Writing at NPR.org, Karen Grigsby Bates lays out her Summer (or rather end of Summer) reading recommendations. Nothing terribly unusual to be found, although she deserves credit for mixing things up a bit and not picking obvious blockbusters (aside from Eat, Pray, Love).

Since this will be my last post until after the holiday, this seems like an appropriate topic. My Summer reading list looks a little different, mainly because most of what I read were galleys.

Standouts include:

Beat The Reaper by Josh Bazell (to be published in January by Little Brown). You can read my comments about this book here and here. Needless to say, I really dug it and can’t wait to see what Bazell does next. I’ve heard that he’s making the Fall trade show rounds and if you get a chance, grab a copy. You’ll be glad you did.

Crime by Irvine Welsh (Norton HC 9780393068191 $24.95). I’m in the thick of this right now, and while Welsh still writes novels that are body-blows to the brain, Crime displays a maturity that I haven’t seen in his books since Glue.

X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker by Alex Cox (Soft Skull PC 9781593761936 $17.95). Anybody who has known me for at least a week knows that I can recite dialogue from Repo Man in my sleep. Here, Cox writes about the films he has made and issues a call-to-arms to readers and viewers to change their way of looking at art and life.

The Crow Road by Iain Banks (MacAdam/Cage HC 9781596923065 $25.00). I got an email from the book’s US publisher (it’s just been published in the States, but has been available in the UK for over a decade) asking for a blurb, as I’ve been a big fan of it for a long time. I went home that night and plucked my dogeared copy from the shelf to refresh my memory and the next thing I knew it was past 3am. It’s part coming-of-age novel and part detective story. I can’t recommend this highly enough.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow HC 9780061474095 $29.95). This sucker is going with me on my Labor Day trip to the East Coast. I’ve even loaded the soundtrack onto my iPod. I am really looking forward to totally immersing myself in this brick of a book. I’m glad that I have a galley, as I think the hardcover might qualify as carry-on luggage.

How about you, dear readers? What books (galleys or otherwise) really stood out for you this Summer? Feel free to leave a comment.

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100% and Heavy Liquid creator Paul Pope writes on his blog “Jack Kirby, born today, would’ve been 91 years old right now. He believed the Earth was visited by flying saucers. He was also the king of comics”.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact, I would have missed it if Pope hadn’t mentioned it.

Pope’s out-of-print and hard-to-find graphic novel Heavy Liquid (Vertigo HC 9781401219499 $39.99) will be reprinted by DC Comics in October and is definitely worth seeking out. It’s delicious-druggy-cyberpunk fun. It’s the sort of thing that William S. Burroughs would have written if he’d started writing in a post-punk, post-William Gibson era.

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Actually, I don’t think there was ever a doubt.

But here, courtesy of Boing Boing, is Richard Dawkins reading his hate mail from creationists. Aloud.

And to echo the comment of the original poster, I’d love to have an audiobook of this.

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When it comes to ebook readers, it seems that publishing industry trade journals and websites are often the last to know. If you want to find out what’s going on in this world, you’ll find out a lot earlier if you read the business or technology pages.

This new whiff of information on possible Kindle upgrades comes courtesy of BusinessWeek, which claims to have it on good authority that Amazon is planning a significant upgrade of the Kindle device in time for them to be out of stock during the busy holiday season.

The article is light on specifics, but it claims that the new version will have a bigger screen, a thinner body and will eliminate some of the annoyances from the first iteration.

To paraphrase my earlier wishes, give me a device that allows me to read Nabokov comfortably, listen to White Zombie mp3s and watch episodes of The Simpsons, and I will part with the cash. Add in Skype functionality and you can have my first-born. I know I can do all of this with an iPhone, but it’s still not a practical ebook platform for serious (more than an hour a day every day) readers.

And, as an aside to BW writer Peter Burrows: don’t feel bad and apologize to TechCrunch for using the term Kindle 2.0. That’s immediately where my mind went with this when I first heard about it. Isn’t using 2.0 as a suffix already part of our vernacular? (via Gizmodo)

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Bookfinder.com, that online bazaar of used and out-of-print books, has just released their list of most frequently searched titles.

It’s more or less the same list we’ve seen before, but it makes for interesting reading. Are there still people looking for Madonna’s Sex? Guess so.

