Book News, In Brief

Last week we linked to the NYTimes' re-evaluation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Today, we link to Hinton's own thoughts on the book. Next week, who knows? Maybe we'll use a Ouija board and some unlicensed, homo-erotic fan-fic to summon Dallas and Johnny and ask them what they think.

In an effort to lower taxes, Bridgewater, MA residents have voted in favor of closing their public library. How much will be saved by this immensely stupid move? Less than 2 percent of the town's total municipal budget! Great job, folks. (Bridgewater residents: Ask a literate friend to read this to you.)

Followng in the footsteps of Al Gore, former president Jimmy Carter is releasing a film to go along with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. No word yet as to how the Leonardo DiCaprio and the Toyota Prius will factor in to all of this.

Terry Pratchett's Making Money is currently, well, making money, charting #4 on this week's NYTimes Best Seller List. The 33rd(!) book in Pratchett's Discworld series, new readers may feel a bit daunted. Fear not. Krzysztof Kietzman of Lspace.org has created the Discworld Reading Order Guide, which puts the main storylines of the Discworld books in their chronological sequence, with dotted lines showing how each storyline intersects with the rest. (Via: BoingBoing.net)

Malcolm Berko, the financial guru over at the Oklahoman.com warns his readers to stay away from investing in Barnes & Noble (and bookstores in general), saying, "Barnes & Noble is a very poor choice. You don't want BKS in your portfolio because future revenue gains will be miserly because of competition from video games, the Internet, TV and a declining literacy rate. Many Americans between ages 10 and 40 are infected with a genetic intellectual deficit. (We are observing a phenomena called 'the dumbing down of America” and what Dan Rather calls "the dumbing down of the news.')"
While it's hard to argue with the 'dumbing down' comments, I'd urge future/current bookstore owners/investors to ignore the rest of Berko's dreary portents, instead following the sage advice of a different Malcolm -- Malcolm X: By any means necessary.

NYTimes Best Sellers: Fiction (now with excerpts)

To read the first chapters (or, in the case of stingier authors and/or publishers, brief excerpts), simply click the titles.

1. You've Been Warned by James Patterson and Howard Roughan

2. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

3. Dead Heat by Dick Francis and Felix Francis

4. Making Money by Terry Pratchett

5. Pontoon by Garrison Keillor

6. The Wheel Of Darkness by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

7. Jonathan's Story by Julia London with Alina Adams

8. Wednesday Letters by Jason F. Wright

9. Bones To Ashes by Kathy Reichs

10. The Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen

Book News, In Brief

Via Chron.com: "Author Douglas Brinkley says he's giving back the $100,000 advance he received from Penguin, for failing to promptly deliver a biography on writer Jack Kerouac. Penguin had sued Brinkley because he failed to finish the book in time to publish it on the 50th anniversary Kerouac's autobiographical novel On the Road."
Does anyone know if Brinkley tried to use the ol' 'Happy Belated Birthday Biography' line before returning the cash?

Via Xboxsolution.com:The newest installment in the Halo video game series was released this week, breaking all entertainment industry records (video games, music, movies and, yes, books) with a take of $170 million on the opening day alone. What does this have to do with bookstores, you ask? The next book in the spin-off/tie-in/cash-in series Halo: Contact Harvest hits stores on October 30th. This is the perfect book to push on lazy grandparents whose only knowledge of their kin is, 'Well, I know he/she likes video games.'

Via GuardianUK: "The mobile phone has changed the way Japanese teens read. Our media will be morphing soon, too. The latest of a new best-selling type of story, the keitai shosetsu, literally 'portable (phone) novel,' is read not on a page but on your phone screen. Of Japan's top 10 bestselling fiction works in the first half of this year, five began life as keitai shosetsu. Moved from pixel to page, their average sale is 400,000."

Book Review: Songs In The Key Of My Life by Ferentz Lafargue

Much like Nick Hornby's Songbook, Songs In The Key Of My Life is a song by song, chapter by chapter examination of various pop songs and their effects upon the author. But unlike Hornby's book, Songs In The Key Of My Life is intended as a memoir, rather than just a collection of personality-driven record reviews.

