California Literary Review

100 novels everyone should read [Telegraph]

Who Says the Book Business Is Dead?: Now that the Kindle and other electronic readers are finally catching fire, publishing can start to rise from its ashes. [Daily Beast]

Toward an All E-Textbook Campus: Many colleges are experimenting with e-textbooks these days. But at Northwest Missouri State University, President Dean L. Hubbard hopes they’ll be an e-book only campus (or close to it) soon — as soon as the market will allow it. [Inside Higher Ed]

TV show turns long out-of-print farming manual into hot seller: A 19th-century farming manual that has been out of print for 100 years is proving hot property among readers keen to emulate the people living as Victorian farmers on the BBC’s new reality television show, Victorian Farm. [Guardian]

John Mortimer, Creator of Rumpole, Dies at 85: John Mortimer, barrister, author, playwright and creator of Horace Rumpole, the cunning defender of the British criminal classes, has died, according to his editor at Viking, Tony Lacey. He was 85 years old. [NYT]

Victorian novels like Pride and Prejudice teach us how to behave: Researchers believe the novels act like “social glue”, providing instructions on how society should behave. [Telegraph]

Religion Writer Who Copied Work Draws Support of Readers: In more than 230 comments posted on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet, many fans of Neale Donald Walsch, the author of the best-selling series “Conversations With God” who acknowledged last week that he had unintentionally copied the work of another writer, rallied around him and begged him not to quit blogging. [NYT]

A Madoff Cookbook Has a Secret, Too: “My understanding was that she entertained a lot in New York and kind of wanted to test some recipes just as a social thing to do with friends,” said Ms. MacNeil, a wine and food consultant in Saint Helena, Calif. “But in point of fact, I wrote the entire book.” [NYT]

How one book ignited a culture war: It’s 20 years since Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie for ‘insulting’ Islam with his novel The Satanic Verses. [Guardian]

Book Is Rallying Resistance to the Antivaccine Crusade: A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States. [NYT]