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
What an exciting time! In honor of the Inauguration, and because we found a few more titles and authors, we’ve decided to leave our Under the Radar list of Barack Obama’s recent reading and favorite titles for one more week. Look to the right column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for that one, which we’ll update periodically. And speaking of updating, we’re still getting lists of best books of 2008, so keep checking back for our Cumulative Lists of Lists of the Best Books of 2008, which we’ll continue to update for awhile.
The Most Wanted Mashup has a handful of titles new to the bestseller lists this week, including Janet Evanovich’s Plum Spooky, From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris and Richard North Patterson’s Eclipse in the fiction column. There’s only one new bestselling nonfiction title this week: Guilty by Ann Coulter. As always, look in the right hand column for this list.
Our New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer list (look directly below this post), is a little short again this week as publishing gets geared up toward spring. But there are a handful of noteworthy titles that will hit the new shelves in the upcoming seven days, including new novels by Louise Penny and Bernard Cornwell. In nonfiction there’s Jimmy Carter’s We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land, and Gwen Ifill’s The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Look just below this entry for the complete list.
While the weekly lists may be a little sparse, the amount of news is a bit overwhelming this week. I may have to save some of it for later, but here goes! And while we’re talking about 2009, do we really need eight books on Bernie Madoff?!
Bestsellers of 2008
According to The Bookseller, Khaled Hosseini and Ken Follett were the two most popular authors worldwide last year. Data was captured in 9 countries around the world to come up with the authors’ names. Third and fourth were Stieg Larsson and John Grisham.
In the US in 2008, six houses—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin USA, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan—controlled about 85% of all the slots on the weekly hardcover bestseller lists and 80% of all paperback slots. In fiction, bestsellers tend to hit the top spot in their first week on sale—35 novels did so in 2008. But only a handful had any traction—26 of those stayed at #1 for just a week.
Stephenie Meyer was the bestselling author in 2008, selling over 15 million books. Meyer’s success helped Hachette US dominate the top 50 with 17 titles from imprints owned by the group.
In the area of 2008 Religion Bestsellers forty-seven different titles landed on PW’s monthly 2008 hardcover charts but only two of them—Joel Osteen’s Become a Better You (Free Press) and Emerson Eggerichs’ Love & Respect (Thomas Nelson)—enjoyed double-digit monthly runs, 11 times for each. In paperback, The Shack and 90 Minutes in Heaven dominated the number one spot.
NEA Publishes New Report on Reading
Dan Gioia of the National Endowment for the Arts announced the release of a new study on reading called “Reading on the Rise.” The report raised some interesting discussion from various sources, as Gioia insisted that it showed a “measurable cultural change in society’s commitment to literary reading” since an earlier report called “Reading at Risk” was published four years ago and an even more pessimistic report called “To Read or Not to Read” was released in 2007. The 2007 report linked a decline in reading test scores to a fall in reading for fun among adolescents. That report also collected data showing that the proportion of adults who read regularly for pleasure had declined.
Then, only a year later, Gioia reported the proportion of overall literary reading increased among virtually all age groups, ethnic and demographic categories since 2002. It increased most dramatically among 18-to-24-year-olds, who had previously shown the most significant declines. Gioia attributes the gain to programs like the NEA’s Big Read, the Oprah Winfrey Show, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, and good teachers and librarians.
Nora Rawlinson over at EarlyWord points out that Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch believes that while Gioia is trying to use the data to show that his programs at the NEA were successful (he’s stepping down now), the change is more likely due to the fact that the most recent study includes online reading.
Ann Patchett in the Wall Street Journal says it only makes sense that young people are reading more. After all, they were raised in the days of Harry Potter book parties and pretending to be sick so they could stay home and read the latest installment. And even though some people tried to ban the Harry books, Patchett says that made them all the more attractive to kids. But even if readers choose bad books, she says “I’m all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug. People who read bad books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.”
