The readers’ advisory librarian’s weekly update, from a scan of more than 100 blogs, newsletters, magazines, newspapers and television. This blog is brought to you by the Reader’s Advisor Online, the subscription database based on Libraries Unlimited’s Genreflecting Advisory series. We’d love to hear from you. Feel free to comment on any of our posts, or contact us here.
By Cindy Orr
This Week In Books
Take a look at this week’s Under the Radar for a list of New(ish) Memoirs by Sarah Statz Cords. With all the press lately about the memoir genre (here’s this week’s entry), you won’t want to miss this one. Then we have Stephenie Meyer’s first adult book, The Host, coming out this week. Don’t forget to check our Most Wanted Mashup (look to the right), where you’ll see a couple of new titles this week, and scroll down to directly below this entry for our weekly New, Noteworthy and No-Brainer list.
Audition, the memoir by Barbara Walters is sure to attract a lot of attention Tuesday, as she talks to Oprah about how she had an affair with former Senator Edward Brooke. There are also new books by Chris Bohjalian, Jude Deveraux, Elizabeth George, Charlaine Harris, Nora Roberts and John Sandford. The nonfiction list is exceptionally long this week. Remember, just scroll down to see all the details.
In other news, Richard Morgan won the Arthur C. Clarke award this week and was quoted as saying, “Holy shit!” when he saw the check. Nice short acceptance speech, I say. Now on to the rest of the week’s highlights.
Biographer Uses False Source
Bloomsbury has announced that it will delay the publication of the book The Secret Life of Louis XIV by Veronica Buckley to give it time to pulp some pages and tip in others. Buckley based her work on secret diaries of Louis XIV that she said were discovered in 1997. The trouble is that these “diaries” were actually written by another author who pieced together information from historical documents and imagined what Louis XIV might have put in his diary.
Several academics have pointed to the book as an example of a trend toward badly researched popular history books. Here’s a really interesting quote: “Thirty years ago this never would have happened. Then, people who wrote biographies were trained in how to carry out archival research. The same cannot be said of Veronica Buckley or many others like her,” said Jerry Brotton, professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London. “There is a whole industry now around historical biographies. Publishers know that they sell, but at the same time they will knock back book proposals unless an author promises something really racy.” Sounds like someone could have used a really good librarian.
Free L’Amour Memoir for Public Libraries
Thanks to Shelf-Awareness, we can spread the word that “to celebrate the centennial of Louis L’Amour’s birth, Bantam Books, his publisher for more than 50 years, is offering a copy of Education of a Wandering Man to all the free lending libraries in the U.S.” To claim your book, click here.
Self-Publishing Phenomenon
USA Today has the story of the self-published sensation The Shack by William P. Young. The short novel is the story of the father of a murdered child who meets God in the form of a Black woman. The book is rapidly climbing the USA Today bestseller list.
So What Makes a YA Book a YA Book?
Editors and authors discussed the issue at a Publishers Weekly panel discussion.
Screen Deals
Variety reports that Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons and A Man in Full have been optioned by NBC. This is his first screen deal since Bonfire of the Vanities in the late 1980s. Paramount has optioned the Scheff father/son memoirs Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and Tweak by Nic Sheff.
Words Without Borders
Check out the online magazine Words Without Borders. The mission of the site is described in part this way: “Few literatures have truly prospered in isolation from the world. English-speaking culture in general and American culture in particular has long benefited from cross-pollination with other worlds and languages. Thus it is an especially dangerous imbalance when, today, 50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but less than 3% are translated into English.” It’s well worth your time.
Authors
Jonathan Franzen - calls Michiko Kakutani the “stupidest person in New York City”
James Frey - his first interview since Oprah took him apart for lying in A Million Little Pieces
Gay Talese - his next book will be the “War and Peace of relationships.”
Lists
Christy Awards Finalists - Winners to be announced July 12
Edgar Awards – Bill Pronzini named Grand Master
Nebula Award Winners – Michael Chabon is a genre author?
PEN Awards – Cynthia Ozick wins for her body of work
June BookSense Picks – don’t miss these
That’s all for this week. Happy Cinco de Mayo!
I’m on the waiting list for “Host” and am getting very curious about it!
I’m personally boycotting the Time 100 list because neither Stephen Colbert nor Jon Stewart were on it. Come on, Stephenie Meyer and not Colbert?
Smashing RA Run Down again. Thanks. It is my favorite RA resource on the web. It always makes me want to look further into what you have brought to our attention.
Stephenie Meyer has also been named to the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World list. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1733748_1733752_1736282,00.html The write-up about her was penned by Orson Scott Card who is the most recent winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award and one of the most influential speculative fiction writers of our time. BTW. The Host is already in RAO. Some advance readers have loved it. (I didn’t like it at first when it seemed rather new agey but did like it by the end where Wanda/ Melanie reminded me of Sarah Connor in the movie The Terminator.) Others have come to the conclusion that they are Twilight fans not Stephenie Meyers fans.
I had to giggle about Morgan’s acceptance speech for the Clarke award. It was similar to Neil Gaiman’s reaction to winning the Hugo award for American Gods. BTW, the American title for Morgan’s Black Man is Thirteen. Now I guess I’ll have to give it another try. I bought it and started it but find his writing so darn bleak that I get depressed. Next brilliantly sunny day I’ll see if I can get through it.
I was in Borders this weekend and saw that they’d put Augusten Burroughs’s latest memoir, The Wolf at the Table, in the “new fiction” section. Don’t know if they did that on purpose but I found it very interesting all the same!