The Producers? OK. Hairspray? Sure. Musicals can come from unlikely sources, but how's this for a surprising one? Dan Savage's book The Kid, a memoir in which the popular sex advice columnist and his partner adopt a baby boy, is being turned into a Broadway musical. Check mentions here and here. 
According to chuckpalahniuk.net, the movie version of the cult novelists book Choke And, sure enough, you can find it listed on the Sundance festival website. The movie version stars Sam Rockwell as the professional scam artist who fakes choking to raise money to care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, played by Angelica Huston.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul are ranked numbers one and three respectively on USA Today's list of America's most literate cities. Minneapolis edged out longtime rival Seattle this year, while St Paul continues its meteoric rise; it was ranked eleventh only four years ago.
Bill Holm talked about his life in Iceland and his most recent book Windows on Brimnes as part of the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library's "Talk of the Stacks" program. If you missed the event, you can listen to his remarks on Minnesota Public Radio (here).
Dads are notoriously hard to buy for, so here are two suggestions: The Illustrated "A Brief History of Time" and Ken Burn's most recent magnum opus The War. They're both fascinating, full of
The Original Picture Puzzle This is another great activity book to engage any family member around the tree. Life originated the side-by-side, almost-the-same photograph game, and they do it right. Can you spot the
Transit Maps of the World contains route maps for every urban rail system in the world-from Buenos Aires to Bucharest. Armchair travelers will
The Book of Bunny Suicides You'll be passing this one around, so everyone can choose their favorite cartoon featuring "little fluffy bunnies who just don't want to live any more." It's funny, it's morbid, it's great for teens and twenty-somethings alike.
There's no better book to introduce a teenager to the joys of reading than A Confederacy of Dunces. The story of grumpy New Orleans misfit Ignatius Reilly is as charming and funny now as when it was first written.
How ironic is this? I haven't had time to read Caleb Crain's article "Twilight of the Books" in the latest issue of the New Yorker because it's been too busy in the store. Which is a shame, since the article (which I've skimmed, thank you) looks interesting. Crain isn't optimistic about the future of books, but we certainly are, and the customers filling the store this month clearly agree.
In this corner, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy--which the Catholic League hopes you won't read or see in movie theaters.
Dublin's Independent newspaper recently talked to Maria Dickenson, who buys books for that city's branch of the Easons chain of bookstores, and asked her picks for the Christmas season's big sellers. Among her picks are some that you can expect to see flying off our shelves here in the states--Man Booker Prize-winner The Gathering by Anne Enright, Per Petersson's much-feted Out Stealing Horses, Eric Clapton: The Autobiography, and The Golden Compass. But there are also some uniquely Irish choices on the list:
One of the most beautiful books out this holiday season has to be Robert Sabuda's pop-up version of The Chronicles of Narnia. Sabuda is probably the best-known "paper engineer" or pop-up book artist working today. His books are avidly collected and always beautiful. This one is no exception.
Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis tells the story of a young girl growing up in Iran during that country's Islamic revolution. It's an amazing story of resistance and resilience. It's also a darn good read. Now Persepolis has been made into a movie. It has already won the Jury Prize at the most recent Cannes Film Festival. It will be released in the US on December 25.
There's still time to get ready for next week's installment of our lubricated reading group Books & Bars. Join us Tuesday night (the 11th) at Bryant Lake Bowl (map) for conversation and a beverage with some very interesting folks. Doors open at 6:00pm for socializing; discussion begins in earnest at 7:00pm.
Today is Calvin Trillin's birthday. Trillin is a prolific writer, whose work spans several disparate genres, and he's one of my favorite authors.
In the wake of the Gillian Gibbons teddy bear brouhaha in Sudan (details here), a British author has decided to revise an existing children's book to change a character's name from Mohammed to something less potentially offensive.
I was reading a review of John MacIntyre's The Montreal Book of Everything because you never know when you might find something interesting in an unlikely place, and sure enough I came across this factoid: 80 per cent of North America's screw-top caps come from a single factory St. Césaire, 60 kilometres east of Montreal. 
Life imitates art in Santa Barbara, where someone is spraypainting graffiti on the local UC campus. The red figures are in the shape of the muted trumpet (below) from Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49. In the book, the trumpet is the clue which allows the protaganist Oedipus Maas to discover the reclusive organization called Tristero. Fifteen to twenty of the designs have been found so far on the University of California campus.
Kalima (Arabic for "word") is a project funded by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage which aims to increase the number of books in translatation available to readers in the Arabic language. According to their website, that won't be hard; there's a real dearth of such works available at the moment. "If you are looking for the works of Freud or Chaucer for example, you will not find them in Arabic. ... Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years."
I'm already a fan of the project just from having learned that one of the first six titles they've translated is Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore. Arabic readers looking for something meatier can at last read Stephen Hawking's A Briefer History of Time--David E
You may not know the name Vinko Bogataj, but his world-famous wipeout in the opening credits of ABC's "Wide World of Sports" was formative to me in my youth and gave rise to the expression "pulling a Vinko."
I'm not a big fan of science fiction, but when the Seattle Public Library's book maven Nancy Pearl--author of Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason and Book Crush For Kids and Teens: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Interest--makes some suggestions, even I pay a little attention. Pearl has listed six of her favorite SF novels. Better still, there are excerpts for them all, so you can get a taste without leaving your computer.
First, Ian McEwan's novel On Chesil Beach is passed over for the Booker Prize. Now he's been hit with a nomination for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award. Also on the list is the late Norman Mailer for his book The Castle. Details of the prize and its history are here.
