Book Of A Lifetime: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte: To select the book of a lifetime is no easy task. Masterpieces clamour from all sides. My own shortlist would include Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness, both watery tales, both dominated by men who are huge, flawed colossi. My book of a lifetime, however, is Wuthering Heights, in which another towering figure bestrides a wild place, and incarnates the elemental principle of storm. [Independent]

US teacher is suspended for letting pupils read bestseller: An Indiana teacher who used a much lauded bestseller, The Freedom Writers Diary, to try to inspire under-performing high-school students has been suspended from her job without pay for 18 months. [Guardian]

JK Rowling says no to age banding on children’s books: JK Rowling has joined the growing revolt against publishers’ plans to brand children’s books with “appropriate” age bands. [Guardian]

Conflicting claims over Andre Norton’s will: Andre Norton, one of science fiction’s most prolific female writers, intrigued her readers by creating hundreds of fantasy worlds during her 70 years of writing. And in a decision that may have been either accidental or calculated, when she died three years ago she left her friends and fans a final puzzle: who should control the rights to her more than 130 books, including the popular “Witch World” series. [San Francisco Chronicle]

July 5th, 2008 at 9:04 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Literary Agent Sues Sites for Ruining Her Reputation: Literary agent Barbara Bauer is suing 19 bloggers and websites, including Wikipedia, YouTube and AbsoluteWrite.com, claiming they are ruining her reputation. [Publisher's Weekly]

Harry Potter ‘deluxe’ first editions auctioned for £17,800: Hectic bidding from around the world this afternoon saw a Berkshire auction house sell a complete set of Harry Potter first editions for £17,800. [Guardian]

Reconsiderations: Richard Yates’s ‘Revolutionary Road’: Americans are ready for Yates, in part because suburban conformity no longer ignites our passions. This is crucial, because “Revolutionary Road” is much more than an attack on suburbia. [NY Sun]

Digital Daze: Over the past few years, a certain boilerplate rhetoric has emerged about the need for university presses boldly to face the challenges of the information technology — the better to seize the exciting new opportunities thus created, yadda yadda yadda. But beneath all the digital platitudes, one detects a growing frustration. [Inside Higher Ed]

July 2nd, 2008 at 10:38 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Book Deals: 6-30-08: Supreme Court, Celtics, Iraq and more… [Publishers Weekly]

Joanna Kavenna: How the author turned from unpublishable failure to prizewinning writer: Her novel Inglorious was so raw, so intense in its portrait of the psychic disintegration of the protagonist, Rosa Lane, that we wondered to what extent Rosa’s meltdown reflected the author’s own state of mind. [Independent]

Summer and Smoke, an American Cauldron: It’s not surprising, then, that American literature is a catalogue of summer disturbances, especially the literature of the South, thanks to geography. Its swamplands and deltas bristle with heat-stoked tensions. [NYT]

June 30th, 2008 at 10:19 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Tribune Co. Redesign Could Kill More Book Coverage: Amid the pending real estate sale and newsroom cutbacks, rumors have surfaced about book sections being cut at Tribune-owned papers. One freelance critic told PW that the Tribune Company is planning to slash overall page counts across the chain. [Publishers Weekly]

Cody’s, landmark Berkeley bookstore, closes: Cody’s Books, the legendary Berkeley bookstore that catered to literati nationwide for more than half a century and was firebombed in the 1980s because of its support of the First Amendment, has closed its doors, the victim of lagging sales. [San Francisco Chronicle]

University Presses Start to Sell Via Kindle: By the beginning of the fall, Princeton plans to have several hundred books available for sale through Kindle. Yale University Press and Oxford University Press already have a similar presence there. The University of California Press recently had about 40 of its volumes placed on Kindle and is ramping up. [Inside Higher Ed]

Nick Harkaway: Le Carré with ninjas: Nick Harkaway describes the challenges of writing a novel in the shadow of a famous father. [Telegraph]

June 28th, 2008 at 10:47 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

The new, improved, disposable father: Britain and Canada are well ahead in the race to make fatherhood completely redundant. [Mercator]

A cut in the wages of sin: But after a long boom, the industry faces a rare slowdown and belts are tightening across Sin City. [Economist]

Scientists find ‘law of war’ that predicts attacks: Scientists believe they may have glimpsed a “law of war” that can be used to predict the likelihood of attacks in modern conflicts, from conventional battles to global terrorism. [Telegraph]

A turning tide?: Many of the past decade’s migrants to Europe and America are beginning to go home again. [Economist]

June 27th, 2008 at 10:31 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

Girls as competitive as boys, study shows: Girls are just as competitive as boys, even as toddlers, but they use different tactics to get what they want, a new study suggests. [Telegraph]

Your Brain Lies to You: With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. [NYT]

June 27th, 2008 at 10:28 am

This article is filed under Blog, Psychology.

A Company Computer and Questions About E-Mail Privacy: When he was fired, Scott Sidell was angry enough. Then he found out that his former employer was reading his personal Yahoo e-mail messages, after he had left the company. [NYT]

One in three IT staff snoops on colleagues: One in three information technology professionals abuses administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues’ salary details, personal e-mails or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey. [msnbc]

Congress’s Fingerprint Fine Print: Yet this week a measure creating a federal fingerprint registry totally unrelated to national security or violent crime may clear the Senate with little debate. The legislation would require thousands of individuals not suspected of any wrongdoing to send their prints to the feds. [WSJ]

June 27th, 2008 at 10:26 am

This article is filed under Blog, Privacy.

Massive asteroid remains found on Mars: THE remains of the largest asteroid impact crater known anywhere in the solar system have been identified on Mars, explaining the origin of the lowland basin that dominates the planet’s northern hemisphere. [Australian]

Martian soil ‘could grow asparagus’: MARTIAN dirt is apparently good enough for asparagus to grow in, NASA scientists said yesterday, as they announced the results of a soil analysis collected by the US Phoenix Mars lander. “There is nothing about the soil that would preclude life. In fact it seems very friendly,” said Samuel Kounaves, the project’s lead chemist at the University of Arizona in a telephone press conference. [Australian]

June 27th, 2008 at 10:24 am

This article is filed under Blog, Cosmology.

G’day Asia: KEVIN RUDD, Australia’s prime minister, wants to make Australia the “most Asia-literate country in the collective West”. But many countries in Asia think Asia-literacy incompatible with membership of “the West”. As hard as Australia tries to engage with the region next door, they still see it as an outsider preaching Western values to neighbours it does not fully understand. [Economist]

Power shifts from the west to the rest: The economic order was transformed not by any altruistic movement or political awakening, but by globalised capitalism. [New Statesman]

Capital inflows to China: Despite strict capital controls, China is being flooded by the biggest wave of speculative capital ever to hit an emerging economy. [Economist]

June 27th, 2008 at 10:21 am

This article is filed under Asia Rising, Blog.

A genetic theory of homosexuality: The gene for male homosexuality persists because it promotes—and is passed down through—high rates of procreation among gay men’s mothers, sisters, and aunts. [Slate]

Evidence Suggests Genes Are Indeed Selfish: A study of worker bees offers proof of Richard Dawkins’ famous theory. [Popsci]

Birds of a feather revealed in evolutionary tree: The world of birds is aflutter because a gene study shows that iridescent daytime hummingbirds evolved from drab nocturnal nightjars, parrots and songbirds share a closer kinship than thought, and falcons are not closely related to hawks and eagles, among other things. [Telegraph]

June 27th, 2008 at 10:19 am

This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.