Bette Midler once called Madonna "the woman who pulled herself up by her bra straps." Madonna's brother Christopher's memoir 'Life With My Sister Madonna', has just been released overseas. According to the publicity material, this is "the juicy, can't-put-it-down story you've always wanted to hear."

Time magazine says, however: "What those readers will get is a narrative that reveals less about Madonna than about the brother condemned to living in her considerable shadow. Ciccone, an artist and interior decorator, served stints as Madonna's backup dancer, her "dresser" (a role in which his tasks included wiping sweat from her sometimes-naked body) and later as her designer. But mostly, by his telling, he functioned as her doormat. And, occasionally, her garbage can (one of his chores was allowing his sister to spit cough drops into his palm).

Madonna is 27 months older than Ciccone, and she snatched his innocence around the same time she was surrendering her own. She gives him his first joint, his first ecstasy pill, his first visit to a gay club. These events foreshadowed a peculiar sort of sibling bond. Consider: Both lost their virginity in the backseats of cars to guys named Russell. True to form, he notes, she "bests" him even here: her dalliance took place in a Cadillac, his in a Datsun. It was clear during her childhood in Michigan, Ciccone says, that Madonna wasn't shy about deploying her sexuality to get what she wanted.

Of course, it's Madonna's love life that readers want the scoop on, and Ciccone is happy to pry open her bedroom door. He dishes on becoming Sean Penn's blood brother and Warren Beatty's habit of quizzing him about what it's like to be gay. Madonna bedded so many luminaries, it seems, that some notable members of this diverse group - John F. Kennedy Jr., graffiti pioneer Jean-Michel Basquiat, basketball star Dennis Rodman and steroid-user-turned-whistle-blowe r Jose Canseco - rate no better than a passing mention. ... But it's hard to muster a ton of sympathy for a guy profiting handsomely from a hatchet job on his own sister - regardless of how miserably she may have treated him".

The Madonna and Guy Ritchie relationship is a focus of the UK Times coverage.

Amazon to acquire AbeBooks

Amazon.com, Inc. has announced that, subject to closing conditions, it has reached an agreement to acquire AbeBooks. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books, with over 110 million primarily used, rare and out-of-print books listed for sale by thousands of independent booksellers from around the world.

"As a leader in rare and hard-to-find books, AbeBooks brings added breadth and expanded selection to our customers worldwide," said Russell Grandinetti, vice president of books for Amazon.com. "AbeBooks provides a wide range of services to both sellers and customers, and we look forward to working with them to further grow their business. We're excited to present all of our customers with the widest selection of books available any place on Earth."

"This deal brings together book sellers and book lovers from around the world, and offers both types of customers a great experience," said Hannes Blum, chief executive officer of AbeBooks. "We are very excited to be joining the Amazon family."

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and is expected to close before the end of the fourth quarter of 2008.AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand-alone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia.

One quarter of the world’s population will be online by 2012

JupiterResearch, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies, has found that the number of worldwide online users will increase 44 percent between 2007 and 2012, reaching 1.8 billion users. By 2012, one quarter of the worldwide population will access the Internet on a regular basis,

According to the report, the growth in online populations of emerging economies will continue to increase at double-digit rates during the next five years, driving the expansion of the worldwide online population. However, in 2012 their online penetration levels will only reach levels the U.S. experienced in 2000, and at a minimum will trail those of developed nations by five years' time.

Brazil, Russia, India and China will experience some of the highest growth rates. By 2011, China will overtake the U.S. in the number of regular online users to become the leading online population, with India following in a distant third place.

Literary gout!

A New York Times Book reporter diagnosed with gout takes solace in the roll call of famous gout sufferers which includes Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell, Galileo, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry James, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx. "Wilkie Collins’s decline as a novelist is often attributed to gout, or rather to the opiates he took to ease the pain of it. John Milton and Thomas Gray are both said to have died of it, but I’m not sure that modern medicine considers death by gout a possibility.

As late as 1926, in his book “A Study of British Genius,” Havelock Ellis was happy to confirm the connection between genius and gout. It “occurs so often,” he writes, “in such extreme forms, and in men of such pre-eminent intellectual ability, that it is impossible not to regard it as having a real association with such ability."

Local Author/Cartoonist Judy Horacek issues a regular monthly newsletter with a selection of cartoons.