I was unaware that Salvador Dali illustrated an edition of the Jerusalem Bible. That would have made lugging that brick (it’s thicker than most bibles since it doesn’t print the text in two columns the way many others do) through four years of catholic high school a bit easier to bear.

And, before you go blowing any cash for the Jim Jones biography The Raven, be aware that Penguin imprint Jeremy P. Tarcher will be reissuing it in November. (via Paper Cuts)

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Because when he talks, people listen.

Exhibit A) Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash gets folks’ attention when he comments on a recent BusinessWeek article regarding the publishing industry and what it can learn from Web 2.0 technologies. Nash blogs and Twitters with the best of them and it’s clear that more publishers could learn from his example. Imagine if publishers like Jonathan Karp or Jamie Byng, or editors like Reagan Arthur or Gerald Howard had blogs. Imagine if they used Facebook. Frankly, I’d rather hear from these folks than read about Sara Nelson’s latest love-in with her Kindle.

Yes, the publishing industry is full of hype, but these folks have enough established clout that if they established more rapport with readers, they could sell more books than a dozen well-armed publicists.

Exhibit B) Nash is blogging this week at Jeff VanderMeer’s blog Ecstatic Days, where he discusses how he actually uses these tools to help him satisfy his customers (both readers and retailers). He also mentions a book that Soft Skull is set to publish, called The Customer Is Always Wrong, making it sound much more compelling than the actual catalog copy. (via Galley Cat & Jacket Copy)

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That is, if it weren’t so cute.

Washington Post writer Bob Thompson explores the world of graphic novels and goes from neophyte to reasonably informed noob.

The article is a lot more informative than the usual type of ‘what are these funny books all about’ pieces that have popped up every few months since Maus was published in 1986. Thompson not only speaks to creators, but he also speaks to a lot of behind-the-scenes folks as well.

Adding to the fun is a series of meta-comic strips (subscription required) that mirror the writer’s own journey in sequential art.
(Via Drawn & Quarterly)

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But in a different format, of course. Now that the speculation over Barack Obama’s running mate is over (sorry Clinton, Bayh and Sebelius), interest in potential veep Joe Biden’s memoir Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (Random HC 9781400065363 $25.95) has exploded.

According to the New York Times, the book is ranking at 35 and 11 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble respectively.

The hardcover edition of this book is over a year old, and a smart publisher, attuned to the scuttle around the beltway, would have a trade paper edition of this ready to go the moment Obama announced his decision. Because, the odds were pretty good on Biden for a few weeks now, especially with the chorus of anti-Bayh proponents being heard.

I’m sure that Random House is that smart of a publisher, but I’ll know for sure as soon as I finish going through my email this morning.

Edit-Publishers Weekly has confirmed that Random is a smart publisher, with trade paperback editions of the book set to arrive at booksellers on Thursday. Are you reading this, Chelsea Green?

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Last week, I poked a bit of fun at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and their perversely optimistic essay on ebooks. Buried amongst the snark was a comment about the good work they do on fair use.

Well, it turns out that they’ve been working on behalf of a housewife who has been legally manhandled by Universal Music because she had the audacity to post a 29-second video of her toddler dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy. The EFF helped her file a counter claim that Universal was required to consider fair-use implications of their copyright enforcements. Universal claimed that they were not required to do so and it was off to court they went.

Well, according to a posting on the EFF’s site, a federal judge agrees with them. This is a victory for fair-use advocates everywhere.

Why go into all of this? Well, I just finished reading a galley of Lawrence Lessig’s (above) newest book on the subject, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin HC 9781594201721 $25.95). The book opens with a discussion of this very case, making for some very interesting timing.

The book itself is an accessible call to arms for artists, businesses and intellectual property attorneys to examine how the current (and hopefully as a result of this recent court case, wanning) approach to fair use stifles innovation and commerce. Lessig deftly shows how the current model is a hopeless zero sum game along the lines of the war on drugs.

Remix is due to hit stores the second week of October. (via Bookninja)

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A lot of hay has been generated in the last seventy-two hours over Chelsea Green’s decision to sell the book Obama’s Challenge exclusively through Amazon for two weeks before everybody else in the country has a chance.

I’ve already commented on this, both on this blog and to a reporter from the Portland Oregonian.

However, I’ve just had a chance to read the open letter to booksellers from CG’s president Margo Baldwin, and it would seem she clearly needs a lesson in proper damage control. . . . .

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