California Literary Review

Want to find a woman? Just go by the book: A survey commissioned by the National Year of Reading has found the top 10 reads to impress a woman. Top of the list is Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. If you also drop in that you adore Shakespeare, poetry, and cookery books; are never off current affairs websites; and – sorry readers – that you take the Financial Times, then there may be queues. [Guardian]

García Márquez is writing new novel, says friend: Fears that Colombia’s Nobel prizewinning author, Gabriel García Márquez, had put down his pen forever were allayed today when a close friend confirmed that the master of magical realism was working on a new novel. [Guardian]

More (and Better) Books for Black Teens: Talk to a YA editor or take a stroll through that section at your local bookstore and it’s evident that there’s a growing number of books aimed at the young adult market—and those numbers include more titles geared specifically to African-American teens. [Publishers Weekly]

‘Sleeper’ hits brighten dire year in publishing: Unless the subject was vampires, or the author our next president, it was a hard, discouraging year for the book business. [Yahoo]

What’s with all the Jonathan Safran Foer-phobia?: Suddenly, resentment of his success seems to be everywhere – in real life and fiction [Guardian]

Bail Out the Writers! : Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity. [NYT]

The top 10 angel books [Guardian]

Court Filing Reveals That Firing Judith Regan Cost News Corp. $10.75 Million: Then yesterday, according to Bloomberg News, Dreier submitted some additional court filings revealing that the mystery figure News Corp. paid Ms. Regan in exchange for retracting her claws and silencing her cries was a stunning $10.75 million dollars. [Observer]