Hello! It's been a busy week, but not quite the usual busy... I spent some time at the WETA studios yesterday taping a segment for a new videoblog program called Author Author! hosted by self-titled Book Maven Bethanne Patrick. As soon as it's up we'll have a link to it from our website. We talked about some of the best books of the year and also some great holiday gift selections. I kept retooling my list all weekend long, trying to fit in all my personal favorites and all the favorites from the stores. So if I left one or two titles off they're surely highlighted at a store or, even better, in our Holiday Gift Guide.

This year's Holiday Gift Guide (or HGG as we so cleverly call it in-house) has finally taken shape and is available on our website. The print version is due next week. I'm really excited about our title selections this year. It's a lot of fun poring through all the year's titles and looking at the upcoming releases that we're all a-titter about.

Speaking of the Holiday Gift Guide, Tuesday night I joined Tony Ritchie at the Lisner Auditorium where the Smithsonian was hosting a conversation with Steve Martin. His recently published autobiography Born Standing Up is one of our featured titles this year. It has garnered a lot of positive reviews and it was one of the pre-publication books I greedily picked up earlier this year. I've enjoyed his fiction and his humor pieces over the years and was eager to see what resulted when he turned the lens on himself. And of course, like just about everyone else in the universe my family had (and played into the ground) the A Wild and Crazy Guy album. And there may have been some arrow headgear floating around, too.

Well, his autobiograghy is a well-crafted and intelligent narrative that reflects as much on his actual life as it does on his savvy and tenacious approach to the science and philosophy of comedy. It's also one of my favorite books this season. And making it an even sweeter deal, we were able to get a number of copies signed by Mr. Martin and they're available at all of our stores.

Late into last evening at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York City burning questions were answered, awards were handed out, speeches were made.

Almost all bets were on Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke for the fiction award. I read some contrarian articles in the last week, but overall the odds were in Johnson’s favor. And they were justified. It certainly was my favorite for the award and one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes won for the non-fiction category, edging out Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) and Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I’m Dying), among others. Robert Haas, the former Poet Laureate, won for Time and Materials and Sherman Alexie won the young people’s literature prize for his semi-autobiographical The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

I’m pleased to say that we’ve got three of the four winners in our upcoming Holiday Gift Guide.

This week it's all about the movies. Maybe it's the cooler weather, maybe it's the no more Daylight Savings time, either way I've watched more movies in the last week than I've seen in the last couple months combined.

I went to the Uptown theater with my younger brother on Tuesday night to see Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Apparently last night it was quite a different scene from me, my brother and the other 20 nerds clustered in the middle seats. Wednesday night was the DC premiere of the new political thriller Lions for Lambs and it seems the all-star cast and various DC politicos were in attendance: TomKat, Robert Redford, George Stepanopoulus, and Lynda Carter to name a few. Yes, Wonder Woman was there. Who knew such glamorous things took place in DC?

Back to my movie-going. The original release of Blade Runner was in 1982, there was a "Director's Cut" released in 1992 and now, 25 years later, we have the definitive Final Cut. Wow, that's a lot of vision. But that's only three of the seven versions out there. Well, It was fun to finally see it on a big screen. It's both a great sci-fi and noir movie, and the AFI put it on their 100 best movies list. And the unicorn bit really clears up any questions about Harrison Ford's character's humanity. But the truth is I've never did read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Maybe, I'll have a little science fiction reading session this winter. I need a little more dystopia in my daily life.

My other movie event of this week was Netflix based. I signed up for this months ago and have been pretty good about watching the movies that come magically into my mailbox. But every once in awhile a DVD sleeve will sit on my coffee table for a disturbing length of time, mocking me, taunting me, making me feel like I'm wasting my money with Netflix since I've been sitting on a movie for 3 months. Ok, 5 months. Well, Monday night was a triumph. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story has now been viewed by me and returned via the United States Postal Service to it's rightful place on a shelf in a sea of white Tyvek sleeves in a warehouse somewhere in Maryland waiting to be called out to another mailbox. How was Tristram Shandy the movie?

It's been some time since I read (the first 150 pages or so of) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Laurence Sterne's book is fantastically unsuited for filmic adaptation since it really never gets started. Unless, Adaptation-style, the movie is more about the making of the movie much as the novel is about the... wait a minute... that's clever. I can't say that I'll go back and read Tristram Shandy, but I think it bears a little more haphazard flipping through. As it was said in the movie, it was the first post-modern book, before there was any modern to be post about.