Currently, I am hiding in an ocean side chateau, surrounded by the gray horizon of the Oregon coast and all the Merlot I can consume.

Between bouts of sleeping, reading (the new Stieg Larsson, hot off the press and smuggled into the US), and staring at the rain, I’ve come across these links worthy of firing up my laptop while I’m supposed to be vacationing.

An early rave for Edgar Wright’s adaption of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim (below), courtesy of director Jason Reitman. (via The Beat)

If you think author photos are strange, you’re not alone. The Millions ponders some egregious examples of questionable author photos, like Amy Hemphel (below). Melissa Banks’ photo is scary in a Mrs. Robinson wants to show off what she learned in yoga class kind of way. (via Bookninja)

Once again, in a crazy-assed situation (sorry, must be the wine), in this case, booksellers canceling their orders for Amazon/Wal-Mart <$10 bestsellers and using the online leviathans as de facto wholesalers, MobyLives is the voice of reason. Bottom line: Don’t do it. You don’t hurt publishers,and you don’t really hurt Amazon (their pockets are much deeper than yours).

Isn’t a bit too early to name the best books of 2009? With two months left on the calendar, Publishers Weekly doesn’t seem to think so. On the plus side, this reminds me that I need to read Victor La Velle’s Big Machine. (via Jacket Copy)

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Yep, these folks are queuing up for the midnight release of the newest installment in the late Robert Jordan’s Wheel  of Time series The Gathering Storm (Tor HC 9780765302304 $29.99), which was completed by Brandon Sanderson.

From the looks of this crowd, it looks like more people showed up to this midnight event at Brigham Young University Bookstore than to the premiere of the Michael Jackson film This is It in Harlem.

Of course, Sanderson teaches at BYU and was present for the event, but still…

(via GalleyCat)

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One of my favorite books of the Fall has been the newest novel by Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (Doubleday HC 9780385518635 $27.95).

While I found it to be sprawling testament to the dislocation that urban anxiety brings about, there are some haters. Like fussy-pants Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times, who describes the novel as being “…tedious, (&) overstuffed”.

Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy has a great interview with the author. It’s the kind of interview that makes you wish that books, like DVDs, could come with audio commentaries.

Photo credit: Amy Sussman – Getty Images for The New Yorker

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Without giving too much away, Stieg Larsson’s second novel in his Millennium series, The Girl Who Played With Fire, ends very abruptly. It’s the Scandinavian thriller equivalent of The Empire Strikes Back.

However, while readers in the UK are now thrilling themselves to the further exploits of Larsson’s manic pixie hacker dream girl in the concluding novel, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, readers in the US have to wait until Spring of 2010.

That is, unless they let their fingers do the walking and order it online from a UK bookseller.

I’m sure there is a rationale for this, but I’m struggling to find it. I realize that most US readers are probably not so savvy (or should I say obsessive), probably blissfully unaware that the book even exists in English in the first place. But I know booksellers, ones who if they hung loose could get a free copy from Random House when it hits the galley stage, who are paying up and buying the book online. And pretty soon, I will probably be one of them.

These are obsessive fans that Random House will not make one penny from.

Will an enterprising bookseller import a few copies and risk the wrath of Random? Or, will Random House make an actually worthwhile drop-in out of this book? Will Random choose to make a buck off of this, or will they loose out to digital pirates?

(Via Booksquare)

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I had no idea this was happening, but it seems that somebody is trying to make a film of Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City.

Since the book doesn’t really have much in the way of plot (it’s really just Klosterman musing on what music means for him-think Nick Hornby’s book about soccer Fever Pitch, but insert hair metal bands whenever Arsenal FC is mentioned), it’ll be interesting to see what kind of a screenplay the filmmakers come up with.

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Reading that date makes me feel like we’re going to be reading this book waiting to be seated in a PF Changs on the moon.

According to sources on Conversational Reading (where I seem to be getting all of my news on this title…doesn’t anybody else care about this?), Haruki Murakami’s newest novel 1Q84 will be published in English, in two volumes, starting in September 2011.

What’s really interesting is that the first volume of the book (comprising the first two volumes released in Japan) will be translated by Jay Rubin, who translated Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and the second volume will be translated Philip Gabriel.

I’m not saying it’s bad, just interesting.

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If this news is true, we could be seeing less expensive devices a lot earlier than expected.

According to this report on TechFlash, the suppliers of the two main components of ebook readers (the E-Ink and the semiconductor) are forming a partnership, and the speculation is that it will drive prices down.

I haven’t seen this reported in the publishing field (not saying it hasn’t happened, just saying I haven’t seen it), so the speculation may be misplaced. But, if we are closer to a $100 reader, perhaps ebooks will become less of a novelty a lot sooner than expected.

(via Gizmodo)

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Some new Twilight Saga: New Moon footage has been released, and all I can say is *yawn*.

I didn’t think the first film was that bad, and if I were a fifteen year old girl who shopped at Hot Topic a lot, I would have been over it like white on rice. But the special effects in this lycanthrope transformation scene are kinda cheesy.

Still, as the wife is a fan of the books, there is a very good chance that I’ll be seeing this.

But, if I had my way, the theater seats would be equipped with headphones so I could listen to the optional Rifftrax commentary instead.

Here is an abridged version of their treatment of the first Twilight film. I don’t know if I posted this before, but it’s a fine way to spend ten minutes.

(via SpoutBlog)

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Gizmodo seems to think that Barnes & Noble’s new ereader Nook will go a long way to convincing readers that ebooks are the way to go.

I’m not so sure, but I do like the little second screen at the bottom, which looks to replicate the cover-flow in Apple’s iTunes. And, it does have some nice ebook borrowing features as well.

Not that I’m going to run out and pre-order one tomorrow, but for some reason, this looks a little more inviting than the Kindle, both on a features and an aesthetic level.

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Arsen Kashkashian at Boulder Book Store suggests, in his Twitter feed, that book buyers (that is, professional a book buyer who purchases for bookstores) should cancel their orders with publishers and pre-order their Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver and Sarah Palin books from the online behemoths focused on destroying the retail book market as we know it.

While I wouldn’t actively encourage such a move (I have to eat too, ya know), it’s hard to argue with the economics. After all, the average wholesale cost (assuming that everybody is playing by the rules and offering the same terms to all retailers) for Stephen King’s Under the Dome is around $18. One could buy the book from Amazon, where it retails for $9, mark it up 40%, and sell it for $15, and you would still be selling it for less than half the cover price of $35.

Ah, but there is a catch, Arsen reports that Amazon is limiting the purchase of these hot books to three copies per customer. I don’t think they have a way of catching multiple orders from the same customer (and I’m not about to find out).

(via twitter.com/R_Nash)

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