The book's format is established in the introduction: Lafargue details the recurring presence of Stevie Wonder's 1976 record, Songs In The Key Of Life, during his relationship with his one-time fiancee/current ex, and examines the way in which certain songs gained and lost significance depending on the state of their union. From there, the book jumps back and forth through time, chronicling the personal tragedies and comic moments that served as hallmarks in Lafargue's life, as well as a few of the highs and los in the last twenty years of pop music. Chapter two, for example, is a funny story about how a nine year old Lafargue used his mom's love of Billy Ocean to woo, and then lose, and then slightly re-woo the affections and attentions of a female classmate. Chapter three is an interesting look at how a "big, black Haitian kid who idolized hairy white boys" suddenly found himself feeling like less of an outsider due to the release of RUN DMC and Aerosmith's Walk This Way video.

An excerpt:
"Dancing to Walk This Way I felt less like a chubby Haitian kid rambling across his parents' room, and more like a man exuding the same swagger shown by the men performing on the TV screen. These perceived changes were affirmed that Monday in school. Everyone was talking about the Walk This Way video; and not only was everyone talking about it, but they were talking about it to me. They presumed that since I liked heavy metal I knew everything about each and every rock band. I remember being peppered with questions about Aerosmith: 'Who are they?' 'Do they like black people?' 'Do they have any other songs like this?'"

And on it goes, detailing Lafargue's thoughts on politics (via 2 Live Crew's Me So Horny, Destiny's Child's Bills, Bills, Bills and Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA), spirituality (Kanye West's Jesus Walks), the loss of a loved one (Bone Thugs' Tha Crossroads) and the loss of innocence (Micheal Jackson's Thriller).

Songs In The Key Of My Life is a quick read. I read the whole thing in one afternoon -- while at work. This is largely due to the author's conversational and unpretentious style of writing. Lafargue's prose possesses the same pared down, easy-flowing quality that many of his favorite songwriters employ.

Click here to visit the author's website.

Book News, In Brief

Still golden, forty years on: The New York Times reassess S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Charges of plagiarism are addressed and dismissed -- not because they're unfounded, but because the final novel turned out so unmistakably original.

The New Yorker magazine has hired Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon as their new poetry editor. The GuardianUK finds this to be a refreshing, albeit ironic selection. "In 1990, Muldoon published a mischievous poem called Capercaillies, in which the first letters of each line spelt out, in acrostic, Is This a New Yorker Poem Or What? (The New Yorker maintains that it rejected the poem.)"

Borders has already drastically downsized their stock of cds and dvds, and it appears that ink & paper books are next. From ReadersRead: "Borders has renewed its agreement with Sony regarding the sale and promotion of the Sony Ebook reader. Under the new deal, Borders will continue to sell the Sony Readers, but will expand the number of stores where it is sold to 500 nationwide." Devoted Borders 'customers' are apparently okay with this, as it doesn't in any way threaten their freeloading, layabout habits. My advice to the company, though: don't f**k with your scone selection!

Tim Lucas' definitive Mario Bava biography, All The Colors Of The Dark, has finally been released. It's $260 (US), but that's why I asked for it for my birthday...two years ago. Delighted recipients have been posting pictures of themselves with their new, prized possession on the blog that Lucas set up specifically for the book. To the left is my personal favorite.

News Bits, In Brief (saving your souls, one News Bit at a time)

Via AP: Norman Mailer will release On God: An Uncommon Conversation on Oct. 16. The book is to be "a series of 'Platonic dialogues' between the author and literary executor Michael Lennon." Judging from that picture, a conversation with God is soon to follow.

Via AP: "A rare first edition of the Book of Mormon found in a home near Palmyra, the birthplace of the Mormon religion, fetched $105,600 at auction Wednesday. Mormons consider the Book of Mormon to be scripture on par with the Bible." This reminds me of the tale of Mark Hofmann, a lapsed Mormon and professional forger who took the Mormon church for thousands of dollars in the 1980s. He sold the church fake letters supposedly written by the church's founders, letters that could have proved damaging to the reputation of the organization. At one point, Hofmann also sold the church a couple of faked pages of sacred Mormon scripture.

