Now, I’m no Alvin Lustig or Paul Rand, but does anyone at Amazon REALLY think these are the “10 Best Covers of 2008” in all of the tens of thousands of books that were printed this year? Really?
I mean, there were some GORGEOUS covers done this year. Maybe Amazon’s editors just let some random number generator pick these. Even with the Chip Kidd cover included, this list is just weird, at best. Feel free to disagree and if you do, please explain why. I just don’t get it.
The numbers have been tallied and it’s official, reading makes you happy (or was it you are happy so you read?). The December issue of Social Indicators Research contains the results of a 30-year University of Maryland study which kept up with 30,000+ adults. Their findings seem to be pretty straight forward:
…unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as very happy spend more time reading and socializing.
Another interesting tidbit was that half of the unhappy television watchers felt they had too much time on their hands and the unwanted free-time just added to their woes. Whereas less than 20% of the happy reading socializers said they had extra free-time to fill.
I’m not real sure what all this says about our culture, but after studying it for 30 years, they should get some props. And to be honest, all these numbers and percentages make me grumpy. So I’m just going to go read.
BookFinds has a fun post on the”10 Best Changes of a Novel’s Title”. My favorite is #5…
5. Originally, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was titled “Catch-18? but the year that he was going to publish his novel, Leon Uris published a novel about German-occupied Warsaw called Mila 18, so Heller had to pick another number.
I mean, who would have thought that the 22 was such an arbitrary choice? I bet I heard three people this week refer to something as a Catch-22. Which just seems better than Catch-18, with the double digit and all. Have a good weekend!
There is a new search engine being developed, Reference Extract. It’s a search engine that gives preference to results tagged by librarians. So where Google and others are trying to remove the human part of the search equation, the folks at Reference Extract are trying to harness the expertise of all the card carrying MLS people out there.
This trained “professional filter” is exactly why I will always watch the network news and read newspapers. There is just too much bunk out there that I want to know that some sort of professional has done the leg work and sorted it for me. But I’m not sure how successful Reference Extract will be…
