Apologies for the Delay

I'm on holiday for the moment--back soon.

A Century in Fiction

There must be some I missed, but here goes: the last 100 years in fiction...

For any novelists looking for a title, there's a near half-century available from the Wall Street Crash to the Watergate scandal.

Restraint

Having read about a "controversial" new YA novel, which rewrites Anne Frank's story to include "explicit and intimate details" of sex and lust, I was hoping that the cover might be in hideous taste, but it's sadly restrained.

For something less restrained you have to go to the Japanese, where this Manga version of her life features the wholly unnecessary inclusion of Astro Boy and his sister.

Speaking of the unexpected, I seem to have somehow signed up to a thing called Bookblips, which is some sort of social media/blog aggregating/news thing about books, which every week sends me a list of popular net articles about books. I do wonder at the software responsible for choosing images to go with the stories, though, as this is not necessarily the memorial José Saramago would have expected.

See this post for Tom Gauld's brilliant Saramago covers.

While I'm on the topic of e-foolishness, it would be great if a certain Nigerian spammer stopped trying to leave comments on old posts. A word of advice to them: if you're looking for someone to scam, choosing a less alarming fake name than 'Elizabeth Bathory' would be a wise move.

How to Make a Chinese or Japanese Book Cover (Epilogue)

In the comments to the last post, Matthew Adams draws attention to another side of Asian literature in the West: "I reckon every book that comes out of Asia should have a kung fu master, ninja or samurai on it. And the really good books would have all three on the cover." Even better would be one that had a ninja AND everything else from the previous post. So here we go: the ultimate Asian book cover...

Phaidon New Testaments & MORE!!!

In 2000, art press Phaidon produced a series of four beautiful books, the 'New Testament' series. The basic idea is a simple one, but I don't think it's one that any other publisher had come up with. The idea is that most Western artists have tackled some aspect of Jesus's life story, some literally, some quite tangentially. The four books each took a significant moment in time of the New Testamant, and showed how artists have interpreted it over 1500-2000 years.



The four books are Annunciation...



.. Last Supper...



.. Crucifixion...



.. and Descent.



All four are beautiful compact hardbacks with metallic covers and no title on the front. The interiors have just enough text to guide you through the common motifs the artists made use of and to give you a little historical context; for the most part, the art speaks for itself.






Foolishly I bought only two of the four books at the time: Annunciation is now available only as a cheaper, less elegant paperback. If you're looking for a crash course in Western art fitted to an Easter theme, here's the place to start.

* * *

In other news, I just read an article in the Guardian Review about a new UK survey of people's non-reading habits. You should read the whole thing (it's the second item on that page, after a bit of strangely unfunny humourous waffle from Will Self), but I've bolded a couple of bits that most struck me in the extract below:

"These are not families with literacy difficulties: they just do not read," the survey noted. "Parents would support reading at school, but wouldn't force their children to do it at home," Wilson-Fletcher said. Reading was seen as isolating, while communal activities such as DVDs or Wii games were valued more. The research revealed that if participants did enter a bookshop, they found it "acutely anxiety-inducing" and "overwhelming". Bookshops and libraries must become more user-friendly, the research concluded, while publishers must explore new ways of presenting books (jackets could be better, was one suggestion, with quick content clues on the front cover). And books should also be sold in less elitist environments, such as "newsagents, station platforms, vending machines, supermarket queues, on the counter in cafés and hairdressers". The "book of the film" could be sold at cinemas, while more recent books should be provided for Nintendo DS, which "associates book reading with a more familiar leisure experience".

In other words, if this survey has its way, in the future, all books will look like this:

The Sorted Books Project

If you've not heard of the Sorted Books Project, see here. I came across it thanks to Musings from a muddy island.

The basic idea, in a nutshell, is to pile up some books so that their titles, read in order, tell a story.

Here's my first attempt. You'll need to click to get a version big enough to read the first and last titles.

A World of Books (Argh, A Pun!)

The resulting of mucking about: two maps of the world made up of book covers.

Click on the images for HUGE versions.

An Unfortunate Resemblance

Something struck me the other day looking at the cover of a book I read last year. It's Black Juice, a collection of dark fantasy tales by Australian author Margot Lanagan. Here's the cover, with a sinister woman on it:



And here's every-prize-but-the-Nobel-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood:



Hmm.

***

In other news, i recently visited a Borders for the first time in a while. I remember when this shop opened in Adelaide, my home city: it was huge, and had a vast array of books. Now it has many, many fewer books, and seems to be all about expensive magazines, coffee and DVDs. Apparently this is normal operating practise for this chain. In any case, I was looking around, and couldn't help but notice that the entire shop had only two (2) books by Chekhov, one (1) book by Patricia Highsmith, and five (5) whole frigging shelves of books by 'Robert Ludlum'.

This made me quite angry, and I inadvertently said aloud, "Well, fuck you, Borders!", at which point a woman near me browsing the Alexander McCall Smiths gave a start and darted away.

1250 Covers Arranged in a Spectrum

Just because I can, really (using AndreaMosaic).



Click to enlarge, though not as much as I'd like. I already had to shrink this down so that Blogger wouldn't have a breakdown.