02 April 2009

Picador launches Twitter Book Club

Not that I really have time to join another book club, but this is an interesting experiment: Picador is giving the book in question away on Twitter and then, two weeks later, will hold some kind of discussion on it. First selection, Yoko Ogawa's THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR, is up for debate a week from Friday here. (This page has some of the upcoming choices, including Andrew Sean Greer's THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE, which I read last summer.)

I haven't read the Ogawa book yet but Picador is one of the first imprints I ever knew by name because they published paperback editions of two books I remember very vividly from my teen years, Brian Hall's THE SASKIAD and Kate Atkinson's BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE MUSEUM (specifically this cover design). I can't totally recommend them given that I haven't read either since the late '90s, but THE SASKIAD was one of my favorite favorite books when I was 12, and reading them and their slightly racy moments made me feel like I was getting away with something. See kids, back in the day, we didn't have YA like they have now; it was SWEET VALLEY UNIVERSITY and Christopher Pike, or Real Grownup Books. I was going to call this the B.S.M. (Before Stephenie Meyer) era, but it wasn't TWILIGHT which caused YA literature to catch on like a house afire... but what was it?

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