Readers Hurt by Paper Cuts

Obama's vacation book list drives leaps in Amazon sales rankings

(NEWSER) - President Obama’s poll numbers are faltering, but his summer reading choices are getting rave reviews, Politico reports. A survey of the Amazon.com standings of the five books the White House announced he would take with him on his Martha’s Vineyard vacation show a drastic improvement in sales. If you’re doubtful about joining Obama’s Book Club, look at these numbers and follow the pack: More»

(NEWSER) - The digital world has become so engrossing that David L Ulin finds it difficult to focus and read a book—not a good sign when you're the editor of the Los Angeles Times book review. "The encroachment of the buzz," from hours of emails to inane rumors across the Web, has made it more and more difficult to settle into the paces of reading. "Reading is an act of contemplation," he writes, that is growing ever harder to master. More»

It's fizzy, too—and comes complete with recipes and regrets

(NEWSER) - Recipes for "Morning After Pumpkin Bread" and "Ineffectual Eggplant Parmigiana" should clue readers in that Giulia Melucci's I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti is no how-to on gaining a man's heart through his stomach, Joyce Wadler writes for the New York Times. Melucci—"a former publishing publicist who is hilarious, good-looking, and as restrained as Joan Rivers on crack"—recounts her checkered love life in a style Wadler dubs "Sex and the City with recipes." More»

We think fibbing about reading classics makes us appear intelligent, 'sexier'

(NEWSER) - The Bible, War and Peace, 1984, and Ulysses are some of the classics people say they've read but actually haven't, a new British study has found. Why? Two-thirds of those surveyed fibbed about their reading mainly to appear intelligent and "more sexually attractive," a researcher tells the Daily Telegraph. "It makes them look good." Of course, "If a date comes back with some obscure quotation from Proust, you might be in trouble." More»

One-star reviews offer relief from literary anxiety

(NEWSER) - Anne Enright's The Gathering won the prestigious Booker Prize and dozens of adulatory reviews, but Cynthia Crossen of the Wall Street Journal didn't find much to admire in the bleak story of a dysfunctional family. Luckily, there's a place to vent such disappointment, she writes: amid Amazon's readers' reviews, where best-sellers and classics alike come in for bitter complaint and bad-mannered invective. More»