Odds & Ends

A couple of bits of literary and non-literary news that have grabbed my attention today:


The 2008 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards have been announced. These titles represent, according to Shelf Awareness, "the books ABA members most enjoyed handselling this year." The winners are as follows:

• Fiction: A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
• Non-Fiction: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingslover
• Children's Literature: The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick
• Children's Illustrated: Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity, by Mo Willems

In other awards news, the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy has been running a series on some of the nominees for the LA Times Book Prizes. Up right now is a post about Simon Sebag Montefoire's biography Young Stalin, complete with You Tube footage. The LA Times Book Prizes will be announced at the LA Times Festival of Books, where Vroman's will have a booth!


Faced-out or not, Border's is circling the drain.


Western Kentucky just upset Drake in the NCAA Tournament. The folks at Slate won't be pleased.


No Weekly Shelf Talker this week. In lieu of that, I thought I'd recommend folks check out the newly revamped Vroman's website, where they can find dozens of recommendations, for adults, teens, and kids, in every imaginable genre.


I didn't want to write an entire recommendation for this book, but the 2008 Baseball Prospectus is out. If you're a baseball fan and you don't read this book, you need to be slapped (metaphorically speaking). The book features breakdowns of all the teams, with a blurb about each player, plus articles on cutting edge statistical analysis and rankings of the game's top prospects. Yeah, it's geeky, but I typically spend two or three days each spring doing nothing but reading this book. It's surprisingly funny, provided the reader has an obsessive working knowledge of baseball. Take for instance, this sentence that appeared in a previous Prospectus instead of a blurb for former Yankee prospect Ruben Rivera: "I had a comment about Ruben Rivera, but I left if in Derek Jeter's locker, and now it's gone." If you get it, great. If not, you probably have a life. Congratulations.