Go, Look!Recommended Christmas Reads

Livejournalist 'morningapproach' asked an online literary group 'What are some of your favourite holiday books?' The responses so far have been quite good, and the longer the list gets, the more out there the recommendations become. (Ever heard of The Stupidest Angel? Me neither. But it's a zombie Christmas book, so I'm sold!)
Click here to read and/or contribute.

What's Obama Reading?

We've all been wondering the same thing. Barring ear enlargement and/or garnering the goodwill of the entire world (save those pesky Talibaners), what can we do to be more like President-Elect Barack Obama?
We can stalk his reading habits!
Yes, simply by slavishly imitating the biblio-interests of our democratically chosen Chosen One, we can find ourselves thinking and acting just like him* -- i.e: with unbridled perfection!

So what is Obama currently reading?
The book at the top of this post, jackass; Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment

Well? What are you waiting for? Run down to your local brick & mortar bookstore** and grab yourselves a copy tout suite.

*Christians take note: This is a lot like the way y'all study the Bible to be more like Jesus, only the books we're pushing here are a whole lot easier to get through.
**Can someone please start a rumor that Obama hates Amazon.com? That little lie would help us more than a million bail-out plans.

Best Of 2008...already?!

I pity the books that get released in November and December. They always get left off of lists like these:

NPR's Top Five Crime And Mystery Novels Of 2008
Publisher's Weekly's Best Books Of '08
Amazon's The Best Graphic Novels of 2008
Amazon's Top Ten 2008 Erotic Romance books
Booklist's Top 10 Arts Books: 2008
The NYTimes' Best Illustrated Children’s Books 2008
Creative Loafing's Best Cookbooks 2008

Here's Some Advice You Won't Hear Too Often: Open a Comic Book Shop Today!

No, seriously. Once you've stopped laughing, we welcome you to look at this bit of Bizarro news. While regular bookstore sales were down quite a bit in the month of October...

via Publishers Weekly:
The news was about as bad as it could be from Barnes & Noble. For the third quarter ended November 1, total sales fell 4.4%, to $1.1 billion, with sales through its bookstores down by the same 4.4%. Same store sales fell 7.4%. Sales at Barnes & Noble.com rose 2%, to $109 million. Moreover, the nation’s largest bookstore chain predicted that--based on the negative sales trend to date--same store sales in the fourth quarter will fall 6% to 9%. Earlier this month, B&N chairman Len Riggio warned employees in a memo that the company was bracing for a terrible holiday season.

...comic book sales were up. Way up.

Via The Comics Chronicle:
The October 2008 comics sales estimates are online at The Comics Chronicles, and it turned out to be a record-setting month in a number of categories.
The Top 300 Comics Dollar sales were the highest they’ve been since the beginning of the Diamond Exclusive era, in April 1997. Likewise, the Top 300 Comics Plus Top 100 Trade Paperbacks (although only the Top 25 and then the Top 50 trades were reported up until a few years ago). The Overall Comics, Trade Paperback, and Magazine sales figure also set the highest mark since that category became trackable in 2003.

Excelsior, suckers!

Book News, In Brief

'Misery memoir' sales have fallen 30% in gray and gloomy England. Does this signal a return to London's swingin' days of yore, or are the Brits just being buzzkills?

The Vatican opened its third bookstore this past Tuesday. A sign on the front door informs patrons that shoplifting is a mortal sin; browsing without buying, venial.

Rapper/actor/Gap model, Common, is adding one more noun to his resume: author. Common says he's decided to write children’s books in an effort to get kids reading.

Moms: You can't live with 'em, you can't....well, actually, you can live without 'em -- if you're a clone kid. But this news bit isn't about the miracles of modern science. It's about two different books about moms and the two very different reactions they garnered. The positive: A Times writer has been shortlisted for a leading literary prize for a book that started out as a letter to his mother. The negative: A British lawyer who wrote a popular book recounting a childhood of emotional and physical abuse is being sued for libel by her mother, who says the claims are fantasy. It's going to be a very awkward Christmas at that house.

Sexy Blacks

Naw, this ain't a Wesley Snipes post. This is my Top 5 Comics Artists Who Use India Ink Boldly & Beautifully post.

5. Jim Rugg (Street Angel, The Plain Janes)


4. Eddie Campbell (Alec, From Hell)


3. Paul Pope (THB, Escapo)


2. Jaime Hernandez (Love & Rockets)


1. Alex Toth (Zorro, Space Ghost, a million other gorgeous looking comics and cartoons)

Why Won't She Overdose Already?

According to Gawker.com, Prozac Nation author/professional pouter Elizabeth Wurtzel failed her bar exam, then had the rich, White gal gall to blame it on her Yale education!
But really, does any of this matter?
Wurtzel's a wealthy, successful, self-branded brand name, thoroughly skilled in the art of I'm-not-modeling modeling.
She'll want for nothing.

