Alex C. Telander's Blog, page 37
December 3, 2014
Book News: LA Bookstores, 75 Reasons Why Margaret Atwood is Awesome, Taylor Swift & More!
Wizarding Tourism��
How to experience the fun and adventure of Harry Potter around the world.
Blank Space��
What to read if you love Taylor Swift’s Blank Space music video.
Margaret Atwood��
Not that you need them, because she’s so awesome, but here are 75 reasons proving she is just that.
November 27, 2014
���Game of Thrones: A Pop-up Guide to Westeros��� illustrated by Michael Komarck, designed by Matthew Christian Reinhart (Insight Editions, 2014) [REVIEW #800!]
It���s that time of year again, deep in the dark of winter, when Christmas is almost upon us; and we sit a fair distance away from the next riveting season of HBO���s Game of Thrones, and even longer from the next book in the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. You���re probably thinking in these dark times what possible gift could I be rewarded with that will make everything feel better, what pricey item would make the perfect Christmas present or possibly a worthwhile spending of the Christmas money? Why not take a look at Game of Thrones: A Pop-Up Guide to Westeros.
There aren���t many books out there to which nothing bad can be said about them, and this is one of those very rare books. However, there is a dilemma with this beautiful pop-up book, which is that you want to continuously open it and lift every flap and card and pop-up section and study and read and admire; but at the same time you also want to keep everything pristine and mint and unopened to preserve its value and perfection.
Much as with anything Matthew Reinhart puts his mind and skill to, this is simply an astonishing work of art. One of his more recent popular works of genius is Star Wars: A Pop-up Guide to the Galaxy. The level of detail and work that has gone into this pop-up book knows no bounds.
Generally, your average pop-up book will have maybe one or two on a page, and sometimes none to continue whatever story it is trying to tell, not so with Game of Thrones. Reinhart pushes the envelope with multiple levels of pop-ups cunningly conceived and designed to defy artistic logic, while other great page-spanning scenes rise up from the paper like Lazarus to dazzle your very eyes.
In addition to the main pop-up on each page, the smaller sub-pop-up has a little corner cover to be folded into so that it remains firmly locked in place and protected, making it easy to release and open up and admire, and then put back again in safety. This device also makes it easy to know how to open up a pop-up so it doesn���t bend the wrong way and possibly get damaged.
The book takes you across the scenes and locations of Westeros, showing you the lands and its citadels, giving you information on the people and characters and some of the familiar story pieces you have come to love and hate and perhaps love again. ��Whether you���re an addict of the books, the TV show or both, as you slowly and delicately leaf through this incredible book you will no doubt have the Game of Thrones theme song running in your head.
Originally written on November 23, 2014 ��Alex C. Telander.
To purchase a copy of Game of Thrones: A Pop-Up Guide to Westeros from Bookshop Santa Cruz, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.
November 25, 2014
Book News: National Book Award Winners Announced, King’s THE STAND Becomes a Quadrilogy, Colbert Takes on Amazon & More!
The Stand Adaptation��
Director Josh Boone will be adapting a four-movie series to cover Stephen King’s most epic and one of his bestselling books, The Stand.
The Talisman 3
In other King news, it’s been announced that Stephen King and Peter Straub will be collaborating on a book once again, a third book after their bestselling The Talisman and Black House.
National Book Award Winners Celebrated��
A full breakdown of the National Book Awards and the winners.
November 20, 2014
���The Silkworm��� by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland Books, 2014)
While the cat is long out of the bag that the secret identity behind Robert Galbraith is none other than Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, it seems that the Cormoran Strike mysteries are books that Rowling has wanted to write for some time. She doesn���t hold back with the characters or the story or the language, and in this second installment, The Silkworm, Rowling goes all out with a twisted gory murder of a lesser known author.
Owen Quine is a novelist who has achieved some notoriety with his books but not of the bestselling caliber he would perhaps like. Now Quine is missing and his wife needs private detective Cormoran Strike to see if he can find Quine or at least find out what has happened. Strike is now doing pretty well for himself after the success of his solving the Landry case in Cuckoo���s Calling and takes the high-profile case, which he thinks is about a missing person.
