BookOpinion

According to results from a recent study, Minneapolis and Seattle are the most well-read cities in the U.S.

The survey targeted 69 U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or above and chose six key indicators to rank literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.

Overall, the top 10 most literate (and wired) cities included:

1—Minneapolis, Minn.
2—Seattle, Wash.
3—St. Paul, Minn.
4—Denver, Colo.
5—Washington, D.C.
6—St. Louis, Mo.
7—San Francisco, Calif.
8—Atlanta, Ga.
9—Pittsburgh, Pa.
10—Boston, Mass.

Minneapolis, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Denver and Washington, D.C., have made the top 10 since the survey was launched in 2003.

More…

Some cities that didn’t make it to the overall top 10, however, did strut their stuff in one of the six key literacy indicators. For instance, while Newark, N.J., was the 49th most literate city overall, it shared the top spot for newspaper circulation with Washington, D.C.

Plano, Texas, ranking 51st on the overall most-literate-city list, came in second for educational attainment. The education ranking included two factors: the percentage of the city’s adult population with a high school diploma or higher and those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Cleveland, Ohio, scored the highest for library resources, with St. Louis coming in second. The library category was a measure of five variables, such as the number of library professional staff and total branch libraries relative to library patrons.

Atlanta and Boston took the lead spots in the Internet resources category.

Read Full Story

The best good and bad quotes last forever or at least until the end of the year … for example, making your “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” T-shirt still a worthy Christmas present.

While a delicious quote on a T-shirt might bleach out in the wash, a book of memorable quotes lasts a lot longer. Fred R. Shapiro, an associate librarian and lecturer at the Yale Law School, is the editor of “The Yale Book of Quotations,” released earlier this year after six years of research. It contains about 13,000 quotes, each extensively researched to verify its origin. He expects to add about 1,000 more quotes — mostly modern — for the next edition of his book in about five years.

More recently, Shapiro released a list of the 10 most memorable quotes of 2007. With help from the Associated Press, here’s the list from bottom to top:

10. “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”

Former President Jimmy Carter, referring to the Bush administration in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper

9. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Sen. Joseph Biden, referring to rival Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama

8. “(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom.”

Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, explaining why his foot touched the foot of an undercover police officer in an airport men’s room

7. “I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, referring to Republican Vice President Dick Cheney

6. “There’s only three things he (Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani) mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”

Sen. Joseph Biden, speaking during a debate for Democratic presidential candidates

5. “I don’t recall.”

Former U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales’ repeated response to questions from members of Congress about the firing of U.S. attorneys

4. “That’s some nappy-headed hos there.”

Radio personality Don Imus, referring to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team

3. “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during a speaking engagement at Columbia University in New York

2. “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.”

Lauren Upton, the South Carolina contestant in the Miss Teen America contest, when asked why one-fifth of Americans cannot find the U.S on a map

1. “Don’t tase me, bro.”

Andrew Meyer, a senior at the University of Florida, after being hauled away by campus police during a speech made by Sen. John Kerry.

Don’t Tase Me, Bro! The Video

Now that I’ve refreshed your memory on some top unforgettable quotes of 2007, I recommend getting your hands on an extensive list found in “The Yale Book of Quotations.”

This from Booklist’s Carolyn Mulac:

To paraphrase Ira Gershwin, “on every [page] that you turn you meet a notable with a statement that is eminently quotable” in this collection. According to editor Shapiro, this is “the first quotation book to be compiled using state-of-the-art research methods to seek out quotations and to trace quotation sources.” He compares his approach with that of the Oxford English Dictionary: he, too, traces words back to their earliest possible usages. Using a variety of electronic sources, such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, andTimes Digital Archive, scores of quotations were verified, and in many cases reverified. The more than 12,000 quotations collected here span a wide array of subjects, from literature, philosophy, and history to science, business, and politics.

Quotations are presented alphabetically by the name of the author or speaker. Shakespeare and the Bible, the mother lodes of quotations, are amply represented, but emphasis is on “modern and American materials.” Children’s authors, who are often ignored in other dictionaries, are quoted here. There are a number of special sections devoted to particular types of quotations, among them advertising slogans, ballads, film lines, political slogans, and radio and television catchphrases. Song lyrics are entered by the name of the composer, and film lines appear either under the film title in the special section devoted to movie lines or, if they originated in a book or play upon which the film was based, under the author of that literary source. Proverbs span the centuries and often include evidence of a saying’s first print appearance. A keyword index, an essential element of any quotation dictionary, rounds out the text.