Via AP: "Codex Gigas, also known as The Devil's Bible — a medieval manuscript said to have been written 800 years ago with the devil's help — has returned to Prague after an absence of 359 years. The priceless piece, considered the biggest medieval book, was taken from the Prague Castle by Swedish troops at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. It is in Prague on loan from Sweden's Royal Library in Stockholm. According to myth, a Benedictine monk promised to write the book overnight to atone for his sins. When he realized the task was impossible, he asked the devil for help. The page with the illustration of the devil is the one visitors see. The manuscript was likely written by one monk from the Benedictine monastery in Podlazice located some 65 miles east of Prague sometime at the beginning of the 13th century, said Zdenek Uhlir, a specialist on medieval manuscripts at the National Library. It contains 'a sum of the Benedictine order's knowledge' of the time, including the Old and New Testament, 'The War of the Jews' by the first-century historian Josephus Flavius, a list of saints, or a guideline how to determine the date of Easter, Uhlir said. 'I would estimate it took him between 10 and 12 years to write,' he said about the piece, which weighs 165 pounds. Originally, it had 640 pages, of which 624 survived in relatively good condition, he said."

Book Du Jour: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

From the publisher's website:
This is a book about shock, and the way it's applied to countries and people. It is the unofficial story of how the 'free market' came to dominate the world from Chile to Russia, China to Iraq, South Africa to Britain.

It is a story radically different from the one usually told. Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that 'free markets' lead to 'free people'. She reveals that our world is increasingly in thrall to a little understood yet hugely influential ideology: the shock doctrine. This is a doctrine that sees moments of collective crisis as a 'window of opportunity'. With societies too terrified or disoriented to protect their own interests, the free market advances, using the trademark tactic of rapid-fire economic shock therapy. Often, a refusal to comply results in distinctly more corporeal shocks: the shock of the Taser gun, or the electric cattle prod. Our history is littered with events that have provided opportunities for the shock doctrine. From the 1970s dictatorships of South America, through the Falklands War, Tiananmen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Naomi Klein reinterprets our past to trace the rise of disaster capitalism, a program of social and economic engineering advanced through shock. Playing out today around the world in Israel, Iraq, New Orleans and South-East Asia, The Shock Doctrine reveals the true beliefs that lie behind global policy and in doing so reframes our history and our present.

To hear a podcast interview with the author, click here.

Don't trust self-promotion? Here are a handful of reviews from GuardianUK, NYTimes, Zmag.org, BlogCritics, Third Estate Sunday Review


And lastly, a brief commercial (artfully disguised as a documentary/sound bite pastiche) for the book by Klein and 'Children of Men' director Alfonso Cuarón:

NYTimes Bestsellers: Fiction (now with excerpts!)

To read the first chapters (or, in the case of stingier authors and/or publishers, brief excerpts), simply click the titles.

1. You've Been Warned by James Patterson and Howard Roughan

2. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

3. Pontoon by Garrison Keillor

4. The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

3. Bones To Ashes by Kathy Reichs

4. Dark Possession by Christine Feehan

5. Bones To Ashes by Kathy Reichs

6. Wednesday Letters by Jason F. Wright

7. Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

8. The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

9. Dark Possession by Christine Feehan

10. The Elves of Cintra by Terry Brooks

News Bits, In Brief

Via Bookforum, by way of BoingBoing: Revealed at last: Jack Kerouac's proposed design for the front cover of the paperback edition of On the Road. If it only took Kerouac three months to write the entire book, it couldn't have taken him more than three minutes to draw this.

Via WeberBooks.com: More competition! "Goodwill is diverting many of its best books to new book-only stores, where they'll be sold for about $3 to $8 apiece." If Goodwill was smart, they'd create an online store and sell them there. Everyone knows that that's where all of the book money is these days.

The New York Times examines the various methods publishers use to successfully roll out their newest books, and how today's news-in-an-instant internet culture is forcing a drastic restructuring of this.

Via Newsarama: DC Comics has announced the lineup for their newest condescending approach to kids' comic books, Johnny DC. Some the titles that will be appearing in 2008 are Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam, Tiny Titans, and Super Friends. What the good-intentioned folks over at DC seem to be forgetting is that kids don't want to know that they're reading 'kids' comics.' They want to think that they're reading something aimed at teens. Hell, if DC would just make their regular line of comic books a little more accessible to the new reader -- child or adult -- I'm sure they'd find these silly, ill-fated experiments unnecessary. (Doesn't anyone else remember the quick crash and burn of Marvel's 'manga inspired' Tsunami line?)