Update!
Boy, was I right. Despite failing the bar exam, Wurtzel has been hired at Boies, Schiller, the law firm headed by Microsoft trust-busting attorney and Al Gore recount counsel David Boies. Is it just me, or does this strike anyone else as being like something out of Ally McBeal?

Go, Look!

Ain't It Cool News has a looong interview with director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Video Days) about the looong delayed film version of Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. Mind you, this isn't the typical, 'everyone was wonderful to work with' puff piece. Nor is it a gossipy, trash-talking, tell-all. It's a glimpse into the filmmaker's process, a candid discussion about adapting beloved books, and a surprisingly touching piece about childhood, memory and imagination.

Choice quote:

Jonze: One of the things I was worried about is that the book is just so beloved to so many people. And as I started to have ideas for it I was worried that I was just making what it means to me, and what the book triggers in me from when I was a kid. And I’d be worried that other people were gonna be disappointed, because it’s like adapting a poem. It can mean so much to so many different people.

And Maurice was very insistent that that’s all I had to do... just make what it was to me, just to make something personal and make something that takes kids seriously and doesn’t pander to them. He told me that when his book came out, it was considered dangerous. It was panned by critics and child psychologists and librarians, because it wasn’t how kids were talked to. And it took like only two years after the book was out that kids started finding it in the libraries, and basically kids discovered it and made it what it is. And now it’s 40 years later and it’s a classic. So he said you just have to make something according to your own instinct.

The whole interview is good. Click here to read.

Book News, In Brief

Vertigo Books, a Washington DC bookstore on the verge of going out of business, has taken an unusual course of action in an effort to save themselves: They're asking their customers to watch a documentary about other bookstores at risk of imminent death. (My grandfather used to say, "You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar." But even Grandpa -- God rest his senile ol' soul -- would have to admit that fresh corpses also attract their share of flies.)

What sells books like Obama's byline? Obama's recommendation. Via Chapters & Verse: Barack Obama mentioned his respect for Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln many times as a candidate, and now it looks as if the President-elect has promoted his first bestseller (by another author). With the title theme dominating media discussion of Obama’s potential Cabinet selections, Goodwin’s book has now cracked the top 20 at both Amazon (currently at No. 12, even though the paperback is out of stock there until November 23) and BN.com (now at No. 11).

Here's a secret most authors and publishers won't admit to: Film adaptations hurt book sales. A bad movie can kill a book forever, but even a decent film slows sales to a certain extent. (Disagreeing bookstores ought to compare their sales of The Lord of the Rings pre-films to post). With this in mind, we at the Inkwell have been wondering how this Friday's Twilight movie release will effect sales of The Mormon Vampire Books to End All Mormon Vampire Books. Oh, sure, the books are selling at a very steady clip now, but we couldn't help but worry that a dud adaptation might kill this Christmas' seemingly 'sure thing' sales. Then we saw the footage of Twilight star, Robert Pattinson, at a Philadelphia mall and read the various accounts of the Twilight stampede at a mall in San Francisco, and we breathed a little sigh of relief. Sure, this series won't sell forever, but considering the cult-like adoration of its current fanbase, it'll for damn sure sell through the new year.

Steven Colbert Defends America's Invention of Baseball Against Jane Austen's Pithy, Post-Mortem Claims To The Contrary!

Skip to the 1:43 mark.

Book News, In Brief

Play on playa Palin! The year's most famous failure is set to net $7 million for her first book. (Whoa. Wait. Hold up a second. Didn't Palin say she didn't read?)

Here's a book deal more to my liking: Sarah Silverman has a book coming out with HarperCollins...in 2009. Kill an hour of the year long wait by watching Silverman's comedy special, Jesus is Magic!, here.

Speaking of Jesus...seems like the spiritual seekers of the Middle Ages were looking for the same thing in their religious lit as the enlightened of today: The bestsellers of the Middle Ages...were popular because they allowed believers to establish an immediate relationship with God without intercession of the clergy. For more info on what was stocked in the 'Spirituality' sections of yesteryear, click here.

For A Brief Moment, Robert Hutchins & Mortimer Adler Were America's White, Male, Oprah Winfreys

The Great Books of the Western World. What a title! What a marketing concept! What hubris! Everybody's grandparents had at least a couple of copies. They were lined up proudly on the top shelf of the living room library, a dusty row of pleather bound volumes that nobody ever did get around to reading. So why did they sell so well? In A Great Idea At The Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, author Alex Beam examines this weird, post war phenomenon. And in today's NYTimes, James Campbell reviews this examination.
An excerpt:
In the middle of the last century, a committee of commercially minded academics came up with its own strategy to undermine the enjoyment of reading. With the backing of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler and a few others whittled the literary, scientific and philosophical canon down to 443 exemplary works. They had them bound in 54 black leatherette volumes, with the overall designation Great Books of the Western World, then hired genial salesmen to knock on suburban doors and make promises of fulfillment through knowledge...Each was a small library in its own right, with slabs of text arranged in monumental double columns. The Great Books of the Western World were what books should not be: an antidote to pleasure.
To read the entire review, click here.

