Handwritten manuscript of 'Jane Eyre' on display in the United States for the first time.

The brief life of Charlotte Bronte will be the focus of an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, where the original handwritten manuscript of Bronte's Jane Eyre will take center stage. It'll be on display in the United States for the first time in the book's 169-year history.

At least half of this is real writing.

Why so long to get around to it? I don't know. Why did it take so long for Charlotte Bronte to get to the point in her books? Why did every character take forever to fall in love?

I'm guessing this is all long-form synergy.



photo: The British Library Board

Book Review: Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

This is part of the continuing series of random book reviews that'll be nothing like a New York Times book review. Gone is the ten thousand word analysis. Instead, here is a book review like you'd tell your friends.


The book:  Joseph Heller's Catch-22

Review:

Could it be 50 pages shorter? Probably.

Could a couple characters be cut out? Maybe.

But is it worth reading? Definitely.

Catch-22 is one of those books people label a classic, but it's never placed on any of those trite "100 Greatest American Novels of All Time!" lists. Why, I'm not sure.

Maybe it's because the novel walks a fine line between humor and the ungodly horrors of war, so that people don't know what to make of it. Great books can't have irreverent humor after all! Only misery and depression is allowed! If you haven't popped half a bottle of Prozac and a fifth of Scotch by the end of a book, then said book can't be great apparently.

In the end, Catch-22 isn't about war. It's really just about the insanity that exists in all of us. Like how insane that this isn't one of the "100 Greatest American Novels of All Time!"

Alan Moore has finished writing million word novel 'Jerusalem.'

Moore suddenly realizes he hasn't seen the sun in years.

Not only is it a light read, but it'll work as a handy step stool in a jiffy.

For comparison's sake, Les Misérables is roughly 530,000 words long. War and Peace? 560,000. Atlas Shrugged? 645,000. Even the Bible is only roughly 800,000 words.

Despite Moore's million words and desperate need for an editor, his novel won't hold the record. That belongs to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which comes in at a tidy 1,267,069.










photo: The Guardian

In 1692, a random Dutch man published a 700-page book describing every color conceivable, and it's largely gone unnoticed.

With over 2,100 colors, the Pantone Color Guide is modern society's bible regarding everything with a hue, a selection so dense yet lovingly adored by artists, designers, and marketers as to what's what with color.

Yet 322 years earlier, a somewhat anonymous Dutch man known solely by 'A. Boogert' published an over 700-page book detailing the breadth of known colors on a level that Pantone needed centuries to match with only half the beauty.

A medieval book historian at Leiden University, Erik Kwakkel, stumbled upon the largely unknown work by A. Boogert while combing over a French database. Kwakkel describes on his blog how, until recently, no scholarly research has ever touched on the 17-century book--and that the only known work to mention Boogert is forthcoming from a yet to be published Ph.D. study from the University of Amsterdam.

Until anything else is known about him, for now Boogert goes down as the medieval Pantone.

Or, rather, Pantone is the poor man's Boogert.

Soccer legend weeps over his own book.

This isn't any book you find on the clearance rack at Barnes & Noble. This is a 33lb., 500 page, $1,700 giant of a book about soccer legend Pele, billed as "the definitive work on the Athlete of the Century." (Muhammad Ali? Babe Ruth? Jackie Robinson? What did you accomplish?) Titled 1283, only 1,283 copies will be made--the same number of goals Pele scored during his career.

But wait--you say you have an unhealthy obsession with elderly soccer players? Good news! There's a luxury edition selling for $2,600 which includes an autographed picture of Pele and what the publisher vaguely describes as "a heart shaped patch of sweat." Potential scratch-and-sniff Pele BO? Hubba-hubba.

At the book release event, Pele became very emotional. "This really makes me well up. It is a legacy I left for Brazil," he told reporters while wiping tears from his eyes.

A legacy of ornate sweat stains.




photo: Getty, via Yahoo.

James Joyce's 'Ulysses' in Twitter form.

James Joyce.

Twitter.

Both are great if you have a fantastically short attention span.

Apparently June 16th is known as Bloomsday to James Joyce fanatics. It's named after the main character of Joyce's novel Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. Usually, Joyceans (is that what they call themselves?) hold public readings of Ulysses on that date, possibly as a means to annoy as many people in the general public as possible.

But this year they're going onto the interwebs. A gentleman has proposed Tweeting Ulysses in 140 character nuggets. Not the whole novel word for word. But miniature eye-blinks of the novel, end to end, spread out over the course of the day on Twitter. And he wants your help to do it.

Because if reading Ulysses doesn't make you develop an attention deficit disorder, seeing it in Twitter form should do the trick.



