Cyber Monday

Oh no, as if Black Friday shopping wasn't enough, now it's CyberMonday - I'm actually glad I have to go to work.

A Good Sign for Reading?

Should it been seen as a good sign for the state of reading that the top-selling, most wished-for and most-gifted item on the Amazon website is the Kindle?

I can see most-wished-for (as in their customer wish-lists) since it would be cool to have one, but they cost a couple hundred bucks. (Even with Black Friday deals).

The Kindle Store currently has more than 360,000 titles, including 101 of 112 books currently found on the New York Times Best Seller list. New York Times Best Sellers and most new releases are only $9.99, and there are a good number for less.

I suspect that if I had one, I would be even more behind on my To Read list.

Or should this be viewed as a positive economic indicator, rather than one about reading habits?

Can You Write Like Sarah Palin?

Write Like Sarah Palin - A little challenge from Slate.com

What is the single worst sentence in Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life? According to Slate's Going Rogue index, it comes on Page 102:
"As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on."

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times didn't have to read past the first paragraph for her nomination:
"I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."

Do you think you can write like Sarah Palin?

Write a sentence that could be mistaken for one from her book. A single sentence of fewer than 150 words.  Send your entry to writelikepalin@gmail.com by 11/25.


(Does it still count as an "Evening" in Paradelle if I'm typing at 3:41 AM but I still haven't gone to sleep? I'm thinking, Yes.)

Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann has won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel Let the Great World Spin.

Colum McCann's novel tells the stories of 10 New Yorkers on a summer day in 1974 when a tightrope-walker spun above the city on a slender strand between the towers of the World Trade Center. McCann, an American citizen who was born in Ireland, paid eloquent homage to the openness of the literary world in his adopted country.

"It seems to me that American literature is able to embrace, and American publishing is able to embrace, the other," McCann said. "I believe in the power of the word. I believe, as Dave Eggers said, you've got to take this honor as a challenge. And as fiction writers and as people who believe in the word, we have to enter the anonymous corners of the human experience and to make that little corner right."


Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty languages. He has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. He has been named one of Esquire's "Best and Brightest," and his short film Everything in This Country Must was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program. He lives in New York City with his wife and their three children.

The Observers

I thought I spotted an Observer outside my office window.




Must put on my foil helmet...

Never argue with a 90° angle.

Never argue with a 90° angle. It's always right.,
originally uploaded by Threadless Mondays.

To Be Read

I will never get to read all of them - and the list is much longer - but here are the last 48 titles I added to my

to-read book list.

Ken's favorite books »