Archive for June 2006

Book titles go rock-and-roll freaky

You love books. That’s a given: It’s why you’re reading a blog called Cuppa Joad, right? But what about music? Are you a music junkie/aficionado/snob? Do you like to listen as much as you’re rabid to read?
If so, you’ll enjoy Booking Bands, the addictive, amusing, clever contest that invited readers to pair the titles of […]

In Katrina’s wake, New Orleans builds an appetite for cookbooks

There is one post-Katrina loss I kick myself for not thinking of: the fact that thousands of family recipes are gone forever. —Stacey Ornstein, The Paper Palate
In the long months after Hurricane Katrina, book donations have poured into New Orleans. Charity used-book sales have helped to match people who lost books with titles from […]

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty wins the Orange Prize

I’m not sure who was more excited that the U.K.’s Orange Prize for Fiction winners were announced yesterday: Zadie Smith, who won the £30,000 prize for On Beauty, or the bloggers at Eve’s Alexandria, where they blogged about the winners as they watched the webcast live.
You’ll find wonderful reviews of all the Orange Prize nominees […]

Blog roundup: Proust, Snicket, Freakonomics, and more

Let’s start the Cuppa Joad week with some literary odds and ends. I’ve been hanging out in blogland this afternoon and have encountered (a) a few random and readworthy author blogs, (b) a hilarious summary of Lemony Snicket’s faux-show at the recent Hay Festival, and (c) a long and decidedly smart summer-reading list. I’ve corralled […]

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, by Simon Winchester

His wit is drier than a desert fault line. His prose moves faster than continents drift. He’s able to leap mountains of technical jargon in a single chapter. He’s Simon Winchester, and he’s my hero.
In A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, Winchester awed me. Not […]

Summer’s mystery novels go Scandinavian cool

Just in time for summer reading comes a wave of Scandinavian crime fiction that promises to occupy the collective imagination of beach-lolling mystery aficionados for the season.
Leading the way, says NPR’s Steve Paulson, is Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, whose “Inspector Wallander” series already has an international English-speaking following (and outsells Harry Potter in […]