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 at rablog@lu.com.
By Cindy Orr
This Week In Books
Well, the holidays are officially over. I’m about to take my daughter to the airport, there’s nothing new on the bestseller lists, and it’s back to work tomorrow. But, we do have lots of new titles coming out this week. Look to the next post for the New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer list for this week. Included are Richard North Patterson, Janet Evanovich, Ted Dekker, Hallie Ephron, C. J. Box, Jayne Ann Phillips and several more in fiction, plus nonfiction titles by Sylvia Browne, Ann Coulter, and Temple Grandin, and Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants and a lot more. See below for the rest.
Look to the right as usual, for our Most Wanted Mashup. As I said, there’s nothing new, but the Christmas shopping season mixed it up a bit. Under the Radar this week is Finding Where We Belong: Racial Identity Memoirs by Sarah Statz Cords, author of The Real Story: a Guide to Nonfiction Reading Interests. Again, look to the right, directly below the Most Wanted Mashup for this great list.
As a reminder, the content of Sarah’s book is included in the Reader’s Advisor Online product. Her linking of nonfiction and fiction reading choices alone makes RAO worth the very reasonable subscription price. Add the other Libraries Unlimited Genreflecting series titles and it’s a real bargain. But enough of that…on with the news of the week…brought to you free by the Reader’s Advisor Online.
Nobel Secretary Steps Down
Horace Engdahl, the chair of the judges for the Nobel Prize who sparked a controversy in September has announced that he will step down. Engdahl was quoted as saying “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world. The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”
Oprah Duped Three Times by Modern Lying Authors
It seems like there have been so many incidents of memoir authors who lied about their lives lately. This article is a brief summary…and it doesn’t even mention all of them! I think maybe the French have it right…I’ve heard they consider memoir to be fiction.
In a related story, Berkley has cancelled the publication of Angel at the Fence, a holocaust memoir that is mostly true, but whose author fabricated the crux of the book—that he met his wife when she gave him apples through the fence while he was a prisoner of the Nazis.
The author, Herman Rosenblat, and his wife Roma Radzicki had appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show twice. That makes three times that Oprah has been duped by “memoirs” that turned out not to be true. Even the children’s version of his story has been cancelled. Literary fakes have a long history, though, so Oprah is definitely not alone. Maybe we should depend upon biographies rather than memoirs for information.
Possibly with that in mind, the City University of New York is setting up a center for the study of biography. Sounds pretty cool.
2008 in Book News
Powell’s Books takes a look at the year 2008 in book news here and here. Take a look. It’s fun to reminisce. Remember the Lonely Planet travel writer Thomas Kohnstamm, who said he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks he wrote and ealt drugs to supplement poor pay? And then there was the fun of the Presidential campaign with the discredited Obama Nation and Sarah Palin thinking she might ban books from her hometown library. I, for one, am pretty happy to bid farewell to 2008, though there were some real highlights as well, including The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and A Mercy and Netherland and Last Night at the Lobster, and…
Short Story Roundup
Are you a short story fan? The LA Times has a couple of new articles on where to find the best short stories. Check here for some specifics and here for the best places to watch for more.
Top Ten Trends in Chinese Publishing
A recent forum of pundits came together for a forum and decided the top ten trends in Chinese publishing for 2008. Among them: psychological health and macroeconomics are big, as well as books on Barack Obama.
Dark Days in the Book Industry
The economic crisis and a broken system have led to terrible news in the publishing industry. Layoffs have begun, publishers have cut back, and the trend is not over.
Vote for the Best Crime Cover of the Year
Here’s a fun one…over at the Rap Sheet, they’re voting on the best cover for a crime book this year. Personally, I love the Minette Walters cover. Take a look and cast your vote here. And, speaking of covers, take a look at this nomination for the worst cover of all.
What’s Obama Reading Now?
Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and SexyUntil You’re 80 and Beyond by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, M. D.
Books NetFlix Style
It’s been a year since a couple of Microsoft employees started Paperspine, a rental service for books. The company entered the market after a couple of competitors called BookSwim, which has sent out over 100,000 books and now includes college textbooks, and BooksFree.com, which includes audiobooks. There’s also Bookrenter, which specializes in textbooks. Do you have experience with any of these sites? How do they compare to library books by mail programs?
Authors
Patricia Cornwell – interview
Seamus Heaney – interview
Per Petterson – profile
Salman Rushdie - interview
Donald Westlake - obituary
Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard – in conversation
Donald Westlake - appreciation by Sarah Weinman, by the Washington Post, and by the Guardian
Lists
5 Best Baseball Novels
5 Best Books About Conspiracy Theories
5 Best Books About the Role of Commander-in-Chief
Top 10 Books By and About Simone de Beauvoir
20 Science Fiction Novels That Will Change Your Life
Lighthearted Link of the Week
The Da Vinci Code rewritten in the style of Richard Stark (Donald Westlake)
