Bits (in the media) about books

August 31, 2008 at 6:30 pm (books, Magazines and newspapers)

The old saw “You can’t judge a book by its cover” has some truth to it – but what about judging a book by the blurbs on the back of that cover? Read “He Blurbed, She Blurbed,” by Rachel Donadio.

In an engaging piece in a recent issue of Literary Review, a critic and writer admits to ambivalent feelings about electronic books. Read “Can You Drop a Kindle in the Bath?” by Kathryn Hughes.

Finally, i am interested in books about business and finance, partly because my brother writes in that subject area, but also because I constantly struggle to understand the abstruse (for me, anyway) concepts basic to both fields of endeavor. Today’s Washington Post Business section features “Recommended Reading for Our Times” by Frank Ahrens. In this article, various individuals with experience in economics, finance, and business are asked to recommend titles that might further the understanding of the average non-expert reader. The result is a surprisingly eclectic list of books that includes – not once, but  twice! – David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

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A brand new anthology I’m very much looking forward to getting is Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business from Tolstoy to Now, edited  by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge, reviewed here by Ron Slate.