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Posts from the ‘Cool Stuff’ Category

May 22

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22 Comments

10 Great Authors Worth Following On Twitter

I love Twitter.

Twitter is seriously my one-stop shop for news, book reviews, entertainment, and sports. (Follow me @robertbruce76).

It’s so much more useful and practical than Facebook and even going straight to a news source.

I follow quite a few authors and book publishers on Twitter. And I’m not sure how many of you are on Twitter, but for those interested, I thought I’d share some of the more notable authors I follow. You might want to follow them yourself.

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May 9

V73tdPn
8 Comments

This Guy’s Dad Read 10,000 Books (And Rated Each One)

Today’s post comes from the land of really cool things you find on the internet.

A guy named BigZ7337 posted this on the Reddit Book forums a couple of weeks ago.

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May 6

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10 Comments

Gatsby For Nintendo, Old Sport!

Hey, did you know that The Great Gatsby comes out on Friday? Have I mentioned that before? Did you know I’m a Gatsby fan? I haven’t talked about that before, have I?

You know I’ll have to review the movie after I watch it (going on Sunday). I might do that next week.

In the meantime, here’s a great way to kill a few hours while you are at work today. Don’t blame me, though.

It’s a 100% fully functional, fully playable online version of The Great Gatsby NES video game from the 1980s.

This is what the internet was made for, my friends.

Gatsby in a video game? Weird. But crazy cool weird. Here’s how it works, according to the Gatsby game website that hosts it.

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May 3

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47 Comments

The Anatomy Of A “Viral” Blog Post

It’s been a crazy week here on 101 Books, and I thought I’d share that experience with you.

The main purpose of this blog is obvious: To read through the Time list. That’s my priority. But 101 Books is also a blog about writing, and even blogging in general at times, and that’s where this post falls.

Last Friday through this past Tuesday was just nuts. I’ve experienced abnormally high traffic with one post before, but that traffic usually comes from one or two main sources, like the WordPress Freshly Pressed feature, for instance.

I also have steady traffic from all of you guys who read the blog every day—for which I’m extremely grateful. So I guess you could say I’ve had some success here and there, after many failures too.

But my post on Friday, April 26—My 2-Year-Old Judges Books By Their Covers—was the first time I’ve experienced a legitimately viral post. That is, a post that was picked up by several sources and produced a week-long enormous spike to my blog traffic.

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May 1

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26 Comments

You’ll Need $186,000 To Buy This Book

A couple of weeks ago, we discussed whether or not we cared about owning signed copies of books. I mentioned that, for the most part, I could care less–with some exceptions, like legendary authors, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.

When I said that, I naively thought a signed book by one of those authors might costs several hundred dollars, maybe a thousand or so. Boy, was I an idiot.

After doing a little research at Peter Harrington’s site–he’s a bookseller who specializes in signed, first-edition books, I realized just how stupid I was for thinking such books would go for so cheap.

Here are just a few examples I pulled from Harrington’s site:

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Apr 26

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64 Comments

My 2-Year-Old Judges Books By Their Covers

My son will be 3 years old in June, and I love the fact that he’s into reading. A day usually doesn’t go by without him asking me or his mom to sit down and read a book with him.

During all those reading sessions, I’ve learned that he’s an imaginative little guy.

So I decided to put that imagination to use and see what he thinks about the books I read, not just the books about Elmo and Thomas The Train and Lightning McQueen.

So I grabbed a bunch of classic books, got him to sit in my lap, showed him the cover of each book, and then asked him one question: “What do you think this book is about?”

He took it from there:

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Apr 15

20 Comments

The Old Man And The Sea, Like You’ve Never Seen It

This is one of the coolest stop motion animations I’ve ever seen. It was created by an artist named Marcel Shindler, whose drawing ability is just ridiculously good, and you must watch it.

If you’ve read one Hemingway, it’s probably The Old Man and the Sea. This stop motion animation captures that novel in one of the coolest ways imaginable.

Apr 8

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14 Comments

The Homes of Great Writers

We all have a little bit of voyeur in us, right?

That’s why reality shows, celebrity magazines, and tours of celeb homes are so popular.

I’ll admit that famous houses intrigue me. I mean, I’m not going to buy a house just because so and so lived in it, but I think it’s cool and interesting to look at the homes of famous people.

So when a friend sent me a link to this website, my eyes lit up.

Not only is the idea behind this site pretty awesome–photos of the homes of famous authors–the site itself is easy to navigate and really well done. You can search by author, state, city, and country to see your favorite author’s house, if it’s included.

I included a few of my favorite author homes below (image credits at bottom of page). How cool is this?

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Dec 5

king1
6 Comments

Famous Authors Reading Famous Books

Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

True that. I think that’s especially true for writers. We’re all loners anyway, right? So we got to have books as friends.

I say that jokingly, mostly. Now, I’m assuming these photos of famous authors reading famous books weren’t staged. Even if they were, these are incredibly intriguing photos from a pretty cool Tumblr called Awesome People Reading.

Take a look:

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