New J K Rowling for Christmas

The Guardian reports that "Harry Potter may have waved his wand for the last time, but JK Rowling is set to cast another spell over the bookbuying public this Christmas. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Rowling's valediction to the world of child wizardry, is to be published for the mass market on December 4 with all proceeds to go to Rowling's charity.

Rowling originally handwrote and illustrated six copies of the book as thank-yous to people closely involved with the Harry Potter books. A seventh copy, bound in brown morocco leather and mounted with silver and semiprecious stones, was auctioned at Sotheby's last December, eventually going to online bookseller Amazon for £1.95m.

The Children's High Level Group (CHLG), the charity Rowling co-founded in 2005, will now publish the collection of five tales in trade and "collector's" editions. The trade editions, retailing for £6.99, will feature additional commentary on each fairy tale from Professor Dumbledore and an introduction by Rowling".

Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk talks dirty about Snuff, his new graphic porn-themed novel

Chris Ayres reports "you learn a lot from lunch with Chuck Palahniuk. For example, I now know that Adolf Hitler invented the blow-up sex doll. True fact, apparently. While the soon-to-be Führer was working as a messenger between the trenches in the First World War, he was appalled to see his fellow Aryans sloping off to French brothels. So he came up with the idea of an inflatable Fräulein. But Hitler didn't get around to manufacturing the doll until near the end of the Second World War when the factory was destroyed by the Allied firebombing of Dresden".

The London Times links in the Palahniuk interview to the top ten men's books. It quotes a 2006 study by British cultural historians Jardine and Watkins who found that 80 per cent of men interviewed had most recently read a novel by a male author, and many male respondents had difficulty recalling the last book by a woman they'd read. Anecdotal evidence also auggests that some male book group members turn their noses up at books written by, or perceived to be aimed at, women. Here, then, is a list to satisgy those hunter-gatherers after more manly tomes.

Money by Martin Amis

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (contains the short story 'Guts', at the author readings of which more than sixty people are rumoured to have fainted)

Man and Boy by Tony Parsons

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

Filth by Irvine Welsh

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Jenny Diski on why sleep!

"As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the dangers of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time. Instead of trying to extend the life of human bodies beyond their cellular feasibility, the men and women in lab coats could be studying ways to retrieve all the time we spend asleep. A third of our lives, they say - and that probably doesn’t take the afternoon nap into account. Even if we died aged what is these days a rather youthful 70, finding a way to stay awake would increase our functional life to the equivalent of 93".

Who Will Digitize the World's Books?

Jean-Claude Guédon replies to Robert Darnton in the letter column of the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

"In his recent essay, "The Library in the New Age" [NYR, June 12], Robert Darnton extols the value of Google's project to digitize the collections of major research libraries. As he puts it, it is a way to make "all book learning available to all people." While there is much truth in this statement, there are some important considerations about the Google project that should be raised.

From the user's perspective, the possibility of using the Internet to access a book, particularly a hard-to-find book, from one of the large libraries of the world is obviously wonderful. However, it is important to clarify what Google is offering: it is not a digital text that the library will be able to share unconditionally with others. In its contracts with the nineteen libraries now in its consortium, Google has stipulated that the "Universal Digital Copy" of digitized books it provides must be protected from non-Google Web software; and that the number of downloads from texts digitized by Google will be limited. Only Google can aggregate collections of different libraries in order to create the larger digital database that is the most valuable part of the consortium project.

...It appears that Google is striving to become the main dispenser of algorithmic power over digital books. By monopolizing much of the computational potential of such books, Google is positioning itself as the operating system of the digital document world. Digital texts already dominate some areas of knowledge. To give a single company such a grip on the collective memory of the world, its analysis, and even its meaning is frightening to say the least.

Dozens of libraries have understood the danger of the Google Book maneuver and have joined the Open Content Alliance (OCA). They include the British Library, the National Library of Australia, the Boston Library Consortium, Columbia University, the University of Toronto, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and the University of California libraries, to name only a few. Like Google Books and unlike most other digitization projects that operate on a much smaller scale, the OCA seeks to promote large-scale digitization, but it does so without putting shackles on the participating libraries. Alas, the OCA has nothing like Google's deep pockets, and the recent withdrawal of Microsoft from the alliance makes the OCA's position even more difficult.

But there may be some hope in this situation. Since many different groups have an interest in the free availability of digital texts, the process of digitization itself could be distributed among a wide variety of libraries and other independent groups, much in the way of contributions to Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. Digitization clubs could emerge not only in public libraries but in schools and museums. In short, mass digitization projects should be designed in ways that are not dependent on market-based corporations or on government subsidies, but can nevertheless profit from forms of support from either kind of institution.