Ode to Independents by Cristin Cali

I was driving down Rt. 149 the other afternoon and noticed that there was a pizza delivery car in front of me. I was amused by the colorful decals plastered all over the car, advertising an adorable, eager-to-please restaurant. For some reason, I started to draw parallels between the pizza business and the independent book-selling industry.

We’re all aware that the big pizza chains are Dominos, Papa Gino’s and Pizza Hut. As a little kid in the late 80s, I remember those three restaurants being the King, Queen and Prince of the pizza world. On a cold or miserable rainy night at the end of a long day my parents would sometimes resort to take out or the occasional delivery. When we ordered from the chains, each pizza would taste exactly the same every time, without the slightest variation.While there may be something comforting about the predictability of a franchise, there’s nothing particularly memorable or special about it either. On the other hand, while growing up in West Barnstable, I would frequently make a pilgrimage (one exclusive to children under the age of fifteen) to the Old Village Store. Whenever I would round the corner (after stopping at the library, of course) I would eagerly anticipate the sight of the maroon building and the dusty scent of its old wooden floor.

Next to the Village Store was the most unassuming pizza parlor, appropriately named Old Village Restaurant and Pizza. I remember it being extremely small, with an Old World atmosphere. In the summer, a batch of strong, tall sunflowers would flourish in front of the quaint little porch where people would sit and devour their massive, piping hot slices.

I attribute my fond memories of Old Village Pizza to the gruff, wrinkled woman who barked orders behind the counter, the romantic ethnicity of the place, and its perfectly sparse decorations. That one restaurant evokes more charm and memories than all of my experiences with the large franchises combined.

So, in thinking about all of this while I was stuck behind the delivery car, I concluded that independent bookstores and humble, locally owned pizza places are quite similar.

I’ve been in the large chain bookstores and they are all the same, no matter where I go. Such homogenized businesses send a shiver down my spine, because they lack warmth and feeling. However, there are still (thank goodness!) plenty of unusual, charming, independent bookstores out there for adventurous book lovers to discover and celebrate.

It takes more time and effort to go to the unique places where we’ll be most likely to have a memorable, truly enjoyable experience. If you are able to spend time finding such precious gems, you will be rewarded with the creativity, quirks, passion and most importantly, the humanity that’s exclusive to independent shops around the world.

Author Du Jour: Jim Woodring

From Wikipedia.com:
Jim Woodring (born October 11, 1952) is a comic book author and artist. He was born in Los Angeles, USA, and lives in Seattle. As a child he suffered from hallucinations of floating, gibbering faces over his bed (among other visions), and his work still has a very surreal and often nightmarish quality. Woodring once told The Comics Journal that under the right circumstances he is still capable of "hallucinating like mad." The desire to draw something that "wasn't there" was always of "paramount importance" to Woodring.

A self-taught artist, Woodring dropped out of college when he hallucinated a cartoon-like frog in the middle of an art history course. (Frogs feature prominently in Woodring's comics, and their symbolism seems to change from story to story. Often they are spiritually-minded but rather pompous creatures, but at other times they are more sinister and alien, at at still other times they are "average joes" struggling to protect their homes or their families from predators.) He spent a few years working as a garbageman and developed a serious drinking problem; he eventually quit drinking because he felt it was interfering with his growth as an artist. He then landed a job with the animation studio Ruby-Spears in the 1970s. He worked designing characters and doing layouts for cartoon shows about Mr. T and Rubik's Cube, and he has often said that these were the worst cartoons ever produced. During this time he formed friendships with and was somewhat mentored by celebrated comic book artists Gil Kane and Jack Kirby, who were both disgruntled with the comics business and were working in animation at the time.

In 1980, he began self-publishing Jim, an anthology of comics, dream art, and free-form writing which he described as an "autojournal". Jim was published as a regular series by Fantagraphics Books starting in 1986, to critical acclaim if less than spectacular sales, and Woodring became a full-time cartoonist. Frank, a wordless surrealist series which began as an occasional feature within Jim, became his best-known work.