After tracking down a piece of property co-owned by Quine, inside Strike finds the brutally murdered and destroyed body of the author and it now becomes a murder investigation. The police don���t think too highly of Strike after he showed them up last time and don���t give him much help, but he���s still able to talk with the right people and work on putting the pieces together, though there are a lot of pieces.
The entire publishing world is angry at Owen Quine for attempting to publish a work of satire that ridicules the entire literary crowd, including Quine���s own editor and agent to an embarrassing degree. While the book hasn���t been published yet, titled Bombyx Mori (Latin for silkworm), a few copies have been made that end up in the wrong hands and pretty soon more copies are made and everyone is reading it. So Quine���s list of potential murderers is considerable.
Rowling clearly had fun writing a dark murder mystery set within the heart of the publishing world, as well as not holding back with the grisly details and unlikeable characters. Like Cuckoo���s Calling, The Silkworm is a fun mystery that keeps the reader going until the resolution and the murderer is found. One hopes Rowling will continue to write more of these great mysteries that she clearly has a talent for.
Originally written on September 24, 2014 ��Alex C. Telander.
To purchase a copy of The Silkworm from Bookshop Santa Cruz, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.
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November 18, 2014
Book News: 33 Books You Should Read, Most Beautiful Bookstores, Amazon/Hachette War Ends & More!
Amazon & Hachette Come to Terms
After spending most of 2014 in a stalemate, Amazon and publisher Hachette have reached an agreement.
Book Boom in Oakland
The book business is booming in Oakland, especially for independent bookstores and here’s how and why.
How to Throw a Great Gatsby Wedding
You know you want to celebrate the union with your partner like no one has done before. Well, here’s how.
November 13, 2014
“In Real Life” by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang (First Second, 2014)
Bestselling author Cory Doctorow, of Little Brother and For the Win, and Jen Wang, known for her work with the Adventure Time comics and her graphic novel Koko Be Good, join forces to create a graphic novel about teenage girls, massive multiplayer online games and what gold farming really means. It’s a funny, addictive, entertaining but also sobering story that any gamer will soon become a big fan of.
Anda, a chubby teenager, gets introduced to a massive online game (MMO) called Coarsegold Online where she joins a female-only guild and has lots of fun leveling and gaining loot. She soon learns about gold farming from a friend in game, which consists of players from developing countries illegally collecting valuable objects and selling them to players from developed countries. But she soon befriends one and discovers while it may be illegal in game, it’s this boy’s life and how he makes money and supports himself and his family. Anda changes her stance about gold farmers and wants to see if she can help her new friend in some way and help him improve his way of life.
Originally written on August 14, 2014 ©Alex C. Telander.
To purchase a copy of In Real Life from Bookshop Santa Cruz, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.
���In Real Life��� by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang (First Second, 2014)
Bestselling author Cory Doctorow, of Little Brother and For the Win, and Jen Wang, known for her work with the Adventure Time comics and her graphic novel Koko Be Good, join forces to create a graphic novel about teenage girls, massive multiplayer online games and what gold farming really means. It���s a funny, addictive, entertaining but also sobering story that any gamer will soon become a big fan of.
Anda, a chubby teenager, gets introduced to a massive online game (MMO) called Coarsegold Online where she joins a female-only guild and has lots of fun leveling and gaining loot. She soon learns about gold farming from a friend in game, which consists of players from developing countries illegally collecting valuable objects and selling them to players from developed countries. But she soon befriends one and discovers while it may be illegal in game, it���s this boy���s life and how he makes money and supports himself and his family. Anda changes her stance about gold farmers and wants to see if she can help her new friend in some way and help him improve his way of life.
Originally written on August 14, 2014 ��Alex C. Telander.
To purchase a copy of In Real Life from Bookshop Santa Cruz, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.
November 11, 2014
Book News: Mega Bookstores, The Lowdown on Amazon Publishing, E-Book Product Placement & More!
The Science of Dead Bodies
An article on the books available out there for those who have a fascination with corpses and what you can do with them.
YA LGBTQ
Coming of age YA books for those who are still discovering their sexuality.
Product Placement in an Ebook
An interesting and perhaps terrifying endeavor in using product placement in a digital book, earning the author royalties of a different nature.
