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.

This Week In Books
We’re definitely into prime spring publishing season now, and this week will see the publication of new fiction by Lisa Jackson, Jonathan Rabb, Carolyn Hart, Wilbur Smith, Jennifer Chiaverini, Jude Deveraux, Harlan Coben, Raymond E. Feist, Lisa Kleypas, and Peter Lovesey, to list about half of them. There aren’t quite as many on the nonfiction side, but we have Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, James Carroll’s Practicing Catholic, and Susan Gubar’s – Judas: A Biography, plus a few more. As always, scroll down to the next entry to see our complete list of New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainers for the upcoming week.

This week’s Under the Radar list is Micro-Histories You May Have Missed. Sarah Statz Cords, our nonfiction expert, has turned up some REALLY interesting ones for this list, which you’ll find in the righthand column just under our Most Wanted Mashup.

And speaking of Most Wanted, there’s only one new fiction title on the top of the bestseller lists this week—Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, and only one nonfiction title as well—The Unforgiving Minute by Craig M. Mullaney. On to the news of the week.

Why the Twilight Movie Is Better Than the Books
Here’s an interesting take on the Stephenie Meyer Twilight series phenomenon—in a Newsweek article Louisa Thomas discusses her surreal near back-to-back experiences of the movie Twilight and the opera Tristan and Isolde, then her disappointment when she tried to read the book.

Countryman Twitters Its Catalog
Countryman Press has placed its Fall catalog on Twitter—140 characters at a time. Pluses=green; way early; Minuses=no pictures; not very enticing.

Harper Drops Print Catalogs
While we’re on the subject of publisher catalogs, here’s another announcement—HarperCollins will be dropping its print catalogs for Fall. They will place their catalogs online at their website. HarperCollins is also one of a group of publishers working on development of an interactive catalog system to be called Edelweiss. That should save a lot of trees.

RUSA President’s Program on RA Trends
Readers advisory librarians attending the ALA conference in Chicago this summer will have the opportunity to attend the RUSA President’s Program called “From the Book and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Readers’ Advisory.” According to the press release, “The program, which will be held from 1:30 to 3 p.m. on Monday, July 13, is the inaugural session of the Readers’ Advisory Research and Trends Forum, a new RUSA initiative where ideas, best practices and creative possibilities are actively engaged and deconstructed in order to contribute to the advancement of RA service. This year’s theme—how appeal is an interdisciplinary concept that applies to music, art and books—will be addressed with program content that covers multiple perspectives on the topic, including service implications and collection building.” Click here for details.

Ron Howard to Tackle Lovecraft
Universal and Imagine Entertainment have bought the film rights to the graphic novel The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft. The book will be released April 8. Ron Howard will be one of the producers of the movie.

Oddest Book Title Winner Is…
The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. What may be even odder…or at least more amazing, is that its author, Philip M. Parker, has written more than 200,000 books. Huh? Turns out a computer helped a little.

The Ludlum Renaissance
We know all about the Jason Bourne films based on books by Robert Ludlum. But there are several other Ludlum titles in film production, including The Parsifal Mosaic, The Matarese Circle and others.

World PEN Voices Festival of International Literature
The PEN American Center sponsors its fifth annual Festival of International Literature in New York April 27 through May 3. The festival’s opening night will feature writers reading in their original languages as their words are projected on screens behind them in English. Festival chair Salman Rushdie says, “We cannot begin to understand and appreciate the world if we do not read its literature and now, more than ever, PEN’s role in providing a platform for global literary discussion is vital.â€?

Are Computer Games a Literary Genre?
The Guardian explores this topic in its blog. John Crace argues against: “The game-play is everything. If it looks good and feels good on screen, you’re on to a good thing.” Quin Parker says yes: If Charles Dickens were alive today, “he might also be writing cut scenes for adventure games.”

Authors
David Baldacci – big article in Newsweek
Nancy Eiesland – obituary
John Hope Franklin – obituary
Sana Krasikov – wins Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
Joanna Smith Rakoff – changes the name of her new novel when Colm Tóibín decides he wants to call his book Brooklyn
Alexander McCall Smith – Precious Ramotswe on HBO
Suze Orman – lets George W. Bush have it
John Updike – remembered at NYPL

Lists
Bancroft Prize Winners
James Beard Foundation Book Award Finalists
PW’s March Catholic Bestsellers
Orwell Prize Shortlist
Indie Next April Notables

Lighthearted Link of the Week

Literary Tattoos – lots of favorite poetry, but that’s not all. Kind of cool to think literature means that much to people. On that cheerful note, I’ll sign off until next week.

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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.

This Week In Books
March Madness is upon us! For you basketball fans, or friends of basketball fans, our Under the Radar list this week (see righthand column) is basketball books. But as always, when we make lists on this site, remember, they’re not just any old basketball books, but the best basketball books. And that’s the philosophy of our sponsor Reader’s Advisor Online as well. Haven’t tried it? Ask for a free trial, we’re sure you’ll love it.

