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The San Jose Mercury News asked local luminaries to share memories of the first book they fell in love with:
"East of Eden
by John Steinbeck," said police chief Rob Davis. "You've got this
allegory, for lack of a better word, for the battle between good and
evil and how they intersect and why some people become evil because of
their insecurities."
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
was the one for San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Darrell Jackson, who
said, "Back in the day when you still had a lot of racism in society,
you had a white lawyer who defended a black defendant in the Southern
states. As a young, black man, you grow up hearing a lot about
injustices and people who were wrongly convicted of crimes just because
they were a minority race. The book allowed me to put these types of
issues into perspective."
Santa Clara county sheriff Laurie Smith chose The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Even though the Mercury News
expressed surprise at the choice of "a book about trumped up charges
and getting back at people," Smith called the book "a
study in people, but the underlying theme really was revenge. It speaks
nothing to how I am as a person."
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"I'm a tourist and I write like a tourist," John Grisham, bestselling author of, most recently, Playing for Pizza, said in an article about Italy's recent popularity as a popular setting for novels. Reuters
reported that "since 2000, 274 novels by foreign authors and set in
Italy have been published, more than twice the number in the 1990s as a
whole, according to a study of book reviews by Italy's International
Tourism Exchange, an industry group."
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The Costa Book Awards, formerly known as the Whitbread Awards and recognizing books by writers in the U.K. and Ireland, have chosen five finalists in each of five categories. For more information, click here.
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The Book Industry Group has clarified its policy on the elimination of dual identifiers on books and related products. For further clarification, click here.