By JK, on November 2nd, 2010 Wait, it’s not Thursday! But there’s Books in 140 Seconds? Is your universe imploding . . . or did it just get a whole lot more awesome?
As many of you know, next Tuesday, November 9, the winner of the Giller Prize is announced. Now, you’re all busy people, and no doubt you intended to get through those books, but there are five of them. And there are so many other things to read. So Erin and I took the CTV One Country, 5 books pledge and decided to read them all — and bring you a Books in 140 Seconds video about each book over the next 5 days. On the sixth day, we’ll stray from the norm a bit and record our own not-so-secret jury deliberations on who we think should take home the $50,000.
So let us give you the crib notes in 140 seconds so that you’ll, a) be able to pick a book to root for, and b) be able to fake having read them to impress your coworkers, coffee shop hotties, or the attendees at the Giller ceremony (or the fabulous Giller Light). Jack Rabinovitch, you can thank us for saving you time later.
We’re kicking things [...]
By JK, on August 26th, 2010 Welcome to another edition of Books in 140 Seconds, the your biweekly book club blast, where Erin and I give you the goods on a book in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. This week the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles joined the YouTube book reviewing party, recording a one-minute review of My Hollywood. Oh, it’s pretty good if you like your videos edited, rehearsed and in a Masterpiece Theater type setting. Sure he has theme music, a budget, and multiple set changes . . . but we keep it real. And we’re adorable. As for 60 seconds, I say, been there done that. 140 is the new 60. But if it really came down to a head-to-head book reviewing video showdown (as we may have suggested to Ron Charles on twitter, and he may have accepted), Erin and I are pretty sure we could take the cake with just one awkward frame.
Speaking of cake, this week we’re talking about Sarah Selecky’s first-rate short story collection, This Cake Is for the Party. Watch it to see us cram as many cake jokes as possible into 140 seconds, and eventually dissolve into laughter at our own cleverness:
By JK, on August 16th, 2010 Though I can’t get enough of the stuff in real life, there’s something about cake in literary fiction that never fails to make me feel a little nauseous with dread (in real life, the nausea comes from having had too much cake). I think it started with Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, when Mrs. Brown decides to make the perfect birthday cake for her husband. I can’t resist quoting this brilliant novel:
“She is going to produce a birthday cake — only a cake — but in her mind at this moment the cake is glossy and resplendent as any photograph in any magazine; it is better, even, than the photographs of cakes in magazines. She imagines making, out of the humblest materials, a cake with all the balance and authority of an urn or a house. The cake will speak of bounty and delight the way a good house speaks of comfort and safety.”
This fragile concoction of flour and sugar is of course a symbol for Mrs. Brown’s desire to be a good wife and mother, and the reader senses the cake will turn out no better than Mrs. Brown’s attempts at embracing domesticity. Of course, the poor cake cannot live [...]
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