LITERANISTA Dialogue on Multicultural Books, Tech & Life

Literanista November 13, 2008

Gee, where does the time go? It really does seem to fly by the older you get or perhaps it’s just the busier you are, the more you wish you had more time.

I’m already being asked to bring pumpkin pie to my mom’s for our Thanksgiving feast and getting inquiries into what I want Santa to bring me. It’s both sweet and anxiety-causing. I long for the days when Christmas started after Thanksgiving and not after Halloween. I do understand how much planning helps especially in terms of getting good deals but I’ve never been one to stock on the gifts throughout the year. Mostly when I do that I just end forgetting all about the stuff hidden somewhere in the outer reaches of my exploding closet.

This year with economy being what it is I’m hearing a lot of buzz about giving books as gifts. Personally, I’ve always given books as gifts, especially for the little ones and I’ve always enjoyed getting too, from the loaded bn.com gift cards I’ve received from my sister and coworkers to the beautiful Jack in the Beanstalk book I got from my aunt in nursery school.

A couple of brilliant book bloggers have joined forces to promote holiday book gift-giving and launched www.buybooksfortheholidays.com.

A couple of youngsters of my list are getting The Twilight Saga Collection By Stephenie Meyer, which I’m currently reading myself. I decided to the vampire series a try after becoming so fixated with True Blood and I can truly say I’m glad I’m reading it and not the Charlaine Harris books, which might interfere with the show’s story lines or so I’m told. Twilight has completely sucked me in and just in time too since the movie version is due out on Dec. 12th.

Last Tuesday, I even ran into Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward in the film. It was sort of funny while we were standing in front of the theater waiting to enter to see The Lion King, he emerged from an SUV and the young girls next to us went bizerk. I thought it was Justin Timberlake so I got all excited to and then when I saw him, I had no idea who he was, just goes to show how out of it I am. The next day when I saw pictures of him from the night before I was thoroughly pleased to have seen in the flesh. I can’t wait to see the film.

Since, I haven’t posted in ages, it seems like I might be posting once a week now, I have tons of tidbits to share:

– Does anyone have the ability to ‘taste’ anesthesia and other chemicals that have been injected into their bodies? I had a bit of anesthesia recently and then a flu shot last week and both times I was able to taste the chemical residue and even smell when I took a deep breath afterwards. Very weird!

– There was a great article on Latino Literary Venues posted today in the Daily News and the also have a review of Sistah Souljah’s follow up to The Coldest Winter Ever, Midnight.

– The Independent Booksellers of NYC have a great new blog to check out: ibnyc.wordpress.com

– The Bronx Museum of the Arts launched a first-Wednesday-of-the-month book signing, and though not focusing on Latino titles, it kicked off last week with Bronx-based authors Américo Casiano Jr. and Marta Moreno-Vega.

– You can now buy skins for your Sony Readers at proporta via www.shinyshiny.tv

– Sprint launched an ultra shiny, web2.0 site for widgets and apps: now.sprint.com/widget, totally dope!

– Woo hoo! Libreria Lectorum Opens Online Store. This will make my mom really happy, she loved this store.

– Search Books on Cellphones via Google blog post

– Who knew you could make pernil in a slow cooker? www.williams-sonoma.com

– Essay on the deep communion of reading books v. the Web via LAT

– The third annual NYC Latin American Cultural Week is taking place November 5th-21st. For more information: www.pamar.org/lacwnyc and Pinta 08, the NYC Modern and Contemporary Latin American art fair, takes place November 13-16th. For more Information: http://www.pintaart.com/.

– Amazon picked their top 100 books for the year, PW also picks their best books of the year.

– There’s a new educational film kit available from Teaching Tolerance called Viva La Causa.

– Obama campaign parallels Hispanic political novel written in 2006