An amusing trip through the rejection histories of well-known authors.

Quoted: Every writer, unless they are extraordinarily lucky, will be rejected during their career. Possibly many, many times. The purpose of this page is provide some perspective and encouragement to anyone who is going through the rejection process.

Don't forget to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar with your little ones today and record your participation at this site!

Quoted: Today, children across the globe are reading Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar to break a world record for the largest shared reading experience. If you read today, click here to be counted in the world record. Help us reach our goal of ONE MILLION readers!

Quoted: So I have paid little heed to the claims of providers of digital content and readers that e-books are eco-friendly alternatives to their paper cousins.  Perhaps they consume less paper – assuming that people aren’t printing them out – but what about the environmental costs of producing, maintaining, powering, and replacing the readers and the servers that provide them with content?
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According to the study, the Kindle usually offsets the carbon emitted in its creation within the first year.  Emma Ritch, the author of the report, writes that “Any additional years of use result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168 kg of CO2 per year (the emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 books).”  The impact is only expected to improve as sales of the Kindle increase.

Writers trashing other writers ... it's pretty funny!

Quoted: IF YOU ever secretly think some books by famous authors are unreadable or just plain rubbish, take comfort. Many writers have thought the same....A new book of "literary invective" has brought together evidence of how writers really view other writers. It shows that some authors are at their most inventive and scabrous when sinking their teeth into other literary stars....Take Jane Austen, one of the most revered and enduring English authors. Mark Twain, the American writer, was so irritated by Austen that he wrote in one letter: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin bone."

I'm not sure why they had to add a new character or why they couldn't have just used the character that Disney has added -- Lumpy.  But I'm glad that it feels the same as the classics.

Quoted: It used to be that all good things would come to an end, but these days, at least in the world of books and movies, there is always "the sequel." And so a new version of one of the most beloved children's classics — A.A. Milne's story of Winnie the Pooh — is being released....Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is the first authorized sequel to the Winnie the Pooh tales. David Benedictus, the writer who has taken on the task of re-creating the Hundred Acre Wood and all its inhabitants, says he tried to enter Milne's mind to find his voice...."What I had to do was to imagine myself to be Milne. And the best way to do that was to visit the Ashdown Forest, which was where he lived and was the basis for the Hundred Acre Wood, and to read everything by and about him," says Benedictus. "When I'd read all that, I felt I could become him."

Creepy ...

Quoted: As I hurtled down the highway, a pair of golden arches crept over the horizon, and the proverbial lightbulb smacked me in the forehead.  To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide....So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least.  This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience.  From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and…...Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!

WeBeReading is on this "100 Best" list under General Fiction Reviews.  Yay!

Quoted: It seems that a large number of book fanatics love to write about what they’ve read almost as much as doing the actual reading. That’s a good thing for the rest of the readers out there, because blogs about books are an excellent way to discover great books without wasting your valuable time on the bad ones. Check out these blogs that are all dedicated to reviewing books.

For all of you Dan Brown haters and those who love his "so bad it's good" books ...

Quoted: Dan Brown is a real living author. His book The Da Vinci Code sold more than 81 million copies....The Lost Symbol is actually the title of Dan Brown’s new novel, not a parody title invented to make fun of how similar all of his novels are. It sold 1 million copies on its first day in stores....All references to Dan Brown and his work in this Reading Room are accurate. The sentences excerpted from The Lost Symbol were actually written by Dan Brown.

It's fascinating to think about the surroundings of some of these science fiction pioneers and what they were able to imagine.

Quoted: H.G. Wells was born 143 years ago today, into the steam-powered, horse-driven England of 1866—the same year the easy-open tin can was patented and a year before dynamite...Yet Wells, often called the father of science fiction, produced an explosive array of ideas and inventions that are now staples of the genre and, in some case, everyday items—including time travel, lasers, invisibility, interplanetary war, wireless communications, and answering machines.