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Happy Pi Day: Make a Venn Pie-agram!

In honor of Pi Day tomorrow, learn how you can make The Venn Pie-agram!

This year will be the most authentic Pi Day you’ve ever experienced, since the date is 3-14-15—as close as we can get to 3.1415 in our lifetime! So how do you make this nerdiest of all pies? Let’s get started.

Posted by Suzanne Wallace

March Big Deal: Crafting With Cat Hair $3.99 on Amazon the Rest of the Month

Photo via Boing Boing

This month, you've got an opportunity to snag a lot of Quirk titles on the cheap, thanks to Quirk Perks (The Little Guide to Vintage Shopping and Secret Lives of the Civil War are both only $3.99) and starting today, this month's March Big Deal over on Amazon. 

From now until the end of the month, you can pick up Crafting With Cat Hair for only $3.99 on your eReader

Posted by Eric Smith

The Phantom of Menace by Ian Doescher: The Pre-order Campaign

The prequels are upon us! Over the next few months, Ian Doescher’s epic William Shakespeare’s Star Wars trilogy will become even more epic, as Phantom of Menace, The Clone Army Attacketh, and Tragedy of the Sith’s Revenge hit bookstores everywhere.

Today, we’re launching the pre-order campaign for Phantom of Menace, due out April 7th. You’ll have a chance to get a free signed bookplate from Ian Doescher, and the opportunity to win all kinds of awesome swag, including posters and custom written sonnets! Note, the campaign is open to US and Canada only. 

Read on!

Posted by Eric Smith

Some of the Greatest Fictional Books Featured in Parks & Recreation

Leslie Knope is perfect. She’s smart, passionate, intensely loyal, a binder-making aficionado, caring, resourceful, honest, a gift-giving master, and driven to make Pawnee the best place to live for its residents. If Amy Poehler is even a tenth of her character—minus the Jerry/Terry/Larry/Garry bullying—I want to be her friend so we can eat waffles while discussing her favorite books.

While Parks & Recreation may have wrapped up its final season, I'm busy re-watching the older episodes. And as any fan of the show will tell you, Leslie Knope and her colleagues love their books, no matter how fake (well, except for one, kinda) they might be. Let's take a look at some of the titles that have appeared over the course of the show's run. 

Posted by Jamie Canaves

Worst-Case Wednesday: How to Break Down a Door

Take a cue from Eric Foreman and read how to break down a door before trying it for real. (And only if it's completely necessary, of course!) Maybe if he had read The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, he would have been successful.

Posted by Christina Schillaci

Top 10 Tuesday: 10 Books for Readers Who Like Wes Anderson Films

Thanks largely to the recently uploaded video What if Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?, and my own obsession with Wes Anderson films, I’ve decided to focus on Wes Anderson fans for this week’s Top 10 Tuesday.

Anderson is known for combining comedy with melancholic topics. He loves topics like grief, the loss of innocence, sibling rivalry, and unlikely friendships. Aesthetically, his films typically adhere to a color palette, make use of flat space camera moves, and involve hand-made miniatures or stop motion animation. If you’re a fan of his films, try out the following books the next time you’re looking for something to read.

BORN WEIRD by Andrew Kauffman: This book is focused on a group of siblings (family name: Weird), and the characters and setting are just as visual as any Wes Anderson film. Anderson would certainly approve of the relationships explored between the family and the very strange “curse” that plagues them.

THE POST OFFICE GIRL by Stefan Zweig: Wes Anderson has spoken at great lengths about Zweig’s work and how this novel in particular helped shape the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): “Many of the ideas expressed and/or explored in Grand Budapest we stole directly from Zweig’s own life and work.” So there you go.

Posted by Maria Vicente