Newtonville Books Community Blog

Flavorwire ranks the top ten bookstores in the country. We’re a little offended they left us out, but we’re working on it!

“It’s probably safe to say that most Americans don’t think about intellectual property laws on a daily basis. The closest most of us ever come to pondering  copyright, trademark and patent issues is when we’re trying in vain to fast-forward through the FBI warning on a DVD. That’s not for lack of trying on the part of groups like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, which have in the past sued individuals for file sharing and sponsored public information campaigns with the goal of educating American youths about music and movie “piracy” (that is, copyright infringement).”      (Read more here.)

On the other hand, what about all the material in the public domain? If you’re interested in what is being done to collect, preserve, and make these works available to the public, take a minute to check out InternetArchive.org. Here, books that are becoming too fragile to handle, government documents you might never have realized were at your disposal, and items too rare to circulate, are digitized and made accessible to anyone with a computer. You can even listen to their archive of public domain audio files while you browse.

Does it drive you crazy when the text of public signs comes riddled with typos and grammatical faux pas of the most egregious kind? You could do what Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson did — traverse the country with a Sharpie and a plan to correct every typo they could find. They’ve summarized their experience over the past few years in a new book The Great Typo Hunt, new this week from Random House.

And full disclosure: these two fine gentlemen attended my alma mater, and though our collegiate careers overlapped, I did not know them personally.

So NPR has finally whittled down its listener-supplied list of the 100 greatest thrillers of all time. Topping the list, unsurprisingly, was Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, followed by Stieg Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Usual suspects such as Stephen King, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, and John Le Carre show up in various places. Check out the full list here.

The Anne Frank House Museum has come out with a new rendering of Anne Frank’s story in a graphic novel format. It will become available in the United States on 09/14/10. 

Read more here.





If this summer hasn’t been hot and sultry enough for you yet, NPR has six great books about illicit romances that are sure to turn up the heat on your inner thermostat, involving everything from the retired military man with a widowed Pakistani store owner, a high school teacher with a student, and the perpetually creepy Paul Auster’s tale about a sibling affair that may or may not have occurred.

Ever wonder why we love summer reading? Barbara King shares her 4 pleasures of summer reading:

1)  Novels that enwrap the senses and shut out all distractions.  

2) Works from well-adored mystery writers.  

3) The heavy stuff. 

4)  All things animal.  

She also provides some of her picks for each pleasure:

1) Diane Hammon’s Seeing Stars

2) Elizabeth George’s This Body of Death

3) Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood

4) Jose Saramego’s The Stone Raft

For more information and to see the actual article from bookslut.com - click here!

For a book trailer, one including Mary Gaitskill, Jay McInerney and a dachshund is hard to top. So get excited for Gary Shteyngart’s third novel Super Sad True Love Story — it’s remarkably prescient and poignantly unsentimental (those two need not be contradictory). He’ll be Newtonville-bound in the fall.