Book News, In Brief

An untitled Michael Crichton novel was scheduled to be released in May, only to have its Amazon.com listing mysteriously removed a few days after his death. This has lead many to speculate that the book has been canceled by publisher HarperCollins. Not a chance. My guess: They're pulling it temporarily, but only so's they can build up the hype.

If you're counting our current economy, this makes two good reasons to go dumpster diving. Via BBC News: A mystery donor has left four 18th Century volumes described by experts as incredibly rare in a charity book bin. The books, in gold-tooled calf binding, were given to Stirling's Oxfam bookshop and form part of Clarendon's 1731 six-part History of the Rebellion.

Sure, this lawsuit has to do with the Batman movie and not the comic, but it seemed ridiculous enough to include here. From Variety (the Publishers Weekly of the movie biz): The mayor of an oil-producing city in southeastern Turkey, which has the same name as the Caped Crusader, is suing helmer Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. for royalties from mega-grosser The Dark Knight. Huseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman, has accused The Dark Knight producers of using the city's name without permission. "There is only one Batman in the world," Kalkan said. "The American producers used the name of our city without informing us."

Recommended Viewing:Elmo Interviews Kevin Clash(Elmo's Puppeteer & Author of My Life As A Furry Red Monster)

It's like Being John Malkovich -- with Muppets. Enjoy.

Tuesday's Tip For Flailing Writers:How to Avoid Tedious Descriptions of Imaginary Technological Devices

Okay, so this tip won't appeal to everybody. Those folks who preferred reading the logistics of Arthur C. Clarke's 'space elevator' more than they enjoyed reading the book it was a part of (Fountains of Paradise) might want to turn away now. But for the rest of you -- the ones who toss an imaginary technological device (I.T.D.) or two into your stories but don't want to have to write long-winded descriptions of how they're made/operated/sold/re-sold/recycled -- these tips will be well worth bookmarking.

Tip #1:
Have an ignorant or impatient character explicitly express their lack of interest in the details of your I.T.D.
Example:
In The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would often have resident genius Reed Richards begin to explain the whys and what-fors of a new invention, only to have burly lummox, the Thing, say, "Aw, save it, Stretch. Yer givin' me a headache!"
This technique tricks your tech-curious readers into believing that you, the author, wanted to elaborate on the workings of your I.T.D., but that your pesky characters wouldn't let you.

Tip #2:
Have a character lament the fact that the details of your I.T.D. have been lost to the ravages of war/time/inclement weather/an overzealous butler.
Example:
In Kirsten Bakis' Lives of the Monster Dogs, she gets around an unnecessary explanation of the surgeries and technologies used to make the monster dogs with one quick line of anti-exposition: It is rumored as well that the blueprints for creating these prosthetic devices were destroyed along with the laboratories of Rankstadt, and the dogs themselves don't know how they were made.
Pretty smooth, eh? Be careful, though. This technique is actually a lot trickier than it looks. Do it right, and it can actually enhance the realism of your tale. (After all, life's full of unanswered questions and unexplained phenomenon.) But do it wrong, and it'll be painfully obvious to your readers that you're just making up excuses for your laziness.

Tip #3:
Make the I.T.D. so advanced that no one in your story is able to fully explain it.
Example:
Tolkien's 'palantir seeing stones' from The Lord of the Rings.
Oh, J-double-R tells you their basic function (a magical melding of crystal balls and web cams), who created them (the elves of Valinor), and even the various sizes that they come in (anywhere from a foot tall to large enough to fill a room), but dude never bothers to explain the nuts and bolts of they work. The closest Tolkien comes to an explanation is when he has Gandalf rattle off ways in which the stones don't work. Perhaps the instruction manual for the palantir stones is among the "much that once was is lost" that Galadriel spoke of. You think?

Tip #4:
Don't even attempt to explain your I.T.D. Just act like it's a given and move the f**k on.
Example:
Back to Jack Kirby for this one. In his sprawling, unfinished, Fourth World saga, small electronic cubes called 'mother boxes' pop up at key moments in almost every characters' storyline. So how does 'The King' describe the workings of the mysterious mother box? He doesn't. The first time a mother box is introduced in The New Gods, he has a woman gasp in amazement at its wonderous, unspecified powers. From then on, Kirby only refers to its capabilities when he's adding new ones. And it works!

