QUILLBLOG

Too many prizes, book club picks, and more

• Are there too many literary prizes? Richard Whitehead at the Times weighs the Booker against the rest.

• According to Indigo Books & Music, “Book Clubs are the New Dinner Party.” Indigo has released a list of Canadian-authored book club recommendations. The list includes: DeNiro’s Game by Rawi Hage, Inside Out Girl by Tish Cohen, The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, and The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. As an added bonus, Indigo provides a few tips for creating a stellar book club ambiance – because you can’t read if you don’t have aromatherapy candles and dark chocolate biscuits. Next on the agenda: using books as coasters at your next theme party.

• Google has expanded its Book Search tool, allowing retailers, publishers, and anyone with a website to embed books from the Google Book Search index.  This means that there are now more ways for users to search through a book, similar to what one might do in a bookstore. With a real book.