BOOKS - ONLY ALIVE IF THEY ARE BEING READ.

How inspiring ..... Books, believes Hernando Guanlao, need to live and they're only alive if they are being read. Thought and effort, time and money went into making them; they will never repay it lying idle in a cabinet or on a shelf. Books need to be set free. So walk by his home on Balagtas Street in Makati, downtown Manila, and it seems books are pretty much all you'll see. Thousands of them, on shelves and in crates outside on the pavement, piled high in the garage and on the stairs, each one free to anyone who wants it. 

"People can borrow, take home, bring back or keep," says Guanlao, 60, a former tax accountant, ice-cream salesman and government employee known by all as Nanie. "Or they can share and pass on to another. But basically they should just take, take!" Guanlao reckons books "have lives, and have to lead them. They have work to do. And the act of giving a book …it makes you complete. It makes your life meaningful and abundant." More

Surely the novel many book bloggers would have given their eye-teeth to be the first to review, JK Rowling's first novel for grown-up's, The Casual Vacancy, was published on the 27th of September with pre-sale orders already placing the paperback at the top of the best seller list even before it hits the shops.

The question being, can it ever live up to all the hype? 

"On balance I would have to say no. not unless you want to have more than 500 pages of relentless socialist manifesto masquerading as literature crammed down your throat.

J.K. Rowling likes to describe her new book as a comic tragedy, yet there are few laughs to pierce the blanket of gloom in this bleak and rather one-sided vision of life in modern England."- Jan Moir. More

 "Right from the start there’s no pandering to a young audience or those that might take offence at bad language.

The C-word is used as both a noun and a verb, while there are depictions of drug abuse, self-harming, domestic violence, and tragic, avoidable deaths.

It’s almost as if JK has been finally let off the leash to rail at the bleak horrors of real life.

This is realism, red raw. Yet The Casual Vacancy is a complete joy to read which might seem odd given the nature of the material." - Henry Sutton. More

'But they are so much cheaper than your old fashioned tree-books' - just one of the arguments my (naughty) little sister uses to persuade me to get a kindle.

Ah, not always so .........

Experts and consumers are outraged, saying, that if anything, electronic books should be far cheaper because they cost nothing to print, store or transport. 

Not surprising that they feel aggrieved after a survey of bestselling fiction and non-fiction sold by online retailer Amazon has found that in more than a third of cases ebooks are priced higher than the same books in hardcover. More

A graphic that shows what plot details make a great novel - just one of the  entries at the Information Is Beautiful Awards ceremony in London. 

The nominees of this year's Man Booker Prize were broken down by genre to find out what makes a great novel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, death is the most common plot device. More

And talking of the Man Booker Prize, for those of you who don't already know the winner is ........ (Drum roll please) 

The first ever British author to win the prize twice, you can read an extract HERE.

Considered too low brow, Agatha Christie, the Queen of British crime writers, missed out on a damehood  in the fifties because officials did not rate her stories according to newly released government papers. More

Hmm, interesting. First published in German in 1812 under the title  Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Child And Housemaid) Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's  Cinderella was known as Ashputtel. More

Reading Jane Austen novels closely activates the areas of the brain more commonly associated with movement and touch US researchers say as the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans looked as they would if readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they analysed it. More