Good Afternoon

Ivan Kramskoy. Portrait of Leo Tolstoy. 1873. Oil on canvas. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Good Afternoon

Today was another half day. I read a bunch of magazines, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. It was mostly typical material. I also prepared some more orders to go out for different kinds of books. It went fairly smoothly. On P.19, December 22, 2008 in Publishers Weekly, there is an article about Sony ebooks. Apparently, they sold 300,000 Sony ebook readers this year. The e-ink technology is changing the way ebooks are being read. There are still no figures for the Amazon Kindle ebook reader that have come out. But, this means there are going to be a lot more ebooks produced. Apparently Oprah Winfrey has come out in support of the Kindle ebook reader.

We have the new agreement for film permisions to show movies during the next year. There will be Sunday matinees coming up for family films. There also will probably be young adult films as well. Also, everything is in place in the calendar for January- February. I am still wondering about the new brochure being produced.

I had a chance to read some more of Spunk & Bite. The book is about how to improve your expressiveness and descriptive phrases so far. For example, you might say cerulean blue, or create a surprising phrase like tiny hamhanded man, or chocolate brown notebook, or savage hamster. There are reminders about style and diction. I try to keep my diction my own, not high handed or high minded in the least.

I find something particularly annoying about thesauri. It reminds me of teenage vocabularly building books. I often think it is more important to make your children read the classics to improve vocabulary than rely on pedantic lists of prosaic words. The best way to improve ones vocabulary is to read constantly. I read the advertisements on the subways, the contents of food packages (one of the main ingredients in many brands of bread these days is high fructose corn syrup), newspapers, the internet, community bulletin boards, and many other things.

The Society of Midnight Wanderers is no more. Psalms From The Wilderness http://jdrbeaudoin.wordpress.com/ told me it had gone defunct. It is one of the first places that I had posted a book review outside of my blog.

I am thinking of putting a list of links to favorite authors on my blog in the sidebar. Could you tell me if you would like this? It is something I have been thinking of for a while.