Mosman Readers

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Bern's Blog (39)

Zorba’s Guide to Free Ebooks

If you're curious about eBooks - what's available? how to find them? - check out Zorba’s Guide to Free Ebooks.

Reading eBooks is more difficult. The Kindle, BeBook and similar readers are available in… Continue

Added by Bern on January 20, 2010 at 20:30 — 2 Comments

When authors attack

Entertaining post by Allison Flood on the Guardian's book blog.

Alain de Botton responded to a poor review of his new book Pleasures and Sorrows of Work with a very angry… Continue

Added by Bern on January 4, 2010 at 15:30 — 1 Comment

Wierd Book Room

From AbeBooks.co.uk - "a celebration of everything that's bizarre, odd and downright weird in books". And they're all for sale.

The Wierd Book Room, for your… Continue

Added by Bern on December 14, 2009 at 12:02 — 1 Comment

Xmas gift wishlist

For the reader who has everything??

The Bedside Booklight - "Never lose your page again"

I wouldn't mind the xkcd book based on the excellent web comic. "It features selections from the first 600 comics, including various author and fan favorites. It was lovingly assembled… Continue

Added by Bern on December 2, 2009 at 13:34 — 1 Comment

The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles and vice versa

Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA's greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer's weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the '60s and early '70s, while writing Gravity's Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of…

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Added by Bern on August 10, 2009 at 16:00 — No Comments

Jonathan Ross's Twitter book club

U.K. TV & radio presenter Jonathan Ross has a book club with, right now, 6,425 members (give or take a few hundred spam bots). The Guardian reports that booksellers are taking an interest after sales spiked for his first pick, Jon Ronson's Men Who Stare at Goats.

People seem to like his "refreshingly… Continue

Added by Bern on June 10, 2009 at 21:30 — 1 Comment

Digital fiction from Penguin

We Tell Stories takes a different approach to fiction.

Might be a gimmick, but it might also be a future for writers and writing. Why restrict yourself to pages (printed or LCD) when your characters can be scattered across the internet... Slice has the characters blogging and tweeting.

There's also a couple of updated 'choose your own adventure' stories, and one where… Continue

Added by Bern on April 18, 2009 at 21:00 — No Comments

The mother lode of recommended reading

MetaFilter is one of the web's most successful online communities with 65,000 registered users, 60,000 discussion threads, 70,000 question threads and over one million comments. It has been going for more than eight years.

During that time, lots of people have asked for book recommendations on specific topics - e.g. things like Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series,… Continue

Added by Bern on March 30, 2009 at 14:30 — No Comments

Line by line

Booker prize-winning Nigerian author Ben Okri is releasing a new poem line by line on Twitter, writes Alison Flood in the Guardian.

"Forms follows adversity – we live in uncertain times. I think we need a new kind of writing that responds to the anxiety of our age and yet has brevity," he said. "My feeling is that these times are perfect for short, lucid forms. We need to get more across in fewer… Continue

Added by Bern on March 26, 2009 at 13:30 — No Comments

What we desire we shall never have

On these nights of low moon, people of a more unstable temperament began to do weird things. There was always a sleepwalker edging along the parapet of a skyscraper with his arms reaching toward the moon, or a werewolf starting to howl in the middle of Times Square, or a pyromaniac setting fire to the dock warehouses. By now these were common occurrences that no longer attracted the usual crowd of rubberneckers. But when I saw a girl sitting, completely naked, on a bench in Central… Continue

Added by Bern on February 27, 2009 at 20:00 — No Comments

London by the book

The Books in London map locates more than 400 books either set in, or about, the capital.

You'll find Absolute Beginners in Ladbroke Grove, Nick Hornby around Highbury and Brick Lane in Shoreditch.

The website also offers The Rough… Continue

Added by Bern on February 24, 2009 at 13:00 — 3 Comments

Put warning labels on books

...before I started reading, I was a rather subservient, slow little boy who never really did anything wrong, but never did much right either. Books inspired me to be very naughty indeed...

Alastair Harper is bemused at the prevailing attitude to reading - that it's a wholesome, anodyne activity that will uplift young illiterates who spend all day at myspace and… Continue

Added by Bern on February 18, 2009 at 16:17 — 1 Comment

"Found Jewish princess. Good-bye succulent pork."

The title of this post is one of Smith magazine's Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak. You can submit your own, or email someone else's as a Valentine's card.

The link came from NPR's Valentine's Day special that offers A Poetry Slam For Valentine's Day and… Continue

Added by Bern on February 13, 2009 at 8:45 — No Comments

Librarians may find the following blog post distressing

Brian Dettmer is an American artist who carves artworks out of books. He seals, then cuts into older dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, science and engineering books, art books, medical guides, history books, atlases, comic books, wallpaper sample books, and others, exposing select images and text to create intricate three-dimensional derivative works that reveal new or alternative… Continue

Added by Bern on February 5, 2009 at 10:30 — 2 Comments

Writers go tweet

- cartoon by gapingvoid.com

You probably already know that John Cleese and Stephen Fry are on Twitter. But there are real live authors too. Like Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman.…

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Added by Bern on January 21, 2009 at 15:38 — 2 Comments

What should I read next?

NextReads has the answer... but try also this magic 8 ball application for impatient types...

I typed in Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence... and got back with a list that included a personal favourite, Midnight in Sicily: On Art, Food, History, Travel, and La Cosa Nostra, a book by Australian author Peter Robb (Carravaggio) that… Continue

Added by Bern on January 2, 2009 at 22:00 — No Comments

Book reviews in 140 characters

On Twitter, @bizbookreview does business and motivational books in 140 characters. Nice work, maybe Mosman Readers could offer a Twitter channel too.

I came across @bizbookreview from this post on Ari Herzog's blog where he favourably compares a Tweeted review of The Cluetrain Manifesto with the 4,091 character version.

On a similar… Continue

Added by Bern on December 2, 2008 at 9:00 — No Comments

Reading Books in Nice Places

Pictures of people - preferably you - reading books in nice (or not so nice?) places.

A good Flickr group for Mosman Readers to… Continue

Added by Bern on November 25, 2008 at 8:31 — No Comments

Top Five Crime And Mystery Novels Of 2008

NPR (National Public Radio) in the US has picked its top five crime novels of the year.

- Small Crimes, by Dave Zeltserman

- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland

- The Chinaman, by Friedrich Glauser, translated from the German by Mike Mitchell

- Death Vows, by Richard… Continue

Added by Bern on November 24, 2008 at 13:00 — No Comments

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