Books

The three giants of the golden age of science fiction are now gone. Arthur C. Clarke has followed Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov into that unknown territory that all humans eventually travel to but nobody reports back from:

I can hardly wait:

NEW YORK - Eminem is working on a book that's "every bit as raw and uncensored as the man himself," according to his publisher.

Dutton Books, an imprint of The Penguin Group, announced Wednesday that it would be publishing the best-selling rapper's "The Way I Am" this fall.

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Of all that humankind has created, books above all are about who we really are: I am what I read. People who insist on treating books as objects to prove to others who they want them to think they are can just stay out of my life:

Papa gets some brand-new digs:

KETCHUM, Idaho - Ernest Hemingway's final home in this central Idaho mountain town — with its astonishing array of the author's personal possessions — is perhaps the most enigmatic, and certainly the least visited, of the houses the Nobel Prize winner once owned.

Remember the digital divide? How the world was going to be split between those with access to all the new media and the poor, left-behind dunces who would not have access? It turns out that we have a divide involving a much older medium. One in four adult Americans say they did not read a book last year:

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' "

Happy 50th anniversary, "On the Road."

OK, people are turning away from the Old Media to sample new forms of communication. Fine. But do the old media have to keep hurting their own credibility?It turns out you can't even believe The New York Times bestseller list:

A few days late, but a shout-out on the 100th birthday of Robert Heinlein. He is considered somewhat of a godfather of modern libertarianism, so it's approrpriate that he's remembered by Reason magazine:

Uh-oh, millions of kids probably will be upset to hear this:

LONDON, England (AP) -- Author J.K. Rowling said two characters will die in the last installment of her boy wizard series, and she hinted Harry Potter might not survive either.

"I have never been tempted to kill him off before the final because I've always planned seven books, and I want to finish on seven books," Rowling said Monday on TV in London.

I know it's so customary to slam other people's success that any attempt at it seems suspicious, but I confess that my reaction to "The Da Vinci Code" was the same as this: