In Reference to Murder

National Readathon Day

 

 

On May 21, the American Library Association (ALA) and Penguin Random House will join to support the second annual National Readathon Day, which is dedicated to fostering reading at an early age and building community and participation at local libraries. Last year's effort raised $100,000 for the National Book Foundation and its efforts to deliver books to underserved communities.

The 2016 celebration is part of the ALA’s "Libraries Transform" campaign, and all funds raised will go to benefit the ALA’s "Every Child Ready to Read" initiative, a program that supports early literacy development—from birth to age five—through libraries.

You can help spread awareness of National Readathon Day by using the hashtag #Readathon2016 to spread awareness of the event and sharing how you plan to celebrate. You can also host or attend a Readathon Day party at libraries, schools and community centers, as well as make a contribution to the ALA’s literacy programs.

"There are more library locations in the US than Starbucks, Walmarts and McDonald’s combined," noted Skip Dye, Penguin Random House’s vice president of library marketing and digital sales. Dye added, "The power of the library is to reflect, honor and evolve the communities which they serve. Reading together as a community, as a family, is a power change agent."

To learn more about National Readathon Day, you can visit ReadathonDay.com, and to make a donation you can click here.

Buy a Banned Book!

This is Banned Books Week in the U.S., although the problem of censorship remains a problem throughout the world. Banned Book Week has hundreds of libraries and bookstores around the country drawing attention to the problem by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events. According to the American Library Association, more than 11,300 books have been challenged since 1982, plus there were 311 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2014, with many more going unreported.

How can you help? For one, buy a banned book! The official BBW website has a list of the most-challenged titles of 2014. For a list of the events being held in your area, check this link, organized by state. There are also online events you can participate in, and various resources for more ways you can help in an ongoing fashion and get more information.

As the character of Stephen Hopkins, the representative from Rhode Island to the Continental Congress, declared in the movie 1776, "I've never seen, heard, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn't be talked about. Hell yes, I'm for debating anything!"

Bringing Hope to Children

Authors and publishers are contributing to campaigns to help the Syrian refugees, with a special focus on the children. Young adult authors Patrick Ness, Suzanne Collins and Kenneth Oppel (and many more) in the UK were joined by publishers including HarperCollins, Egmont, and Hachette UK in raising funds for Save the Children. They recently passed the $1 million mark, but are still open to donations via the official fundraising website (donations are accepted in UK pounds, but credit card companies do automatic conversions).

In Canada, children's authors and illustrators, spearheaded by Robin Stevenson and Sarah Harvey, started a campaign for Doctors Without Borders to assist with the children of refugees. In less than two weeks, they reached their goal of raising $20,000, but they are still taking contributions through October 12. Although they are focusing their outreach on the Canadian children's literature community, they stress that anyone is welcome to donate. For more information, check out their site at canadahelps.org.

In the U.S., author Patrick Rothfuss operates the charity Worldbuilders and has set up a campaign for refugees there. You'll have to hurry on that one, since it's only open to donations through tomorrow. Funds will be distributed to Mercy Corps to provide food, clothing, clean water, medical care, and education for children of refugees.

Also in the UK, Benedict Cumberbatch (of the BBC's Sherlock) recorded the intro for a charity single to raise funds for refugees fleeing Syria and other war zones. The single is available for download now from iTunes, and a 7-inch vinyl version will be released September 28 in the United Kingdom, with a previously unreleased B-side. To contribute, you can purchase and download the single, which is a re-release of the Crowded House tune "Help is Coming."

A Database on European Crime Fiction, You Say?

 

Crime fiction is growing in popularity around the world, and the recent burst of Scandinavian crime fiction on the bestseller lists is yet another marker of that growth. So it only makes sense that the academic world is taking notice, spearheaded in Europe by the International Crime Fiction Group based at Queen’s University of Belfast. The group brings together scholars from disciplines such as literature, film studies and cultural history in a series of initiatives to study various aspect of the genre.

Recently, they sponsored a symposium at the British Library titled "Towards a Digital Atlas of European Crime Fiction?", investigating how to harvest the catalogs of the 48 European national libraries to analyze the transnational spread of crime fiction (including books, covers, authors, films, etc.)  with the help of maps and graphs. Hopefully, this will not only help the libraries involved create virtual as well as physical exhibitions based on their collections, including book covers and illustrations, it will benefit crime fiction authors, too, thanks to online resources coming soon.

