Shelfari

Patterson's Spree at Tiffany's

Last night, Fifth Avenue in New York City was the scene of an event that rocked the house of rocks, Tiffany’s, as it hosted a book party for James Patterson.

Some may ask, "Why would this world-famous jewelry store celebrate a world-famous thriller writer?" When that writer calls his latest book Sunday at Tiffany's there's reason enough.

The book, co-written with children's book author Gabrielle Charbonnet, is actually a love story about a lonely young girl who finds comfort in weekend trips to the jewelers with her handsome and charming imaginary friend. Years later, she meets a man who reminds her of that long-gone dream friend...but is he for real? Maybe there is a bit of mystery in this book after all!

Patterson, who splits his time between Palm Beach and the NYC area, looked tanned and relaxed as he mingled at the event, which was attended by a few hundred locals of the publishing and society variety. He is credited for the sales of 140 million books worldwide during the thirty-two years he's been writing novels. He also founded the James Patterson Page-Turner Awards and claims to have given away hundreds of thousands of dollars to individuals and groups that promote books and reading.  For that alone, he's a gem!

David Nudo

NEW! Authors Unbound

Monday marked the launch of our NEW Authors Unbound feature.  We wanted to make it easier for authors and readers to connect on Shelfari.  This new feature does just that!   Every author has an Unbound page that provides a place to share information about the author, discuss their writing and see a list of published works. Authors and readers can jot down what they know about an author, edit what someone else has written, add videos and pictures, and post favorite quotes.

TechCrunch highlighted Authors Unbound today, saying, "With the introduction of these new profiles, Shelfari is poised to become a uniquely rich repository of literary information, and has the potential to become an IMBD for books."

                  

• Authors—Now you have a forum to directly connect with Shelfari readers and fans.  You can customize your page, discuss your work and link to your Shelfari profile.
• Readers—Now you have the opportunity to share what you know and love about your favorite author. You can connect with Shelfari authors and discuss their books or create pages for your favorite authors.  Share your knowledge with the entire Shelfari community.

Come and check out some of our authors: Paulo Coelho, Dean Koontz, Elizabeth Gilbert and Octavia Butler.    

Anyone can contribute.  Anyone can edit.  Authors Unbound.

Enjoy!

Amanda

The UK’s Most Prestigious Non-fiction Award

The UK’s most Prestigious non-fiction award

The BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is the richest non fiction prize in the UK, worth £30,000 to the winner. Sponsored by BBC FOUR, the prize aims to reward the best of non-fiction and is open to authors of all non-fiction books in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. To see the list of finalist for 2008.

What we're reading this week

This week on Shelfari, the top 5 books everyone's reading are:

1. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
2. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
3. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
4. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. Atonement by Ian McEwan

Atonement is actually in my reading pile right now (one of the lucky ones that's been coming with me on the bus this week).  I'm 3/4 through it and have to decide if I'll be renting the movie this weekend.  It's rare I actually read the book first (bad Amanda, I know).

Happy Reading!

Amanda

Sound familiar?

By Nick Owchar at Jacket Copy: Los Angeles Times

Before Lewis: What inspired his Narnia tales?

               

Well, it seems that C.S. Lewis doesn't hold the patent on inventing the magical wardrobe that transports children to other worlds. Edith Nesbit deserves more of the credit for her 1909 story, "The Aunt and Amabel," in which a young girl, banished by her aunt to a bedroom for committing some vague act of mischief, escapes her loneliness thus:

She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.

"I expect it's only shelves and people's best hats," she said. But she only said it. People often say what they don't mean, so that if things turn out as they don't expect, they can say "I told you so," but this is most dishonest to one's self, and being dishonest to one's self is almost worse than being dishonest to other people. Amabel would never have done it if she had been herself. But she was out of herself with anger and unhappiness.

Of course it wasn't hats. It was, most amazingly, a crystal cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station. It seemed to be lighted by stars, which is, of course, unusual in a booking office, and over the station clock was a full moon. The clock had no figures, only 'Now' in shining letters all round it, twelve times. ...

A train station too, huh? Shades of Mr. Potter. This delightful short story is among a rich selection that Douglas A. Anderson includes in "Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction." Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen: A Tale in Seven Stories" gives us not only a possible inspiration for Jadis, Lewis' villainous White Witch in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," but also for elements found in other modern fantasies--most specifically, I'm thinking of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Andersen's Snow Queen, for instance, lives in a palace illuminated only by the northern lights, and among her attendants are polar bears, which, in John Howe's illustration for this book's cover, pull the queen's sledge across the snow.

G.K. Chesterton is included, and so are Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Morris and many others. Even though the book's main title highlights its connection to Lewis' Narnia stories, editor Anderson is right, in the subtitle, to point out that the stories gathered here inspired more than a single author.

The Writer's "Revenge"

From The Huffington Post: "Men Explain Things to Me"

I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young ladies. The house was great -- if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets -- a rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money.

He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."

I replied, "Several, actually."

He said, in the way you encourage your friend's seven-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"

They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"

So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped.

Quite amused!

