The Cheat Sheet

blue-skies-bright-eyes:

I want a room in my house to be like this…

Why hello there, bookshelfporn. (via @GrahamDavidA)

[A]ny memoir that is ghost written will very likely turn out to be, with a very few notable exceptions, dead as a doornail, and hardly worth reading. If a movie star isn’t going to sit down to write his or her own book, the hell with it.

Former publisher Michael Korda laments the fact that the memoirs of Hollywood’s greats are usually quite dull, especially if their ghost-written. 

Photo: Laurence Olivier, whose memoir Confessions of an Actor was “carefully managed to avoid baring any of his soul.”

imwithkanye:

Bill Clinton and Mindy Kaling pick their must-have books of the holiday season. Upon reviewing Clinton’s list, Mindy said she would have chosen more “PhD-friendly books.” That’s just silly…

Watch the clip (and hear Ann Curry say ‘semen’) and check out their book selections below:

Mindy Kaling’s list

1. “11/22/63” By Stephen King
2. “Bossypants” By Tina Fey 
3. “Lady Gaga X Terry Richardson” By Lady Gaga and Terry Richardson 
4. “My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness”  By Gwyneth Paltrow 
5. “Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty” By Andrew Bolton
6. “The Girl in the Green Raincoat: A Tess Monaghan Novel” By Laura Lippman 
7. “The Marriage Plot: A Novel” By Jeffrey Eugenides 
8. “Look I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany” By Stephen Sondheim
9. “The Art of Fielding” By Chad Harbach 
10. “What to Wear, Where: The How-to Handbook for Any Style Situation” By Hilary Kerr and Katherine Power

Bill Clinton’s list  

1. “Jerusalem” By Simon Sebag Montefiore 
2. “Lincoln” By David Herbert Donald
3. “Meditations” By Marcus Aurelius 
4. “The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century” By David Fromkin
5. “The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes” By Seamus Heaney 
6. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” By Adam Hochschild
8. “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” By Robert Wright 

Today in Brilliant Programming Pairings.

PS. If nothing listed above is doing it for you, here’s our Holiday Book Gift Guide.

literaryflack:

Great night — Joan really opened up and told wonderful stories.

vintageanchor:

Joan Didion (with Sloane Crosley) last night at the New York Public Library: “I don’t write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.”

“I have to write to understand.”

UPDATE: Video of Crosley and Didion’s hour-long conversation. 

(Source: vintageanchorbooks)

firstbook:

Our friends at Random House Children’s Books have generously agreed to donate one brand-new book for each new follower we gain on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter this week. Those books will go to thousands of schools and programs serving kids from low-income families across the country.

Please Re-blog!

To learn more about First Book, please visit: www.firstbook.org

“Let’s do this, Internet.”

newsweek:

Here’s the pic we sent in for BuzzFeed’s Awesome Stacks Of Books Found In Offices post. This is, quite honestly, the tip of the iceberg.

Although these are credited as ours. We = you! You = us! Those are our books.

Exclusive sneak peek of Michele Bachmann’s new book cover.

newsweek:

An infographic of every book President Obama has read since the last campaign. (Click here to see it in full size.)

hmacg:

FINALLLLLLLLLY!!!! I HAVE IT!!! 

If you’re a George R.R. Martin fan, today is a BIG DAY. After six years, the latest installment in the series is finally in bookstores. Jace Lacob reviewed it last week and called it “a taut and relentless masterpiece that reaffirms the reader’s obsession with the panoply of unforgettable characters that Martin has created.”