There's already a strong scholarly crime fiction presence in Europe, including such institutions as the Library of Crime Literature (Bilipo) a Parisian public library exclusively concerned with crime-themed publications (which journalist Brad Spurgeon discusses in this blog post). And, if you happen to be in London early this summer, check out the London exhibition "Forensics: The anatomy of crime" at the Wellcome Collection through June 21.

The Little Free Libraries Need You!

There are more than 25,000 Little Free Libraries in all 50 states and in 75 other countries around the globe. What are Little Free Libraries, you ask? They are neighborhood book exchanges, where free books are housed in small containers and made available to members of the local community (much as the picture above demonstrates).

The Little Free Library concept was begun by Wisconsin's Todd Bol, who mounted a wooden container designed to look like a school house on a post on his lawn as a tribute to his mother, a book lover and school teacher. And now, as the movement celebrates its third birthday, the Little Free Library project has organized a Kickstarter project to help raise funds "to double and deepen our impact and build 50,000 Little Free Libraries by 2017."

With the Kickstarter funds, the group's goals include the following:

• Install hundreds more Little Free Libraries that 'kick start" brighter futures for thousands of children through the power of literacy.
• Water book deserts - rural or urban areas where books are difficult to access or afford.
• Help teachers provide books to their students that they can take home to enjoy and build their reading skills during summer and year-round.
• Provide police departments with Libraries of Understanding that will help them engage with youths and encourage them to read.
• Positively impact at least 100 communities through the power of reading.

The Kickstarter campaign only has eight days left to go and as of this writing, has funded less than half of its relatively modest $50,000 goal. You can make a contribution as little as $3 to help, of if you happen to have a lot of cash on hand, a pledge of $5,000 or more will help sponsor 20 libraries and get your name/logo on plaques on 10 Little Free Libraries.

Indie Bookstore Bash

Last year, the California Bookstore Day celebrating indie bookstores was such a huge success that the project is going bigger in 2015. This Saturday, May 2, Independent Bookstore Day will include 400 indie bookstores across the U.S. participating in the inaugural national event. Meanwhile, our neighbors to the north will be celebrating their first Authors for Indies Day.

The U.S. organizations put it this way as to why they think the event is important:

Independent bookstores are not just stores, they’re community centers and local anchors run by passionate readers. They are entire universes of ideas that contain the possibility of real serendipity. They are lively performance spaces and quiet places where aimless perusal is a day well spent.
 
Indie bookstores, whether dusty and labyrinthine or clean and well-lighted, are not just stores, they are solutions. They hold the key to your love life, your career, and your passions. Walking the aisles of a good bookstore means stumbling upon a novel from India that expands your heart. It’s encountering an art book that changes the direction of your life. It’s the joy of having a perfect stranger steer you toward the perfect book.
 
In a world of tweets and algorithms and pageless digital downloads, bookstores are not a dying anachronism.  They are living, breathing organisms that continue to grow and expand. In fact, there are more of them this year than there were last year. And they are at your service.

 

We are blessed here in the greater Washington D.C. area with several terrific indie bookstores like Mystery Loves Company, One More Page, Politics & Prose and Kramerbooks and Afterwards Cafe. Check out the event website links at the top of this post for the participating bookstores and authors near you and stop by this Saturday. Help support your local stores and your favorite authors at the same time.

#TwitterFiction Festival

Last year, the Association of American Publishers and Penguin Random House partnered to sponsor the second industry-wide #TwitterFiction Festival. What exactly is a Twitter Fiction Festival, you may ask? Pretty much like it sounds, as it turns out. Over the course of five days for twenty-four hours a day, authors like Megan Abbott, Alexander McCall Smith, Brad Meltzer, and Ben H. Winters all created experimental fiction as Tweets (140-character snippets).