Other Woodring characters include Pulque - a perpetually drunken, man-sized, Spanish-speaking frog-creature who inexplicably hangs around with a group of American, suburban children despite the fact that they cannot understand each other and are drawn in markedly different styles - and Big Red, a large street cat who hunts and kills with an appropriately cat-like gusto made chilling by the fact that we can understand his dialogues with his prey ("I'll kill you," shrieks a terrified possum, "I killed the old owl!" "That's nice," is Red's amused response, as he moves in for the kill.)

Woodring created a short-lived comics series for children, Tantalizing Stories, with Mark Martin. He has also worked as a freelance illustrator and comics writer, writing comics based on Aliens and Star Wars for Dark Horse Comics and adapting the film Freaks with F. Solano Lopez. Additionally, Woodring illustrated Microsoft's Comic Chat program, an IRC client which is notably employed in the creation of the daily Internet comic Jerkcity. In recent years Woodring has also become a popular toy designer, with his strange creations sold in vending machines in Japan and available at hip comics shops in America. In a 2002 interview with The Comics Journal, Woodring said that he was gradually leaving comics behind because they simply weren't lucrative enough, and he was increasingly concentrating on individual paintings. Still, Woodring produced a new Frank book in 2005 (The Lute String) and is working on another.
(End of Wikipedia entry.)

For a more personal look at the man, check out Woodring's own blog, here, or read the Comics Journal interview here.

Too shy for such an intimate encounter? Then by all means, go the formal route and visit The Official Jim Woodring Website, which also happens to house The Official Jim Woodring Website's Official Art Gallery.

And lastly, for the lazy, Visions Of Frank, a series of short films by some of Japan's hippest animators, all based on the Frank comics by Woodring.

News Bits, In Brief

Via MediaBistro.com: "Starting September 23rd, The New York Times will have two separate paperback fiction lists: one for trade paperbacks, and one for mass market books. Each list will be expanded to include the top 20 bestsellers in each category, up from the present top 15 just for paperbacks."

Via BoingBoing.net: "Up for auction on eBay is an original copy of the charter and by-laws for Timothy Leary's League of Spiritual Discovery, founded in Millbrook, New York in 1966. With four days left in the auction, the current bid is $250."
Caveat Emptor: Licking of said document may prove hazardous to your health. Or it might make colors taste better. You never know until you try.

Via The Pensacola News Journal: "Florida State Parks will offer free admission to anyone showing a library card or library book to celebrate Libraries and Literacy this month."
What's the point of this? To make book lovers feel guilty for all of the trees they've caused to be killed? I've got a sneaking suspicion that this is somehow tied into the great e-book push of 2007.

Hardcover, Trade Paperback, Mass-market

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal covering Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, really gets interesting when it veers off into the old hardcover vs. trade paperback vs. mass market debate, and how it effected Gilbert's book's huge success.
An excerpt:
Ms. Gilbert's experience shows what a big influence fancy trade paperbacks are having on an industry that prices its mass-market paperbacks at about $7.99. Back in the 1970s, those smaller, rack-sized paperbacks were the blockbusters of the business, led by such best sellers as William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (11 million copies sold); Peter Benchley's Jaws (more than nine million copies), and Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight (six million copies plus).

"One of the mantras of publishing economics of the 1970s and early 1980s was that mass-market paperbacks could achieve 10 times the sales of a hardcover," says Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Bertlesmann AG's Random House Inc. Then retailers started discounting hardcover titles, and the smaller, cheaper paperbacks lost ground.

Laurence Kirshbaum, a book agent who heads up LJK Literary Management in New York, estimates that the current ratio between hardcover and paperback sales is one to one -- mostly because so many hardcover books are so steeply discounted. "These days the bulk of the people who are interested in a book buy it in hardcover; that's what makes titles such as 'Eat, Pray, Love' so exceptional," says Mr. Kirshbaum. "They are throwbacks to the days when paperbacks sold huge multiples of the hardcover."

News Bits, In Brief

The Age of Turbulence finds Alan Greenspan writing erotic nonfiction about his lifelong love of money. It's page after page of hot, lusty prose, most of which involves Greenspan rolling around naked on a bed covered with money -- by himself. The New York Times chooses to ignore all of this in their review, though, focusing solely on the parts where Greenspan takes Bush to task for destroying the U.S. economy.

