For me, the best feature of a long plane ride is having the chance to read. I jam my carry-on with books and magazines (I'm a pre-Kindle-ite, remember) and prepare for several hours of peace and quiet. (I did the same thing two weeks ago, riding one on the super-cheap buses to New York. Heading north, I finished Anne Tyler's new novel, "Noah's Compass"; on the way home, I read most of Paul Auster's "Invisible.")
But last weekend, as I headed to Denver (ready to wrap up "Invisible" and start "Annie's Ghosts" by Baltimore's Steve Luxenberg), I was struck with panic as I moved through the Southwest plane's cabin. Few aisle seats were available, and the only ones open were next to parents with infants and toddlers. (I'm quite fond of little kids, but I wouldn't want to be surrounded by them at a library.) I walked farther back, among kids who were already starting to wail, and found a seemingly safe aisle seat next to two adults. But just as I settled in, I noticed a small child kneeling on the ground next to the window seat. I scrambled to change, but by then, savvier passengers had rushed past.
The little guy (he never gave me his name) was pretty good for a non-napping, 14-month-old -- if you overlook the can of ginger ale he tipped onto my lap, and the toys flung my way. I'll even give him credit for occasionally distracting the little girl in front of home, who spent most of the time shrieking. But as for reading, I was lucky to finish a few dozen pages.
Would it be so hard for Southwest and other airlines to set up a kids-free zone for readers? I'm not even asking for a glass of Sambuca, though that wouldn't hurt.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Barnes & Noble's new e-reader, the nook, has gotten off to a strong start as the all-important holiday shopping season nears. (Maybe it started weeks ago, with the big book discounts offered by Walmart, Amazon and others.)
"Demand for the product in our stores and online has surpassed our expectations," company spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating said, according to the Wall Street Journal. While declining to give sales numbers, she said the first wave of pre-orders will be shipped on Nov. 30 as promised. However, customers who pre-order the $259 device now will have to wait a little longer to receive them. "We are working hard to meet demand for the holidays," she said.
So, Nancy, if you're looking to bring me over to e-books, you'd better order my reader soon.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Newspaper dispatches about D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge and other defining war-time moments are captured in Joseph R.L. Sterne's new book, “Combat Correspondents: The Baltimore Sun in World War II.” He brings together and analyzes these writings in a book that reviewer Michael Sragow says "offers a bracing fresh perspective — the intensely written perspective of Sun correspondents filing copy from the front as if the life they shared with their subjects and their readers depended on it." Here's more of Sragow's report (for an excerpt of the book itself, go to the jump):

Observation, analysis, and the tingle of personal experience come together in their dispatches with a hot-off-the-typewriter quality that hasn’t cooled since they first hit newsstands between 60 and 70 years ago. ... Providing context as well as insights gleaned from his own 44-year career as a Sun correspondent, foreign bureau chief and editorial page editor, Sterne compiles and shapes their stories into a chronicle of combat, politics, social upheaval — and a newspaper’s recognition that a major metropolitan daily in the 20th century needed to be a major cosmopolitan daily to serve its readership and fulfill its journalistic responsibility.

[Sterne says,] “Think of McCardell going from the command post maybe 25-50 miles to the trenches to the front lines, then watching and observing a firefight, and coming back, and — can you imagine? — sitting down and filing a 2,000 or 3,000-word piece. Just astounding. Think of Bradley, with the 175th Regiment of the Twenty-ninth Infantry Division, bobbing up and down on a troop ship, coming ashore on D-Day Plus One, wading through the water and observing all the snafus and the dead on Omaha Beach, and somehow sitting down and writing this incredible copy. Nothing is more ephemeral than newspaper copy. I wanted to put something into a book that might preserve it from total obscurity.”

Continue reading "Combat Correspondents: The Baltimore Sun in World War II" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Romania is populated with technological entrepreneurs, hard-working young people and plenty of art, music and culture, Rosapepe and Kast said. Tourists might not put Bucharest at the top of their list, but a visit to the Romanian capital and the rest of the country is worth undertaking.