The event was so successful, it's back again this year from May 11-15, where authors will share their text, photos, and/or videos during a scheduled daily time slot to live-stream their work. Invited participants this year include Margaret Atwood, Matthew Dunn, Lemony Snicket, and Chuck Wendig. But anyone can join in, either by entering the competition for aspiring writers (an open call for submissions begins March 2), or joining in at any time and telling your own stories using the #TwitterFiction hashtag.

If you'd like to see the kinds of offerings that might be in store for you this year, check out some of last year's creative works in the mystery category archived via this link. Maybe I'll Tweet you there.

Valentine's Gifts for Crime Fiction Lovers

If you're struggling with ideas for Valentine's Day gifts for your sweetie, and said sweetie happens to be a fan of crime fiction, here are some ideas that just might help. After all, who needs plain, boring chocolate?

Nothing says love like a handgun, or at least a chocolate one. The website chocolateweapons.com has several models to choose from, like this one based on the classic 1911 Colt .45 ACP, a full pound of milk chocolate in its own little carrying case. And if you want, you can add some chocolate ammo.

Or maybe you prefer chocolate handcuffs from The Chocolate Delicacy, boxed with foil wrapped hearts. Because Fifty Shades of Grey, right?


If your beloved is allergic to chocolate, and you have a lot more to spend, why not give a 18k gold plated or rhodium plated curb chain with 18mm rivoli swarovski crystal and a handcuff clasp?



For the budget-minded, this coffee mug will have your lover ready to share a cup of latte with you and possibly quite a bit more.


For a gift that's even a mystery to you, try the Love is Blind Valentine's Day Mystery Box. According to the merchant, it contains a "seriously romantic selection of gifts that are guaranteed to extend your relationship for another 365 days, but it also absolves you of any responsibility because even you don't know what's inside."

For Sherlock fans, you can get a "Sherlock Fan Club Certificate Microscope 221B Baker Street Personalized Sherlock Holmes London England Fan Art Detective Mystery Geekery." Your sweetie's very own certificate to the 221B Fan Club to let everyone know they're Sher-locked.

Celebrate National Readathon Day!

Mark your calendar for the first-ever National Readathon Day. On Saturday, January 24, you can join readers across the country who will be reading in solidarity for literacy from noon to 4 p.m. (in your own time zone). National Readathon Day is partnered with FirstGiving.com, with all money raised going to the National Book Foundation's projects to improve literacy and reading proficiency for millions of Americans who lack basic skills. At the most basic level of participation, all you need to do to is pick a book and read it on January 24. But there are also local readalong events, and you can also make a donation, create a fund-raising team on FirstGiving.com, or host your own "reading party."

Many Americans fortunate enough to have benefited from a good education may be unaware of how much of a problem illiteracy remains. According to a study conducted in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can't read, or 14 percent of the population. In addition, twenty-one percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level. Even worse, the current literacy rate isn't any better than it was 10 years ago. 

So, on January 24, read a book and consider making a donation to FirstGiving or other literacy organizations in your area. 

Wanna Buy a Bookstore?

Here's your chance, and it's a perfect opportunity to help a great bookstore tradition continue. Reblogging from Shelf Awareness:

Mystery Lovers Bookshop Would Love New Owners

Laurie Stephens, owner of Mystery Lovers Bookshop, Oakmont, Pa., near Pittsburgh (one of the largest specialty mystery book stores in the country), for the past two and a half years, is putting the store up for sale. "Now in 2015, it is time for me to begin a new chapter in my life," she wrote in an e-mail to store customers.

"The key ingredients that will contribute to the success of a new owner are all in place: a loyal customer base, a dedicated, hard-working staff, the technology tools to remain current and relevant, and an environment that appeals to customers of all ages," she continued. "All it will take is someone who is passionate about books, who genuinely loves people, and who has enough good judgment and business sense to lead a team of top-notch booksellers. I know how much you care about Mystery Lovers Bookshop, and hope you can help find the right person who would enjoy being the store's new owner."

Founders Richard Goldman and Mary Alice Gorman, who owned the store for 22 years, sold it to Stephens in April 2012. At that point, in her 35-year career, Stephens had been a bookseller, librarian and director of a lecture series and had long wanted to own a bookstore. In 2013, Stephens remodeled the store, dismantling the café, moving the kids' section and cash register, and creating more event space.

For more information, contact [email protected] or 412-828-4877.