Don’t disappoint me, bro…go check out “The Yale Book of Quotations” now!

- Alexander

Doris Lessing won the 2007 Noble Prize for Literature. When told she just won the prize, the author responded with a less-than-enthusiastic, “Oh, Christ!”

“It’s been going on now for more than 30 years,” she said. “I can’t get more excited.”

Check out the classic reaction from the newly named Nobel Laureate here:

To use BookOpinion’s price comparison shopper to find the best prices on Lessing books, click here.

Here is a biography of Lessing’s life and work:

Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 to British parents in Kermanshah in what was then known as Persia (now Iran) as Doris May Taylor. Her father, Alfred Cook Taylor, formerly a captain in the British army during the First World War, was a bank official. Her mother, Emily Maude Taylor, had been a nurse. In 1925 the family moved to a farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) hoping to improve their income. Lessing described her childhood on the farm in the first part of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994). At the age of seven, she was sent to a convent boarding school but later moved to a girls’ school in Salisbury. When 14 she independently ended her formal schooling. In the following years she worked as a young nanny, telephonist, office worker, stenographer and journalist and had several short stories published. In 1939 she married Frank Charles Wisdom with whom she had a son, John, and a daughter, Jean. The couple divorced in 1943. In 1945 Doris married Gottfried Lessing, a German-Jewish immigrant she had met in a Marxist group mainly concerned with the race issue. She became involved with the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party. She and Gottfried had a son, Peter. When the couple divorced in 1949, she took Peter and moved to London, quickly establishing herself as a writer. Between 1952 and 1956 she was a member of the British Communist Party and was active in the campaign against nuclear weapons. Because of her criticism of the South African regime, she was prohibited entry to that country between 1956 and 1995. After a brief visit to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she was banned there as well for the same reason. In African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992) she described going back in 1982 to the country where she had grown up. She now lives in London.

Doris Lessing made her debut as a novelist with The Grass is Singing (1950), which examines the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. The book is both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts.

Even the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, usually called the Martha Quest series for its main character, is largely set in Africa. The series comprises Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965) and The Four-Gated City (1969). It describes Martha Quest’s awakening to greater awareness on every level and was pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman. With these books Lessing created a modern equivalent of the Bildungsroman of women writers of the 19th century. The Children of Violence, despite its emphatic liberation theme, is characterised by an almost fatalistic outlook. The story is told with the mild despair of someone seeing her younger self from the heavens of an afterlife, unable to intervene. The masterpiece is the final volume of the series, The Four-Gated City, a period frescoe apparently enveloping all of England – indeed our entire culture – illuminated by the author’s empathy and incivility.

The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough. The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. The style levels of differing documents and experiences mix: newspaper cuttings, news items, films, dreams and diaries. Anna Wulf, the main character, has five notebooks for her thoughts about Africa, politics and the communist party, her relationship to men and sex, Jungian analysis and dream interpretation. The disjointed form reflects that of the main character’s mind. There is no single perspective from which to capture the entirety of her life experience.

Books published in the 1970s included Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), inspired by R. D. Laing. Lessing has characterised her novel from this period as “inner-space fiction”: an attempt in the spirit of Romanticism to expand human knowledge to encompass regions beyond the control of reason and the ego.

In the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing expanded the science fiction genre. The series studies the post-atomic war development of the human species. Lessing varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles. Among inspirations for the work was the Idries Shah’s school of Sufism that she discovered in the 1960s. Doris Lessing revisited her interest in Sufism in the Time Bites (2004) collection of essays.

Lessing returned to realistic narrative in The Good Terrorist (1985), providing a satirical picture of the need of the contemporary left for total control and the female protagonist’s misdirected martyrdom and subjugation. Her analysis of the greenhouse for the terrorist mind in generation hatred and an Übermensch attitude retains currency.

The autobiographical Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) represented a new peak in her writing. Lessing recalls not only her own life but the entire epoch: England in the last days of the empire. Her novel The Sweetest Dream (2001) is a stand-alone sequel in fictive form. Perhaps her unsparing view of the polical antics of friends and lovers necessitated such discretion.

