I HATE ISBNs

Mostly because of the ignorant Billy & Betty Blackberrys I have to reach around to get the expensive books that they have passed over while scanning the ISBNs of the crap that they buy to sell for fifty percent more than they paid for it. However, this ISBN leads you to some of the best autobiographical writing I've read in the last 30 years:  0-7434-1065-3.

If You Have A Dirty Mind...

Do you have a sense of humus ?  The non-misspent part of my youth involved reading all the jokes from Bennett Cerf's humor books, Reader's Digest page bottoms, and in particular the Boy Scouting magazine, Boy's Life, Think and Grin page. My sense of humor is still rather juvenile, but I never play practical jokes, just tell old ones. I must admit that the most hilarious, and most extremely raunchy, jokes were told by Buddy Hackett in his Live and Uncensored show in the Catskills -

Children's Books from BookThinker

Once again, I would encourage you to subscribe to this e-letter because they have some great information there: Children's Books

Maybe

The label for this post is "Great Hints for Great Reading," and the title is "Maybe." Hmmmm. We carry what we call Books of Worth in All Genres:  this doesn't usually encompass books that are hot off the press, because they haven't stood the test of time.

Fosters - Australian for Beer, McCullough- New South Walesian for Literature

Two of my favorite authors are Morris West - The Shoes of the Fisherman, et seq - and Colleen McCullough who had many of her books made into big- and small- screen productions. For example:
    * Tim - movie,  1979 with Mel Gibson and Piper Laurie
    * The Thorn Birds - TV miniseries, 1983 with Richard Chamberlain
    * An Indecent Obsession -  movie in 1985 starring Gary Sweet
    *  Rome - miniseries HBO. With Kevin McKidd

Another Mostly Worthwhile Site for Book Topics

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I Still Love Lists

To follow up on the Random House/Modern Library article, I thought you might like to see another list - known as "opposing views from questionable spokesmen & women." On July 21, 1998, the Radcliffe College Publishing Course compiled and released its own list of the century's top 100 novels, at the request of the Modern Library editorial board. Notice the politically correct nature of some of the choices:

I LOVE Lists

Random House, publisher of the Modern Library series of books stirred the book business pot in 1998 by making a list of the top 100 books of the 20th Century. After the "100 Best" story first broke in The New York Times on Monday, July 20, 1998, all kinds of opinions about the list - and theories about the Modern Library's purpose in concocting such a contest of sorts - emerged. According to Random House, the goal of the "100 Best" project was to get people talking about great books. And they succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings -- more than 400,000 avid readers rushed online to cast votes for their favorite books and the students of the Radcliffe Publishing Course quickly responded with a rival list.

Random House also conducted two other polls - one for best non-fiction published in the English language since 1900, with a total of 194,829 votes cast. The readers' poll for the best novels published in the English language since 1900 had 217,520 votes cast. I love lists, especially when they provide great hints for great reading. Here's the Random House lists: