In praise of the internet and in memory of Summer Fridays

It’s the Friday before Labor Day, marking the end of the publishing industry’s grandest tradition--Summer Fridays--until next Memorial Day. (For the uninitiated, Summer Fridays are half-day Fridays in the summer and one of the few things left over from the more civilized bygone days of three-martini lunches.) Let’s all shed a tear and distract ourselves with some of what the wide internet world has to offer:


Shelfari via Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing shows us why we should be jealous of Neil Gaiman’s library.


The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog brings us a few gems: Sivers.org’s explanation of Kurt Vonnegut’s explanation of drama queens--in handy graph form!

And a link to the Telegraph in the UK with their story about books most often left behind in UK Travelodge hotels--#2 is our very own Dreams from My Father! (Second only to what must be the most important book of our time, the latest memoir by the trashtastic Katie Price/Jordan. We just don’t do fake celebrity like they do in the UK!)

And a post in praise of risky covers with which I heartily agree! The cover they feature, for Black Cat's The Hole We're In by Gabrielle Zevin is phenomenal.


Some practical (but amusingly communicated) advice from Pimp My Blog, a blog by someone in the sales department at a major trade publisher, on blogging. I’m not sure I can really get behind #10, but I think we could all learn something from this post as well as the rest of the entries.



And to finish up, the Pimp My Novel Friday roundup (written by a “recovering publishing insider”, not the aforementioned sales team member) points to a piece on the Guardian Books Blog about not finishing books. I’m on board, generally, because there are very few books I’ll struggle through if I’m not loving them since I rarely find it worth it in the end, but I’d suggest that skipping out on the second half of Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost is a mistake. I’ll admit I had trouble with parts of it, but because Michael praised it so heavily I kept going and was happy to have done so.



Happy Final Summer Friday everyone, and have a great weekend!



-Lauren