Friday Round-Up, 2010

For the first Friday in close to forever, Laura is visiting from Combreviations to round-up the week:

It has been a long time, folks, and I pined for you all. Plus a lot of things have happened since we left good old 2009 (parts of which seriously sucked but, hey, it's over!). As we leave yesteryear, there were some lists of the past and resolutions for the future you may want to check out. There are some books to watch for 2010 here and here and here, and you can start picking them up at Sam's Club, if you're so inclined (or your book might get picked up for their book club, if you follow these rules). 2010 might see the resuscitation of Kirkus, and will be the year for women in comics, but will the big houses fold in the next five years? And will authors ever learn to stop talking back to reviewers? Because this is what they get when they sass.

Ursula LeGuin is one of the few classy sassers, and she's leaving the reviewers alone and instead resigned from the Author's Guild over the Google Books settlement. Maybe there isn't much point to blurbs, but I would pick up something she recommended. She's so classy, I bet she doesn't need this chart to correct common misspellings, or ever mispronounce words she's only seen in print. If only AbeBooks had thought to pair her with a literary pet.

This all might be because she's a lady—I hear that literary success is based on being a dude. Also, if Alan Moore is anything to go by, you have to know a lot about pornography. This of course all ties back to Kate Rophie's essay on how white men write about sex, about which Steve Almond shares some choice words. Is this too sexy for you? Is it getting hot over there? Perhaps you should buy some of these fireproof books then, for safety.

While you're all riled up, I guess we should talk about the recent e-book shenanigans, of which there are many. A number of e-readers were presented at the Consumer Electronics Show, which has filled the Internet with both gleeful and angry nerds. You can write on some, some have two screens, some can flex, and you can take a video tour of the new Sony, oooh. Of course there are all of the Apple tablet rumors swirling around, and Jonathan Galassi started some tiffs over what publishers give to e-books (which some people had responses to).

That's all for this week, I'm sorry to say. I'll leave you with the most important things of all: The Babysitter's Club reboot, the academic study of The Big Lebowski, and how The Wizard of Oz should have ended. Five dollars to the person who can do the best job tying those three things together!