So was reading really in crisis and is it better now? David Ulin in the LA Times has another good point: “The answer depends on where you stand in the cultural landscape; how you think about reading itself. I’m not so sure reading really was in crisis — any more than it ever has been.” And “The NEA’s terms are not particularly useful. The key phrase in ‘Reading on the Rise’ is ‘literary reading,’ which the endowment defines as ‘novels and short stories, plays or poems.’ In 2008, for the first time, the NEA included online reading habits in its survey; as in previous years, nonfiction was left out of the loop.” What? You can’t count Team of Rivals or David McCullough or even Barack Obama’s books as literary reading? That’s just wrong.
In a letter to Harper’s, literary critic Wyatt Mason argued that “Like playing competitive tennis at a world-class level or composing polyphonic music in one’s mind, reading a book is…a special way of being alive.” William Deresiewicz believes this attitude is held by too many academics who could be encouraging reading, but instead they are largely oblivious. “The existence of a reading public, a large mass of adults who read because they want to, simply never crosses anyone’s mind. If it did, it would be profoundly disturbing, because it would mean that people are reading without professional supervision, and that can’t be any good. As far as the academy is concerned, the literary transaction consists of a teacher, a student and a book, preferably an old one.” Sounds like a great way to kill off interest in reading.
So what do you think? Is reading up or is reading down? And if it’s up, is the Big Read the reason?
Researchers Believe Victorian Novels Not Only Reflected Society’s Morals, But Helped Shape Them
A group of evolutionary psychologists studied Victorian novels and found that leading characters fell into “groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.” The effect of such moralistic literature was to uphold and instil a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, according to the researchers.
What If the New York Times Went Out of Business in, Say, May?
According to Michael Hirschorn of The Atlantic, if that happened, it would be a sentimental moment, but not a disaster. There would be a culling of the journalistic herd, but the best would survive.
All the President’s Literature
The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the writing strengths of our Presidents.
A Year of New Yorker Fiction
In case you don’t read the New Yorker, you’re missing some great short fiction. The Millions has compiled a blog listing of all the short fiction published in 2008. It includes links to pieces by E. J. Doctorow, Alice Munro, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Richard Ford, Ha Jin, Roddy Doyle and many others. Take a look here.
Who Says the Book Business Is Dead?
Peter Osnos in the Daily Beast argues that the eBook has arrived and so has the print-on-demand machine. Using these two new digital products can provide a way for the book business to pull itself out of the doldrums. The article includes statistics from OverDrive, which provides digital downloads to libraries. OverDrive’s over 8500 libraries downloaded over 10 million items in 2008, and its users increased by 45%. Osnos questions why bookstores are still skeptical about digital books.
Simon and Schuster Launches New Website
S & S has launched a spiffy new version of its website.
Authors
Hortense Calisher – obituary
Inger Christensen – obituary
Nelson DeMille – interview
Temple Grandin - interview
Christopher Hibbert – obituary
Ravi Howard – wins Ernest Gaines Award
John Mortimer – obituary
Meg O’Brien – obituary
Thomas Perry – video interview
W. D. Snodgrass – obituary
Lists
8 Bernie Madoff Books in the Pipeline
13 Jane Austen Variations
AbeBooks Most Expensive Sales of 2008
Borders Original Voices Winners
Edgar Award Nominees
Independent Mystery Booksellers December Bestsellers
National Jewish Book Award Winners
LJ’s Best Audiobooks of the Year
LJ’s The Word on Street Lit
LJ’s YA Nonfiction for Adults
LJ’s Books for Dudes
LJ’s June PrePub
LJ’s June PrePub Mysteries
PW’s Christian Marketplace Bestsellers January 2009
Romantic Novel of the Year Shortlist
Romantic Times Choice Award Nominees 2008
Seattle Public Library’s New Year’s Resolutions for Readers by David Wright
Story Prize Finalists
2009 Tournament of Books Candidates
Ten of the Best Butlers
USA Today’s Calendar of Winter Books
The Return of the Storytellers: Books of 2009
Financial Times Books to Look Out for in 2009
The Independent Highlights of 2009: Books
The Guardian: Treats in Store for 2009
100 Novels Everyone Should Read
1000 Novels Everyone Must Read
Lighthearted Link of the Week
Dear Oprah
