‘Book Bites’ for Sunday 22nd Feb 2009

Scott Herman’s passion for Penguin – A big thank you to Kim of Reading Matters for pointing her readers over to Erasing.org to take a look at Scott Herman’s glorious obsession for Penguin Modern Classic covers. You got to love a man who writes such passionate bookish things as “I just about burst into flames at the awesomeness of this cover. Its simplicity, its symmetry, its monochromatic sleekness, its cleverly oblique reference to the content of the book..”, but you’ve got to love him even more when you see the photos he’s posted of the framed Penguin novels around his home. Very nice, and sure to give any bibliophile that warm fuzzy feeling.

Two things I want to add while we’re on the subject of bookcovers. If your interested in showing off your own favourite covers without ruining the books, you can do as Scott does and seek out a few shadow-box frames (which as you can see from the photos is a great solution), or you can check out Suck UK’s ‘Picturebook’ solution. These things have been on my ‘radar’ for a while now and I absolutely love them!

The second thing I want to mention is to keep an eye out for my own bookcover loving series, ‘Cover Love’, which starts on RobAroundBooks real soon. It’s gonna be a fun one!

Waterstones: ‘New Voices 2009’ selection announced – Uk bookstore Waterstones have released details of the dozen titles chosen to be featured in stores and online as part of their ‘New Voices’ campaign. Devised as a way to highlight the novels of emerging writers, ‘New Voices’ promotes the new authors whose books are considered to be capable of picking up literary awards in the coming months. The official word from Waterstones:

“Our booksellers read scores of new novels and this final twelve contains the books they loved the most. The writers may be new, but they have huge talent and these books deserve to compete with those from more established writers for both the attention of readers and for the big prizes.”

The chosen twelve (one of which I already have in my reading pile [as *ed], and the rest I hope to get over the coming weeks) are as follows:

• Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward
• Ablutions by Patrick deWitt
• A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth
• An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay
• Guernica by Dave Boling
• Days of Grace by Catherine Hall
• Black Rock by Amanda Smyth
• The Street Philosopher by Matthew Plampin
• *The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan
• The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee
• The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn
• The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

I’ll be giving my thoughts and feelings on any and all of the books in this selection whenever I can (and if I can), but meantime, if anyone has read any of these and has anything to say then I’d love to hear it.

‘Book Bites’ – bringing you tasty bite-size morsels of bookish news and delight, from around the web.