Amanda

The Last Lecture

When Randy Pausch was given the opportunity to speak at Carnegie Mellon University's annual "The Last Lecture" series, it was only the beginning.  Recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, this father of three (pictured above) gave a lecture titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". His inspiring lecture on valuable life lessons quickly caught media attention and he has spent the last 7 months recounting his story.  At the urging of his wife, Pausch wrote a book fittingly titled "The Last Lecture" (released April 8th).  The author graciously did an interview with Amazon prior to the book release: 

Amazon.com: Your lecture at Carnegie Mellon has reached millions of people, but even with the short time you apparently have, you wanted to write a book. What did you want to say in a book that you weren't able to say in the lecture?

Pausch: Well, the lecture was written quickly--in under a week. And it was time-limited. I had a great six-hour lecture I could give, but I suspect it would have been less popular at that length ;-).

A book allows me to cover many, many more stories from my life and the attendant lessons I hope my kids can take from them. Also, much of my lecture at Carnegie Mellon focused on the professional side of my life--my students, colleagues and career. The book is a far more personal look at my childhood dreams and all the lessons I've learned. Putting words on paper, I've found, was a better way for me to share all the yearnings I have regarding my wife, children and other loved ones. I knew I couldn't have gone into those subjects on stage without getting emotional.

Amazon.com: You talk about the importance--and the possibility!--of following your childhood dreams, and of keeping that childlike sense of wonder. But are there things you didn't learn until you were a grownup that helped you do that?

Pausch: That's a great question. I think the most important thing I learned as I grew older was that you can't get anywhere without help. That means people have to want to help you, and that begs the question: What kind of person do other people seem to want to help? That strikes me as a pretty good operational answer to the existential question: "What kind of person should you try to be?" (to read complete interview)

Amanda

2008 Pulitzer Prize Winners

 

Fiction: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Drama: August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

History: What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe

Biography: Eden’s Outcasts by John Matteson

Poetry: Time and Materials by Robert Hass

Poetry: Failure by Philip Schultz

General Nonfiction: The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedlander

For more information on the Pulitzer Prize Winners for 2008.

Do you have the perfect library?

Telegraph UK has assembled a list of 110 best books that compose the perfect library.  The list is divided into: Classics, Poetry, Literary Fiction, Romantic Fiction, Children's Books, Sci-Fi, Crime, Books that Changed the World, Books that Changed Your World, History and Lives.  What do you think? 

A Loathed Profession

DEADLINE: April 17, 2008

Okay, okay, I'm being melodramatic.  Consider this a friendly reminder that taxes are due in less then 2 weeks.   Timely that Powell's original essay by Richard Yancey's caught my eye. Yancey spent almost 13 years as a Revenue Office for the IRS and captured his experience in the book "Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS".  In my life, I’ve imagined what it would be like to be a spy, actress, professional photographer, advertising executive, and president, but never a “Revenue Officer”.  To channel Pam (from The Office), “I don’t think it’s many little girls’ dream…”

Welcome to the IRS

by Richard Yancey

October 18, 2003: After twelve years, nine months and five days, my tour-of-duty was over. In a matter of hours, my manager would arrive in the office for the final, ironic act of confiscation. I sat at my desk that morning, staring at my computer screen, and none of my co-workers spoke to me. I was no longer one of them.

That afternoon I surrendered my credentials and my receipt book to my manager, a precise, no-nonsense "company man," whose political shrewdness was matched only by his technical incompetence. He was destined for great things in the Service; I was destined for oblivion. We respected but did not like each other, and our parting was strained, an awkward pall hanging over my "employee-closeout," the Service's euphemism for the final act of surrender, the last goodbye to my identity. As I walked to my car that mild, cloudless, breathtakingly beautiful fall afternoon, I touched my empty breast pocket. For almost thirteen years, I had carried my commission there, and now that commission was gone. "You will become what you do," my trainer with the Service had warned me in the beginning of my career. His words had proved prophetic, and now I wasn't a revenue officer anymore. I wasn't one of us; I was one of them.

On that following Monday, five new trainees began their careers with the IRS. I did not envy them, although, thanks to Congress, the Service is not the same beast it was when I came on-board in early 1991. The ranks of the revenue officer corps have thinned, new laws have made the collection of taxes a mind-numbing, complex task fraught with legal and ethical challenges, and the Service, like a great ship that has lost its rudder, drifts upon a sea of indecision, caught between a disgruntled workforce and a Congress hell-bent on limiting its ability to enforce the very laws it is charged with enforcing. The one constant over the years has been the public's perception of the Service as a heartless, intrusive, overbearing, unresponsive bureaucracy, at once incompetent and ruthless, all-knowing, all-powerful, and completely inept.

You will become what you do, and people will hate you for it.

A few months after my last day, I heard the story of one of the new-hires getting her hair done, not long after she came on-board.

"So, what are you up to now?" the stylist asked.

"I finally got a job," the trainee answered.

"Hey, that's great. Where?"

"The IRS."

"The what?"

"You know, the IRS. The Internal Revenue Service."

The stylist abruptly ripped the apron from the trainee, spun the chair around and pointed to the door.

"Get out."

"Excuse me?"

"Get out. Get out of my chair and get out of my shop and never come back here."

"But I can't leave now," the trainee protested. "You haven't finished my cut!"

"And I'm not going to finish it either. I want you to leave and I want you to leave now!"

The trainee left. In tears, she called her new boss, who listened sympathetically to the story and then said, "Welcome to the IRS." (Read more)

Happy Reading,

Amanda