little_cafe

Are you guys have a Goodreads account? If so, what's your experience with it so far? :)

I don´t know if anybody has noticed, but on January the 30th goodreads won´t be able to use Amazon as a database anymore. This can affect books, audio books, ebooks, graphic novels & mangas. So goodreads needs the help of it´s users (that mean us, folks!). If you got a librarian status, please check if there are books in your goodreads that might be deleted & complete the goodreads dat with the help of your own copies at home. If you have not a librarian status, but know books in your goodreads shelf with incomplete data (no right isbn, language, author), please leave a post on the goodreads message board. Your books need you!

cross posted to my journal ravenbloodmist

What are your thoughts on this piece? Do you agree or disagree?

An American hasn't won in 20 years. The Academy finds our writers insular and self-involved -- and they're right
By Alexander Nazaryan

America wants a Nobel Prize in literature. America demands it! America doesn’t understand why those superannuated Swedes haven’t given one to an American since Toni Morrison in 1993. America wonders what they’re waiting for with Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. America wonders how you say “clueless” in Swedish.

OK, enough. But the literature Nobel will be announced this Thursday and if an American doesn’t win yet again, there will be the usual entitled whining — the sound of which has been especially piercing since 2008, when Nobel Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl deemed American fiction “too isolated, too insular” and declared Europe “the centre of the literary world.”

Boy, were we upset. Over at Slate, Adam Kirsch penned a scathing essay declaring that “the Nobel committee has no clue about American literature,” arguing that Philip Roth should have won the prize. New Yorker editor David Remnick said, “You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lecture.” He added John Updike (then living) and Don DeLillo to the mix of worthy laureates.

It’s true that the Academy, like any body of judges, has made some ill-informed decisions. And they’ve not done themselves any favors with some George W. Bush-era selections that plainly had more to do with politics than literature.

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1.Does the bookstore have a future?

2.Does reading make you a better person?

3. What advice would you give to young aspiring writers?

4. What are you reading this month?

5. Books you picked up after seeing the movie?

6. What spoils a book for you?

7. What books do you want to see adapted?

8. Did anybody read NPR piece on why Barnes and Noble survive while Borders failed? Here's the article. Do you agree or disagree? Or is there more to issue than it is?

Not literally but I have created a community for writers, it is called writersplace. Although it still need more fixing, hopefully you guys join if you are interest in it.

Some members on this community may want to a writer. Here is a video of critically acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates discusses buildng characters in story in a realistic way.

Question 14:

What's the hardest novel you've ever read?

Questions 15:

What genre is your favourite?

Question 16:

What is your favorite Shakespeare work?

Question 17:

If you were to make a living as a writer, provided you have the talent and the opportunity, what would you write?

Question 18:

Which book you can predict or want to see as a musical like The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables?

Question:11

Any book you wish you'd read earlier and why?

Question 12:

Name some books that you thought you'd like but ended up hating or not quite hating but severely disliking

Question 13:

What movies did you find BETTER than the books?