So, What Do You Read?

Richard Rushfield's book party was in a swanky English pub downtown. The kind of place where the shepherd's pie is served with a baby green salad in a tangy vinaigrette.

Anyway, the place was packed for the release party of Rushfield's college memoir "Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost." And yes, in keeping with the theme of the book, we had trouble finding the place.

Pictured above is Gawker editor and author Richard Rushfield and Love Junkie author Rachel Resnick.

More photos after the break...

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The ABA seems to think so:

The Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association today sent the following letter to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting that it investigate practices by Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target that it believes constitute illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers.

On the other hand, isn't paying more than $8.99 for Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" a crime of another kind?

Read the ABA's angry letter after the jump-

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You'd think Wal-Mart or McDonalds or Haliburton were buying the iconic West Hollywood indie book store Book Soup by the tone of Hugo Martin's piece in LAT:

Tyson Cornell, Book Soup's general manager, declined to comment on the impending sale. But like most of his customers, he worried that a new owner would change the atmosphere and guiding principles of the store.

The store is special, Cornell said Sunday, because of its unique selection of books and its knowledgeable staff, composed mostly of aspiring authors and screenwriters.

"I'm very concerned that things will change," he added.

Shocker, people who work at a book store don't want things to change.

We like Vromans. We're happy Book Soup isn't been turned into an organic tattoo parlor or something. A locally grown, whole grain, doggy day care or teeth whitening acting school...oh it could be MUCH worse.

Craigslist is good for our psyche.

This next Dr. Phil calls himself a "renegade shrink," which sounds like a euphemism for what too much booze and/or cold water does to the male anatomy. Wasn't that a Seinfeld episode and/or season?

Anyway, enjoy:

The "Next Dr. Phil" Seeking Established Published Author (anywhere) Date: 2009-10-06, 11:13PM PDT Reply to: job-hdgzu-1410133727@craigslist.org

Successful renegade shrink, coach, speaker, and thought leader on innovative behavior change has powerful book proposal in mind that will turn over the shrink industry by uncovering the truth of the brain and what we as shrinks dont say but should to our clients....

A project that has enough controversy and good neuroscience that media and publishers will love it...

www.drkevinfleming.com
www.thebraincorp.com
www.greymattersintl.com

Pasted bio below to show platform. I got the expert side covered, but need to write this book with someone who has a "name" in pop, commercial publishing---that is, who has published with the big houses (not self-published).... and has "ins" with bigtime publishing houses, agents, etc

Thanks,
Dr. Fleming

Yes, that's Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong also looking off into the distance, perhaps to Russia.

Sarah Palin's new book "Going Rogue," which sounds kind of like public urination, but sure whatever. The cover for her first book, er a book about her written by someone else, like John McCain's books. Not like the books written by and about Barack Obama she criticized during the campaign.

Anyway, Jezebel has what they are calling an artistic analysis of the book jacket:

While we might have expected Palin to choose a bold and unadorned font like Impact (or perhaps Comic Sans), Palin's team went instead with Linotype Didot. According to Typedia, the Didot family of fonts comes from the Didot family, who lived and worked in Paris in the 19th Century. While Pierre Didot published books and prints, Firmin Didot designed the typefaces. Linotype Didot was added much later, drawn by Adrian Frutiger in 1991. Typedia informs us that this font, with its vertical emphasis and bold strokes, is the "right choice for elegant book and magazine designs, as well as advertising with a classic touch." However, as Anna notes, for all its elegance, Didot is only one "i" away from idiot. And you'd think that is one association she'd rather avoid.

Read the whole post here.

It's Banned Books Week, and the American Library Association wants you to celebrate by reading something that would piss off your Sunday school teacher. Course that's not exactly how they put it:

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

More info at the ALA website and BannedBooksweek.org

The New York Observer reports that October 5th will be a big day for Arianna Huffington. Arianna will be launching her own book club, and The Huffington Post will be debuting a new books section in partnership with The New York Review of Books:

The site's newly minted editor, Amy Hertz, a Penguin editor at large under their Dutton division, will have to balance the fortnightly magazine's 5,000-word essays and thoughtful articles based on multiple publications with book reviews written by HuffPo readers, HuffPo co-founder editor in chief Ms. Huffington confirmed with the Observer.

The article reports that Arianna is still deciding between three of her favorites for the book club's first selection. It also goes on to make the obligitory Oprah Winfrey reference - as does every other article we've seen on the subject. Why must another powerful woman promoting a public interest in literature through a book club be reduced to a catfight?

It's a book we've been waiting for someone to write. And according to the New York Observer, it's on the way:

Naomi Wolf is going back to her roots. The journalist and author, who has seemingly been on a break for the past couple of years from writing books on the kinds of feminist themes that made her famous in the early 1990s, has signed on with the Ecco Press for a project tentatively titled A Cultural History of the Vagina.

Image: "Red Canna" by Georgia O'Keeffe. Visit the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum webpage for more.

Comedian Kathy Griffin's new book hits shelves today, and we're looking forward to reading it. Cause we haven't yet. Read it. Sure, you'd think being dear friends with her ghost writer Robert Abele would have earned us an advanced copy, but no. The guy did nothing for us. And we mean nothing. He spent six months hanging out with Griffin, and he didn't bother stealing us a pair of her panties, a lock of her hair or even her toenail clippings - how hard are those to get? Some friend.

We're not germ phobes or anything but we washed our hands after taking this photo. This is in the women's restroom at Netroots Nation.

A public bathroom book? Gross. Gross. Gross.

If we were Michael Huttner and Jason Salzman we'd be pissed.

(And yes after several minutes of deliberating on toilet jokes, that's the one we went with.)

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