trolling the net for book news

Here's an interesting interview with Julia Cameron, author of the now classic inspirational book for artists, The Artist's Way. The interview with the author is by Jay MacDonald for BookPage, one of the online book sites I have bookmarked.
Another literary blog worth looking at is Critical Mass written by reviewers, writers, editors etc associated with the National Book Critics Circle.
These critics do the surfing and slogging through piles of books and websites to come up with the good stuff. For example: todays post by John Freeman mentions the book, How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years by Kaye Ballard. A great title, but I can't vouch for the book.
The NBCC blog led me to Words Without Borders online book groups which has a schedule of non-American authors to read and discuss over the next few months. The invitation or introduction to this new venture funded by the New York Council of the Humanities, says,
"As beach season approaches, are all your friends reading the Da Vinci Code rather than Dubravka Ugresic? Tired of the same six titles on display at the store and want some recommendations on what to read next? Looking for a few, cool people to talk about the newest titles from the international scene? If so, join in the Words without Borders book clubs starting May 15, 2006."
Critical Mass also leads to a Washington Post interview with mystery writer Donna Leon.
If you enjoy Leon's books based in Venice, you will be interested in this. If you don't read her books and are looking for a good mystery series set in an interesting locale, you might want to give these a try.
Here is a link to a website that lists all the books that are available free on the internet in full text. Here is the description of the site:
"The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all."
"The Online Books Page was founded, and is edited, by John Mark Ockerbloom, He is a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He is solely responsible for the content of the site."
All of the books listed on the site have either copyright permission to do so or are in the public domain. Most people probably don't want to read a book on their computer, but with a little techno-savvy, the books could be loaded to a PDA (I guess.)
And finally for today, a link to a site that has nothing to do with books that I found in my bookmarks, Japanese(initially called Chinese) Watermelon carving. Just click and take a look, it's unbelievable what can be done to a melon, isn't it?