You’ve always been different. While other people cultivated “friendships” and had “experiences,” your bookshelf grew heavier and heavier with volumes about people who did those things. Folks said to you, HEY, WOW, you have a lot of books! Thanks to a senior award at Penn, your book problem could all pay off real soon.

The Charles W. Burr Prize, which we all get emailed about every now and then, is a $750 award to the senior with the best book collection. If your selection was thoughtful, if you strove for variety, and (importantly) if you didn’t just buy them all as required reading for your classes, you’re eligible to win. So if you poo-poo the idea of a lending library, click here (under the awards tab) and get working on your list. Conversely, start buying great books off Amazon like a fiend; as long as your receipt comes in under $750, PROFIT!

Reading Days, ah. Four whole days of blank schedules and welcome distraction. For Reading Days this semester, why not consider reading! Introducing UTB‘s first ever edition of “What You Should Read Over Reading Days.” Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments.

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins: Take a trip to the Capitol and join the fun that everybody is talking about. Bonus perks: this book will not take more than 48 hours to read. Good for those who have papers and finals late in the week.

Fifty Shades of Grey, E.L. James: If you can’t be convinced by critics’ description of this book as an “erotic breakout novel” and “mommy porn,” chances are that you have no business reading it. Potentially dangerous for those who brought “just a friend” to formal.

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Calling all bookworms! The Kelly Writers House (3805 Locust Walk for you freshmen folk) just announced that it will be holding an open house today at 2pm. The afternoon will be complete with poem-making stations (for the aspiring artist), t-shirt “embellishing” (for those who wish they were still in preschool), ice cream (for those who attend these events only for the free food) and a supposedly MASSIVE book sale.

Massive, eh? Text books? Cook books? Library books? Comic books? We dunno, which is why you should go and tell us all ’bout it. Anyone is welcome to attend.

[Disclaimer: This article was part of our "Joke Day" series... if you couldn't tell by the usage of Comic Sans.] In a last ditch effort to finish his thesis, senior Sociology major Dirk Evans checked American Sociology: Perspectives, Problems, Method out of the Van Pelt library. Evans said it was his first time borrowing a book from the library, “though obviously I’ve done work with my boys in Rosengarten and sometimes if I need to cram and I can score an Adderall I’ll crank out a couple pages in the fourth floor stacks.” Though Evans said he was hesitant to check out a physical book, he said he was surprised by the efficiency of the process. “I guess it was a good system, that you can just find any book you want and borrow it to write your paper,” Evans commented. “The only thing that sucks,” he lamented. “Is that you can’t copy and paste the quotes you want to use which is what I usually do.” Evans said it is unlikely that he will check out a book again, as he plans to complete his thesis this weekend.

Beer, music, and wordplay – what more does one need on a Sunday afternoon? We can’t think of anything, which is why Dock Street’s DOCKtoberfest is the place to be today starting at 2pm.

If you’ve never been to the firehouse-turned-brewery on the corner of 50th & Baltimore, then get ready to experience a whole new meaning of the words “pizza and beer.” Yum. There will also be tons of free live music, and it’s for a good cause! Bring a book to donate and it will go to Books Through Bars, a non-profit that works to bring better quality of life to prisoners through reading. Meanwhile, go enjoy this awesome twist on the traditional Bavarian drinking celebrations! Bonus points for wearing lederhosen.

Once upon a time, people read books over Winter Break. The English Department seems to think people still do this!

For the literate among you, take note: the English Department will be distributing free copies of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao today as part of the Winter Reading Project. You can pick up your copy in the Fisher Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge between 3 and 4 p.m.

If you haven’t read the book, it happens to be excellent (and a 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner). Check out a description of the book after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been to the Perelman Quad around lunchtime any day this week, you may have noticed the sound of Winnie the Pooh being read aloud. Chances are, you let it go without a second thought. It’s not like it’s so bizarre to hear the faint mumblings of A.A. Milne every now and again, right guys? Well this time, there is actually an explanation.

The DP reports:

Starting [Sept 28], ACLU is honoring the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week by reading banned books aloud in Wynn Commons. Between the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. every day until Friday, group members will recites passages from books ranging from Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Today is your last chance to check it out. We stopped by on Wednesday and found an unmanned table, so let us know what happens. Otherwise we’ll think the event got banned.

Penn students probably spend more money in one trip to the bookstore than your average sorority girl has ever spent at American Apparel. Every semester, miserable Quakers trek to 36th and Walnut, swearing that this will be the year that they actually keep up with their reading rather than letting that $70 econ book sit and collect dust. And at the end of the semester, that mint condition book fetches us about $5.50.

While UTB relishes any opportunity to use our Bursar accounts, the fact that we have to spend hundreds of dollars on books we’ll rarely use while we’re in the midst of an economic downturn is ridiculous.

That’s why we were glad to hear that Penn Press feels our struggles. Showing how “with it” they are, they’ve started a Facebook contest to give away two free books from their catalog. All you have to do is become a fan of their Facebook page and post the title of the Penn Press book that you most resemble and why on their wall, and you’re entered. (And just in case you’re wondering, if UTB had to choose a book that best embodied us, we’d probably pick this one.)

Listen up, Kerry Golds, this could be you in four short years: onetime Street editor and ’05 alum Grant Ginder can officially update his already-impressive resume to include his new novel, This Is How It Starts, which is out in bookstores this week.  Ginder was featured on Daily Intel yesterday, where he plugged his book and sadly made no mention of Penn.  Good thing we never forget a Streetie!  (We don’t, um, actually call ourselves that though.)  The book, per Amazon, is “about how far one postcollegiate idealist will go to be an insider in a town that is unyielding in what it will take from a person in exchange for granting him a margin of knowledge and power.”  Sounds juicy — we would expect nothing less from one of our own.