What book blog posts have you enjoyed this week? Asterisks, Ramona, Proust. . . my browsing has been all over the place this week:
So You Love Punctuation? Write a Letter to Your Favorite Mark, and You Might Win a Copy of Ben Greenman’s Brand-New Book!
Posted by Emdashes.
The contributors at arts and letters site Emdashes love letters and books. They combine the two passions in this contest, in which readers are encouraged to write a letter to their favorite punctuation mark for a chance to win a signed copy of Ben Greenman’s What He’s Poised to Do:
Here is a partial list of possible correspondents, with the current tally of blushing recipients marked in bold: the air quote, the ampersand (2), the apostrophe (2), the asterisk, the at-the-price-of, the at sign, the backslash, the bracket, the bullet, the caret, the colon (3), the comma, the curly quote, the dagger, the dash ditto mark, the diaeresis, the double hyphen, the ellipsis (5), the em dash (toward which some jurors are slightly biased) or the en dash, the exclamation point (3), the full stop, the grawlix, the hyphen, the interpunct, the interrobang, the inverted exclamation point, the interroverti (formerly the inverted question mark), the little star, the manicule, number sign, the parenthesis (2), the percent sign, the period, the pilcrow, the pound sign, the question mark (2), the quotation mark (or a pair of them), the semicolon (3), the smart quote, the slash, the tilde, the underline, the Oxford comma, or any other mark close to your heart but not listed here.
It’s worth it to spend a few minutes browsing the letters that have already been left in the comments. (Which reminds me: What punctuation mark would you write a letter to? I think I’d have to go with the semicolon.)
5 Children’s Books That Hollywood Should Tackle Next
Posted by Moviefone
The 
movie Ramona and Beezus opens today—what better time to think about what other kids books should make it to the big screen? Moviefone suggests Anastasia Krupnik, In the Night Kitchen, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and The Boxcar Children.
What titles would you add to the list? I’ll add a big vote for Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl.
Reading in Tongues
Posted by The Millions
Novelist and screenwriter J.P. Smith has written an interesting post about the rewards of learning to read in another language. I was especially interested in how the experience has influenced his own writing:
Adopting French as a second reading language gave me two worlds through which my own work could be filtered. As a novelist (far less so as a screenwriter), I find that reading in two languages has a way of enriching one’s own work. When reading in French I’m really stepping beyond myself and my world, and it’s this tiptoeing into another culture and another way of viewing things, that allows me to look back over my shoulder and find perhaps a whole new way of telling my own story.
Do you have any goals to learn to read in another language?
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