Issue of December 25, 2011

We at BiblioBuffet wish all of our readers a fond and wonderful holiday season! Take care, and we will see you in the New Year.

Lauren Roberts sends lots of holiday greetings to BiblioBuffet’s wonderful readers in this, the last issue of 2011 in Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Books aren’t created to be bad, but sometimes they are. Pete Croatto explores the common factors that make up bad sports-related books—what readers should lo0k for—and how authors can avoid them so readers don’t have to avoid them, in The Architecture of a Terrible Sports Book.

Cool books that are more than one hundred years old? Yes, indeed. Gillian Polack reached out far and wide in her search for authors, writers, and readers who have deep feelings for old books that still light the flame of passion within them in Beloved Books.

Biographers often tread tricky pathways in their research, and one of the most touchy of all can be relatives who have also become “keepers of the flame.” Carl Rollyson’s background work on his upcoming biography of poet Sylvia Plath has him feeling the bludgeon of Ted Hughes and others, a process he describes in Proprietary Biography.

Issue of December 18, 2011

We wish all of our readers a peaceful, calm, and safe holiday season; nothing is worth your health and peace of mind. Therefore, we encourage you to make time for yourself, and live only up to your expectations.

Only a few more days of holiday shopping remain, and Lauren Roberts shares her final selections of gifts—this time in the price category of $1,000 to near infinity. Join her for the final version of the Literary Gift Guide, Part 5.

For many people, the holiday season means shopping or decorations. For Nicki Leone, it means comfort food, and along with her visiting mom she has been dipping into cookbooks and old family recipes. The result? Food plus Sauerkraut-Inspired Memories.

Bookmarks follow the seasons too, and this week Lauren Roberts re-visits one of the most exquisite of her collection, a marvelous silk beauty used an advertising/memorial device in Compliments of the Season.

There’s a new kid on the JA block: Jane Austen Made Me Do It, an entertaining anthology of new stories inspired by the famed author’s life and work. Lev Raphael reviews it and interviews the witty editor, a well-known Austen blogger in A Jane Austen Christmas.

There’s lots of discussion about the evolution of books and the e-book in particular. But what do you suppose might have happened to bedtime reading before the last revolution—the one from which the modern day codex is derived—took place? Elizabeth Creith fantasizes, then gives thanks for today’s versions in Midnight Rambles.

Holidays mean get-togethers with challenging family members who provoke “a roll of the eyes, a sigh, and a groan” rather than best wishes. Katherine Hauswirth finds company in the month of crazy in two books, a novel and a memoir that show “how perhaps in many families there is some silver lining alongside the lunatic fringe” in The Crazy Streak.

That favorite Christmas poem, The Night Before Christmas has taken a bit of a twist in Lauren Roberts’ hands becoming with Santa and his “reindeer” making an appearance in ‘Twas That Night Before Christmas.

Issue of December 11, 2011

I imagine most people are now feeling the holiday season. What they feel is entirely individual, but it is to be hoped that at least some, and maybe most, of the feelings are positive ones. Happy holidays!

The past—be it the Middle Ages or 1692—spawned enormous advances in science, art, literature, and more, advances that in fact bring us to today. Gillian Polack found three books—all in different genres—that highlight how “we, as readers, begin to understand the people who have gone before” in How We Understand the Past – From Three Directions.

Former boxing champion Joe Frazier is the focus of Pete Croatto’s latest read in Requiem for a Heavyweight. While the book includes his extended relationship with his nemesis, Muhammad Ali, another champion, it is the book and its readers who are the real winners.

Carl Rollyson is sufficiently annoyed by the latest awarding of the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Biography to Keith Richards that he beats up the writers’ colony that was born of the writer and provides the prize in this biting, honest warning to readers of biography in Accept No Substitutes.

Gifts and more gifts. Lauren Roberts has the fourth in her guide to bookish gifts, this one focusing on those in the price range of $500-$1,000 (along with a selection of literary hotels) in Literary Gift Guide, Part 4.

Issue of December 4, 2011

In this week’s issue, we have lots of fabulous reading for you. From an interview with the author of a new book on 1970s skyjacker D.B. Cooper to holiday shopping suggestions to recommendations of several outstanding books. It’s all here. Get a cup of hot tea and join us.

Nicki Leone terms a recent and much beloved book an “allegorical illustration of an allegorical poem,” but also, she notes, “there is more here, more to be heard, more to be learned,” in an intimate way and that’s what she shares in What Enlightenment Looks Like.

What does the word “home” actually mean? Katherine Hauswirth explores that question within the context of two books that “evoked a true sense of being home” in Where We Find Home.

The theme of Christmas through bookmarks is a nostalgic journey into the world of Art Deco and its stylized art for Laine Farley who shares some of her early twentieth century collection of beauties in Decorama—Holiday Style.

It’s time for Elizabeth Creith to come clean—and she does. Who knew she was a polysyllable whore? Are you one too? Find out in True Confessions.

Forty years later the question still haunts: Who was D.B. Cooper? Guest columnist Mike Yawn talked with the author of a new and impressive account of the crime, the theories, and the possible man in Welcome to Cooperland: An Interview with Geoffrey Gray.

Seeking literary gifts in the $100-$500 range? Lauren Roberts has ‘em—good ones too even if you are just looking—as well as some other fun reading in Literary Gift Guide, Part 3.