Banned Books Week 2013

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

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Banned Books Week is the American book community’s annual celebration of our freedom to read. Around the nation librarians, booksellers, publishers, teachers, students and readers focus attention on the ongoing threats of censorship. This year, Banned Books Week events will be held from September 22 through 28 around the nation at bookshops, libraries, schools and universities. You can get involved at the Banned Books website.

The 10 most challenged titles of 2012 in the U.S.were:

Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Pilkey

Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited for age group

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

Reasons: Offensive language, racism, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group

Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher

Reasons: Drugs/alcohol/smoking, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited for age group

Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James.

Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit

And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson.

Reasons: Homosexuality, unsuited for age group

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.

Reasons: Homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit

Looking for Alaska, by John Green.

Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group

Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz

Reasons: Unsuited for age group, violence

The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls

Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Reasons: Sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, violence

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Hidden Barcelona

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

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What better way to discover the hidden secrets of a city neighborhood than through the eyes of someone who has lived on the streets. Hidden City Tours has launched a project to allow visitors to Barcelona to view the city’s Barri Gotic historic district through the perspective of a homeless guide.

Company founder Lisa Grace decided to tap into the local expertise of the city’s homeless population to guide tourists and to simultaneously address Barcelona’s growing unemployment problem by creating jobs.

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The tours of the atmospheric Barri Gotic will run in both English and Spanish starting on October 11th, and will cost €10 per person.

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I Love Coffee

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

I love coffee and spend way too much time discovering new places to consume coffee when I travel. But I’m a caffeinated lightweight when compared to coffee fanatic and coffee blogger Ryoko Iwata. She’s a U.S.-based Japanese self-proclaimed coffee lover—hence her fun blog I Love Coffee. Ryoko created this terrific infographic to inform and entertain all of the other coffee fanatics out there.

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Book Dominos

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

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Volunteers from this year’s Cape Town Open Book Festival along with staff of Cape Town’s Central Library have triumphantly established an impressive new Guinness World Record for Book Dominos. On August 27th, they managed to down 2586 books in one go. Take a look:

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Divine Bookstore

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

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The Dutch are still devoted to reading and to their bookstores. You might even say that they are religious about literature. Booklovers around the world are familiar with the glorious Selexyz Bookstore in Maastricht which is housed in a gorgeous medieval Dominican church. Now the city of Zwolle, just east of Amsterdam, can boast of their very own bookstore in a church.

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July 13th marked the official opening of Boekhandel Waanders in de Broeren set in the beautiful 15th century Dominican Broerenkerk in the heart of Zwolle. Designed by Norwegian artist Kjell Nuper and realized by BK Architecten of Utrecht, the stunning bookstore is a bibliophile’s dream.

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photos by Hans Westerink and Joop van Putter

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Hold That Review

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

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Do you post hotel and restaurant reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp? Do you ever worry about retribution from the businesses for a negative review? It may be time to reconsider that angry post on shoddy service or a less than clean hotel room.

A popular hotel in the Quebec City neighborhood of Sainte-Foy has struck back at a former guest for his stinging, negative review (see below) on TripAdvisor with a $95,000 lawsuit. The guest, Laurent Azoulay, claimed that he had captured bed bugs in a glass and on video after being bitten soon after going to bed. When he asked for redress or compensation, Azoulay claims that the hotel only offered a $40 discount.

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For its part, the hotel claims that it tried to resolve the situation and that no bed bugs were reported or found in any other of their rooms, and that it is only suing because the guest refused to remove the negative review.

It was only a matter of time before businesses began to respond to poor reviews with legal action against customers. There’s already a $10 million suit against TripAdvisor by a resort hotel in Tennessee that refutes the claim on the site that it’s the “dirtiest” hotel in the country.

Will these types of cases set a precedent that will scare customers from posting negative, albeit, accurate reviews? Would you go ahead with a negative review if you thought that you might be sued?

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Imagine The People’s Library

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

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Imagine a library stocked with books written by you, your family, your friends and neighbors. And each of those books handmade with recycled paper and book bindings. Well, The People’s Library project at the Richmond, Virginia Main Public Library is just that library.

The remarkable, ongoing project is the brainchild of student activists Mark Strandquist, Riley Duncan and Courtney Bowles, and is being created by a team of dedicated community participants.

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The People’s Library is creating a thousand books for any member of the Richmond community to take home and fill with their memoirs, histories or stories. The process begins with paper that has been sourced from 5,000 discarded books. The recycled pages are pulped, blended and dried to fabricate new paper. The book bindings are fashioned from the discarded books as well.

Project participants are also designing and building unique bookshelves to house the community sourced literature. There’s even a custom built old school card catalog to manage the People’s Library books.

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Conversations With Booksellers

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

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As a bookseller myself, I found this little documentary film called Conversations With Booksellers encouraging in this era of the so called “death of the printed book”. I hope that the booklovers following this blog will find the conversations with booksellers from nine popular and successful North American bookstores equally heartening. The film visits indie bookstores across the continent from the fabulous Politics and Prose bookshop in Washington D.C. to the legendary Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, with stops at great shops, such as Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa.

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Friday the 13th is so random

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

psst…here’s that bookporn you’ve been looking for xxx

Vedi Napoli e poi muori or just visit the creepy Bourbon Tunnels.

Margaret Atwood has a new book out and has taken the time to discuss horror fiction over blueberry pie right here.

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More TVwithCheese at newyorkshitty.com .

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Have you tried airbnb yet ? Well, now there are spinoffs.

There are more than six thousand known languages spoken around the world. Some of us are barely fluent in one, but think we can still communicate just fine. Here’s a chance to test your linguistic skills by playing the Great Language Game.

How many books have you read from F.Scott Fitzgerald‘s reading list?

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“our bones like stems into the sky

will forever cry

victory”

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The great Elmore Leonard is gone, but he left us some words of wisdom:

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What Do We have in Our Pockets

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Brian D. Butler

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I’m an unabashed fan of the Israeli writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret. If you read any of his terrific short story collections, I’m confident that you’ll fall under his thrall too.

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Keret recently posted an amusing annotated version of his short story “What Do We have in Our Pockets?” on the Poetry Genius website, which encourages writers to post commentary on their own work. There’s even a link to Goran Dukics’s marvelous animated version of the short story.

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