Be Still My Beating Heart!

I cannot tell you all how excited I am about this website! It's been bookmarked in my Favorites page for well over a month now, and I wanted to write about it the minute I came across it but I could never seem to find the right words to express my deep love. But like a secret romance I can't keep it to myself any longer. I have to tell somebody! And who better than the sassy, smart bibliophiles of UL, right?!

Feast your eyes on The Book Cover Archive. Seriously. This site is a visual cornucopia of amazing book covers of all genres of literature. Just as Melissa mentioned being taken by a book based on it's cover with just one glance, so is the intention of this website: to grab your eye's attention for a book by featuring covers that dazzle, inspire, and provoke. Once you're in then the enlightenment can begin. The website itself is built with a great aesthetic that allows you to view a full page of colorful book covers and then click on any one to get more detailed information about that particular title. Be prepared to set up a special folder where you can store dozens of images of books you plan to track down via Amazon or Barnes & Noble later on. (I know I have already ;) I would love to post an image of the site's homepage here, but my computer's screen shot feature is currently out of commission. But here's a sneak peek at what kind of cover designs are featured.

I thought you might like that ;)

Nicole

Lifestyle Gumbo: Celebs as Literary Figures, Hot or Not?

I ran across this slideshow from StyleList that pits modern day celebs as classic literary heroines. Here are my favorite looks from the shoot:

[Sienna Miller as Natasha from Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace]

[Marcia Cross as Marguerite from Alexandre Dumas' La Dame aux Camélias]

[Emily Blunt as Gwendolyne from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest]

The campaign benefits Montblanc's "Signature for Good" campaign.

-- Whitney

Photos by Roger Moeniks for Montblanc

I Love a Good Gem!

Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me
Alice Pung

Ok, UL world, I have a confession to make...ready? I am...a book cover judger. Yes, I will pick up a classic, and few new books on the block but I can't leave the library (yes library, I'm a student on a budget) without a random selection that simply caught my eye. With this being my tv-free week, (I encourage you all to try it sometime) I picked up this striking orange beauty and flipped to the back.


A quick glance and I learn about a family fleeing the Cambodian killing fields in search of the Australian dream. Wow, Oz, I've been there, never heard anyone call it the "Australian dream" though. I better read on. So I opened the intro and found:

"In 1980, my father, mother, grandmother, and Auntie Kieu arrived in Australia by airplane. They arrived with one suitcase. There was nothing in the suitcase, and the only person who was carrying a heavy load was my mother, because she was eight months pregnant with me."

I don't know about you, but I was intrigued. I was all the more inspired when I saw that the author is a young 28 and her story about being a second-generation immigrant is garnering much acclaim. Check it out.

~Melissa

And just a quick survey, am I the only one who judges books by their covers?

Oh, Zadie

[Zadie, clutching one of her books]

We're Sorry! Okay, I just wanted to get that out of the way before I commence to posting. We (as in the fabulously bookish/ridiculously busy bookworms of this blog) have completely neglected our project in favor of other delights, like starting new jobs, going to school, moving, and overall conquering the world.

So anyway, I hope that we'll be back to regular reading + posting glory soon, but until then I just wanted to quickly draw your attention to a Mrs. Zadie Smith. If you don't know Zadie, you definitely should. She's a young, biracial British author who's three novels have all been considered new classics. I've been trying to read her latest On Beauty for about a year now but always seem to get distracted. My sister (Miss Sweet Jones on The Real 7) read it and raved about it.

[On Beauty, by Zadie Smith]

Anyway, she is mentioned in a recent Guardian article about upcoming writers that actually live up to the hype. How often does that happen?

Maybe a new, fresh voice is just what we UL girls need to kickstart our book club?

-- Whitney