books – Page 24 – don't confuse the narrator

international book day

One wonders – well, this one does – who decides which “days” are to be allocated to what worthy purpose and which are to be publicised and celebrated. Wikipedia gives a list of international observance, but these things seem to be fairly hit and miss.

Today, the day when Shakespeare, Cervantes and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died in 1616, is officially designated World Book and Copyright Day by UNESCO.

However, although yesterday the Google site was displaying a re-designed logo for Earth Day, today there is nothing special about the google.com logo, and on the google.co.uk site the reference is to St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday. (In fact, the birthday is only deduced from the fact he was baptised on the 26th.)
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weekend reading

The Topka editor has lined up another reading for the T-Tales collection, including Bubbles.

This time we will be reading in Moralzarzal, just north of Madrid. It’s their feria del libro next weekend – following close on the heels of Thursday 23rd, Cervantes’ and Shakespeare’s birthdays, St. George’s Day and el día del libro – and there are cuentacuentos, book signings and other activities.

Sadly, there was a slight scheduling mix up, so Bubbles is to be read in the library rather than the feria precinct, but never mind.
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books to look cool

According to a story on the BBC website, Don’t be 404, know the tech slang, new words and expressions are entering the language, driven by modern technology such as Oyster cards, the internet, mobile phones and “textese”.

This probably won’t come as much of a surprise to many of us already happy to include abbreviations like b4, u, @ and wld in our msgs in an attempt to keep the costs down, even if we baulk at l8r and draw the line at ur, wat or y?.
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bubbles, butterflies & baseball

Apparently unrelated, perhaps, but the words in the title do, in fact, have something in common: they are the topics of the three new titles in the T-Tales collection by Topka.

And those are the books I’ll be reading at two separate readings/story-telling sessions in Madrid this coming Saturday, December 13th.
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en Guadalajara

Vale. No puedo decir que yo estoy en Guadalajara.

Ni siquiera puedo decir que mi editora está en Guadalajara.

Sin embargo, mi editora -¡qué bien suena la frase!- me ha dicho que una compañera de una librería de Madrid ha llevado unos libros de Topka a la Feria del Libro, o, como lo llaman en El País, “el mayor acontecimiento de su clase en lengua española”.

Así que, Bubbles (Pompas) está en Guadalajara. Menos da una piedra.