Big booksellers bash opens here next weekend
For three days next weekend, McCormick Place becomes the official book capital of the nation while as many as 30,000 booksellers, publishers, authors, agents, librarians and critics descend upon Chicago for Book Expo America 2004, the industry's biggest convention. It's the first time the convention, once a Chicago staple, has been held here since 2001; it was in Los Angeles last year.
Sunday, May 23, 2004
What to read this summer
Every year at this time, big new beach books (known to the literati as “guilty pleasures”) clamor for attention like small children at the Good Humor wagon.
What to give the well equiped and overly obsessed golfer
"Eighteen holes is never enough," declares Undercover Golf: An Off-the-Links Guide to Improving Your Game -- At Work, at Home, and on the Sly, by Joe Borgenicht and R. G. Robinson (Quirk, $10.95 paperback). If you are a dedicated duffer, they say, you need to train your right-hand grip while hanging shirts, exercise your left-hand grip while stuck in traffic, practice your posture while talking to a co-worker, finesse your knee pressure while hugging your lover, and do half a hundred other useful exercises away from the course. With absolutely deadpan delivery and sober illustrations, the authors slyly explain their techniques step by step. In a grocery store, for instance, you first choose an item to take off the shelf, then "stand perpendicular to the shelves with your feet about shoulder-width apart. Lean forward from your hips and bend your knees slightly ... " This is another good gift prospect for Father's Day, if you're tired of giving boxes of Titleists. It'll also send a subtle message: If the golfer doesn't get the joke, he needs to get a life. Henry Kisor
Wild about Harry
15 Mickey Mouse statues will flank State Street for the next two months.
