Book reviews 2008

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Maxine

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Best worst movie lines

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Maxine

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog – film: The best worst lines in film.

As it says on the label (above), what are your favourite worst lines in films? Ronald Bergan in the Guardian post at the link highlights a couple of beauties (but as usual with Guardian blog pieces, there isn’t much more to it as the author of the piece can’t remember the lines, as opposed to scenes, that he found funny in recent films):

El Greco (bravely played by a British actor called Nick Ashdon) says to a priest that he expected the Inquisition to come for him, the priest replies, "They will, but there’s backlog at the moment".
Merle Oberon as George Sand in the Chopin biopic A Song To Remember tells the composer, "Discontinue that so-called Polonaise jumble you’ve been playing for days."
In I Wake Up Screaming, Victor Mature, dining Betty Grable in a smart restaurant, impresses her with his sophistication by saying to the waiter, "We’ll have the wine with the meal and coffee afterwards."

Do you have any favourites? "And did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?" is an apocryphal example that comes to mind, but whether it actually was in a movie I don’t know.

What’s right for booksellers

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Maxine

Martyn Daniels, author of the UK Bookseller Association’s report Brave New World, posts here: Brave New World: Reviewing Our Predictions For 2007. What did the report get right and what wrong? Check out the link. Among the "right":

The start of real POD services based not on short print runs but distributed printing at affordable prices. POD still moving at pace and people now looking to distribute to print rather than print and distribute. Foyles looked at the Espresso machine. Right

Increased importance of Internet sales, emarketing and community engagement and participation. The Internet is clearly here and becoming pervasive in all markets. For the bookstores it is now a must do. Right

Yes, two definite "rights", I’d agree. Next for Martyn and co is to make their predictions for 2008. I’m watching.

The Life of the Blog

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Maxine

Via Books, Inq, here is an article, Timeline: The Life of the Blog, over at National Public Radio. It’s an interesting archive of key points in the evolution of blogging — skewed, not surprisingly in view of the fact that the timeline is on a news site, to the impact of blogging on politics and current affairs. I thought it petered out at the end, though. The list captures Twitter as a recent innovation, as well as podcasting, photostreams and video (vlogs), but fails to mention the late-2007 trend of the integration of blogs with social networking sites, whether big players such as Facebook or MySpace, or niche networks such as Nature Network or Crimespace, which support blogs. If I were starting out blogging now, rather than two and a half years ago, I would do so within a social network rather than as a standalone blog (I think! I’m never entirely sure I have captured all the pros and cons of these things.) One thing I can be sure about, though — in another couple of months’ time, there will be another blog trend spreading like wildfire across the Internet.