Reading Copy Book Blog

The books listed here were the top 10 best selling books on AbeBooks.com for the month of June, 2008

1) Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert
2) Wisdom of Our Fathers by Tim Russert
3) Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Daniel Amen
4) Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama
5) The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
6) The Red Car by Don Stanford
7) A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
8) Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
9) The Wordsworth Dictionary of Culinary and Menu Terms by Rodney Dale
10) Night by Elie Wiesel

Toni Jordan, who novel Addition was just selected by Richard and Judy for their summer reading list picks her top 10 flawed romantic heronines

1. Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
2. Prudence Merridew in The Perfect Rake by Anne Gracie
3. Ayla in The Valley of Horses by Jean M Auel
4. Lucinda Leplastrier in Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
5. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch by George Eliot
6. Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
7. Lisa Palmer by What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn
8. Christabel LaMotte and Maud Bailey in Possession by AS Byatt
9. Miss Haversham in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
10. Esther Evans in Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

An Indiana teacher was suspended for 18 months for teaching from the bestselling book The Freedom Writers Diary. Apparently one member of the teachers union disagreed with the fact that the book contained some swearing, because you all know what a little colourful language will do to an inner city kid!

The Writers Diary, a series of true stories written by inner-city teenagers, was put together by a teacher, Erin Gruwell, and has been celebrated as a model for transforming young lives. It was made into a film with Hilary Swank last year.

Connie Heermann, a teacher for 27 years, sought permission to introduce the book to her students last autumn after attending a training workshop held by the Freedom Writers Foundation. “If you read the whole book you will see how these inner-city students grow and change and become articulate, compassionate, educated young people who want to do something good in their lives despite the environment in which they were raised,” she told the Guardian. “I thought my students would very much relate to those kids.”

Spanish chef and cookery author, Simone Ortega, died yesterday at the age of 89. Ortega was the author of 1,080 Recetas de Cocina which sold over 3 million copies, until his death in 2002 she was married to publisher José Ortega Spottorno, son of famous philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and founder of the Spanish daily newspaper El País.

Their daughter, Ines Ortega Klein, has followed in the footsteps of her mother to become something of a celebrity chef and is also a cookbook author.

So what’s the number one book in the UK right now? The Outcast by Sadie Jones. The book received the Richard and Judy treatment last week and took off - here is our interview with Sadie from earlier in the year.

Bloomberg, oddly enough, writes about the growing genre of wine memoirs.

Two recent examples of the genre offer very different views of what it’s like to spend a life discovering and peddling wine. Sergio Esposito’s unabashed love letter to Italian wine and food, Passion on the Vine, and Neal I. Rosenthal’s often querulous, Reflections of a Wine Merchant go well beyond vintages and varietals to explore wine’s cultural context.

I wonder if there is a market for a memoir about drinking Newcastle Brown. Now that would have some interesting fight scenes.

Like AbeBooks revealed a few weeks ago, weird things can be found inside books. Here’s an example of some pornography recently discovered.

A collection of Harry Potter deluxe editions - all first editions of this particular version - have sold for £17,800 at auction, reports The Guardian. Don’t confuse these deluxe editions with proper firsts. I wonder if the value of collectible Harry Potter books is falling - I think it is.

The Independent tells me about the prequel to Treasure Island, which will be 125 years old in November. John Drake has written Flint and Silver, and he’s prepared to shatter a few myths.

One of the biggest myths that Mr Drake wanted to dispel was that pirates buried their treasure: “This is nonsense. Pirates never bury their treasure. There is no known proven example of pirates burying their treasure on an island. Pirates led short, violent lives and when they got money, they went to an island and spent it on booze and girls and when they’d run out they went and got some more.”

The Chicago Tribune reports on how librarians are mixing video games in with the books to sneakily encourage those teenage gamers to become interested in books. Here are a few suggestions from me….

Grand Theft Auto with American Pyscho by Bret Easton Ellis
Guitar Hero with Rock Star by Jackie Collins
Mario with The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Pacman with Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
Sim City with Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Sam Tanenhaus, the gaffer at the NY Times book review, writes about summer heat and literature.

In William Faulkner’s fiction, the “ardent and unheeding sun” pours down mercilessly on parched country roads and backwoods hollows. “Heat quivered up from the asphalt, giving to the familiar buildings about the square a nimbus quality,” Faulkner writes of a sleepy town in his novel “Light in August.” Elsewhere he describes the grim fates dealt in “the bloody September twilight.”

After a bit of a choppy start to our summer the weather is finally starting to co-operate, which means I can finally start cooking every meal on the BBQ, which means seafood (I mean we DO live on an island). Sara Croft from Orphan Treasures, Riverside, CA, USA wrote a great article about Seafood cookbooks and I think its very appropriate now. Enjoy!

By now, everyone except Queen Latifa has told you that you need to eat more seafood. It has Omega 3 oil and vitamins all over it. Your body needs it. The thing is that not all of us like seafood. Shrimp, maybe, or tuna, but those big flat pieces of fish! I don’t think so. Still, it’s one of your New Year’s resolutions, to eat healthier—and fish is part of that. How can cookbooks help you?

Each part of the US and Canada that is on a waterfront of any sort, has it’s own style of cooking seafood. In fact that goes for all 190 countries of the world (yesterday’s number—may be wrong). Water access means an active cooking tradition involving seafood. And this is going to be your secret weapon in getting seafood on your family’s plates. There are several ways to go about it.

