Hail, Linda Nagata!

Book View Café Welcomes Linda Nagata.

Book View Café is welcoming newest member, Linda Nagata, today. She's the author of seven novels under her own name, including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. Linda also writes under the name Trey Shiels.

To celebrate, Sue Lange is interviewing Linda at the Book View Café blog .

And BVC is holding one of their world renowned giveaways! Send an email with “Linda Nagata ebook” in the subject line to linda.nagata@bookviewcafe.com. BVC will pick five winners at random and send each a free ecopy of The Bohr Maker. This is a one day only offer, so send your email today!

Visit Linda Nagata’s bookshelf at Book View Café

Visit <a href="http://www.mythicisland.com and her blog: http://hahvi.net/>Linda’s website</a>.

Oh Good God

Roger Ebert blogs this morning on a new "middle school" edition of The Great Gatsby. From the few snatches of the "retelling," I suspect that Classics Illustrated would have done a better job (they at least tended to throw in actual lines from the work in question). I don't have the same reverence for Gatsby that some folk have, but as Ebert says, the book is not so much the story as it is the telling of the story. Knock it down to the "see Jay run" level and you lose the point of reading the book. And this is being marketed to school as a book for HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS. At what point do they get to graduate to grownup books?

If you give a baby nothing but Pablum past a certain age, they not only don't develop a taste for anything with flavor--after a while they may not be able to eat anything else at all.

Edited to add: This edition is apparently meant for English-language learners. Frankly, if you're going to write a whole new book, make it a book that is its own self, and let the learner aspire to read Gatsby when she's mastered the new book.