New iteration of a great book blog

Nonfiction Readers Anonymous is dead, long live the Citizen Reader. Nonanon was a great blog that covered only nonfiction, from a reader/librarian's perspective. The new site already brings the same goodness, but now with fiction! Add it to your RSS today.

Pillars

I am happy to see that the latest Oprah pick is Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. The story spans the decades it takes to build a cathedral in a 12th century English town. It will be too long for some, but it is in some ways like Lonesome Dove. That book is probably the only Western that many people read, and Pillars is probably the only medieval tale for many people. In both cases, the authors tell a complex story with compelling stories in a well described setting.

For those looking to get a little more medieval, Sharon Kay Penman's Here Be Dragons is an excellent choice. She uses historical personages for her main characters and I haven't the slightest idea if it is accurate or not. I can say that it feels real and it is an excellent story.

And if your interests lean to the game side, then why not pick up the game version of Pillars of the Earth? I haven't played it yet, but I think I might tonight with my game group. So I'm in a game group and a large portion of my reading is given to science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels and military history. I may as well start LARPing.

Nov 14-16: Love of Reading Online Book Fair

BAMOF is pleased to sponsor the second annual Love of Reading Online Book Fair. The Fair provides an opportunity for readers, writers, publishers, and bloggers to interact and to find out about new books. The Fair is hosted by FSB Associates, creators of the excellent Liberation Trilogy website. Like that site, the Fair uses the Internet to create new connections to books and to fellow readers.

I will be guest blogging at the fair on November 15, but you will want to visit on all three days, to see the other guest bloggers from sites like Elegant Variation and Cup of Books, to listen to podcasts from the likes of Rick Atkinson, to participate in forums and roundtables and, no doubt most exciting to you, the hourly raffles of three books.

There are also Readers Choice Awards, which will, among other things, give an award to the best book cover. Somehow I doubt my current read, the House of Chains, will take that honor.

Booksprice

Booksprice is book (and other entertainment media) search tool and price aggregator. You search for a book and it will list availability and prices. The website selection is deep, with the obvious big names (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell), but also smaller specialty sites, like ecampus. That will make cash strapped students happy, as they can evade insane college bookstore prices.

For my needs, the most interesting sites are the Amazon marketplace, Ebay, Alibris and the foreign Amazons. With these sites included you should be much more able to get your hands on a hard to find book. I searched for the hard to find Rules of the Game: Jutland and the British Naval Command and I found quite a few reasonable prices. As many of the sites are overseas, there is shipping to consider, but the overall price is still reasonable.

It has some other useful features as well. If you just want to look at a few sites when you search , you can exclude those you don't want to see. Once you find some books you can like, you can set up an RSS feed for the book, to allow you to easily check up on the prices. This would be helpful with new books that you suspect will hit remainder pricing in the coming weeks or months.

Lost and found

One of the great pleasures of book shopping is finding a lost treasure. Ideally I would like to stumble on something at the bookstore. I don't think this has ever happened to me. Instead I look to reviews, essays and other sources of book information. Neglected Books is dedicated to recommending forgotten books. A number of these are no doubt forgotten for good reason, but I wager many are unjustly forgotten.

Finding some of the books mentioned will be a challenge. Many are long out of print and will take a strong search. I recommend working with a good used book store or using your library's Interlibrary Loan Service.

For lesser known but easy to obtain books, have a look at the New York Review of Books Classics list. I am currently reading the Big Clock, a mystery from 1946, republished under the Classics imprint. Its quite solid.

Book blog

Nonfiction Readers Anonymous is written by a librarian and the author notes (his or her?) opinions on a variety of books. I liked this post where the author notes that some books remain unread because of the title alone.