‘Book Bites’ for Thursday 25th June 2009
June 25, 2009 by Rob
Filed under Book Bites, Book News
Murakami talks 1Q84 – Kathleen over at the Reading Copy Book Blog points to the first of two-part interview with Haruki Murakami over at Asia One News. My first reaction was the interview was going to be in Japanese but thankfully it’s in English.
It’s a great interview (even with the mild spoilers), but as it belongs to Asia One News I’m not about to start ripping over loads of Murakami quotes and revelations to here. So head on over to the Asia One News website if you want to get the gist of it.
One thing though. Interesting that the interview is presented in 2-parts, just like the novel. Probably more to do with space, and tension building, but I’d like to think it’s a clever mirroring of the novel’s own presentation *evil grin*.
Oh and another thing (I lied 
)). Cast aside the misconception that Murakami’s 1Q84 is pronounced ‘one-q-eighty-four’. Asia One News gives us the correct pronunciation and it’s in the vernacular, not Western. The title is pronounced ichi-kew-hachi-yon, which I personally think sounds much nicer.
Twitterature. A world gone crazy? – You would have thought that mighty publishing mogul Penguin would know better, but apparently not. The Guardian reports this:
Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.
In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature – they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling – into 20 tweets or less – that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.
I feel like crying I really do. What on earth is our world coming to when we even feel the need to condense down our classic works of literature in order to save time? Wikipedia has already sounded the death knell on the chances of our kids learning good research and inquiry skills. Is Twitter now going to kill off classical reading too? As much as I love you Penguin – shame on you!
‘Book Bites’ – bringing you tasty bite-size morsels of bookish news and delight, from around the web.
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Rob, a self-confessed bibliophile, is without any hope of rehabilitation. He gets unnaturally excited over anything book-shaped, and if book sniffing were a crime then he would have been locked up years ago (which wouldn't bother him in the slightest provided his cell were lined with books)