We have lots of new books on our Most Wanted Mashup this week, which is kind of surprising because there were plenty of new ones last week as well. New to the bestseller lists are Corsair by Clive Cussler and Jack Du Brul and Randy Wayne White’s Dead Silence. In nonfiction, we have one we predicted, A Lion Called Christian by Anthony Bourke and John Rendall. There’s also Russel Brand’s My Booky Wook, William D. Cohan’s House of Cards, and The Unforgiving Minute by Craig M. Mullaney. Both Under the Radar and the Most Wanted Mashup are in the righthand column.

Directly below this post you’ll see New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer, our listing of books with laydown dates in the upcoming week. Run to the shelves and watch for these to come in: Joy Fielding’s Still Life, Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry: Stories, Dante’s Numbers by David Hewson, Conn Iggulden’s Genghis: Bones of the Hills, Jonathan Kellerman’s True Detectives, and new ones by Jim Lehrer, Walter Mosley, Anne Perry and Karen Robards. And that’s not even all of them! Again, look below for the complete list.

Now, on to the news of the week.

Book Madness
Since we are into March Madness with basketball, it is only fitting that book reading non-basketball fans should have their own entertainment for the month. Welcome to The Tournament of Books. It’s become a tradition now. Every March, the Morning News and Powell’s Books sponsor a bracket with competition between two books at a time to see which book advances. They start with the Sweet Sixteen—sixteen of the best books of the previous year. Two books fight it out every weekday in March until the winner is revealed. Each day a judge argues with himself about which is the best of his two books, and he has to make a decision. No overtime here. It’s a hoot, and you’ll learn a lot about all sixteen books.

Movie and TV Tie-Ins
The Coen Brothers have decided to film True Grit, the book by Charles Portis. You may remember the John Wayne version of the story. It wasn’t exactly true to the book, and the Coens say they will be true to the book, which is the story of a 14-year-old girl who set off from her Arkansas farm to avenge her father. It will be a couple of years before they start work on it, as they’re in the middle of another movie right now. After that? They’ll be doing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Cool.

We’ve mentioned this before, but Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency will premiere as a series on HBO on March 29.

Paramount and Brad Pitt have acquired the rights to John Le Carre’s The Night Manager.

Bush to Write Memoir
George W. Bush has received an advance of $7 million to write a memoir specifically about twelve of the most difficult decisions he made as President. The book is scheduled for a 2010 release by Crown Publishers. Bill Clinton received a $15 million advance for his book.

Major Publishers to Use Scribd to Put Free Content Up
Scribd is an online document sharing site, and several major publishers have partnered with them to offer some of their content to Scribd members for free. Some of it is teaser excerpts, but some includes full length works. Scribd’s document viewer allows users to embed the content into their websites or blogs in order to share it with even more people. It’s early, but author Tess Gerritsen, whose primary audience is older women, attracted some younger readers to her novel which was posted on the site temporarily.

Publish Fewer Books Says Expert
Jonathan Karp, publisher at Twelve, addressed the annual luncheon of the Publishers Advertising and Marketing Association. His topic: how to survive the “post-apocalyptic publishing scene.” His answer? “There are too many books, and too many of them are derivative of each other.” Check here for some more of his choice words.

Bookish Protest
This is hilarious. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has made it very clear what his least favorite book is. It’s La Princesse de Cleves (The Princess of Cleves), a novel by Madame de La Fayette which was published in 1678 and is taught in most French classrooms. Apparently,he really hated the book when he was in school—hated it enough to suggest time after time that knowledge of this book is not useful. Interestingly enough, as he criticized the book, it became more and more popular. His attacks made people curious, apparently.

But now there’s a new wrinkle. Mr. Sarkozy has apparently been criticized for being more interested in physical fitness than literature, and he’s become more and more unpopular as his country seems to be on the verge of national strikes. And now, The Princess of Cleves has become a theme of protests. At the Paris Book Fair all copies of the book sold out, and they ran out of buttons that said “I am reading La Princesse de Cleves.” There have been public readings of the book, and in a current survey, it hit the top ten list of favorite books…actually, it was 3rd. Sounds like someone could make a killing on T-shirts.

Authors
Harlan Ellison – “There were flecks of blood on Mr. Ellison’s otherwise charming face.”
Rivka Galchen – on the death of publishing
Seamus Heaney – wins David Cohen Prize for Literature
Millard Kaufman – obituary
Alexander McCall Smith – interview
James Purdy – obituary
Salvatore Scibona – wins NYPL Young Lions Award
Art Spiegelman – wants a blood test
Youssef Ziedan – Beelzebub wins 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Lists
Orange Prize Long List
Man Booker Prize Long List
20 Post-Apocalyptic Novels
Orion Book Awards Short List
Hugo Award Nominations
Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist

That’s all for this week. Sorry if it’s a bit short. Had to write a big speech and celebrate my birthday and spend time with my kids who came home for the occasion. But here it is, Your Moment of Zen…I mean your

Lighthearted Link of the Week

Put Yourself Into a Harlequin Story – seriously, just fill in the blanks, hit submit, and up pops your story.

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