The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Thoughts)

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

This is a literary fantasy set in the Barcelona of the 1920s and 1930s. David Martin the main character walks the line between heaven and hell. His life is one of loneliness and darkness haunted by the bad pulp novels he writes.

This book has a wonderful sense of the symbolic. The main character lives in a tower house whose previous inhabitants have all suffered terrible fates. The villain, Andreas Corelli, has piercing eyes and wears a lapel pin in the shape of an angel. There is a nice sense of contradiction as well. David's father who is shot to death in an alley is given a heroic funeral.

The work he is commissoned to write by Andreas Corelli will damn him no matter what he does. It is through the power of literature he is saved. My favorite scene in the novel is where he is taken by a bookstore owner to the cemetery of forgotten books. The description reminds me of old library storage stacks.

This book very much reminds me of the fantastic side of books. Bibliophiles will like the literary allusions. The Angel's Game is well worth reading.

Daily Thoughts 7/14/2009 ( Collection Development )

Jack Vance, the science fiction writer, with a banjo and a kazoo, photograph taken by Hayford Peirce

Daily Thoughts 7/14/2009

Today was an excellent day. I finished reading The Angels Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It is an excellent literary novel and a nice train read. I will be writing a review shortly.

I read my usual Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and New York Times Book Review. I am going through and selecting new titles to order. I have been taken off of doing the law collection and am now being asked to focus solely on collection development and management in the main collection. We are discussing the idea of building special collections and doing more bookmarks, flyers, and other promotional material.

We are working on designing a new label for the graphic novels. Pretty soon we will be merchandising the graphic novels collection as well. I am looking forward to seeing this done.

I am going to be going through the collection tomorrow and checking for books to be mended and those which need covers replaced. We have a man from Ghana who is coming to pick up some of our deaccessioned books to be sent abroad to Ghana. They badly need books. I found this to be very interesting.

I read some more of Say Everything on the way home. It already has a bit of interesting history of the internet, the author is writing about Justin Hall and Wired magazine as part of the founding of the blogging phenomenon.

I also did some floor exercises while watching popeye. It was a nice break from thinking a lot about books.

Daily Thoughts 7/12/2009 ( Twitterers at the American Library Association )

Vladimir Nabokov's Scrabble Board

Daily Thoughts 7/12/2009

I am still reading Marketing Without Advertising. There is a blog which goes with the book, http://phillips.blogs.com/mwa It gives lots of tips on how to market your business without using advertisements.

I have started reading The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. There is a lot about writing in this novel as well as excellent use of symbolism.

Web Bits

Based on the Book-- Movies based on books.http://www.mcpl.lib.mo.us/readers/movies/

Library Website Hall of Fame from Library Success Wikihttp://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Website_Design

Microbloggers (Twitter) at the American Library Associaton Conference. http://wikis.ala.org/annual2009/index.php/Microblogging_Annual There is a virtual conference for the American Library Association, but it costs money-- $215 to look at the virtual sessions. I think I will stick to looking at blogs on the conference and reading Twitter.

Daily Thoughts 7/10/2009 ( Small Press Distributors)

book wall at House of the Book in the city of Leipzig/Buchwand im Haus des Buches in Leipzig

Daily Thoughts 7/10/2009

I spent some time looking at http://www.spdbooks.org/ Small Press Distributors which is a nonprofit organization focused on distributing small press titles. Many of the titles are unique and high quality. There is a lot of poetry here, especially modern fiction and poetry. Some of it is experimental and would never be distributed by large publishing houses or book distributors.

I also spent a little bit of time looking at the New Releases section of the Mysterious Bookshop. They include a few espionage novels which look quite interesting. http://www.mysteriousbookshop.com/?page=shop/browse&category_id=21&CLSN_2723=12472333322723e70ee980e4654b4b63

Today was another fairly busy day. I used the content of my postcard on ebooks to redo it as a flyer which should look very interesting. I also did a display of some of our rare books from storage. Some of them are quite interesting. We have a first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica which is interesting to look at. We also added some more baskets for the nonfiction area of our slat walls. I am still doing some evaluation of the 700s.

I picked up two books to read this weekend, Marketing Without Advertising Easy Ways to Build a Business Your Customers Will Love & Recommend by Michael Phillips & Sally Rasberry and The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Both look like very interesting books.