Category: BOOKS

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BLOG BOOKS STORIES WRITING

The magical worlds of Chris Van Allsburg

Yesterday I mentioned how much I love buying used books from Thriftbooks. One of the best things about the site is being able to search for old books that I loved as a child.

One of my favorite author-illustrators from childhood is Chris Van Allsburg. You probably remember some of his most famous books, Jumanji and The Polar Express. Many of his books have been adapted into movies (some successfully, some not). But the worlds that he builds in his gorgeous, dramatic and striking illustrations are breathtaking.

Part of the magic of Van Allsburg’s illustrations, which often include children, is the scale. He takes the reader right into the middle of a scene…

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from Jumanji

Or pulls so far back that we feel like we’re peeking into the world in miniature….

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from Jumanji

As a child these books fueled my imagination and my sense of wonder…

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from The Garden of Abdul Gasazi

And brought a feeling of extraordinary to the ordinary. They still do!

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from Zathura

Do you have a favorite author from childhood? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

– Jenna

 

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BLOG BOOKS

The delight of used books

I love books! I love reading them, I love buying them, I love talking about them. I love the idea of them. I love the SMELL of them.

But I don’t want to spend an outrageous amount of money on them.

In addition to checking out library books (both physical books and ebooks), and buying select new books from authors that I love and want to support, there is a third category of books that I regularly indulge in: used books.

Used books are great. You can find out of print titles, versions of a beloved book that you read as a child, or older editions of books with better looking covers. Best of all, they are CHEAP. And buying used books keeps them out of a landfill!

One great online source for used books is Thriftbooks. They have a huge variety of books, sorted by year and edition, in a wide range of genres. They ship from locations all over the country, and if you spend $10 in one purchase you get free shipping ($10 can sometimes buy you THREE used books! Amazing.

This is not an ad, I just love Thriftbooks. A lot,

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I’ll show you some of the great books I’ve bought from Thriftbooks tomorrow, so stay tuned!

– Jenna

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BLOG BOOKS FUN STORIES WRITING

A giant helping of bite-sized reading

If you haven’t read Tamara Shopsin’s book Arbitrary Stupid Goal (published in 2017), stop everything and get a copy immediately. It’s a memoir about growing up in 1970’s Greenwich Village, and her family’s diner/market, known affectionately as “The Store.”

The book is structured as a rapid-fire avalanche of vignettes, some several pages, some only a few sentences: remembrances, retellings and nostalgia all mixed together with a giant dose of humor, a realistic amount of sadness and several celebrity cameos.

Although the stories involving John Belushi (a regular at the diner who had his own key) are the most poignant and sometimes heartbreaking, one story involving Jeff Goldblum was the standout bite of delicious cake for me. Goldblum was in the diner with Shopsin’s parents and another employee when a well-dressed armed robber bursts in, herds them to the bathroom and tells them to empty their pockets…

“The thief takes fifteen dollars from my mom, forty off of Tommy, twenty off my dad, and hands Jeff back his ten, saying ‘you need this more than me.’”

Arbitrary Stupid Goal is the kind of book that marketers love to mention you can “dip in and out” of in bite-sized pieces, but it’s so good you’ll want to devour it in one sitting.

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Don’t judge this book by its cover. Except, maybe you should because it perfectly captures the “what the $@&#?!” feel of reading it…in the best way possible.

And if you’re hungry for more, make sure to check out the famous eleven page EPIC menu of the original Shopsin’s, and patriarch Kenny Shopsin’s tribute in the New Yorker after his death in 2018.

– Jenna

 

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BLOG BOOKS TECHNOLOGY WRITING

eBooks are expensive for libraries

Blogger and book lover Modern Mrs. Darcy, posted today about how expensive eBooks are for libraries. I’ve often wondered how the process works, and it seems that it really doesn’t:

Should I have known this already? Probably. But did I? Nope. This spring I’ve done several events with librarians all over the country, who all echoed the same sentiment: the current model of lending ebooks to patrons is not sustainable, because the costs libraries pay to offer them are substantial. But patrons love ebooks.

And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, she points to a Good Reader article that explains the whole model in detail.

When libraries put new paper books on their shelves, they simply buy the book. When libraries put ebooks into circulation, they don’t just buy the book. They buy ebooks at a significant markup, averaging $25 per copy in 2018, and they can only use them for a limited time before they are required to pay to renew the license. Some publishers don’t sell to libraries at all; they want every individual reader to purchase every book.

For more info, check out this breakdown of how much libraries pay for ebooks from publishers. It’s not the most current—and one top publisher just announced changes to their pricing model yesterday—but it’s thorough.

Food for thought. Library eBooks have always seemed like the best of all options, but it sounds like a monthly trip to your local branch might be better for the long term health of your library.

– Jenna