BOOK NEWS
Oprah “stunned” dad will write bio of her
Oprah Winfrey said she was “stunned” to learn her father plans to write a book about her.
“I was upset. I won’t say devastated, but I was stunned,” Winfrey told New York’s Daily News.
Winfrey said she laughed when one of her assistants told her the newspaper was calling to ask about a book her father Vernon Winfrey was writing.
Winfrey was living with her mother in Milwaukee when she was sent as a young teen to live with her father in Nashville. She previously has credited him for imposing discipline on her.
Vernon Winfrey told, “There is no book.” The alleged book title is “Things Unspoken,” according to the newspaper. | The Associated Press
Play books “market”
Can crowds predict a book’s success?
That is the hope of the founders of Media Predict (MediaPredict.com), a virtual market, and Simon & Schuster, a publisher that plans to select a book proposal based on bets placed by traders in the new market.
Media Predict is soliciting book proposals from agents and the public and posting pages of them on the site. Traders, who are given $5,000 in fantasy cash, can buy shares based on their guess about whether a proposal is likely to get a deal or whether the publisher will select it as a finalist. If either happens in a four-month period, the values of the shares goes to $100 each; if not, the share price falls to zero. | The New York Times
FIRST LINE
Once Around the Track | Sharon McCrumb
Have you found him yet?’ The voice on the cell phone was shrill and insistent, but then it always was, even for the most trivial of messages. Clients were notoriously impatient people, and she billed them accordingly.
Suzie Terrell looked out her windshield at the kudzu-covered hillside overlooking a ramshackle collection of buildings that could hardly be called a town. Next to the narrow concrete bridge spanning what was surely nothing more than a creek was a battered tin sign, emblazoned with checkered flags and bearing the bullet-riddled legend: ‘Marengo, Georgia: Home of Badger Jenkins, Winner of the Southern 500.’
“I think I’m on the last lap,” she said wearily, and clicked off the phone.”
MOST BORROWED
Fiction, from libraries
1. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter | Kim Edwards
2. Step on a Crack | James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge
3. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan | Lisa See
4. Nineteen Minutes | Anita Shreve
5. Eldest | Christopher Paolini
Library Journal
