blog.
I’m in the Author Spotlight in RT Book Reviews.
http://www.rtbookreviews.com/rt-daily-blog/ever-evolving-elizabeth-bass
Miss You Most of All is finally out there. Yay! Thanks to all the good people who have said good words already. They’re keeping me going as I finish up my next book!
I worried that Ashes to Ashes would run out of juice in Season 3, but I just took a peak at an episode and I’m already hooked.
For the Gene Genie fans:
Words of the day
I subscribe to words of the day in both French and English. This Monday morning all the words that appeared in my inbox were synonyms for disheveled.
High Plains Drifter
Clint Eastwood lured me out last night, breaking my more than two-month streak of non-moviegoing, which has to be some kind of a record for me. I watched High Plains Drifter on the big screen, the way Clint Eastwood westerns need to be seen. The movie seemed very much like Unforgiven, twenty years earlier. An added bonus was seeing Paul Brinegar–Wishbone from Rawhide–as the bartender.
The Lost Man Bookers
You be the judge.
One year the Man Booker Prize eligibility rules changed and a bunch of novels–by people like Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch–fell through the cracks. So they’re holding another contest and the public gets to vote. Sort of a People’s Choice Award for British novels of 1970.
The shortlist:
(Note: Iris Murdoch didn’t make the cut!)
- The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden (Virago)
- Troubles by J G Farrell (Phoenix)
- Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault (Arrow)
- The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (Penguin)
- The Vivisector by Patrick White (Vintage)
- The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard (Virago)
And The Driver’s Seat is already sitting on my shelf…
Elizabeth Bass 