Tom Carter’s CHINA: Portrait of a People captures diversity of 33 Chinese provinces



Beijing, China – As the 2008 Summer Olympics commence, all eyes are on China. But far from being the celebration envisaged by Chinese leaders, the first six months of 2008 have seen unrest in Tibet, worldwide protests against the Olympic torch and the devastating earthquake in Sichuan.

This attention has raised new curiosity: Who are the Chinese? How do they live, work and play? How much do we really know about the 1.3 billion people who inhabit this vast country?

I used a variety of objects (i.e., boarding passes, fancy store-bought bookmarks, flowers) to bookmark my books, but after meeting my hubby my bookmarking habits changed.  Jason keeps his books in somewhat pristine condition and doesn't use bookmarks fearing that the bookmarks would ruin the binding of the books.  I'm glad I've been broken of this habit.  Apparently, many people forget their "bookmarks" in their books, give the books away and potentially lose something very valuable. 

AbeBooks.com has put together an interesting article on the things they have discovered inside books by AbeBooks.com booksellers.  You will not believe some of the strange and priceless things they found. 

Have you ever forgotten anything in your books?  Share it in the comments.

Link [via]

Read at Work is a website that lets you get away with reading at work by disguising various literary classics as 'Powerpoint' presentations.  Instead of procrastinating on Facebook, catch up on your reading.  Link.

"My Beautiful Mommy" is a children's picture book written by Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a board-certified plastic surgeon, where a mom explains to her daughter why she is having cosmetic surgery done.  Link [via]

I definitely foresee this book winning the Caldecott Medal.

Designer Lucy Norman uses unwanted used books to create attractive chandeliers. 

The World of Books.com sell second hand books which they receive from the British Heart Foundation charity. 25% of the books they receive cannot be sold as no-one will buy them, which is approximately 10,000 a week. Presently these books have to be land filled which is costly and detrimental to the environment.  These wasted books are used to create an attractive chandelier.  Every page of the book is folded in half, producing a circular arrangement which hangs around a ceiling light.

This past Christmas Zachary received "My Little Blue Robot" by Stephen T. Johnson from his grandparents.  It's a hands-on book that your 3- to 7-year-olds -- and even you -- will just love.  Follow the directions on each page, pull out the cardboard parts of the robot, "screw" the robot parts together, and by the end your kiddo will have his very own walking and talking robot!

Zachary loves this book and has even named his robot "Marty".  Attempts to take "Marty" apart and put him back into the book ends in tears, which definitely means this present was a winner.  I love this book because it's both a fun and educational project to do with my son. 

Even if you don't have any kids or they are all grown, you should still check out this book.  It will bring out the kid in you.

Books by Stephen T. Johnson:
My Little Blue Robot - Amazon.com
My Little Red Toolbox - Amazon.com
My Little Yellow Taxi - Amazon.com

You shouldn't have a problem locating the libraries in Cardiff and Kansas City. 

The exterior of the Cardiff library is only temporary until the building is completed, however, the "novel" exterior of Kansas City's library carpark is permanent.  Link.

Stephen Hawking is determined to turn kids onto science fiction so he has written a trilogy called George's Secret Key to the Universe specifically for your future nerds and nerdettes. 

"Our aim is to make real science as exciting as science fiction," Hawking said.

Lucy Hawking, a journalist and writer, told the press conference that one of her father's common refrains was, "That's too much science fiction, we do science fact."

Rowling has revealed that she is currently working on two projects -- a book for children and another for adults -- and neither are a continuation of the Harry Potter series. 

But she said that she expected to drop one of the projects - as happened when she wrote Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone, the first in the Hogwarts’ series.

"The weird thing is that this is exactly the way I started writing Harry," she said.

"I was writing two things simultaneously for a year before Harry took over. So one will oust the other in due course, and I’ll know that’s my next thing," she tells USA Today in an interview to promote Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the series published last weekend.

With a fortune estimated at more than £500 million, Rowling is now so successful that she does not need to write for her bank manager or her publishers - only for her own satisfaction. But it is tantalising for her fans.

She always maintained that Harry Potter would end after seven books. But, asked recently whether she would reconsider, she unexpectedly said: "Never say never." She has also talked about writing a Hogwarts encyclopaedia.

I have yet to look over my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, but I'm not so sure I would return it if pages turned up missing.

Apparently, Harry Potter fans have found pages missing.  Some have exchanged their copies and others have decided to keep their incomplete publications as a piece of history.

Officials at Scholastic said that with such a massive printing — 8.3 million copies of the final installment of J.K. Rowling's fantasy series sold in the first 24 hours — a handful of problems was probably unavoidable.

"Printing and distributing 12 million copies of a book is a Herculean task, and it is not surprising that some books would have printing errors," Scholastic spokeswoman Sara Sinek said in a statement.

She said that as of Tuesday, the company had only heard of "a few hundred" instances of books with missing pages.

Sinek said Scholastic is happy to replace any book with a defect and advised customers to take defective books back to the place where they were purchased.