A Christian and a Jew walk into a prison library...
Two inmates at an upstate New York federal prison have filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that their rights to the free exercise of religion (as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act) have been violated by the Bureau of Prisons' systematic purging of religious books and materials from prison chapel libraries. This purging was prompted by (surprise, surprise) the terrorist attacks on 9-11, in hopes of curtailing any would-be recruiting for militant Islamic groups. The Sunday New York Times tells the whole damn story, possibly provoking an anti-Bureau of Prisons recruitment surge.

Diamond Comics (still basically the only distributor for most comic books/graphic novels/trade paperbacks/Batman bobbing head dolls) has just unveiled Comics Suite, a new computer program that Publishers Weekly is describing as "the biggest revolution in comics retailing since Marvel editor Carol Kalish helped subsidize comics shops buying cash registers back in the early ‘90s." And just as mind bogglingly well-it-was-about-god-damned-time as that high water mark in comics' history is Comics Suite's intended purpose: it "allows comics shops—many of which do not use computerized inventory systems and rely on paper and pencil cycle sheets—to use barcode scanning to automate inventory control, sales and reorder activity." Wow! What's next? The horseless carriage? Electric candles?

New York Times Best Sellers: Fiction (now with excerpts!)

To read the first chapters (or, in the case of stingier authors and/or publishers, brief excerpts), simply click the titles.

1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

2. The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

3. Bones To Ashes by Kathy Reichs

4. Dark Possession by Christine Feehan

5. The Elves of Cintra by Terry Brooks

6. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

7. Play Dirty by Sandra Brown

8. Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

9. The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

10. Songs Without Words by Ann Packer

News Bits, In Brief

This is one of those News Bits I hate to publish, as every other book news site will already be covering it. Then again, if'n I choose to ignore it, we'll look like we never knew about it in the first place. So here goes: James Frey, the writer you love to hate, has a new novel coming out through HarperCollins in the summer of 2008. The fact that Frey has already been so thoroughly kicked to the curb over the faked authenticity of A Million Little Pieces (his Oprah appearance was especially/deliciously brutal), compounded with the fact that similar cases keep coming to light as of late (Augusten Burroughs, J.T. Leroy) makes me think that he might actually receive an underdog's welcome when he returns to the media spotlight. Sort of like Britney at this past Sunday's VMAs.

Jenna Bush's new children's book, Ana's Story, is getting rave reviews. When asked how she was able to put herself into the mind of a child, Jenna said, "I thought of how my Daddy talks. Then I made it sound a little less retarded."

BookBlog.net has a brief article about the oft-reported Death of Hardcovers. Their angle is the publishers' infrequent attempts at releasing high profile books in a variety of formats simultaneously (say, an equal number of hardcover and trade paperback, or a 75/25 trade paperback/mass market release). I like this idea, but the fact that they've been toying around with it for over twenty years now leads me to believe that it's not exactly the next big thing.

Yawn. Awards.

Okay, I'll make this quick. I know that these things are always boring unless you're in the running, in the audience, or expecting to hear your name mentioned in someone's thank-you list.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and an audio edition of To Kill a Mockingbird are among the winners in the third annual Quills Award. Here's the night's real surprise, though: The awards ceremony will be aired on television October 27. Not because America cares about quality literature/books on tape, but because Steven Colbert is hosting.

Mr. McMarthy's The Road has also won the 2006 James Tait Black Award for fiction. Wtf is the James Tait Black award, you ask? Only Scotland’s most prestigious and the U.K.’s oldest literary award. Note: No celebrities.

My homegirl, and the only woman over 70 I'd cheat on my girlfriend with besides Elizabeth Taylor (What? I like 'em crazy. I'm a masochist.), Joan Didion, will receive the 2007 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for her "outstanding achievements as a novelist and essayist." This is, of course, for her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and not for the truly great books she wrote 30 years ago that the literary community was too pussified to recognize.

Thank You, Madeleine.

"L'Engle, an accomplished author whose works transcended the traditional boundaries of genre and audience, passed away at a Connecticut nursing home on September 11." She was 88 years old.

One of my favorite authors as a child and young adult, Madeleine L'Engle's books actually made my life more enjoyable. Her work nourished my imagination and made me feel as though there was something greater in this life--something beyond the monotony of each day.

Not only a brilliant author of children's books, L'Engle was a talented poet--just a marvelously talented woman. Today my heart is being squeezed by grief.

