We’ve reached another blissful Friday, an we in the Bookstr/Reading Room offices can barely contain our energy. To help ourselves get into the spirit a little early, we jumped a chance to make a musical look back at this past week. Celebrating the work that you’ve done while giving it a fond wave from the rear-view window – that’s what the weekends are for, right? This playlist is an ecclectic mix of literature-themed favorites, book-smart tunes and tracks inspired by our articles from the past week. We believe you’ll enjoy this mix as much as you will the weekend! An abridged, annotated …
Jason Aaron Baca is the man of thousands of womens’ dreams, and most likely none of them know his name. The 42-year-old keeps a seemingly unassuming lifestyle: he commutes everyday from his charming Bay Area suburb to his regular 9-to-5 office job. The catch? He’s virtually monopolized the ‘romance book cover model market’. Baca’s decided to start cover modeling nine years ago, and the story is the thing of silver screen dreams. He walked into a bookstore, saw a romance book, and decided to make a change. That was it. From there, he embarked on two journeys that have both separately broken thousands …
Let’s state the obvious for a moment: creative types love paying homage to great works. If done well, it’s a win-win: the original gets more recognition and praise for its genius, and the new work aligns itself with that fame while being able to stand on its own. The most paved route to this is the adaptation, something you’ve already groaned over if you’re aware of any movie from the past 15 years. Book adaptations to stage plays and musicals, however, can go beyond movies, pulling from higher-brow or obscure titles, adding musical complements, and having the attendee feel that …
Charlotte’s Web, the classic children’s novel by E.B. White, turns 64 this month. You may be wary of glamorizing books you read when you were 10, but for us, reading this book felt like a great leap forward. It instilled us with the value of friendship (like most you read in school). Yet there was a candor about the book when it discussed heavy subjects other books sometimes strayed away from: death, specifically losing a friend, feelings of helplessness, and injustice. You could think of Charlotte’s Web as providing the lighthearted, optimistic worldview that To Kill a Mockingbird would shade in for us just …
Publishing has been progressive on many fronts. On the creative side, it’s really making inroads (with a special star given to the comic book world, which is re-contextualizing and empowering minorities left and right). On the business side, it is a strong example of a place where women can be hired and promoted to the top of their industry. Unfortunately, and despite much smoke about the efforts, diversifying the race of the workforce is much like everywhere else – languid. Everyday, we see an article about people in the book world ‘saying what we’ve all been thinking’. Most recently, for example, …
