Book News, In Brief

The American Book Review has just released their list of the 100 Best Last Lines From Novels. When you're done with that, check out their previous list -- the 100 Best First Lines.

The LATimes lays the smackdown on lying memoirists past, present and future. The author of the piece -- a memoirist, herself -- then goes on to talk about her experience with publishers: they never asked for any proof that what she'd written was true, nor did they ever hire an attorney to check things over.

Via: The Independent: "It’s every author’s worst nightmare: what would you do if the book you’d so carefully written was accidentally deleted? Anna Pavord had to face such a crisis. But as she discovered, she’s not the first writer to be cruelly separated from her work." (For the full story, click here.)

Via The School Library Journal: "The average book in New York public school libraries is between 21 to 25 years old, and current state aid isn’t keeping up with the cost of books, leading to the unacceptable aging of collections, says a new report by the New York Library Association."
So what. A good book is timeless, right? Wrong.
"Borges also points to several outdated books recently pulled off the shelves of some public school libraries, including The First Book of Science Experiments, published in 1952, and Soviet Society Today, released in 1989."
Yikes.
(For the full story, click here.)