News Bits, In Brief

They say 'Write what you know,' and then they go and punish you when you do. A Polish pulp fiction writer was sentenced to 25 years in jail yesterday for his role in a grisly case of abduction, torture and murder, a crime that he then used for the plot of a bestselling thriller, Amok. The dirty, no good snitches over at The Guardian UK tell all.

Two Nebraska teens were busted this past May after repeatedly breaking into their public library to download internet porn. The library responded by installing software that blocks access to adult content, only to outrage free speech advocates in the area. Here's my two step, First Amendment friendly, encourage-the-kids-to-read suggestion: 1. Reinstate the unfiltered internet access. 2. Make a bigger, brighter sign for the erotica section.

Trailing a trend that has been going strong in Japan for years, comic books are now available via cellphone in the USA. For $4.49 a month on Verizon, or $3.99 a month for AT&T and Sprint, subscribers can view nearly a dozen different traditional comic books. There's also a separate subscription service for manga.The books range from well-known names like Bone and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to up-and-coming books, such as crime noirish Umbra and Hindu folklore-inspired Devi. The comics site uClick adds new chapters and/or issues for each title every week. Click here for their catalog of available comics.

Via NPR: "A couple of years ago, British author Ian McEwan conducted an admittedly unscientific experiment. He and his son waded into the lunch-time crowds at a London park and began handing out free books. Within a few minutes, they had given away 30 novels. Nearly all of the takers were women, who were 'eager and grateful' for the freebies while the men 'frowned in suspicion, or distaste.' The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan in The Guardian newspaper: 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.'"
Want the rest of this article? Ick-clay Ere-hay.

This Post Has Nothing To Do With Bush Reading 'The Pet Goat'

To try and distract you from the fabulous flubs committed by our commander in chief this weekend, here are reviews to three recent George W. Bush themed tomes.

Terror Presidency
Dead Certain
Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency

Weekend Links

Google steals from Goodreads, launching a new blog feature wherein users can find, organize, review, and boast about the books that they've read. Computerworld.com has the official description, but in short, it's a book nerd's MySpace.


Those of you still emailing newspaper editors, demanding that they reinstate their recently canceled book review sections, might want to head on over to the Columbia Journalism Review. Their cover story this month is 'Goodbye to All That: The decline of the coverage of books isn’t new, benign, or necessary' by Steve Wasserman. It's a thoughtful and surprisingly optimistic piece on that very subject.
Update: Critical Mass just held a brief interview with Wasserman that addresses many of the issues that he raises in his article. To read it, click here.


According to the Associated Press, much of the blame for Wednesday's stock market plummet is being attributed to the the recent publication of the federal government's vaguely titled, Beige Book. So what exactly is this Beige Book, who writes it, how is it written, and why should we as bookstore folk even give a damn?


Stolen whole from the blog.Wired.com article, Whither the E-Book?:
"The New York Times offers some tantalizing nuggets from the perpetually fledgling e-book market. These includes deets on the expensive ($400 to $500) reader Amazon is set to release next month. Early users of the Kindle say it's quite limited as a Web browser, thanks to a screen that can't display color or animation. And it uses a proprietary format that means early e-book adopters will have to repurchase a lot of content from Amazon. More glad tidings from the money-grubbing frontier: Google allegedly plans to require payment for full access to certain digital texts in its database."

"Samedi the Deafness" by Jesse Ball

What follows is a review of Jesse Ball's recently-published novel Samedi the Deafness.

I will spare you specifics about the book, as this is well-covered elsewhere on these interweb-tubes. Another motivation for this is because I wish for each new reader of Samedi to discover the story on their own terms as much as possible. I was looking forward to reading this novel by the poet Jesse Ball ever since I saw it was to be released. Once I got my hands on the advanced reader's copy, I paused my reading only for sleep and eating. It can go by quickly if you aren't careful to savor it, yet you don't feel as if the book is whipping you along. At the same time, the wonder and preciousness of each moment comes through in the book. The story feels like a distinct character, as if it has it's own life and agency. You come across little wisdoms uttered by the characters which initially feel as if they are meant to remain within the realm of the book, but as the book seeps into you you start to wonder which ones might function well outside the pages. And there are deeper wisdoms here, stretching across pages and sections of the book, which take longer to seep in.