Her other important novels are The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988). In the former, the reader at first infers a liberation motif: a woman finally about to fulfil her gift and sexual desires. After a first reading, the contours of the real novel take shape: a ruthless study of the collapse of values in middle age. The Fifth Child is a masterfully realised psychological thriller, where a woman’s repressed or denied aggression against family life is incarnated in a monstrous boy child.

The vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life has had special appeal for Doris Lessing. It reappears in some of her books of recent years: the fantasy novel Mara and Dann (1999) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005). From collapse and chaos emerge the elementary qualities that allow Lessing to retain hope in humanity…

Read Full Biography

Borders along with Court TV and Gather.com has announced a crime and mystery writing contest. ”The Next Great Crime Writer” contest is open to anyone with a completed, but unpublished manuscript. First chapters will be voted up upon by the Gather.com community.

Among the panelists of judges include authors David Baldacci, Sandra Brown and Harlan Coben. Winners will receive a book publishing and distribution contract and an advance.

Complete contest details can be found here.

“Driving quality manuscript submissions is the key to any successful writing contest,” said Borders Group, Inc. Executive Vice President, Merchandising and Marketing, Rob Gruen. “By joining forces with Court TV and Gather.com, we exponentially enhance the quantity and quality of submissions. This puts Borders in a unique position to make a dream come true for an aspiring and deserving writer.”

“We are thrilled to launch yet another groundbreaking marketing initiative, which, for the first time, partners Court TV with Borders and Gather.com,” says Mary Corigliano, senior vice president of marketing for Court TV. “Taking advantage of this multiplatform environment, we are extremely well positioned to lead the search to bring national attention to an unpublished mystery writer primed for his or her big break, while at the same time ultimately driving tune-in to our hit series Murder by the Book.”

Court TV’s “Murder by the Book,” which premieres Monday, November 5, 10 p.m. ET, is a 13-episode, one-hour series featuring best-selling crime authors including David Baldacci, Sandra Brown, and Harlan Coben. Court TV’s promotion for the “Search for the Next Great Crime Writer” Contest will include on-air, Internet and guerilla marketing. Gather.com members and fans of crime fiction will have a unique opportunity to pose questions and interact with the authors via web site postings and interviews.

“Clearly, we are setting a trend here, using our base of loyal members in our strong social network to partner with two leading companies in their respective fields,” says Tom Gerace, founder and CEO of Gather.com. “The Gather.com, Borders and Court TV alliance is a powerful mix of media that delivers a multi-faceted platform to identify, vet and elevate aspiring mystery writers.”

THE COURT TV SEARCH FOR THE NEXT GREAT CRIME WRITER CONTEST TIMELINE
Round 1: October 1 - November 11, 2007
Submission period

Round 2: November 15, 2007 - December 9, 2008:
1st Chapters posted of all eligible entries on Courttv.Gather.com, where the community will help narrow the pool down to 25 semifinalists.

Round 3: December 13, 2007 - January 2, 2008:
The 25 semifinalists will post their second chapters on Courttv.Gather.com, where the community will help narrow the pool down to
5 finalists.

Round 4: January 3, 2008 - January 22, 2008:
The judging panel will select one talented mystery novelist as the Grand Prize Winner.

Winner Announced: February 4, 2008:
The judging panel will announce the mystery novelist as the Grand Prize Winner, the Next Great Crime Writer.

As her next book club selection, Oprah Winfrey has chosen “Love in the Time of Cholera,” a love story by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “He’s truly one of our greatest living literary giants,” Winfrey said.

“If you love ‘love,’ this book is the best love story ever,” Winfrey said on her show.

Published in 1985, the novel will now certainly skyrocket up the bestseller lists. Garcia Marquez, 80, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. “Love in the Time of Cholera” is set on the Caribbean coast of South America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It tells the tale of a woman and two men, and an unrequited love that spans 50 years.

“It is so beautifully written that it really takes you to another place in time and will make you ask yourself how long could you or would you wait for love,” Winfrey said.

This is the second time he has been selected for Oprah’s book club. “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” was a selection in 2004

A film adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera” is scheduled for November release. “If you’re like me, you’ll want to read the book before you see the movie,” Winfrey said.