Book News, In Brief

Well, there's one Obama themed book that is not topping the sales charts: A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. Author Shelby Steele defends his tome -- but not its subtitle -- in the NYTimes.

Here's a disturbing new trend: schools selling off their libraries to pay for repairs. What's worse, it's a worldwide trend. Here's an article about it happening in Florida, and another article about a rare books sale going on at a New Zealand university. (This is why tax increases are sometimes necessary, folks!)

I'm not speaking to the NYTimes. They went and told the whole world our secret fears in yesterday's paper: Booksellers and Publishers Nervous as Holiday Season Approaches. Oh, sure, they tried to cover for it with this bit of wishful b.s.: "I think that people have not been reading for the past year because they’ve been checking political blogs every 20 minutes," said Larry Weissman, a literary agent. "At some point I think people are going to say, 'You know what, this is not nourishing.'" But still...

Book News, In Brief

EDITOR'S WARNING: Today's Book News, In Brief is deadly dull. But suffer/scroll through it, and you'll be rewarded with some choice recommendations for lurid crime comics.

Less than a week after reporting their tumbling profits, HarperCollins has announced a three year partnership with the Wall Street Journal for a series of books written by the WSJ's editors and reporters. Is this a smart investment for either party?

Atiq Rahimi's Stone of Patience has all the hallmarks of an award-winner: debilitating illness, a foreign locale, a tragic love story, and a plot revolving around the ravages of war. Now it's got the award. Afghan author Rahimi wins France's 105-year-old Prix Goncourt literary prize.

This should surprise no one, especially not those of us in the book industry. Via the AP: On the weekend after he became the country's first black president-elect, Obama's The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father, both already million sellers, ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

Quick Picks: Crime Comics(er...socially conscious graphic novels)

Scalped by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guéra
Most reviewers describe this comic as The Sopranos on an Indian reservation, but it's actually closer to an old, low budget film noir set on a rez. The basic premise is this: undercover FBI agent Dash Bad Horse returns to the reservation he was raised on after having gone to both jail and war in an effort to escape it. The feds have assigned Bad Horse one task -- dig up enough dirt on the tribe's chief, Red Crow, to put him away for life. This is easier said than done, though, as Chief Red Crow is as complex and commanding a foe as Deadwood's Al Swearengen and the aforementioned T. Soprano...combined. Mix in a newly opened casino, a gang of corrupt cops, a trailer park worth of mobile meth labs, and a large, multi-generational cast of sad and seething characters, and motherf**k my aforementioned 'film noir on a rez' summation. Scalped is a monster all its own.

Catwoman by Brubaker, Cooke, etc.
Catwoman mixes 1930's pulp novels with late 60's crime flicks to create a smart, sexy and tragic tale of anti-heroes and anti-heroines. It's the story of recently reformed master criminal, Selina Kyle, and her attempts to live life on the up and up. But just like the ol' cliche says, we may be finished with the past, but the past isn't finished with us. Old foes, friends, and inner demons begin popping up immediately, causing Kyle to question the practicality of living a moral life.
Since finishing his stint on Catwoman, writer Ed Brubaker has gone on to gain mainstream acclaim for 'killing' Captain America and tossing Daredevil into prison. Those stories may have gotten him mentions in Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly, but it's Catwoman that put him in the comic writers' pantheon.
Recommended titles: Volume 1: The Dark End of the Street, Volume 2: Crooked Little Town, and Volume 3: Relentless.

Blog-Jacking: Mollygood

No One Wants to Read a Book Written By W.
Originally posted by Whitney on 11/7
For all the jokes about President Bush being borderline retarded that have been made in the last eight years, you would think that the man would leave well enough alone once he left the White House and stopped being the world's chief source of ridicule.
But no. Our 43rd commander-in-chief wants to publish his memoirs as soon as he gets out of office, despite the fact that no one is buying books in this bad economy, and no one wants to buy a book written by the guy who gave us this bad economy. So that's a double neg.
To finish this article, click here.

Book News, In Brief

We did not forget Louis Braille's birthday on January 4th. In fact, we're offended at the accusation. We sent him a card. He must not have seen it.

Financially, this holiday season is going to be crap. The publishers have admitted it. The big box stores have said the same thing. So why are certain booksellers claiming everything's going to be alright? (My guess: They're either lying, high, or still practicing that The Secret bullsh*t.)

The next time you visit online print-on-demand publisher Lulu.com, you may be surprised at what you find. They're not printing books. Well, not at the moment, anyway. When internet watchdog Valleywag contacted Lulu to ask what was up, "a customer-support rep said that the company had known about the ordering bug for a week, and might not fix it for another week." Valleywag's conclusion: "Lulu doesn't have enough actual customers to worry about letting them conduct business with the company." Ouch.