“Americans who visited Romania got entranced with the place,” Rosapepe said. “They speak English, they’re pro-American, they’re nice people. It’s a very interesting culture and history.”

Perhaps Romania’s most persistent myth revolves around Vlad Dracul, the basis for Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Also known as Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian prince is revered by Romanians several centuries after his death, Kast and Rosapepe write. Though Vlad’s preferred punishment was impaling his victims, the legend of him being a blood-sucking demon helps boost Transylvania’s tourism trade.

“I do think since Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’ the vampire legend has made Romania seem really exotic,” Kast said. “People think it’s a real adventure to go there. It is an adventure — but not a scary one.”

Photo of Romanian Athenaeum in downtown Bucharest

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The pre-ordered book price war that drove down the online cost of hit titles below $10 has been extended to DVDs, including “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” which will be released Dec. 8. Walmart, Amazon and Target have slashed prices on that new movie and others, the Wall St. Journal notes.

The mega-retailers have been battling for an early share of holiday spending, in a war that makes indie bookstores shudder. For one local bookseller’s take on the issue, check out this blog post by Lauretta at Constellation Books in Reisterstown. An excerpt: "My personal opinion as a bookseller is that this price war is not sustainable and will eventually shrink the pool of available publishers and authors. Publishers pay attention to what sells - and if all that is selling are the 5-10 different $8.99-priced titles, they won't accept or print the new authors. They can't afford to. So we get a reduction in titles, a reduction in authors, and eventually a reduction in publishers."

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Maryland has been home to many beloved literary icons, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rachel Carson and Edgar Allan Poe -- and they've each left their mark in the Free State. So, with the help of our readers, we've compiled a list of the best places to relive a bit of bookish history. So here are our picks, and if you have a few of your own, let us know! (Here are more Top 10 lists from Sun bloggers.)

1. Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that would become "The Star-Spangled Banner." By the time you reach the "and the land of the free," even the most hard-hearted cynic feels a stirring their chest. "The Defence of Fort McHenry" was inspired by the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812, though it would take more than 100 years for it to be officially recognized as our national anthem.

2. Maryland's favorite gothic son, Edgar Allan Poe, stayed in Baltimore only a short time, but left a lasting mark -- as any Ravens fan can tell you. So don't miss the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum at 203 N. Amity St, where you can learn everything about his life, and death, in Baltimore. Afterward, you can stop by the Westminster Burying Grounds and Catacombs, where tours are conducted the first and third Fridays, April through November.

3. Rachel Carson, the celebrated author and biologist, was born in Pennsylvania, but by the time she'd started work on "Silent Spring," she had moved to Silver Spring, in a one-story rancher she designed and lived in until her death in 1964. The Rachel Carson Conservation Park in Brookeville is a great place to commune with nature, just as the former Johns Hopkins student and sometimes Sun writer would have intended.

4. It's no secret that Baltimore Sun luminary H.L. Mencken and Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald loved to party. So while you can stop by the Mencken House at 1524 Hollins St., or the rowhouse at 1307 Park Ave. where Fitzgerald wrote "Tender is the Night," it'd be much more fitting to enjoy a drink or two at The Owl Bar, at 1. E. Chase St., where they threw back quite a few martinis.

5. Anyone who's read Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anne Tyler's books can tell you about the beauty (and lovable oddballs) of Roland Park. Tyler made the upscale neighborhood famous in her critically acclaimed books, including "The Accidental Tourist" and "Ladder of Years." Check out Eddie's at 5113 Roland Ave., and if you're in the mood for French food, you can't go wrong with Petit Louis at 4800 Roland Ave.

Continue reading "Maryland's Top 10 Literary Locales" »

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Marylandia
        

I'm pinch-hitting for Nancy this week on Freebie Friday, and we're giving away "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind 'Little Women' " by Harriet Reisen. It's an enticing biography about Alcott, whose classic work was published 140 years ago and has never been out of print. Reisen also wrote the PBS documentary about Alcott, due to air Dec. 28.

