the Today Show kicked off a new, monthly feature of books called “Cover to Cover.”  included is Jamil Zaidi of the Elliott Bay Book Company.  from Shelf Awareness.

from The New York Times:

February 25, 2008

Arts, Briefly

Book Title Search Yields Weird Works

Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

The polls are open in the annual balloting for the Diagram Prize, honoring the world’s oddest book title, Agence France-Presse reported. Conducted by The Bookseller, a British trade magazine, the vote at www.thebookseller.com asks participants to choose from six mostly nonfiction titles on the shortlist, culled from titles submitted by publishers, bookstore workers and librarians around the world. The nominees are “I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen” by Jasper McCutcheon; “How to Write a How to Write Book” by Brian Paddock; “Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues” by Catharine A. MacKinnon; “Cheese Problems Solved” edited by P. L. H. McSweeney; “If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs” by Big Boom; and “People Who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Doctor Feelgood” by Dee Gordon. The winner is to be announced on March 28. The prize has been offered since 1978, when the winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”

 *thanks to David at CAM for passing this one along

from shelf awareness:

The winners of the 15th annual Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards are:

Nonfiction

• Winner: Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup (Little, Brown)
• Second place honors: Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet (FSG)
• Third place honors: The Siege of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov (Doubleday)

Fiction

• Winner: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown)
• Second place honors: The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck (Milkweed Editions)
• Third place honors: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (Ecco)

The main winners each receive $10,000 and a year of additional marketing and advertising. Second place winners receive $5,000. Third place winner receive $2,500. The winners read last night at the Lincoln Triangle B&N in New York City.

B&N called Here If You Need Me “a heartbreaking memoir. As a young widow with four children, Braestrup recounts her decision to pursue her deceased husband’s quest to work as a chaplain for the Maine warden service and delivers stories from the field, full of compassion, honesty, and wisdom.”

B&N described Then We Came to the End as “the tale of a group of malcontented employees at a declining Chicago ad agency,” and fiction jurist John Burnham Schwartz called it “a blisteringly funny first novel that speaks in a rollicking chorus of complaint and misdirection from within the vast corporate beehive, nailing the species, while never ceasing to recognize the human and particular.”

Is WKRP with piped in generic instrumentals, instead of the classic rock worth it?  I’m on the fence on this one.

looks like anne rice will be adding another chapter to her lestat series.

No Country for Old Men the film based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel was a big winner at last nights Academy Award ceremony. The film directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and starring Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem took home four Oscars.

• Achievement in directing — Joel and Ethan Coen — No Country for Old Men
• Best Picture — No Country for Old Men
• Supporting Actor — Javier Bardem — No Country for Old Men
• Best Adapted Screenplay — No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men is on order and will be available in the catalog soon.

Here’s a list of films that either won or were nominated and their order status as of today. I’ll post when these titles have made it into CARL.

There Will Be Blood — (on order) — Daniel Day Lewis — Best Actor — winner

Sweeney Todd — (on order) — Johnny Depp — Best Actor — nominee

In the Valley of Elah — (on order) — Tommy Lee Jones — Best Actor — nominee

Eastern Promises — (on order) — Viggo Mortensen — Best Actor — nominee

The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — (on order) — Casey Afleck — Best Supporting Actor — nominee

Into the Wild — (on order) — Hal Holbrook — Best Supporting Actor — nominee

Charlie Wilson’s War — (on order) — Philip Seymour Hoffman — Best Supporting Actor — nominee

Away From Her — (in CARL) — Julie Christie — Best Actress — nominee

La Vie En Rose — (in CARL) — Marion Cotillard — Best Actress — winner

Elizabeth the Golden Age — (on order) — Cate Blanchett — Best Actress — nominee

The Savages — (on order) — Laura Linney — Best Actress — nominee

Juno– (on order) — Ellen Page — Best Actress — nominee

I’m Not There– (on order) — Cate Blanchett — Best Supporting Actress — nominee

Gone Baby Gone– (on order) — Amy Ryan — Best Supporting Actress — nominee

Atonement– (on order) — Saoirse Ronan — Best Supporting Actress — nominee

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly– (on order) — Achievement in Directing — nominee

No End in Sight– (on order) — Best Documentary Feature — nominee

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience– (in CARL) — Best Documentary Feature — nominee

Sicko — (in CARL) — Best Documentary Feature — nominee

Taxi to the Dark Side– (Not Available on DVD) — Best Documentary Feature — winner

War Dance — (on order) — Best Documentary Feature — nominee

Beaufort– (Not Available on DVD) — Best Foreign Language Film of the Year — nominee

The Counterfeiters– (Not Available on DVD) — Best Foreign Language Film of the Year — winner

Katyn– (Not Available on DVD) — Best Foreign Language Film of the Year — nominee

Mongol– (Not Available on DVD) — Best Foreign Language Film of the Year — nominee

12– (Not Available on DVD) — Best Foreign Language Film of the Year — nominee

Random House audio books will begin selling their titles without DRM soon. Why should you care? DRM is the stuff that makes our OverDrive audiobooks incompatible with the iPod, since Apple uses a different version of DRM, than Microsoft. Yes, its one of those Apple vs. Microsoft things…. So, if other publishers follow suit and choose to sell their titles without DRM, theres no obstacle to prevent our downloadable audio books being compatible with iPod. Of course its never quite as simple as it seems on the surface, but I feel optomistic about things, and can’t wait to see what OverDrive will have to say about this news, and its implications later this year at Digipalooza.

Here are the latest additions to the downloadable audio book collection. These should be available through our website later Thursday afternoon, or Friday morning.

The Eagles new album Long Road Out of Eden arrived on my desk yesterday, and I’m halfway through this double disc album, so I haven’t made up my mind yet, but the critics all agree this is a pretty fine release for a group who last recorded a studio album in 1979.

Love them or hate them or a little of both, the Eagles deserve our attention for being able to recreate their classic sound without entering into the dangerous territory of self-parody. You can read reviews here. That it took nearly 30 years for the Eagles to get back in the studio again is due to absolutely epic proportions of the feud between various members of the band.

Love Them?

• Eagles Greatest Hits and Hotel California rank among the ten best selling albums of all time.
• Inducted into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame 1998.
• Long Road Out of Eden has sold 7 million copies in just 15 weeks.

Hate Them?

• The Eagles reunion tour, Hell Freezes Over ushered in the era of the stratospheric concert ticket prices. If you paid $200 bucks or more to sit in the nosebleed section to see the Police last year, these are the guys you can blame.

Regardless of how you feel about the Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden is worth a listen as a way to see that its possible for a band to reunite long enough to create an album. That it is a very good album, is a bonus for fans as well as the merely curious. So, place a hold on it, as of right now, there’s no one ahead of you.

It’s official, Toshiba has thrown in the towel and said “No Mas” in the fight over HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray to see which format would emerge as the standard.  HD-DVD took several blows to the head recently, when studios stopped producing their films on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats.