The Buzz...About Books

Calling All Angels: Heavenly Creatures in Recent Fiction

Angel fiction is all the rage. Fans of Danielle Trussoni's best-selling Angelology, a tale of secret societies, ancient libraries, and fallen angels, eagerly await the upcoming release of Angelopolis. If you like books by Dan Brown, you must check this series out. Even more exciting, Will Smith has signed on to produce the film adaptation. Paul Bettany in Legion (above) is one of the many heavenly bodies to grace the big screen. The super-hot Mortal Instruments series is due to hit theatres in August.

Recent titles featuring angels (and a few hot demons) range from steamy romance (J.R. Ward), to mystery (Linda Poitven), to dark urban fantasy (Tad Williams, Nalini Singh). This sub-genre is a celestial mash-up of religious sources, literary traditions, and pure invention. Fallen angels make for less than angelic behaviour - which is part of the attraction. Angel fiction by Laini Taylor, Lauren Kate, Michelle Rowan, and Becca Fitzpatrick appeal to both teen and adult readers. In fact, Lauren Kate's fallen angel, Daniel Grigori, is arguably even more sparkly than Edward Cullen. Some angels are just working stiffs: Stephanie Chong's guardian angel, Serena St. Clair, has a day job as a yoga instructor. Simon Rich's What in God's Name? takes this to the next level: God is a cranky CEO who wants to liquidate his assets  - but not before he challenges two underpaid angels to save the Earth.

Read on:

Check out these seraphic graphics - fallen angels have long been a fixture in graphic fiction:           

Ben Foster's role as the mutant, Angel, in X-Men 3: The Last Stand is oft cited as a positive LGBT symbol.  

Planning a Harlem Shake? Resources to Optimize Your 30 Seconds of Fame

Just perfected your Gangnam gallop?  Forget it - the Harlem Shake is where it's at.  Baauer, a Brooklyn producer, released this electronic dance groove last May. This month, a 30-second concept video set to Baauer's song went viral.  Not only that, 40,000+ videos have since been posted to YouTube by people doing their own version. Celebrities, office workers, firefighters, grannies, cats, campuses and the military are offering their spin on the Shake.  Check it out on CBC and CTV, in the Star, the L.A. Times, the Independant, Forbes, and the Huffington Post. 

Here's how it works: a lone dancer (wearing a helmut or mask) dances to the intro, ignored by those around them. The beat drops, a jump cut, and everyone goes nuts. Dancers in costume (or in underwear), waving props, do a very loose approximation of the Harlem Shake - an old-school hip hop dance made famous by American rapper, G-Dep in Let's Get It.  

Here is a fraction of the funniest (heads up: some are nerdishly naughty).

*Updated*  Check out this interesting video response: Harlem Reacts to 'Harlem Shake' Videos.

Planning your own Harlem Shake video?  Hurry, before the cool kids on Tumblr say this meme is over.   

• Culturematic by Grant McCracken
• Conquering YouTube: 101 Pro VideoTips to Take You to the Top by Jay Miles
• 15 Minutes of Fame: Becoming a Star in the YouTube Revolution by Frederick Levy
• eBook: YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts by Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean
• Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People by Michael Strangelove
• YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Memes by John Gunders

  

This version has only two people, but it's sweet.  Note the bemused family dog in the background.

Con los terroristas!

 

Related Posts:

• Millions and Millions of Cats
• Reading Gangnam Style

Reading Gangnam Style (강남스타일): South Korean Fiction in Translation

South Korean rapper Psy's music video Gangnam Style went viral last August with now over 7 million hits on YouTube. It has spawned hundreds of parodies and tributes and has brought Korean pop culture galloping (literally) front and center to a Western audience.

Of course, this is old news to the legions of North American K-Pop fans who have been dancing to South Korean groups for years. News to you? Here's a selection available from the library: First Album by Girls' Generation,  The First Album to Anyone by 2NE1, Mini4 by Bigbang, Wonder World by the Wonder Girls, Red: The 4th Single Album by After School, So Cool by Sistar and The Shinee World by Shinee (South Korea's One Direction). 

However, if your speed is more book club than night club, here's another great, if somewhat less bouncy, import worth checking out: recent South Korean fiction in translation. 

Please Look After Mom by Kyung Sook Shin.   A rural woman goes missing at a busy subway station in Seoul. Her children, all successful adults, and her husband frantically search for her while each is wracked with guilt about their relationships with the missing woman. Shin is a best-selling author in South Korea - and her book is getting great reviews in North America. This was our online book club's choice in May.

Black Flower by Young-Ha Kim.  Chronicles the hardships suffered by hundreds of Koreans who went to Mexico in 1905 to escape the impending invasion from Japan. Instead of finding a better life, they found a life of indentured servitude working in terrible conditions for wealthy landowners.

Tongue by Kyung Ran Jo. A cooking school teacher is devastated when her partner leaves her for an ex-model. The relationship between food and sex is explored in this psychological tale of infidelity and revenge.

The Old Garden by Hwang Sok-Yong.  A political prisoner is freed after 18 years in jail to find that the love of his life has died. He discovers her letters and journals and re-traces their life together.  Sok-Yong, a longtime dissident of the South Korean government, has himself been jailed as a political prisoner. 

Like your reads a little more graphic?  South Korean manhwa is challenging the dominance of Japanese manga. Here are some popular series available from the library.

 
   

• Lizzie Newton: Victorian Mysteries by Hey-Jin Jeon
• Goong by Soohee Park
• Angel Diary by Yun Hee-Lee
• Banya by Kim Young-Oh

Finally - Gangnam Style comes to Canada - watch Stratford Festival cast members participate in a parody with the CBC's Peter Mansbridge. Enjoy!

Is Geek the New Cool?

In the book, Geek Girls Unite: How Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie Chicks, and Other Misfits are Taking Over the World a geek is defined as: "a person who's passionate about something and strives to be an expert."

Recently one of my friends commented that while we were in school, being a geek was considered a bad thing! This statement made me think. Have things truly changed? Are geeks now more socially accepted? Or have the geeks of the past simply grown up to design computers and make television shows like the Big Bang Theory and blockbuster superhero movies. These geeks have grown into successful adults. Is it true, just as the book title suggests, that The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth?

The following are a few of my favourite geeky books and movies, including a few biographies by some self-proclaimed geeks, who made it big.

Non-Fiction

Fiction

 
                 

DVDs

                                                        

Successful Geeks

Dispatches from the War on the Internet

When Wikipedia darkened it's site last week to protest the passing of laws that would have placed new restrictions on our use of the internet to share books, music and video, I was very glad to have just finished reading two excellent collections of essays by Cory Doctorow on the issues involved.

Cory Doctorow by Derryl Murphy

Doctorow was born in Toronto and has a reputation as an author of fine science-fiction and as a co-editor of the wildly popular blog Boing Boing. He has also been writing marvelously entertaining articles on the internet using down-to-earth, easy to understand language and examples from everyday life.

In his first collection -- Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future he writes in detail about the negative effects of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and other forms of control on the internet.

Doctorow's argument boils down to his belief that whatever we lose in the free exchange of information on the internet, we will gain in innovations which will enrich our culture in ways that cannot yet be predicted. Call him an optimist.

Doctorow has given away free downloads of all his novels from the beginning of his career. He has found that by making these copies free and encouraging his fans to share them online he has expanded the market for the printed editions of his books.

In his latest collection -- Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century he writes about how these issues affect him as a creative writer and as a new parent.

He explains intellectual property, the "information economy", copyright enforcement and digital licensing in clearly understandable ways.

His warnings about the vulnerability of our passwords and our personal data online are frightening and sobering.

He explains why streaming will never replace the downloading of music online.

He also talks about how he manages the hundreds of non-spam emails he gets every day, and why he will never buy an iPad.

Together these books cover ten years of exciting, insightful coverage of these increasingly important issues in a highly readable way.

 

Millions and Millions of Cats

Millions of cats roam the Internet, from legendary kitties like Ceiling Cat, Keyboard Cat, and the touchingly rotund Maru to the captioned "kittehs" in I Can Haz Cheeseburger. 

In less than a decade, net cats have multiplied exponentially - with no sign of letting up. Chances are, you have at least one cat right now in your inbox or posted on Facebook. In particular, library staff have a symbiotic relationship with cats (if you don't own a cat when you are hired, you are issued one).

Some popular web cats are prowling their way into print. And we can help you find them.

Check out Cat vs Human by Yasmine Surovec which originated as a personal blog.  Simon's Cat and Simon's Cat: Beyond the Fence by Simon Tofield, a British animator, started as a delightful series of Internet shorts.

 The popularity of cat videos spawned "Catvertising," a brilliant parody by a Toronto-based ad agency:

  

Watch a real commerical that used cats to their ad-vantage.

Not all Internet cats are sweet like the Talking Cats.  Some are nightmarishly creative. Watch "Welcome to Kitty City" by the UK animator, Cyriak.

 

 Want more funny felines in print (beyond Garfield)?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Fat Freddy's Cat Omnibus by Gilbert Shelton
• Great Comic Cats by Malcolm Whyte
• The New Yorker Book of All-New Cat Cartoons

 

Ceiling Cat is watching . . .

Go the [Bleep] to Sleep: Tender Tales for Sleepy Adults

No one was more surprised than Adam Mansbach when Go the Fuck to Sleep became a bestseller in advance sales.  Definitely not for children, this book is intended to reflect the frustration of parents whose little (non-sleeping) angels remain wide awake long after their bedtimes. Mansbach, a prof at Rutgers University, a novelist (The End of the Jews), and a first-time parent, was inspired to publish this book after he joked on Facebook that this would be the name of his next novel - and received an overwhelmingly postive response. See his interview on ABC news.  Listen to his interview on CBC.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I think of childrens' storytellers, American actor, Samuel L. Jackson and German director, Werner Herzog naturally spring to mind.

Listen to Samuel L. Jackson's tender interpretation. 

And here is Werner's version.

Read what the NY Times, the Washington Times, and the Globe and Mail have to say.  The U.K. Guardian writes about the curious phenonemon of children's books for adults.

Read what the New Yorker says about nervous publishers dealing with profanity-laced bestsellers in a post-Cee Lo universe.  Forget you, indeed.

Will parents find this funny?  Of course.  No doubt some parents will find this offensive, or dismiss it as a one-joke gimmick.  Serious parenting pundits will wade in to argue for or against the book's "premise."  One thing is for sure - this book stands to make a lot of money. 

For those who prefer to hear bedtime tales with an old lady whispering 'hush,' there is always the classic Goodnight Moon.

(author Adam Mansbach with his daughter)