My friend Emily Pullen at Skylight Books in Los Angeles wrote a great post about the price wars between Amazon and Wal-Mart. If you haven’t heard, the two behemoths are reducing prices of bestsellers to ridiculous prices. I love Emily’s response:

But times are tough, everyone’s pockets are feeling a little empty these days, right? What kind of soulless person would think that cheaper isn’t better? According to Merriam Webster, the verb to cheapen also means “to lower in general esteem; to make tawdry, vulgar, or inferior in some moral sense.” And frankly, that’s something that I’d rather not do to our concept of reading and its influence in our lives. I’m amazed that publishers don’t seem more outraged about this. As luxuries go (and reading is usually a luxury), you can’t get much more economical than a book. Let’s say you read one page per minute for 30 minutes every day. At that rate, it would take you 10 days to read a 300 page book, or 5 total hours. Where can you get 5 hours of entertainment or education for less than $15, let alone 10 DAYS of entertainment or education for about $25? And what if that book happens to change your life? Priceless.

• Owner of my store, Jeffrey Mayersohn, has a post over at the Huffington Post, where he discusses why exactly he bought the store.
• The trailer for The Fantastic Mr. Fox directed by Wes Anderson looks amazing!
• The National Book Award Finalists were announced today. It’s an odd list, if I might say so. Almost no one reviewed Far North, but it’s a great book!
• Ed Champion led a roundtable discussion of Sarah Hall’s fantastic Booker nominated novel How to Paint a Dead Man last month. I recently finished this book. I’ve read all of Hall’s work and this is probably the best so far.

The 2009 prize was awarded to Herta Muller. I had to look her up. The Literary Saloon has more information on her.

The title of the post pretty much says it all. “Speaking on stage after her name was announced, Mantel said: ‘I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air.'”

• New England booksellers are optimistic according to this PW article about the NEIBA trade show I missed last week in Hartford. “Incoming NEIBA president Dick Hermans, owner of Oblong Books & Music in Millerton and Rhinebeck, N.Y., said that his stores were up in August, which is usually his third biggest month.” Optimistic booksellers are about as rare as snow leopard sightings!
• Maud Newton and Bookforum write enthusiastically about Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s first novel The Informers, a fabulous novel. From Bookforum:
  

  Vásquez has much in common with Roberto Bolaño. Vásquez’s great theme is memory: the nightmares, personal and political, that return to haunt us. But unlike Bolaño’s stolid, serviceable prose, Vásquez’s style is musical, occasionally even lush, and its poeticism remains unmuddled in McLean’s translation.

  I posted about how this novel spurred me to read more about colonization and Colombian history back in April.

• The National Book Foundation has announced the “5 Under 35” for 2009.
• James Wood responds to Ed’s response to Wood’s review of Richard Power’s Generosity in the New Yorker. I disagreed with Wood’s take on the novel, but I also think I have different expectations from novels than he does.
• Electric Literature’s latest video is Martha Colburn imagining a Diana Wagman sentence from her memoir Three Legged Dog.
• An interesting post on pre-publication anxiety by an author.
• Oh, hey, we’re on television! You might have to search for “book machine” on WBZ-TV’s website. We launched our Book Machine last week, now dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg. I’ve got some photos to show too. It’s pretty neat watching the books being made, sort of like our own Rube Goldberg machine.

You might have heard something about the National Book Foundation picking the best of the best this year. They started a special blog featuring a past winner each day. Now they’ve opened the polls. You can pick from 6 books which is the best National Book Award book. It’s a tough one. Right now Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man leads the pack. The winner will be announced at the 60th National Book Awards ceremony on November 18th.

Whew, I’ve read a lot in the past four days! I saw a copy of John Burdett’s latest in his series featuring Thai detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep titled The Godfather of Kathmandu. I couldn’t resist reading it right away. I think the first and third in the series are best, but this fourth is still worth reading. There was a finality to the end too that leads me to think the series is at an end. It’s another mystery which features the many ins and outs of mysterious Thai culture with dollops of otherworldlness tossed on top.

Then I finally sat down to read Stitches, David Small’s memoir of his awful childhood. I’d been avoiding it precisely because I didn’t want to read anything too depressing. Realizing how stupid that sounded, I gave it a go. I’m glad I did as it’s such a beautiful nuanced portrait of a truly troubled family. David Small’s website has a trailer and some of the artwork which you should check out. He captured his childhood memories with such precision, you feel like you are there. It’s truly an awesome book.

I finished this last book late last night. I’d been hearing some buzz about it from other booksellers, particularly Daniel Goldin. The book I’m talking about is Michelle Huneven’s Blame, which features Patsy, a sottish history professor who wakes up in jail one morning only to learn that she has struck and killed a mother and child while drunk driving.The accident changes her life forever. She spends several years in prison and spends the next decades seeking atonement. I found the novel incredibly compelling. What are the moral consequences of what Patsy did and how long does she have to feel to guilty about it? The story gets more complicated at the end with a twist tossed in but don’t let that put you off. It’s a remarkable novel!

• Sara Nelson picks her 15 top books of the Fall over at the Daily Beast. Some are obvious, but there are a few surprises in there.
• A library without books?
• The Man Booker Prize shortlist was announced today.
• Papercuts has a cool video of a sentence from a Lydia Millet short story animated.
• I read  David Liss’ latest in his Benjamin Weaver series called The Devil’s Company. I can’t praise this one highly enough–a fantastic portrait of 19th century London, great characters, with a good plot thrown in there. Now I’m tackling John Irving’s forthcoming novel Last Night in Twisted River. I’m having dinner with him tonight and of course, I’m not that far into it. My boss Carole loves it so far. I believe she said she wishes she could sit in the corner and finish reading it. That’s high praise from a bookseller!

• Gastronomer’s Guide lists their Top 5 Books for the Fall.
• Bookforum reviews Richard Power’s Generosity. I can’t praise that book highly enough.
• Harvard Magazine’s long article on Atul Gawande reveals what a careful, thoughtful writer he has become. Plus he has good taste in music: “OR teams that work with him are treated to a soundtrack of alternative rock from his iPod (a recent playlist included Tom Petty, the Clash, Modest Mouse, Feist, Dido, and M.I.A.).”