Man Booker Prize for Fiction Longlist is Announced

I have probably mentioned this before, but I have been a follower of the Booker Prize since I read my first prizewinner, Keri Hulme's The Bone People, in high school. Every year I am on tenterhooks as first the longlist is announced, then the shortlist, & finally the winner!

This year's Man Booker Dozen (must be like a baker's dozen-there are 13 books) was announced on July 27th:

• Peter Carey, Parrot and Oliver in America
• Emma Donoghue, Room
• Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal
• Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
• Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
• Andrea Levy, The Long Song
• Tom McCarthy, C
• David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
• Lisa Moore, February
• Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
• Rose Tremain, Trespass
• Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
• Alan Warner, The Stars in the Bright Sky

For more information on the Man Booker Prize, head to their website. A shortlist of six will be announced on September 7th and the winner will be revealed on October 12th.

Voices from the Past

Suddenly, two authors long deceased are speaking to us again.


After 100 years of simmering, the first volume of Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography is about to be published. "Versions of the autobiography have been published before, in 1924, 1940 and 1959. But the original editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, was a stickler for propriety, cutting entire sections he thought offensive; his successors imposed a chronological cradle-to-grave narrative that Twain had specifically rejected, altered his distinctive punctuation, struck additional material they considered uninteresting and generally bowed to the desire of Twain’s daughter Clara, who died in 1962, to protect her father’s image," says the article in the New York Times.



In the late 1950s, English students at the University of Virginia were treated to a series of lectures by William Faulkner, then writer-in-residence. These lectures were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes that have since been digitized & published online. Check the UVA website's "Faulkner in Virginia" to listen to Faulkner lecturing & taking questions from students.

TED: Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world

I have seen a lot of talks from TED online, & been interested in the variety of subjects covered. The other day I actually checked out their website, subtitled "Ideas worth spreading". Hear talks on joint replacement, fractals, global population, & more! On-site ratings include jaw-dropping, informative, funny, & beautiful. Here are a couple examples of what you'll find there:

J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure (2008 Harvard Commencement speech)
At her Harvard commencement speech, "Harry Potter" author JK Rowling offers some powerful, heartening advice to dreamers and overachievers, including one hard-won lesson that she deems "worth more than any qualification I ever earned."

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity



Isabel Allende tells tales of passion



Doris Kearns Goodwin on learning from past presidents

What We're Reading: How to Knit a Love Song

Today we're pleased to feature a review by Diana, a member of our Itch to Stitch group!

How to Knit a Love Song by Rachel Herron is a sweet contemporary romance between a sheep rancher/cowboy (very Gary Cooper) and an independent knitting fanatic (she makes her own yarn and patterns). The romance and bad guy storylines were predictable, but the lightness and brightness of the dialogue and descriptions keeps you engaged and turning the pages. The small town setting and secondary characters keep it fun. The knitting theme is interesting without overwhelming the non-knitting reader. I found the ending a little flat since there's no confrontation between the hero and the villain. The setting and the characters shout potential series. I would look forward to another book from this author.

Femme Fatales, Shady Characters, & Crooked Situations-It Must Be Film Noir!

I love summer, because summer brings to Albuquerque the local Film Noir festival at the Guild Cinema-"seven double features to watch in the dark". The festival started last Friday and features classics like Touch of Evil, Naked City, & Sorry, Wrong Number. Another film in the festival lineup, the Coen brothers' Blood Simple, is a good example of modern noir. Some of the other films shown in the series are perhaps lesser known, but you'll find some famous names hiding in the cast list & frequently the lesser known films prove to be diamonds in the rough. The film noir festival is lovingly assembled by Guild staff with the assistance of noir aficionado Peter Conheim, the cinema's former co-owner. Don't miss out on this great Albuquerque tradition!

For a list of film noir books & movies, & other hardboiled topics available from your local library system, try a keyword search in the catalog using the phrase "film noir". I'm even reading a book of poetry that's an homage to the film noir detective story called Black Maria: Being the Adventures of Delilah Redbone & A.K.A. Jones, which is "produced & directed" by Kevin Young.

To access the listings & showtimes for the Seventh Annual Festival of Film Noir, visit the Guild Cinema website.

Celebrate the anniversary of Apollo 11, 41 years ago today!

I Write Like

We found a link to the I Write Like website on Facebook. All you need is a sample of your writing-a couple paragraphs of a story, some poems, a blog post-& this statistical analysis tool will analyze your word choice and writing style and compare them with those of famous writers. We write like George Orwell. Have you noticed?

This is just for fun-obviously it's not completely accurate, as Margaret Atwood used it with a sample of her own writing & found she writes like Stephen King. Rogert Ebert has also given it a try (he writes like Margaret Atwood); Yann Martel writes like Kurt Vonnegut; a writer for the New Yorker's Book Bench says, "According to the machine, an invitation to a birthday party was worthy of a comparison to James Joyce; an excerpt from a term paper on Renaissance literature, though, more closely resembled Dan Brown’s fiction." (The program, written by a Russian software programmer whose second language is English, only pulls from a list of 50 authors right now, but we gather more are being added.)