the buzz log

News for the silver-lining crowd: The credit hysteria has triggered an outbreak of widespread reading.

Bookseller behemoths are seeing a run on the finance and personal finance shelves, according to the Wall Street Journal. Window dressers for Barnes & Noble and Borders have been going giddy laying out tomes like "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown" and "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets."

The latter must-read is by liberal billionaire George Soros, one of many sought-after financial names on the Web: His online stock surged 127% over the past 7 days (although the jump might be due to a recent Saturday Night Live skit). He also just crunched out his latest, "The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means." You can probably get the gist of his financial prescription in his Sunday article for the Financial Times. The column advocates a stronger government role in banks, and illuminates how British newspapers spell "recapitalisation" and "programme."

With the shift from summer beach potboilers to autumn waiting-in-the-bank-line reads, book reviews are percolating within the Buzz. The suggestions below might satisfy searchers who've been going online to make "financial sense" out of the "global financial meltdown," seeing what the new "office of financial stability" is going to do about it, and what "personal finance advice" can be had at this late stage.

• The Austin American Statesman finds itself impressed with "The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough."
• The New York Observer waded through a spanking new examination of Goldman Sachs—the investment banking house that once employed Secretary Treasurer Henry Paulson and which aims to evade collapse by becoming a commercial bank.
• A biography's out on the popular Warren "Buying-Spree" Buffett (+19%), weighing in at 960 pages.
• WSJ thinks some oldies are still goodies, and lists the five best overviews with titles like "Manias, Panics, and Crashes," "Bailout," and "When Genius Failed."
• The New York Times and Slate don't think financial messes necessarily make for scary bedtime stories. NYT culls tips from the Moneyology series on teaching kids a financial education, while Slate presents a fun-filled slideshow of "Great Kids' Books About Financial Ruin." Ah, to be young and informed.

Filed under: Literature, Finance, Books, Money, Reading, Economics

Imagine a rack that holds only one magazine, but the issue magically updates every month. Or every time you pick up the newspaper, the news has changed.

That future is kind-of-but-not-quite-here with Esquire's 75th anniversary edition and its E-Ink digital display cover. Well, it's not the entire cover, and tecchies have sniffed at the unveiling. Portfolio describes the unit as "only a little bigger than a credit card, and about as flexible." The gadget boys at Boing Boing aren't only underwhelmed, they're "outraged by the design's tackiness, the bereavement of imagination, the lack of class..." The blog goes on to kick some more dirt into the face of "dying" print journalism.

Still, in the clubby sluggish world of publishing, a beginning's a beginning (or, as the publisher put it, version 1.0 is version 1.0). Esquire tells of the 7,000-mile journey to get the issue developed (at least the display unit is recyclable). Like many, Make magazine promptly disemboweled the cover to reveal its 21st-century innards.

The next evolution may not come shrinkwrapped in a magazine, but be tossed on the front steps as a newspaper... or newsscreen, as the case may be. A British company called Plastic Logic debuted a plastic screen double the size of the Amazon Kindle or Sony eReader. PaidContent reports that the device, which also uses E-Ink technology, can be updated wirelessly. (A big investor in E-Ink: Hearst Interactive, which owns Esquire, newspapers, and other media.) 

The New York Times explores some implications of a Plastic Logic future, such as cost savings for daily news publishers and privacy concerns for readers, but no insight as to how birds used to having their cages lined with newspaper will feel about the death of newsprint. Feathered friends, messy collectors, news junkies, and technology critics can judge in 2009, when the British-made gizmo hits shelves. 

Filed under: Reading, News, Magazines, Media, Newspapers

A Bond reborn, a White House exposé, and rhymes about eating bugs. The next best thing to reading good books is recommending them. Outlets like NPR have posted their summer literary shopping lists, and USA Today provides a helpful guide, noting new titles' release dates. While the Washington Post released its mix of critical and readers' favorites after Memorial Day, Salon drags out the pleasure with a weekly dip into the juiciest summer passages. Most recently—literary responses to "Sex and the City."

Political tell-alls are hot again, as publishers who rejected former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's (sold-out) memoir now see. Other revelatory reading includes a former high-level commander who gives the military lowdown in Iraq. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle aims for closure with the 'Good Riddance Lit' round-up devoted to the lame-duck president, including the night-time reader "Goodnight Bush."

In the fiction category, many critics agree on a fictional imagining of Nikolas Tesla in "The Invention of Everything Else," and Samantha Hunt (among others authors), reads a snippet from her work in NPR's fiction addict round-up. Sports lovers can get a wincing look into how female physiology may explain higher rates of injuries in "Warrior Girls." The New York Times compiles a wistful reading list that brings back the heyday of America's vehicular culture. Reviews have been mixed for Sebastian Faulk's "Devil May Care" redux of spy James Bond, but read an excerpt and judge for yourself. 

Not enough hours to stay lit? Die-hard readers can sneak in a few pages right under the boss' nose with a program that disguises the classics as Powerpoint presentations. The drama need never end.

As for what readers have been seeking out in new titles, below are the top "book" searches from the past 30 days.

1. James Patterson Book ("Sail," June 9 release date)
2. Scott McClellan Book ("What Happened," May 28)
3. Barbara Walters Book ("Audition: A Memoir," May 6)
4. Meg Wolitzer Book 2008 ("The Ten-Year Nap," March 27)
5. "Hello Cupcake" Book (April 24)
6. "Millionaire by 30" Book (April 30)
7. "Quantum Wellness" Book (May 20)
8. Terrance Dean Book ("Hiding in Hip Hop," May 13)
9. "The Grandmother" Book (March 1)
10. Randy Pausch Last Lecture Book ("The Last Lecture," April 8)

Filed under: Sports, Politics, Books, Reading, Fiction