The imagination present in this story is inspirational, as it is not a separate entity but the well up from which the story is drawn. Scenes from the book are still swirling about my head. I say this in contrast to another author whom I enjoy, who blurs the line between reality and the sub-/un-conscious (imaginary?), thus making reality feel unstable and foggy. This is enjoyable on its own merits, if you enjoy such a challenge. Ball's work is assured in its vagaries and imagination, which imparts a confidence on the reader rather than a fog, bringing its own challenges to the reader and reinforcing the reader's suspension of disbelief. While I speak of confidences, I should mention that Ball's writing style makes it feels like the story is being told directly to you, bestowed in confidence not to be disclosed to others. What a feeling to be in collusion with an author while reading their words!

Samedi is a good introduction to Ball's fiction writing style, which has a feel akin to prose poetry. There is talk of another of his novels being released sometime in 2008, which promises to delve deeper into imaginative realms. His other publications are worth your time, including a collection of poetry, March Book, and a collection of short stories/prose poems about an atrocious couple with a stirring joie de vivre, Vera & Linus, written with poet Thordis Bjornsdottir.

I urge you to explore the website for Samedi the Deafness, which includes audio of the author reading excerpts, videos produced by the author, and promotional materials for the populace to spread the word about Samedi. The Flash plug-in is necessary.

Your Favorite Literary Classics, Now With 100% More Bodily Fluids!

Marquis de Sade, Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf...all of them were great literary minds who willfully ignored the accepted social and moral codes of their day in order to artistically examine and express the darker aspects of the world they lived in.

Johnny Ryan, author and illustrator of Angry Youth Comics and Comic Book Holocaust makes no such claims. He is just a filthy, funny, cantankerous motherf***er with no self-righteous excuses for the foul things he draws.

Ryan's officially licensed website is currently offering free peeks at a few of his comics. Making it marginally appropriate for inclusion on this blog is The Klassic Komix Klub, an X-rated collection of comic strips themed solely around the capital-G Great Works of Literature.

If, after clearing your hard drive of any evidence that you ever visited his site, you're curious to read an extensive interview with Mr. Ryan, head over to The Hooded Utilitarian. Then clear your hard drive all over again.

The Way We See It: At Least They're Not Bashing Bookstores

The popularity of crappy, new release bestsellers with the cheap and demanding public is forcing many libraries to restructure themselves into book-themed Blockbuster Videos. This sad turn of events has prompted the Guardian UK to ask, 'Where's the great literature in local libraries?'

Do Bookstore Employees Dream of Shelving Philip K. Dick Novels?

We are now two days into our nine month hibernatory slumber. The self-reflective imagery that we had so eagerly looked forward to has already proved entirely disappointing. It lacks vividness and grows fainter with every passing hour. What were we thinking, asking for answers? There are no lessons to be learned in the downtime.

Shrill snippetts of garbled voices echo and drift in from the street. They belong to the lost and not the looking. I offer direction, but they crave only directions. Don't they know who we are? What we are? What we can do?

I step outside to check: Has our once proud sign fallen into disrepair? Have the shadows stretched so far as to obscure the letters, making our mission moot?

Or is it true what scientists say: That no one reads in dreams?

What Does Your Store Do?

Summer is over. The crowds have left the Cape. No longer are the streets packed with people who forgot their intended summer reads and have no permanent address where Amazon.com can send their orders to. This leaves our shop with only the faithful year round residents and the occasional and possibly accidental walk-ins to pawn our paperback wares to.
Yesterday I posed a challenge to the members of my staff. I wanted each of them to try and think of an idea/gimmick/scam/kidnapping plot to attract a fresh, new audience to our bookstore and win back the crusty bottomed crowd that would rather sit at home and shop than peruse the aisles of a local indie. We already do in-store book signings and readings, as well as the seasonal museum tour or two. These work well, but we're noticing that it's the same faces attending every time. We've also been doing out-of-store events, mostly due to the tireless promotional work of one our store's best handsellers, Kay. These, too, have been highly effective. But now we need something new to add to our arsenal. So we're putting the question out to you, the readers.
As a bookstore employee/owner, what does your store do to attract a crowd?
And as a bookstore shopper, what sorts of things do you look for in the stores that you frequent?