If your family has ties to another country, you are probably always talking about strengthening ties to the culture. So get a cookbook from that country and try a popular fish dish from there, along with appropriate side dishes. You can find one by using the country name in the keyword space of AbeBooks super search engine.

If you originally are from a waterfront state, you can get a cookbook from there and make up some down-home flavor seafood. For example New Maine Cooking by Pollard or Alaskan Cookbook by Cleveland or Eva Davis Mississippi Mixens by Davis.

Another way to go about this is to pick an ingredient that you like and find some recipes involving it and fish. For example, if you love Beer (and that beer can chicken from last year) then buy The Beer Cookbook by Tolson. If you adore habanero chilies, the Habanero Cookbook by DeWitt will give you fish recipes you’ll like. Crazy for curry? Try the Complete Book of Curries by Day. This will work for nearly every ingredient but Chocolate.

If your specialty (or your spouse’s) is outdoor cooking, Seafood on the Grill by Barich is one of many cookbooks that will help you choose the right fish, and rub or marinade to get a flavor you like. If a smoker is more your style, MECO Barbecue and Smoker Cookbook by Fisher will do the trick.

If none of those appeal to you, how about a Christian approach? Cookbook of Foods from Bible Days by McKibben brings history to the table as well as loaves and fishes.

If you and your family don’t require manipulation, and you just want a lot of good seafood recipes, then we recommend Lake, Stream Seafood Cookbook by Henderson or the Complete Fish Cookbook by Grunes, 250 Fish and Seafood Recipes by Berolzheimer, The Fish and Seafood Cookbook by Fried or Seafood Recipes from the Shrimp Peddler by Porter.

Learning to eat fish is not only worth your time to bring new interest to your table, but to bring more variety to your nutritional intake for your health. Ask Queen Latifa.

Robert Crais, author of the Elvis Cole books, is interviewed in the Shelf Awareness newsletter.

On your nightstand now:
The books I’m currently reading are manuscripts for possible blurbs, so I shouldn’t name them. But the books I’m looking forward to reading soon are Shadow Bridge by Gregory Frost, At the City’s Edge by Marcus Sakey and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

Favorite book when you were a child:
I remember the story, but not the title. Maybe a Shelf Awareness reader can help. It’s an adventure story about three children marooned on a desert island, a la Robinson Crusoe, and how they survive. It held amazing, adventurous factoids like “banking the fire.” These kids kept a fire going for weeks by “banking the fire” every night. I never understood what “banking the fire” was, but it seemed magical. I read that book again and again, and wish I recalled the title. We’re talking the early ’60s. If you have any ideas what this book might be, please write to me through my website, robertcrais.com.

Your top five authors:
Robert Heinlein, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Harlan Ellison, Mark Twain.

Book you’ve faked reading:
Pretty much everything assigned by my 10th grade English teacher. I got a “D” for the year. We were supposed to read all manner of ponderous, uninspiring tomes, but I was hiding in back of the class, reading Mailer and Ellison and Truman Capote. I was a terrible student. I chased work that inspired me.

Book you are an evangelist for:
I like helping newer writers, so if I find something special I spread the word. I felt this way about Ace Atkins’ book, White Shadow, and The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz, which held some of the best passages about Los Angeles I’ve read in years. When Joseph Wambaugh returned with Hollywood Station, I couldn’t stop talking about it, though Wambaugh hardly needed my help.

Book you’ve bought for the cover:
That’s easy. Paperback covers were once painted by fabulous painters like Frank Frazetta, James Bama and Jim Steranko. I used to collect those guys. I bought anything with a Frazetta cover. Didn’t matter what the book was–I bought it for Frazetta’s art.

Book that changed your life:
Harlan Ellison’s book of essays, The Glass Teat, which chronicles his views about the television industry. Here I was, this totally out-of-the-loop kid in Louisiana, with no real belief or expectation that someone like me could be a writer–”writing” was something larger-than-life people did, like becoming astronauts or actors or president. But The Glass Teat demystified the working world of television, and convinced me that if “they” could be a writer, I could be a writer. So I came out to Hollywood and did it. Every good thing in my life began when I moved to Los Angeles. The Glass Teat, like any meaningful book, opened the door to possibilities.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Old Man and the Sea. I’ve read it several times, and each time it leaves me awed.

(Thanks to Shelf Awareness - we read it Monday to Friday)

Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies … Are Scamming Us … and What to Do About It” by political commentator Dick Morris is not only one of the longest book titles I have ever seen, but seems to be flying up the bestselling charts at the moment.

Morris made his name in the political sphere assisting Bill Clinton in his bid for Governor of Arkansas in 1978 and then again when he was seeking his second presidential nomination in 1996. However his career with the Clintons came to an end in August of 1996 when he was forced to resign under allegations of hiring prostitutes.

In the aftermath of his resignation Morris wrote Behind the Oval Office, a retrospective of his work with the Clinton’s as well as a pair of books criticizing the Clinton’s: Rewriting History, written as a rebuttal to Hillary’s book Living History, and Because He Could, a response to Bill’s My Life.

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A prize-winning author of children’s books has revealed how she uses rats’ urine to give pages a tinged yellow look. If you meet Emily Gravett in the street just don’t shake her hand - although I’m sure she’d love to talk about her book, Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears.