New! Hatchette Book's Blog Talk Radio

This afternoon was just tooling around the web, looking for some suggestions for good books, and I came across this cool site where Miriam Parker hosts Blog Talk Radio shows with various authors. The first interview (with Michael Connelly) aired on Wednesday last.

Turns out, I missed the one with Michael Connelly (who is one of my absolute favorite authors), but I was able to listen to it by going to her site and scrolling down to the blue Blog Talk Radio dial. He gave a wonderful interview ~ talked about how he writes, how he finds things to write about, and how he feels about blog reviews. He also talked about his latest novel coming out soon, THE BRASS VERDICT. I so want to read this sequel to THE LINCOLN LAWYER, which I really enjoyed when I read it earlier this year. You know, Harry's going to be featured in THE BRASS VERDICT too!



Then, next Wednesday 10/29 at 1PM ET, Miriam's going to be interviewing Kathleen Kent, author of THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER. Anyone who wants to can post a question on Miriam's blog and she will put you on the agenda. You can either call into the show at (646) 378-0040 or just listen online here.

I know where I'm going to be next Wednesday! Hope you can join in!

Lists, Lists, Lists!

So I just Stumbled Upon a new website that contains nothing but lists, and, as I've written before, I just love lists. Two that I looked at were the 10 Most Disturbing Novels and the 5 Worst Presidential Candidates Who Lost. Both were eye opening and pretty funny, in a macabre kind of way (at least the one that listed the presidential candidates who lost).

BTW, I've found some interesting stuff through Stumble Upon, though I haven't had much time to explore the site.

Banned Book Week - Never Too Late!

Last week was Banned Books Week. I was a bit busy at work so didn't have time to get involved in the celebration, but in my view it's never too late.

From a post at the Book Therapy blog, here is a list of books that have been banned somewhere in the world at one time or another for one reason or another. I just love lists, don't you? This one is interesting because on most of them I have no idea for what misbegotten reason the book could possibly have been banned. But people who think it's their right to control how others think don't really need a reason, misbegotten or otherwise, I guess.

So, how many have you read?

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes *
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman *
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli *
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens *
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo *
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon *
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce *
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque ***
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury *
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud
70. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson *
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles *
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius *
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl *
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut *
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola
104. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ***
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
111. Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume *
112. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
113. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
114. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
115. The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatly Snyder

I am sad to see that I have not read that many of these books (I bolded the ones I have read and italicised the ones I have partially read; *=books I want to read and ***=books I have in my library). Some are books I have long intended to read but just haven't gotten round to yet. Perhaps one goal for next year will be to read one banned book a month.

Let's all do our parts to combat the book banning control freaks of the world by reading a banned book today!