Libraries can have a very important part in promoting these projects and enforcing the standards that must accompany them. In so doing, they would be acting as institutional citizens of the digital document age, and not as grateful (and somewhat passive) consumers of Google's apparent largesse".

Robert Darnton replies...

"I share Jean-Claude Guédon's worry about the danger of one company monopolizing the "computational potential" of digitized texts, and I agree that the Open Content Alliance is a good thing. But is it an adequate alternative to Google? Grassroots digitizing may help a thou-sand flowers bloom. Our Open Collec-tions Program at Harvard-a project for digitizing public-domain material from special collections on topics such as im-migration and women at work-has already made hundreds of thousands of pages freely available on-line. But we need to search, mine, and study millions of volumes from all the collections of our research libraries.

Libraries have accumulated those volumes at great cost over many generations, but they have kept most of them within their walls. Digital technology now makes it possible for this common intellectual heritage to come within the range of the common man and woman. Yet corporate interests, flawed copyright laws, unfair restrictions on fair use, and many other obstacles block the public's access to this public good. By removing those obstacles, the United States Congress can clear the way for a new phase in the democratization of knowledge. For my part, I think congressional action is required to align the digital landscape with the public good".

Booker longlist Garnering criticism!

The Guardian blog reports "Among those to express his surprise was Canongate publisher Jamie Byng, who was disappointed that Canongate's own submission, Helen Garner's The Spare Room, did not appear on the list. He wrote on the Man Booker website forum: "I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44, a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that, over novels as exceptional as Helen Garner's The Spare Room or Ross Raisin's God's Own Country.

Is Child 44 really no more than a "fairly well-written and well-paced thriller"? And is the real issue the fact that there is a thriller on the list at all? Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 is a serial-killer story set in Soviet Russia, in the year of Stalin's death. It received impressive reviews -- this newspaper labelled it "compelling" and "a real achievement" (though cautioned that "the desire for the plot to encompass every element of Soviet history eventually overrides any sense of artistic seriousness") and has already been awarded the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for the year's best thriller".

Arthur C Clarke's final book of SF, written with Frederik Pohl, takes the reader to the first Lunar Olympics

James Higgs on a great opening line

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

It's the opening of Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers. There are several reasons I think this is great. First, it's packed with things that are unexplained and that almost demand that you continue reading. It's almost as if Burgess has set himself a challenge: what story could he possibly spin from this beginning? It's outrageously provocative (the juxtaposition of "catamite" and "archbishop"

Swift Sale for Michael Foot’s Collection

The Rare Books Review news reports that "former leader of the UK Labour Party, Michel Foot, who will be 95 this month, has recently sold his entire collection of books by and about Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). The books by Anglo-Irish author of the infamous Gulliver’s Travels were snapped up before the catalogue produced by Jarndyce Booksellers was even sent out. It was Hesburgh Library, Notre Dame University, Indiana who purchased the Swift collection and already have an extensive rare books collection of some 125,000 volumes.

Within the collection sold of Swift’s work and biographical literature, some of the most valuable items were: The Drapier’s Letters to the people of Ireland, concerning Mr Wood’s Brass Half-Pence, plus Poems and Songs relating to the subject, Gulliver’s Travels, in four parts, an early 1726 edition, The Examiner: Remarks upon Papers and Occurrences and the Pamphlet Volume that was presented to Michel Foot by his father that sparked his initial interest in Swift. The whole collection was catalogued at a modest estimate of £55,000 by Jarndyce Booksellers, but the sum that the collection was actually sold for is not known.

Jack Waterford, Editor at Large of the Canberra Times, to whom I passed on this reference, commented "You know Michael Foot's father was Dingle, don't you, mayor of somewhere or other, as well as a QC. There's a famous photo of "Sir Dingle and all the little Feet".

Potty for Potter at Sotheby’s

Rare Book review has also reported that a new record was recently set at Sotheby’s for a staggering £289,250 - the highest sum for a book illustration ever to be sold at auction. The illustration was an original Beatrix Potter watercolour depicting the final scene from “The Rabbit’s Christmas Party” sequence. The illustration soared above its top end estimate of £60,000, almost five times what was expected, making it a remarkable sale.

