Brilliant, brilliant, brrrriiiiillliiiiant post on The Millions entitled Confined by Pages : The Joy of Unread Books by Kirsty Logan. Go forth, and read (and then don’t read)!
Category : Book Trade News
Category : BookieMonster News, Fun Stuff
Thanks to 12 year old for drawing names for us, we have a winner in our Naming the Bones competition. Congratulations go to Tracey, who commented
Ohh this sounds interesting, would love to read something a bit different.
Thanks for visiting BookieMonster and we hope you enjoy the book Tracey! We will email you soon.
As a surprise I decided to give away a second prize book also, which is The Future Homemakers of America by Laurie Graham, which I read and enjoyed recently. This is just a secondhand book, so seemed an appropriate second prize! And the winner of that prize is Su Yin. 
I’ll be emailing you soon also.
I’ll be doing more giveaways soon, so keep visiting and keep an eye out. And thanks for all your comments, everyone!
I’m going to be a Mrs McPreachy-pants. I’ve been thinking a bit about why I read and why I’ve always read and why I 
think everyone should read. And I mean read books. There’s an equally good argument that people should read magazines and newspapers too – but I’m not going to make it.
Everyone should read books, non-fiction, fiction, literary and trashy, genre – anything. Just read books. Read a page a day or a week, if that’s all the time you can afford. Spend $1000 on an iPad and read digital books, spend $1 on 10 seventh-hand romance books on Trade Me, go to the library, swap books with everyone and anyone you know. Have one book or have 10 bookshelves full. Read old books, read new books, read shy books, read bold books.
However you do it, read books.
Books explain people to you. Books can give you the world. They can give you more than the world. It doesn’t matter how small your own world is, in books you can find the world you need and want. You can know what it is to be a man, or a woman, a gay man or a teen girl, an animal or a creature you’d never imagined. You can be in a part of the world you’ve never been to, or in a part of the world you know very well.
You can experience love, death, sex, violence, fear, loneliness, happiness, music, art, poverty, sickness, God, the devil, anything. Really, anything.
And unlike movies or television, you won’t be handed this “anything” on a plate. There is something deep about books, a point where books stop and pause and push you to take it further, to think it further, to find out where this is going. Nothing is presented to you on a plate, even the most obvious books just give you an opening and a few details and give you the space to paint the picture, write the story (make the most extended metaphor) for yourself.
Everyone has a limit on their life. For some it’s sickness, or money, or circumstances, or understanding of other people. But none of these things have to mean your life must stay small. Just read books.
Photos from WikiCommons.
Category : Book Trade News, Fun Stuff
If, like me, you
a) are in love with food and the preparing thereof, and;
b) are in love with Nigella Lawson
then the new Nigella Quick Collection app for Iphone and Ipod Touch is for you! (and me). Plus the screenshot shows a Raspberry Syllabub. All food should have names like Syllabub, Fool and Snooglepops. (One of these is not a real food name.)
If, like me, you
a) are not in love with vampires and young people and the meetings thereof, and;
b) are not in love with people who speak before thinking (this blog being proof of do as I say not as I do, clearly)
then this lovely story from Not Always Right will give you equal measure of giggles and facepalms.
And, apropos of nothing, this picture is so damn cute it makes me actually want to weep with joy. I’m that far away from cynical today.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
My dears, I would like some advice. I have three large and wordy non-fiction tomes which I would dearly love to read. These are The Seven Basic Plots : Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker, Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstader and Symbolic Logic by Lewis Carroll (ZOMG, am I not terribly intellectual? With glasses-wearing ponies?).
But, as mentioned, these are all rather large, rather wordy and require rather a lot of concentration and time in the reading. This is a problem for two reasons.
A. I have the concentration span of a pygmy hamster, and
B. I would have to go a long time without writing a review of anything whilst reading them, as I would be too busy being my clever-pants self to read flim-flam like fiction. *whiny voice* But I like fiction flim-flam.
Behold and lo! I think I have a possible solution. All these books are divided into “parts” and “sections” (I think the more erudite even call them “chapters”). So perhaps I will read them in parts interspersed with flim-flam. Then I can keep bringing you reviews of flim-flammery, along with “read-in-progress” reviews of glasses-wearing pony intellectualism? Yes?
Does this seem like a plan? Does anyone else do this with the more brain-bending and long-winded reading? Does it work?
P.S. plus I can still bring you my reviews of recent releases because… I am being sent honest-to-goodness advance review copies of books! I am beyond excited at being like an actual proper Dorothy Parker-like journalist (you may cease laughing now) and I kiss you, dear publishing companies (shameless shill – here are our Contact Details if you are a publisher who hasn’t sent me an ARC but would love to do so). I am firm, but fair.
