The Onion and Rare Book News

[Tenley Nadine (book ningmaster)]

Hello again, Nerdfighters! Today I'm going to try something a little bit different. Instead of talking about one major book related issue, I'm going to talk about a couple minor ones. Now, without further ado, your weekly book news.

On Monday the New York Times posted an intriguing article about The Onion, a popular online news source. The article focused on how well The Onion's headlines pull their readers in and how the paper itself sort of has its own language that they've really used to their advantage. And I must say, as a reader of The Onion, both of these facts are without a doubt true.

Another site I follow, although admittedly this one isn't as popular, is the blog Lee Jay Stoltzfus, but I'd argue to say that its more of a news site than a blog (and I mean that in the best possible way). The blog is called, Rare Book News and it is basically a collection of fascinating and at times unbelievable book news from some of the biggest news sites and also from a few low key news sites as well. It's a very helpful site when your trying to find a large amount of information about books and you'd rather not go to a million and a half sites to find that information One of his posts that I personally found quite interesting mentions that, the Walters Art Museum is posting an online version of the Quran. That specific article and many others can be found on the site (linked above)and as a bonus, its incredibly easy to navigate the site (random facts FTW?).

Thus concludes the main portion of the blog, but I have a few other quick things to mention.

First, the Blurbing book is now in it's second week of reading, ""One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey. So far, there hasn't been a whole lot of participation in the discussion, but I urge you all to discuss/blurb the book when your done reading it (if you have questions about blurbs you can ask in the discussion, or send me as message/leave me a comment on my page). The results of the poll I posted last week told me that you (or at least those who voted) want me to choose a winning blurb for each book, but I can't pick a winner if there aren't any blurbs!

Second, I've been thinking about possibly doing some book reviews in my weekly blogs, not all the time, but possibly every few weeks or something. Is this something you'd be interested in reading? Also, would you like me to review any SPECIFIC books?

As always, best wishes!
Tenley Nadine

[thefirstofmany]

Book reviews are a good idea. Maybe if you're not doing a book review you could "promote" someone elses book review.

[Wonder Woman 2.0]

I don't know if you should so much as review specific books as much as you should cover various books within a genre/interest. Although genre lines are more or less blurred beyond recognition at this point, I still think that it would be a good idea to go through and present books from different ideas. Like, what are some good green technology books out right now? How about books that read similar to John's books? Consider Amazon's lists of books within certain ranges that have appealed to different groups. You may or may not have to read them all, but find out a little bit of information on the books so that we can start introducing new titles and authors to other nerdfighters.

After all, this is a book blog. We should be mentioning BOOKS. This isn't to say I don't like the fact that you've come up with some great and interesting virtual resources for us nerdfighters, but I think there are some of us who want something to think about reading, and want a place to start looking before we start wandering aimlessly through Borders.

If you want help with that Nadine, I'd be more than willing to make a blog about it for you every week. I think this would be a fun project to get into and it would be good to expand our literary vocabulary.

That Rare News site was amazering by the way. :)

[Jasmine]

Me too :D and if you did book reviews every so often, I would definitely read them.

[President Clive-φ-Davidson]

Nice blog, I might like to see more of this type. }8¬D