The Star Trib did an interesting piece on children’s author and illustrator Wanda G

The Lord of the Rings fun continues as Sean Astin, who played Samwise Gamgee, releases his new book, There and Back Again: An Actor’s Tale. You can read the first chapter on theonering.net, which includes the story of Peter Jackson mentioning the b-movie Icebreaker, which starred Sean Astin.

The excerpt centers a lot on Astin’s journey as an actor, which gives you an inside glimpse at the not-so glamorous world of Hollywood. But a quick glance at the reviews on Amazon isn’t very encouraging.

The New York Times on the rise of Christian chick-lit, predictably a few years behind the mainstream.

But apparently it’s not the author’s fault: one writer penned a church-friendly chick-lit novel four years ago but her agent couldn’t sell it. Now with chick-lit a mainstream phenomenon, the book was an easy sell.

DC Comics is messing with the formula, killing off a superhero’s wife in the new seven-part series, “Identity Crisis.” The plotline has some fans up in arms, but DC defends the move, citing the need to explore further depth in otherwise stoic characters.

The story involves the murder and rape of the Elongated Man’s wife, and the fallout among the superheroes as some are indirectly involved and others unjustly punish the wrong suspect. It’s a tragedy that deals in guilt and redemption rather than traded blows and one-liners.

I stumbled across another quality book worth reading while curled up in a chair at Barnes & Noble. This time it’s actor Wil Wheaton’s latest book, Just a Geek. For those of you who don’t know, Wheaton played the teenage Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and has spent the last 15 years trying to get past that distinction.

The book (at least the 60 pages or so I read today) is his honest struggle with moving beyond Star Trek. Though he’s not afraid of profanity or fantasizing about Hooters’ waitresses, he’s pretty funny. The whole things started when Wheaton put together his own web site and started blogging. Yep, in a nutshell it’s another blogger with a book deal. But you have to admit that title is enticing.

Minneapolis has been declared the most literate city in the U.S. in a study examining the country’s largest 79 cities. St. Paul came in at a respectable 16th.

In the past several weeks I’ve read the three fattest Harry Potter books, The Prizoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, and The Order of the Phoenix. In all three cases I read them in a matter of days (less than three), and I think in every case much faster than I read them the first time around.

It started after seeing the movie of The Prisoner of Azkaban and feeling a bit let down. It was a decent movie (much better than the other Potter flicks), but the story was just too complex for a two hour movie. So I reread the book to renew my appreciation for what has become my favorite Harry Potter book.

Continue reading Why I Like Harry Potter →

Slate on the explosion of child authors, including Christopher Paolini (wrote Eragon at 15), Flavia Bujor (The Prophecy of the Stones became a bestseller in France and Germany the year she turned 14) and the late Mattie Stepanek (five volumes of Heartsongs have sold half a million copies; he died at 13 from a rare form of muscular dystrophy).

The New York Times Magazine gives a long (7,000+ words) look at graphic novels (registration required). The piece ponders whether or not the graphic novel will replace the normal, word-based novel as the next great literary form, the way the novel replace poetry once upon a time. It’s a toss-up at this point, though their growing popularity — and floor space in major bookstores — is worth noticing.

McSweeney’s Quarterly even dedicated a recent issue to comics. (Comics? Comic books? Graphic novels? What’s the difference? Comics are typically the multipanel stories you’ll find in the newspaper. Comic books are typically multipanel stories stretched out into a small magazine. Graphic novels take the multipanel story and stretch it into a novel. That’s my horribly inadequate definition, though there’s a lot of overlap. The issue of McSweeney’s is edited by graphic novelist Chris Ware and features many other graphic novelists.)