According to the biographer, Alcott disliked writing fiction for children and preferred to secretly write pulp thrillers that featured killers and transvestites. She took opiates and smoked hash. And she was a true rags-to-riches story, moving from a commune to multimillionaire status.

But the book is not meant to be salacious. It recounts her friendship with other famous writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. (Quite the literary neighborhood, eh?)

You know the drill: If you'd like to enter for the giveaway, leave a comment. 

As for last week's giveaway, the winner is: me! My name really did come up in the Universal Number Randomizer, but knowing that Nancy would accuse me of a conflict of interest, I am ceding Duff and Willie Goldman's "Ace of Cakes" to Marnie. Congratulations to the Divine Ms. M (all I ask is that you send me a piece of cake).

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
Categories: Freebie Friday
        

If you ever wondered whether folks around Baltimore were serious about literature, consider this: The area is home to not one, not two, but three groups dedicated to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Today in The Baltimore Sun, Chris Kaltenbach profiled the groups, which will gather Saturday at the Enoch Pratt library for their 30th annual conference, "A Gallery of Rogues: The Adversaries of Sherlock Holmes." Here's an excerpt from his article:

[S]ome half-dozen speakers will take to the podium Saturday to discuss "A Gallery of Rogues," the roster of bad guys and ne'er-do-wells Holmes was constantly running up against as he tried to make Victorian London a safer place. They'll be talking about the thugs, the schemers, the traitors, the suave evildoers who were always meeting their match in Holmes.

Die-hard Holmesians love to dissect the world Conan Doyle created, to try to extract tiny bits of information about the characters. (Did Holmes, for example, attend Oxford or Cambridge? Conan Doyle never said, but fans have their opinions.) And they love to try and rationalize the occasional inconsistencies that creep into the narrative. The wound Dr. Watson received while fighting in Afghanistan, for instance: Was it in his leg, as one story says, or in his shoulder?

"Conan Doyle was not a stickler for continuity," says Abdrew Solberg, in a tone more amused than critical.

Continue reading "Sherlock Holmes and his rogue's gallery" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Sarah Palin, the maverick's maverick, is taking a highly unconventional approach to her book tour for "Going Rogue," the memoir that will be released Nov. 17.

Except for an appearance on Oprah the day before release, she'll skip the largest U.S. cities, and appear in reddish small towns across the nation, the AP reports. The tour starts Nov. 18 at a Barnes & Noble in Grand Rapids, Mich., and includes other stops in Noblesville, Ind.; Washington, Pa.; and Rochester, N.Y.

ABC News also plans a huge sendoff for the book -- similar to the Today shows recent touting of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. Barbara Walters' interviews of Palin will air in five parts on Good Morning America, Nightline and 20/20.

Not surprising that ABC -- and many others-- would want to take advantage of Palin's book, which was on best-seller lists well before the release date.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
        

While I'm in Boston through the weekend, I'm missing out on tons of fun here in Maryland.

As I mentioned Tuesday, Taylor Branch will be at the Pratt tonight, discussing his new book, "The Clinton Tapes." This man knows his history, and he's got the tapes to prove it.

Tomorrow night, Atomic Books hosts "Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys," with readings and discussions of the anthology detailing the sex industry led by David Henry Sterry and Shawna Kenney.

On Saturday, local author Mark Millikin will be at Greetings & Readings to discuss and sign his book, "The Glory of the 1966 Orioles and Baltimore," which tells the story of the era through the eyes of those who lived it.

And on Wednesday, Baltimore's own James Magruder will be at the Johns Hopkins Barnes and Noble to sign and discuss his debut novel, "Sugarless," a coming-of-age story complete with drugs, sex and born-again Christians.

Don't see anything you like? Visit the Read Street calendar for even more events.

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Book It