DEBlog

Herodotus infiltrates Amazon

This is all becoming very real! Searching Amazon today I discovered that my book is now available for pre-order. The release date is apparently August 30th, and it's coming out simultaneously in hardcover and paperback. Life is good. Here are the links:

paperback | hardcover (US)
paperback | hardcover (UK)

On posting my 600th book review

Today I posted my 600th book review on book-blog.com. (I posted my first review there--of Richard Russo's Straight Man--on May 28th, 2003.) My reviews have gotten shorter over the years. Sometimes I feel like I just don't have very much to say--particularly with fiction; nonfiction is easier to discuss. And I also prefer reading short reviews myself. But mostly, writing lengthy reviews is a lot of work, and sometimes it feels like too much work. I've sometimes fantasized about writing only very short reviews--tweet-sized reviews--but after nine (9!) years and hundreds of posts it's scary to think about making such a drastic change in the blog's format.

Nonetheless, today I tried something different. I preceded my regular review with a "tweetable review" of the same book. It reads:

3.5* A pleasant memoir about life, knitting, & middle age on a Minnesota sheep farm. The take-away: buy wool undies. amzn.to/K1XzRP

I of course tweeted this, on my @book_blog account. I also experimented by posting this review--or "notice," really--on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/debrahamel/tweetable-books/

It may be that I'll move to super-short notices like this for some of the books I read, those about which I don't have much to say. It would be nice to at least have the option of doing this, so that finishing a book doesn't mean I've got work to do. Reading for fun should be, well, fun. I'm thinking maybe life is too short for long reviews.

It's an audacious romp!

Check out page 32 of JHU Press's fall catalog! It looks quite nice, I must say. You can click on the picture for a bigger view. The full catalogue is available on PDF here.

Herodotus, under cover

There's nothing up on Amazon yet, and the book won't be available until sometime this fall, but information about Reading Herodotus is starting to leak out. For example, if you're crafty, you'll find that the book now has a cover:

Mutilated herms in the UK and around the world

Good news! The paperback version of The Mutilation of the Herms: Unpacking an Ancient Mystery is now listed on both Amazon.co.uk and BookDepository.com. This should make it much easier for people outside the US to get their hands on a copy.

The paperback is also available from Amazon.com and CreateSpace.com. And the Kindle ebook is available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.