Wednesday, February 27, 2008

No 20 - Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year

If you don't already know, the Bookseller magazine has just announced the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. The nominees are:

I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
How to Write a How to Write Book
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
Cheese Problems Solved
If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs
People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood

The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year is a humorous literary award, normally given each year to the book with the oddest title. The award was created by Horace Bent, and first presented in 1978 by the British magazine Bookseller. Nominees are selected from submissions sent in by librarians, publishers, and booksellers, and the final winner is voted for by the public

The details for each nomination can be found here.

My pick for the winner will definitely be:

Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
By Catharine A MacKinnon (Harvard University Press)


This is a question long debated by biologists, psychotherapists and misogynists the world over. Annoyingly, MacKinnon doesn’t claim to have the definitive answer. Instead, her book is a "critique of the trans-national status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights . . . this bracing book makes us look as never before at an ongoing war too long undeclared."

Oddest title is crowned

28 March 2008

If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs was crowned the winner of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.

Friday, February 22, 2008

No 19 - oScope Visual Search

For those who surf a lot here is a new way to search stuff. Introducing oScope Visual Search, a free online service developed by a great team of highly talented and skillful people at oSkope media gmbh in Zurich and Berlin. Unlike other search engines oSkope allows you to search for items on different web services like eBay, Amazon, flickr, and YouTube and gives you a visual result. There are other cool bits as well like if you search for videos under YouTube, you can play the video directly without leaving for another site. You can also save your favorite videos, images in "My Folder". You can change the image size as well as layout style.

It is really amazing. Go on give it a try it - have some fun. I searched my name under YouTube and this came out:

Saturday, February 16, 2008

No 18 - Cairo


Check out Cairo - the graphic novel.

Book Description

Journalist G. Willow Wilson brings an extraordinary fable to Vertigo with CAIRO, an original graphic novel illustrated by Turkish artist M.K. Perker, himself a contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker. Set in bustling modern-day Cairo, this magical-realism thriller interweaves the lives of a drug runner, a down-on-his-luck journalist, an American expatriate, a young activist, an Israeli soldier, and a genie as they navigate the city's streets and spiritual underworld to find a stolen hooka sought by a wrathful gangster-magician.

About the Creators

G. Willow Wilson is an American author and essayist who divides her time between Egypt and the US. Her articles about modern religion and the Middle East have appeared in publications including the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine and the Canada National Post.

This is her first foray into graphic novels. Read her interview about Cairo here.

M. K. Perker

M. K. Perker was born in Istanbul in 1972. He studied animation and started his professional career at the age of 16 as a comic book artist. Between 1990 and 2001 he contributed to almost all major newspapers and magazines in Turkey, including Esquire, Harper's Bazaar and Cosmopolitan as an illustrator, editorial cartoonist and art director. Perker's first book, a collection of short comic stories, appeared in 1998 followed by a second in 2000. Since relocating to New York City in 2001 his work has appeared in a wide range of publications from The New York Times to MAD Magazine. Perker lives in New York City.

No 17 - LookyBook

Finally a site that allows you to browse great children's picture books from cover to cover. Looky Book allows you to look at picture books in their entirety—from cover to cover, at your own pace.

You can also create your own booklist (My Bookshelf) and share your favourite books with others.

One my favourites is:

Sparkle and Spin: A Book about Words.
It starts with an ice-cream cone and ends with only the cone.

Have fun looking!

No 16 - JacketFlap


© 2008 Jacketflap.com

Move over Friendster and FaceBook, here comes JacketFlap.

JacketFlap is a social networking community where you can connect with more than 1,600 published authors and illustrators of books for Children and Young Adults.

Calling all writers, illustrators and publishers, register now. It's free!

No 15 - World Book Day


A good initiative to encourage reading amongst children - refer to attached site:

http://www.worldbookday.com/

The core activity of World Book Day (WBD) is to spread the habit of reading - covering schools and pre-schools. On World Book Day - 1st of March - participating bookshops/publishers will distribute schools packs, display material and distribute World Book Day £1 or €1.50 Book Tokens. These tokens can be used to exchange for books that are specially published for the occasion. These books are priced at £1 or €1.50 hence the name. As a special contribution to World Book Day’s 10th Birthday celebrations there will be ten rather than six specially created £1 Books, pre-schools and secondary schools need to register to participate, as in previous years.

Other activities of WBD are:

Spread the Word - aimed at older children and adults - to ensure that the whole population is encouraged to be involved in reading

Quick Reads - where special titles will be published on World Book Day for those who have lost or are yet to develop the habit of reading for pleasure

Better by the Book - which will enable people or organisations to donate NEW books to hospitals, hospices and other settings via the bookshops themselves

I think it's about time that Malay/Muslim book-literature-related organisations come up with creative activities to encourage reading.

No 14 - Kalima Launch

Severe lack of foreign language books translated into Arabic prompts The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) of the United Arab Emirates – the same organization responsible for the Abu Dhabi Book Fair - to launch a program - Kalima - to translate hundreds of foreign language works into Arabic.

Kalima is the Arabic for “word”.

Read more ...

No 13 - Toon Books

Françoise Mouly, New Yorker art director and wife of acclaimed cartoonist Art Spiegelman launches a new line of book comics called Toon Books. This new line is aimed at readers ages four and up and are designed to nurture basic reading skills and encourage a love of visual storytelling.

An excerpt from Toon Books' official website states

"TOON Books represent a whole new approach to books for emerging readers — a rethinking as radical as the first time Theodore Geisel* put a hat on a cat."

*Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss.

Among its Spring 2008 titles is Otto's Orange Day about a cat named Otto who meets a magical genie and wishes for everything to be orange. Cover and sample pages below - extracted from www.toon-books.com.



Toon Books
THE LITTLE LIT LIBRARY is a division of RAW JUNIOR, LLC, 27 Greene Street, NEW YORK, NY 10013.
© and ™ 2007 RAW JUNIOR, LLC, all rights reserved

No 12 - Brown Bookshelf

Authors Launch Brown Bookshelf

Five authors have banded together to create The Brown Bookshelf, an online community dedicated to promoting children’s fiction by African-American authors and illustrators. The group, which launched November 1, is the brainchild of authors Paula Chase Hyman (the Del Rio Bay Clique series, Kensington) and Varian Johnson (Red Polka Dot in a World Full of Plaid, Genesis Press), who “met” via online author message boards.


I am hoping to form this sort of alliance - so that local writers and illustrators can support each other by imparting knowledge and skills, sharing resources and as a group, help to promote the culture of reading and buying books by local writers and illustrators.

No 11 - Nestlé Children’s Book Prize

Have you heard the news ...

Nestlé and Booktrust have agreed to end the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize after 23 years of partnership.

The revelation was a sad one - nonetheless - here are the last winners for the prize:

2007 gold medal winners

9 to 11 years category
Shadow Forest by Matt Haig (Bodley Head)



6 to 8 years category
Ottoline and the Yellow Cat by Chris Riddell (Macmillan Children's Books)



5 years and under category
When a Monster is Born by Sean Taylor and Nick Sharratt (Orchard Books)