A Booktopia gift certificate is the perfect gift for Christmas. It’s the easy yet thoughtful present to get for the book-loving people you care about.

We can customize a gift certificate to any denomination.

Terry Pratchett, fantasy author, has been diagnosed with a form of Alzheimer’s disease at age 59.

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Amazon.com buys one of only seven handmade copies of J.K. Rowling’s book of fairy tales, “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” for £1.9 million. Proceeds of the sale of the book written and illustrated by Rowling will be donated to The Children’s Voice, a charity the author co-founded.

Books for him
The Dangerous Book for Boys

Books for her
The Daring Book for Girls
Rachael Ray cookbooks
Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food

Books for everyone
The Little Prince (gift edition)
A Guide for Grown-ups: Essential Wisdom from the Collected Works of Antoine de Saint-Exupery
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know
100 Words to Make You Sound Smart
The Intellectual Devotional
Secret Lives of Men And Women : A PostSecret Book
You: Staying Young: The Owner’s Manual for Extending Your Warranty

Reading journals for readers who read a lot
Books to Check Out
Books to Check Out for Kids

Books for fans
Hardy Boys Detective Handbook
Lost Files of Nancy Drew
Nancy Drew Cookbook: Clues to Good Cooking
Nancy Drew Sleuth Book : Clues to Good Sleuthing
Nancy Drew’s Guide to Life

Books for fantasy and science fiction readers
The Dresden Files novels
R. Scott Baker trilogy
Peter David trilogies
Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge

Books for your kids
There is a book for every child . Do not worry if your child does not read the books normally categorized for his or her age. Some boys will not read Hardy Boys but may appreciate a book on chess that was written for adults. Or maybe he enjoys reading car magazines. If you are not sure which reading material your child likes, bring him or her to a bookstore and let the child choose.

We have some books that we think are good gift ideas for children. Just arrived are Recorder Fun books from Hal Leonard for young musicians. Most have a recorder included with the book. A recorder is a simple wind instrument that is easy to learn and is popular with amateur musicians. It is a good first instrument for a child. My niece learned to play the recorder when she was five. It’s not just an instrument for kids, of course, adults who want to discover a new talent, can easily learn too.

Available titles are: The Sound of Music, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Snow White, Disney Princess collection and Disney Favorites

For adults, we also have Beatles music for recorder. Titles include: All My Loving * Hey Jude * Michelle * Norwegian Wood * Yesterday * Eight Days A Week * Eleanor Rigby * Let It Be * She Loves You

Other books your child may like are the all-time favorite Ologies — Dragonology, Wizardology, Pirateology, etc. We also have companion titles to these books. Each book is full of information, beautifully illustrated, and some have pop-up art or activities.

Our next shipment is scheduled for January, most likely mid-January. Please place your orders now if you want to make it to that shipment. Please note that if we do no receive enough orders for that shipment, we will move all orders to our February shipment.

Here’s an invitation from our friend Beverly of LIRA –

When once-white canvases succeed to show images of ourselves, our lives and our society, we admire the likenesses and explore the distortions. But how much of ourselves could we actually see from a reversed take-off point? This time, we are invited to engage into a recollection of our realities through looking at, in and from the dark.

PUSIKIT, an exhibition of paintings created from black canvases by artist Vivian N. Limpin, will open on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 6:00 in the evening, at the Conspiracy Bar, Visayas Avenue, QC. A poetry reading with the word “Pusikit” as the theme featuring young poets from universities and literary organizations will follow. Poets from all walks of life are encouraged to join. Text 09193175708 for details.

Links: LIRA

Apologies to those of you who may have received multiple copies of our newsletter in your inbox.  You must be wondering what is going on with us.  Our mailing system needs some tweaking and we have been looking for the best way to get our news to you with minimal work on your part.  We found FeedBurner and we like its features.   However, you will have to re-approve your subscription to our newsletter once we start using it.

We will be sending you email or you can subscribe by entering your email address into the form on the right.

We have already begun amassing friends on Shelfari. If you have accepted our invitation to be a friend, thank you very much. We like it that Shelfari allows us to upload an unlimited number of books while a similar site, LibraryThing, limits us to 200. However, we do like the library-ness of LibraryThing. It just feels cozier. We like both sites, they are both great ways to be in touch with other book lovers so we are actually on both Shelfari and LibraryThing. If you will notice we have widgets from both sites on the right side of our blog.  So look us up and connect with us on either one.

Shelfari is a site where you can create a virtual shelf of books (which could be books you have in your library or even books you want to have), rate and review your books, meet people who like the same books you do, and even join discussion groups and online book clubs. It is similar to LibraryThing which we blogged about a few months ago.

Since we get requests to have our inventory online all the time, we thought we could make use of these excellent features and upload our titles to our own Shelfari shelf. (For now, we prefer to use Shelfari because it allows us to have an unlimited number of books on our shelves.) Our virtual shelf does not represent our entire inventory just yet. For now it contains our later additions and titles we want to highlight. Starting now, our website will have, on the right side, a short list of titles from our Shelfari shelf.

You can join Shelfari too, of course. It’s a great way to keep track of what books you have, which you lent out, the titles you plan to read next, etc. If you do join, add Booktopia as a friend. Or, if you get an invitation from us to be a friend on Shelfari, we hope you’ll say “Yes.”

Here is a link to our Shelfari page: Booktopia on Shelfari

Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem, was awarded the first Man Asian Literary Prize. The Man Asian Literary Prize is the Asian version of the Man Booker Prize and one of its objectives is to bring Asian authors to the world literary scene. Our own Butch Dalisay was one of those shortlisted for the award for his novel, Soledad’s Sister. Mr. Dalisay’s blog includes an excerpt from Soledad’s Sister which will be published soon.

Other links: The Man Asian Literary Prize

Moleskine is the legendary notebook, used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin. We now have large Moleskine notebooks at the store. At the moment they are the large classic notebooks and reporter notebooks and they each retail for P850.

Moleskine notebooks look nice and use only acid-free paper. They are a pleasure to write or draw in. For more about the history of Moleskine, visit the website and visit a Moleskine-dedicated blog.