John Green's New York Times Ad, Les Miserables Tee Shirts, New Penguin Classics Series.

Today I opened my copy of The New York Times and saw the full-page ad for John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. The novel is making best-of lists left and right (including ours, as noted in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). One imagines the book will have a long shelf life, but will it migrate towards a teen staple of schools like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, or more like The Book Thief, which though published as a young adult novel, seemed to find its niche as a staple of adult book clubs? Or both?

Aside #1: Why does it sometimes take ten seconds to get a picture emailed to me from my phone, and sometimes it takes an hour? I will load the photos when they someday arrive in my in box.

Yes, an advertisement is getting second life on a blog. But we are not averse to that sort of thing. The movie studio sent us Les Miserables tee shirts and we're all aflutter. "So soft!" "I might go see the movie tonight!" "If I were in the Academy, I'd be talking about Ann Hathaway at my Oscar Discussion Group." "Did you know that Victor Hugo wrote over fifty novels? I wonder what his third most popular book is*?" See how these tee shirts generate discussion?

Aside #2: Jason confirmed that we are getting deliveries on Monday. And he thinks we might get a FedEx order tomorrow. There's nothing like getting stuff we need before Christmas.

Speaking of classics and being all aflutter, Jason showed us the new series of Penguin Classics. There's an alphabet theme going on, and they also have a rainbow of colors. I asked what K, Q, and X were going to be (assuming Z was for Zola), and he didn't know. The first set has a lot of yellow and orange.

*According to Ingram demand, the next most popular Hugo novel appears to be The Last Day of a Condemned Man, which is said to be a precursor in spirit to Les Miserables. The edition I found, however, is POD, short discount, and nonreturnable, meaning you won't likely see it on the shelves at Boswell. So the next most popular we'd carry would be the Modern Library edition of Toilers of the Sea, a well-regarded-at-the-time, change-of-pace follow up to Les Miserables. Gauging from demand, it's not particularly popular in the United States.