James Joyce fanatics always seem a little smug, don't you think? Like they've somehow read a book you're too low class to read. They're like Charles Dickens fanatics without the socialization skills. Like they have a membership at a country club and don't want to be seen with you unless you're serving them a mimosa and foie gras. But reading and loving a fancy book doesn't make you fancy. It doesn't make you smart, either. It just makes you snobby. Just saying.

Book Review: Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton

This is part of the continuing series of random book reviews that'll be nothing like a New York Times book review. Gone is the ten thousand word analysis. Instead, here is a book review like you'd tell your friends.


The book: Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country.

Review:

Okay. I get it. Rich people are annoying. Newly rich people are even more annoying. Divorcing newly rich people are the most annoying of all.

But did you know they can make for a dreadfully annoying plot, too?

Best of all: after 450 pages, you, too, can hope to never find love or financial stability.

Can a book save your life? No, literally, can it stop a bullet?

You'll want to know these sorts of things if you've lived in some of the neighborhoods I have. Kevlar is expensive. But padding your body with about 50 copies of thousand page tomes might work in a jiffy.

That's why Electric Literature (an online site of short fiction) decided to test if any girthy 2010 releases could save you from dying. It turns out one book was made for parts of Fitchburg.



Or save your money and just buy any book by Dickens at a thrift shop. That man made literary Kevlar for forty years.

You can buy a lot of succotash for that kind of money.

On December 7th, Sotheby's auction house is going to auction off what they say will be the world's most expensive book.

And what literary masterpiece would that be? What amazing written work of genius delivered from the very soul of some laboring writer is it? What novel--what book of poetry--what collection of plays--what slim, desirous book of intellect will English majors drool over?

Why, of course, it's a copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America!

(Somewhere Thomas Pynchon is clutching his chest.)

That's right, folks--an illustrated book which measures 3ft by 2ft (so as to accommodate life-sized paintings) about birds brings in the big bucks. How big bucks are we talking? Try upwards of $9.2 million. Meanwhile, a First Folio of Shakespeare from 1623 will be up for auction that same day. It's expected to get around $1.5 million.

Would it have killed Shakespeare to have created a talking flamingo character? Maybe a dancing emu? A penguin doing anything? Penguins sell. Everyone knows that, and that's one bird Audobon's book lacks. If Shakespeare had the foresight to think 400 years in the future, he wouldn't be trailing behind.

So we're left with a book of illustrated birds. There's no word on whether it includes a pictorial spread of Daffy Duck in his natural habitat, but here's to fingers crossed.

Book Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

This is part of the continuing series of random book reviews that'll be nothing like a New York Times book review. Gone is the ten thousand word analysis. Instead, here is a book review like you'd tell your friends.

 The book: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything

Review:

Question: If Wikipedia and your witty uncle became amorous and somehow had a child, what would it look like?

Answer: This book.

Don't read it if you're a scientist. Don't read it if you have a PhD in anything that involves numbers. Don't read it if you know how to use a graphing calculator with ease. Don't read it if your career choice ends in anything with "-ology." Odds are your britches will get bunched because you think Bryson skips over too much microscopic information that is just too, too, too important to your field of expertise to skip over.

Otherwise, if you always wondered how stuff in the universe works--but never felt like asking your college professor for fear they'd assign you a 20 page research paper on the topic--this is the book for you.

Book Review: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

This is part of the continuing series of random book reviews that'll be nothing like a New York Times book review. Gone is the ten thousand word analysis. Instead, here is a book review like you'd tell your friends.

The Book: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Review:

Chapter One Reaction: It can't be this boring for 600 pages, can it?

Chapter Two Reaction: No, seriously, it has to get perkier than this, right? What page am I on?

Chapter Three Reaction: Okay, really, can you pick up the pace a little? I have a date with life I'd like to keep.

The pace doesn't quicken. The Grapes of Wrath makes War and Peace look like a light summer beach read. It's the type of book where if you just lost your job and your 401(k)...and then came home and found your spouse in bed with your best friend...and then mistakenly ran over your precious golden retriever as you peeled out of the driveway...and then you happened to read The Grapes of Wrath that night, you'd say, "Well, hey, life can always be worse I guess."

You know those books where you read 50 pages and then probably never get back to reading it because you're easily distracted by shiny objects and Entertainment Tonight on tv? That's The Grapes of Wrath. You know those books that get listed as a "great novel," but after reading those first 50 pages you question the sanity of book reviewers? That's The Grapes of Wrath. You know when you have no patience for a book after those first three chapters...but that when you get to the end of the book you understand that patience was all part of the master plan of the book? That there's an emotional payoff at the end? That there was a point after all to trudging through 600 pages because the author looked for a message that transcended literature for a change? That the point of the whole book is that it actually has a point?

That's The Grapes of Wrath.