November 6, 2014
Guest Post: Top 5 Ray Bradbury Books
One of the most enduring aspects of science fiction author Ray Bradbury’s legacy is his ability to humanize something as cold and alien as the future and leave readers examining their own relationships to the worlds and societies they live in. He was a prolific writer who had completed three novels and over 600 short stories at the time of his passing in 2012, but five of his works stand as the greatest testaments to his genre-transcendent ability to tell stories.
The Halloween Tree
Bradbury’s 1972 novel The Halloween Tree combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and historical fiction to tell the story of nine friends’ journey through time. Throughout their jaunts across time and space, the friends learn about the origins of Halloween, from ancient pagan practices and Druid priests to the Mexican Dias de Muertos celebrations. The novel was originally written as a script for an animated film that was supposed to be directed by Chuck Jones. Even though the collaboration with Jones never fully materialized, an Emmy-winning animated adaptation premiered on television in 1993. Disneyland displays a Bradbury-inspired Halloween tree every year with their Halloween decorations.
The Illustrated Man
Although The Illustrated Man was mostly composed to versions of stories Bradbury had already previously published, it is considered one of his most significant collections. The entire work is framed around a transient man who is covered from head to toe in vibrant and constantly shifting tattoos that each tell a story. Most of the stories have strikingly philosophical focuses that utilize the future and its imagined technologies to ask questions about human nature. For example, the story The Other Foot touches on the deep wounds created by racism while Kaleidoscope has deeply introspective and existentialist themes.
The Martian Chronicles
Throughout this collection course of nearly thirty short stories, readers are given an image of a devastated Earth and a Mars colonization mission are painted, leading to genocide of the native Martians that parallels the devastation of Native Americans following European colonization. Bradbury poignantly reflects on humanities capacity for destruction and environmental concerns through a character in the story “And the Moon Be Still As Bright” when he states “We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves…We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.” Bradbury always insisted the wasn’t as interested in “predicting” the future as much as preventing it, and he clearly anticipated modern concerns about the environment, and thankfully people are generally looking to reduce their carbon footprint (more details here). Another story that feels eerily relevant is “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” which details a fully-automated house which self destructs in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust — and the story is all the more chilling nowadays, in the age of home automation systems.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
In Something Wicked, Bradbury departs somewhat dramatically from his normal futuristic setting and instead writes about a supernatural carnival that has settled down in an anonymous Midwestern American town. Rather than using humanity’s relationship to technology to ask the important questions, Bradbury utilizes more mystical plot devices such as a carousel that increases or reverses a rider’s age depending on which direction it is spinning and a blind fortune teller with telepathic powers. Ultimately, the novel is about good and evil and a few deeper themes like eternal youth and hubris and its relevance has not faded in the fifty years it has been in print.
Fahrenheit 451
To put it simply, Fahrenheit 451 is considered Bradbury’s masterpiece and a starkly unsettling view of the near future. The novel is told through the perspective of a “fireman”, who is tasked with finding and burning hidden caches of books which are now illegal in a world saturated by the media and a mindless public. The book was formulated during the harrowing McCarthy trials in which Senator Joe McCarthy was leading so-called “witch hunts” against suspected Communists in the United States, which lead to the destruction of many persons’ lives. Fahrenheit 451 encapsulates the ultimate fear of every thinking human being: a world where free thought and discussion have given way to mass media and groupthink. Bradbury also put his uncanny knack for accurately predicting the future when he described tiny electronic radios that fit into people’s ears a la Bluetooth headsets, giant flatscreen TV’s that would dominate people’s free time, social media and its resulting isolation, shortening attention spans and even ATMs.
Kate Voss
@kateevoss
You might also like these other guest posts from Kate Voss:
Top Five Novels That Make Great Holiday Gifts
November 4, 2014
Book News: Star Trek Gets Literal, Gaiman Tells Stories, a Return Ticket to Hogwarts & More!
Why We Need Diverse Books
A powerful video from bestselling author John Green on why we need diverse books.
Literary Moments on TNG
Literary references and moments on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
DIY Bookends
Looking for some really good homemade bookends to keep your favorite books together?
