Tomas by James Palumbo

There's a very bizarre campaign for this book by James 'Ministry of Sound' Palumbo, currently showing all over the tube and - um - YouTube.



Do we fancy going trashy one month and giving it a go?

Here's a review by Stephen Fry:

Persepolis 2.0

Have a look at this new online version of Persepolis, re-edited from the original to reflect the events of the post-election uprising. You can read the whole thing online here

Oxfam's Ox Tales

Watch out for Oxfam's new collections of short stories, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, collectively known as Ox Tales, to officially go on sale this week (although I've seen them on sale already, and bought the 'Water' one).

Each book has about ten short stories around the central theme. Included are some of the authors we've read, including Mark Haddon, William Boyd, Zoe Heller, Jonathan Coe, Giles Foden, DBC Pierre and Lionel Shriver.

They cost a fiver - 50p goes to Oxfam.

The Day The Saucers Came

A really intriguing way of presenting short stories online - The Day The Saucers Came, by Neil Gaiman, with illustrations by Jouni Kaponen. It's not long - give it a go!

BBC GCSE Bitesize revision guide for To Kill A Mockingbird

We did this one in 2007 - could we still have a stab at this question:

As Scout walks back to her house after leading Boo Radley home at the end of the novel, she thinks:

"Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else left for us to learn, except possibly algebra."

What do Scout and Jem learn during the novel?

Check out the other resources over at the BBC GCSE Bitesize education guide for the book.

Entertainment Weekly's best 100 books 1983-2008

More inspiration - some real gems here:

1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)

See the full list on their site

The Time Travelers Wife Trailer

New trailer - film out in August. Starring Eric Bana & Rachel McAdams. This was our favourite light read. It will inevitably get compared to Benjamin Button, which also an adaptation, of course.



I've worked out that 24 of the books we've read to date have been filmed, including TV productions, - All Quiet on the Western Front, American Psycho, Atonement, Beloved, Brighton Rock, Children of Men, Doctor Zhivago, Great Gatsby, Lolita, Metamorphosis, Notes on a Scandal, On the Road, Persepolis, Scoop, Stuart - A Life Backwards, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Name of the Rose, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Tin Drum, To Kill a Mockingbird, & Wuthering Heights.

More about Time Traveler here