Today is Earth Day! Use the library more!

Scanning through the Book section of the New York Times this morning brought me two articles that yielded promising results.  

The first was a review of a new biography on Helen Gurley Brown, former editor of Cosmo for thirty-two years and the author of Sex and the Single Girl (1962). Dubbed the original Carrie Bradshaw for her views, Brown sounds like a fascinating woman who climbed her way to the top by using everything she had available to her.

I also found it interesting that the year she was "gently forced out of the editorship of Cosmopolitan" was the same year I graduated high school.

The second article that caught my eye is about the upcoming print book from Randall Munroe, the genius behind the on line comic strip xkcd.

I love that the author of this article describes the book as "you know, dead trees, ink, no text search, nonadjustable font size."

Also, just for fun: my favorite strip at xkcd.

I'm reading several different accounts of this year's London Book Fair and they all seem to be saying the same thing: just like last year, except smaller.  As cool as I think it would be to go to the London Book Fair (or the Frankfurt Book Fair, etc.), I think that BEA would be a lot more fun.  From everything I've heard about it, it sounds just like Comic Con, except there won't be anyone dressed up like a Wookie.

The fourth book in Diane Peterfreund's Secret Society series, Tap & Gown, comes out at the end of May.  This series has become my perfect start-of-summer book for me; I read the last one, Rites of Spring (Break), on the plane when I moved to New York.

Interesting: British thriller writers mount challenge to US 'production line.' 

An informative post about Judith Krug, the director of the ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom and the founder of Banned Books Week, is up at Blogher.  I have to say that I never once thought about who started Banned Books Week and perhaps I should have.  It's never to late, right?