August 7, 2022   This has been the summer of Colleen Hoover, a recent viral TikTok announced, editing together clips of young women at the beach reading books by the Texas novelist.  Furthermore, just a couple of months ago we had a Colleen Hoover spring and before that a Colleen Hoover winter and before that a Colleen Hoover fall.  On any given week for more than a year now, the 42-year-old Hoover has had three to six books on Publishers Weekly’s top 10 bestseller list.  Currently three of the top five titles on the New York Times’ combined print and e-book fiction list are Hoover’s.  The most popular of these novels, It Ends With Us, isn’t even new.  It was published six years ago.  A forthcoming sequel to that novel (or possibly a prequel, it’s not yet clear), It Starts With Us, will be published in October, its perch at the summit of both lists guaranteed.  Observers typically attribute Hoover’s success to BookTok, the segment of TikTok dedicated to authors and readers.  And Hoover—known as CoHo to her fans, who call themselves Cohorts—is indeed the queen of BookTok, an adept TikToker herself, as well as the subject of countless videos in which young women appear clutching huge stacks of candy-colored CoHo paperbacks and proceed to rank their favorites among her 24 titles.  But while Hoover might just be the ideal author to preside over TikTok, the platform is only the latest online vehicle she had ridden to fame and fortune.  She sometimes presents herself as surprised by her own virality, but Hoover has been a savvy self-promoter since 2012, when she distributed free copies of her first, self-published YA novel, Slammed, to influential book bloggers.  She was big on BookTube (the YouTube book community) and big on “Bookstagram” well before TikTok came along.  Furthermore, her story—social worker and mom transformed into blockbuster author via whatever new technology of the moment is ostensibly revolutionizing the book business (self-publishing, blogging, Instagram, TikTok)—is catnip to traditional news outlets.   LAURA MILLER  https://slate.com/culture/2022/08/colleen-hoover-books-it-ends-with-us-verity.html?utm_source 

The dog days or dog days of summer are the hot, sultry days of summer.  They were historically the period following the heliacal rising of the star system Sirius (known colloquially as the "Dog Star"), which Hellenistic astrology connected with heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck.  They are now taken to be the hottest, most uncomfortable part of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.  In addition to following Orion into the night sky, the Dog Star Sirius can be easily located in the heavens by following the line created by the prominent asterism Orion's Belt.  The English name is a calque of the Latin dies caniculares (lit. "the puppy days").  Sirius is by far the brightest proper star in the night sky, which caused ancient astronomers to take note of it around the world.  In Egypt, its return to the night sky became known as a precursor to the annual flooding of the Nile and was worshipped as the goddess Sopdet.  In Greece, it became known as the precursor of the unpleasantly hot phase of the summer.  Greek poets even recorded the belief that the return of the bright star was responsible for bringing heat and fever with it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_days  Thank you, Muse reader!

Hedge funds are actively managed investment pools whose managers use a wide range of strategies, often including buying with borrowed money and trading esoteric assets, in an effort to beat average investment returns for their clients.  They are considered risky alternative investment choices.  Hedge funds require a high minimum investment or net worth, excluding all but wealthy clients.  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hedgefund.asp 

The sanderling (Calidris alba) is a small wading bird.  The name derives from Old English sand-yrðling, "sand-ploughman".  The genus name is from Ancient Greek kalidris or skalidris, a term used by Aristotle for some grey-coloured waterside birds.  The specific, alba, is Latin for "white".  It is a circumpolar Arctic breeder, and is a long-distance migrant, wintering south to South America, South Europe, Africa, and Australia.  It is highly gregarious in winter, sometimes forming large flocks on coastal mudflats or sandy beaches.  In spring, birds migrating north from South America consume large numbers of horseshoe crab eggs in the Delaware Bay area.  The sanderling was described by the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas in 1764 and given the binomial name Trynga alba.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanderling 

Over the course of his storied career, Jean-Jacques Sempe became a fixture on the newsstands of New York, illustrating more than 100 covers of the prestigious New Yorker magazine.  After republishing one of those iconic covers on an inner page August 29, 2022, the magazine will reuse one of his drawings on the cover of its September 5 edition, said the periodical's art editor Francoise Mouly.  At the intersection of 47th Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan stands a giant mural signed by the illustrator behind the beloved "Little Nicolas" series of children's books--a man carrying a woman on a bicycle, trailed by a boy on two wheels.  In 2009, the publisher Denoel put out a book of Sempe drawings entitled "Sempe in New York."  https://www.yahoo.com/news/york-cartoonist-sempes-spiritual-home-164739023.html 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2556  August 26, 2022