Pocket Books and Gather.com have announced their top 25 semi-finalists in their romance novel writing contest. First chapters were submitted in August, and second chapters are now up. Five finalists will be chosen and a grand prize winner will receive a contract with the Pocket Books imprint of Simon & Schuster.

“Excitement around the First Chapters competition continues to build as people increasingly realize the power that their participation has in selecting the world’s next great literary talents,” says Tom Gerace, Gather.com founder and Chief Executive Officer. “The high quality of the romance submissions has ignited a feverous flow of activity and engagement amongst our members, who have always been captivated by good writing.”

The contest gives first-time novelists a chance to get their work noticed and printed.

“Romance writers are one of the world’s most passionate groups of people,” noted Louise Burke, Executive Vice President and Publisher, Pocket Books. “The First Chapters Romance competition has allowed Pocket Books to leverage the power of social media to identify undiscovered talent and provide our customers with fresh, carefully plotted, and well-crafted romance writing.”

From now through Oct. 8, 2007, readers may check out the first two chapters for each writer and vote for the finalists. The three chapters with the most “10” votes will proceed to Round 3, along with two chapters selected by the Gather Editorial Team.

Interested in checking them out? Click here to Read the First Chapters.

Last year’s First Chapter winner was recently published along with another finalist. USA Today reviewed the books here.

Bestselling author Robert Jordan, whose “Wheel of Time” series of novels sold millions, died of a rare blood disease Sunday. He was 58.

A message was posted on his blog with the annoucement:

“It is with great sadness that I tell you that the Dragon is gone. RJ left us today at 2:45 PM. He fought a valiant fight against this most horrid disease. In the end, he left peacefully and in no pain. In the years he had fought this, he taught me much about living and about facing death. He never waivered in his faith, nor questioned our God’s timing. I could not possibly be more proud of anyone. I am eternally grateful for the time that I had with him on this earth and look forward to our reunion, though as I told him this afternoon, not yet. I love you bubba.Our beloved Harriet was at his side through the entire fight and to the end. The last words from his mouth were to tell her that he loved her.Thank each and everyone of you for your prayers and support through this ordeal. He knew you were there. Harriet reminded him today that she was very proud of the many lives he had touched through his work. We’ve all felt the love that you’ve been sending my brother/cousin. Please keep it coming as our Harriet could use the support.”

The Associated Press writes:

…He wrote a trilogy of historical novels set in Charleston under the pen name Reagan O’Neal in the early 1980s. Then he turned his attention to fantasy and the first volume in his Wheel of Time epic, “The Eye of the World,” was published in 1990 under the name Robert Jordan.

Jordan’s books tells of Rand al’Thor, who is destined to become the champion who will battle ultimate evil in a mythical land.

Book 11, “Knife of Dreams,” came out in 2005; there was also a prequel, “New Spring: The Novel,” in 2004. The other titles in the series include “The Great Hunt,” “Lord of Chaos” and “The Path of Daggers.” Jordan was working on a 12th volume at the time of his death, Simons said.

“The younger devotees of the series, who seem to be legion, have a habit of dutifully rereading the complete gospel before each addition. … (Jordan) creates a universe simple enough to master and then challenges the characters to do the same in meticulously choreographed battles against chaos and dissolution.”

In a 2004 online chat on the USA Today Web site, Jordan said he hoped to finish the main “Wheel” series in two more books. “It’s not an absolute promise, but I’m very much hoping for it and I think I can do it,” he wrote.

Most of the books made The New York Times list of best sellers.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 2003, Jordan discussed having a best seller. The first time it happens “you go out in the middle of the floor and you do a little dance. Then you go someplace booze is being served and buy a drink for everybody in the house.

“You have to have talent to some extent — I certainly hope I have talent — but you have to have luck as well,” Jordan said. “Once you get that first shot, that will get you noticed for the rest of your books and that will give the rest of your books a better chance.”

He said in the interview that his Southern background came through in his work, even though it is set in a fantasy world.

“What I write is certainly not set in South Carolina, but I have had a number of reviewers comment on the fact that I write with a distinctly Southern voice,” he said.

“It goes beyond more than simply where the story is set. I believe it is something we take in in the air and the water. It’s a matter of word choices — of the rhythms of sentences and the rhythm of speech in particular.”…

Read Full Story