Texas Pages

In the very near future, the books blog you are reading will cease to exist. But books blogging is not going away -- you'll find it on a new fine arts-related blog that will be unveiled shortly. When that blog is operating, you'll be redirected there automatically.

So goodbye, thanks for reading, see you soon, we hope you'll be back for more reading on the new blog.

Uva Uvam Videndo Varia Fit

Here are some of the new releases for next week:

- Tick Tock by James Patterson, Michael Ledwidge
- Call Me Irresistible by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
- The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
- You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
- Andrew Johnson by Annette Gordon-Reed, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
- BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family by Mara Shalhoup
- Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West
- My Father at 100 by Ron Reagan

See more new releases at Barnes and Noble's site.

Photo by Penguin Group.

In her Dallas Morning News review, critic Jenny Shank says Kings of Colorado is "a suspenseful, sure-footed debut."

Over on NewWest.net, she has an interview with the Austin-based author David E. Hilton, wherein he offers details about his West Texas upbringing, how his agent changed his book, and this tidbit, which is a lesson to writers who are picky about their surroundings:

Laura Claridge, author of a well-received biography of Emily Post, is asking Dallas residents for help with her next topic.

Claridge is writing about Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, who lived in Dallas until his death in 2009 (read about him here.) Borlaug was awarded the Nobel in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing agricultural innovations to the developing world, saving perhaps 1 billion lives in the process.

Claridge says she is looking for "those priceless tidbits of info townspeople tend to believe are too inconsequential to matter." Such moments tell volumes, she told me in an e-mail.

Here are some of the new releases for next week:

- The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer
- The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok
- The Angel Therapy Handbook by Doreen Virtue
- Across the Universe by Beth Revis
- The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
- An American Life: The Autobiography by Ronald Reagan
- Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland
- Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
- The Lo-Down by Lo Bosworth
- Gideon's War by Howard Gordon

See more new releases at Barnes and Noble's site.

Photo by Simon & Schuster.

You can't get tickets to Maya Angelou's Nasher Salon appearance on Thursday. But you can still see her in Dallas.

The legendary writer will appear at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 7700 W. Northwest Highway. Updated details were just released, and I have them after the jump.

That Dallasite, of course, is George W. Bush.

Publishers Weekly reports that his book, Decision Points, was the top-selling adult nonfiction book of 2010, with 1,649,000 copies. He also topped the audio best-sellers list, with 83,000 copies.

The top fiction seller was everybody's favorite deceased Swede, Stieg Larsson, who sold 2.1 million copies of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Plus 1.4 million copies of The Girl Who Played With Fire. Plus 1.4 million copies of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

The Associated Press writes:

Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in "Huck Finn" and four times in "Tom Sawyer." He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those "which people praise and don't read."

Not everyone agrees with the alteration:

Another Twain scholar, professor Stephen Railton at the University of Virginia, said Gribben was well respected, but called the new version "a terrible idea."

The language depicts America's past, Railton said, and the revised book was not being true to the period in which Twain was writing. Railton has an unaltered version of "Huck Finn" coming out later this year that includes context for schools to explore racism and slavery in the book.

Read the rest of the story here and tell us: Do you agree with the decision to alter these literary classics?

Business writer Maria Halkias today reports on the new website for Half Price Books.

She notes:

The family-owned chain of 110 used bookstores, with annual sales of more than $220 million, just launched its company-branded online shopping site and expects to soon sell electronic books.

Live since Thursday, www.hpbmarketplace.com offers 120 million titles sold through Half Price Books and other independent booksellers.

What better way to start off the new year than with a new book? Here are a few new releases coming to bookstores for next week:

- Damage by John Lescroart
- The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
- A Shore Thing by Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
- The Bloodlust (The Vampire Diaries: Stefan's Diaries #2) by L. J. Smith, Kevin Williamson & Julie Plec
- NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
- Fang by James Patterson
- Halo: Cryptum: Book One of the Forerunner Saga by Greg Bear

You can check out more releases on Barnes and Noble's site.

Here are some of the new releases for next week:

- What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz
- Ruthless Game by Christine Feehan
- Deadly Little Games by Laurie Faria Stolarz
- Secrets to the Grave by Tami Hoag
- Once in a Full Moon by Ellen Schreiber
- Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber

See more new releases at Barnes and Noble's site.

Photo by Random House.

Here are some of the new releases for next week:

- The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn by Alison Weir
- The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli
- The Complete Book of Mustang: Every Model Since 1964-1/2 by Mike Mueller
- Sundome by Kazuto Okada
- Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss
- Identical by Ellen Hopkins

See more new releases at Barnes and Noble's site.

Photo by Random House.

More than 500 people lined up to see Rachael Ray sign copies of her new book, Rachael Ray's Look and Cook, at the Borders on Preston at Royal. The Dallas Morning News' Richard Michael Pruitt was there to film the scene. Take a look:

Nancy Churnin has written in the past about Dallas' The Story Book House, which opened with great promise earlier this year.

Unfortunately, the store has announced on its website that it is closing its physical location and becoming an online-only presence as of Sunday.

There is good news for fans of children's books, though.

The website deadline.com reports that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana are working on scripts for two books of local interest:

First up is an adaptation of The Color of Lightning, by Paulette Jiles. As per our review, this story about a freed slave who settles in North Texas but must rescue his family from Kiowa kidnappers is "a potent, harrowing story about real people with that genuine heroism that makes legendary pale by comparison."

It's always fun to compile a roundup such as Sunday's look at gift books. Fun and arbitrary -- arbitrary because "gift book" here simply means "hard to fit on a shelf," and because you just can't fit every interesting book into one story.

Which is why I'm happy to be surrounded by smart readers whose tastes are sometimes radically different. Case in point: regular reviewer Joy Tipping, who selected several of the books in our roundup.

Here are some of the most buzzed-about new releases for next week:

- I'm Tempted to Stop Acting Randomly: A Dilbert Book by Scott Adams
- Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2011 by Roger Ebert
- Goodnight Tweetheart by Teresa Medeiros
- Just Watch the Game by John Steigerwald
- What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell

See more new releases at Barnes and Noble's site.

Photo by Andrews McMeel Publishing.

Carlos Fuentes has changed the date of his scheduled appearance in Dallas.

Originally scheduled for Jan. 26, he'll now be appearing 7:30 p.m. Feb. 10.

Tickets, and the full Arts & Letters Live schedule, are available here.

Several of the Texas-related books we've written about this year have started cropping up on year's best lists.

Here are some I've spotted so far:

The Street suggests that it might be a good idea for Borders to buy Barnes & Noble.

The market is clearly in favor of such a deal, with shares of Barnes & Noble surging 15.7% to $15.36, while Borders is spiking 34.3% to $1.45 in midday trading.

The merger of Borders and Barnes & Noble would result in a significant shrinkage in the book space, but this union might be necessary for at least one of the two to survive.

Barnes & Noble put itself up for sale this summer and Borders management has said it would support the purchase.

Do you think a union of Borders and Barnes & Noble is a good idea? Share your thoughts in the comments section.