Just as the ‘departure’ scene from the “Rabbit’s Christmas Party” did well, so did ‘the arrival’ scene (the first painting in the sequence), which is widely known from another copy in the V&A Collection. The V&A copy was originally given by Beatrix Potter to her aunt Lucy, wife of Sir Henry Roscoe, but the copy at auction was from the private collection of the artist’s brother, Bertram Potter. The painting went under the hammer for £121,250, while not being quite the sum of the last, still a magnificent result.

Beatrix was not the only Potter that was popular at auction; of course one cannot have a children’s auction without Harry. A first edition of J.K. Rowling’s, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone went for £10,000, but a much rarer and fascinating lot were three hand drawn, personal horoscopes fetching £21,250. The unpublished horoscopes date back from when J.K. Rowling was writing the first Harry Potter book and provide a wonderful insight into the creative mind behind her prose. The horoscopes are of three members of a single family, but also hint at the characters; Harry himself is a Leo (sharing his birthday with J.K. Rowling herself), whilst the meticulous worrier Hermione is naturally a Virgo.

Top 10 graphic novels chosen by Danny Fingeroth

Fingeroth is an American comic book writer and editor. He was group editor of Marvel comics' Spider-Man books, and is the author of many comics for Marvel. An expert on superheroes, he is the author of Superman on the Couch, among other works.

The Two Mr. Banvilles

The Washington Post recently interviewed Booker prize winner John Banville. The article states Banville "spends years writing and rewriting the things, but the misery doesn't stop there. For example, when he finished "The Sea" -- now his best-known book by far, because it won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 -- he anticipated an embarrassing scene in which his publishers would stare at their hands and say, "John, we think we'd like your next one. This really isn't very good."

All of which explains why he's so fond of Benjamin Black. Black is Banville's thriller-writing alter ego. His name graces the covers of "Christine Falls," "The Silver Swan" and "The Lemur," though the pseudonym has always been an open secret. And Black, unlike Banville, is the kind of writer who can pound out a novel in a few months and never look back".

Darwin to the Rescue of literary scholars?

The Chronicle of Higher Education (which needs an online subscription for most articles) recently pondered whether evolutionary science can reinvigorate literary studies.

"In the face of any looming apocalypse, imagined or not, prophets abound. For the literary academy, which has been imagining its own demise for almost as long as it has been around, prophets seem always to look to science, with its soothing specificity and concreteness. As the modern discipline of literary criticism was forming in the early 20th century, scholars concentrated their efforts on philology, a study that was thought to be more systematic than pure literary analysis. When the New Critics made their debut in the 1920s and 30s, their goal was to give a quasi-scientific rigor to literary theory: to lay out in detail the formal attributes of a "good poem" and provide guidance as to how exactly one discovered them. Later the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, famously queried: "What if criticism is a science as well as an art?" And some of the poststructuralist thought that began to filter into America from France in the 1960s took as its bedrock linguistic and psychoanalytic theory.

But very few pro-science activists suggested that literary scholars should actually work the way scientists do, using such methods as accumulating data and forming and testing hypotheses. Even Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy's novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged."

Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very loud about it. The most prominent (at least in the nonacademic media) are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts - the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals - and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism. In the past few years, such critics have had the honor of a long, if quizzical, New York Times Magazine profile and, in May, a place on the Boston Globe's Ideas page, where Jonathan A. Gottschall, a leading proponent of Literary Darwinism and an adjunct English professor at Washington and Jefferson College, explained why the approach is for him, as he says, "the way and the light."

His comments have been receiving widespread attention in the blogosphere, perhaps because they touch a nerve: The idea that traditional literary studies are in decline, or already dead, is bandied about almost casually now. The symptoms are legion, from the discussion of books as an old technology to the tight job market and the increasing reliance on adjunct labor in the humanities. And, like Gottschall, many academics see literary theory as an alienating force that has driven students away from their disciplines, and splintered the disciplines to the point, sometimes, of outright war".

Love Letters of Great Men

The imaginary book of romantic epistles read by Carrie Bradshaw in the movie “Sex and the City” has inspired an actual collection, entitled “Love Letters of Great Men,” to be published in the U.K. by Macmillan in August. For some of these great men, love is a ‘delicious poison’ (William Congreve); for others, ‘a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music’ (Charles Darwin). Love can scorch like the heat of the sun (Henry VIII), or penetrate the depths of one’s heart like a cooling rain (Flaubert). Every shade of love is here, from the exquisite eloquence of Oscar Wilde and the simple devotion of Robert Browning, to the wonderfully modern misery of the Roman Pliny the Younger, losing himself in work to forget how much he misses his beloved wife, Calpurnia.