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
Woohoo! 80 degrees in Cleveland finally. It makes you want to go outside and enjoy the weather instead of reading. Oh, wait…gotta get the hammock out!
Again this week, there’s a lot of activity on the bestseller lists. New to the list in fiction are the sleeper hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith and Lisa Scottoline’s Look Again. On the nonfiction side, Kristin Chenoweth with Joni Rodgers has A Little Bit Wicked, a reference to Chenoweth’s role as Glinda in the musical Wicked. Then there’s Kathie Lee Gifford’s Just When I Thought I’d Dropped My Last Egg, and a new Tori Spelling called Mommywood. As always, look to the right for the entire Most Wanted Mashup list.
Our Under the Radar list this week, which you’ll see directly under Most Wanted, is a little unusual. This one is Judging a Book By Its Cover—a collection of books about book covers—a topic that readers’ advisors should know about.
And, finally, our third list this week is New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer—books you should know about that are scheduled to be published this week. Look directly below this post for that one, but here are some highlights from a very good week: Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg, Laurie R. King’s The Language of Bees, James Patterson and Maxine Paetro’s The 8th Confession, Vision in White by Nora Roberts, Mr. and Miss Anonymous by Fern Michaels, and that’s not all. See directly below for the rest.
Book News
President Barack Obama has a new book coming out on September 9. This one is a policy statement, though, called Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise. It will be interesting to see if Americans are willing to read policy, but Crown is printing 300,000 copies, so they seem to be hopeful (pardon the pun).
And speaking of royalty, Prince Charles has signed to do a book with HarperCollins. The title is Harmony, and it will be out in 2010. The book will be about the Prince’s feeling that “in our relentless pursuit of economic growth and technological progress we have become dangerously disconnected from Nature.”
Vladimir Nabokov’s son has, after several decades, reluctantly decided to allow the publication of a novel that his father had wanted destroyed. Nabokov’s book, called The Original of Laura, will be published by Knopf in November.
Is Hugo Chavez the new Oprah? That’s the question from the New York Times, as the obscure book that Chavez gave to Barack Obama has shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. That’s understandable. What’s not, is that Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent suddenly has, at this point, 125 reviews as well. Nation of speed readers, aren’t we? Of course, nearly all the reviews give it either 5 stars or 1, depending on the point of view.
In September, Norton will be publishing The Complete Stories of JG Ballard, who passed away last week. It will be the first complete collection of his work to be published in the US.
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, won the Pulitzer Prize for his book American Lion, and now we have news about his next project: a biography of George H. W. Bush.
Books Into Movies
Ken Kesey’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test will be heading to the big screen. Rumors are that either Jack Black or Woody Harrelson will star. Take a look…those copies are probably pretty shabby by now.
Angelina Jolie will star as Kay Scarpetta in a movie based on Patricia Cornwell’s books. No date has been set, and details are still being worked out. Apparently, the movie will not be based on a particular title in the series.
Peter Jackson is directing the movie based on Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. It’s due out in December. USA Today has an interview.
Reece Witherspoon is the potential star for a screen version of Nice by Jen Sacks about a magazine writer who accidentally kills her boyfriend, then realizes this is an easier way to get rid of someone than breaking up.
Mordecai Richler’s last novel, Barney’s Version, will be made into an independent film starring Paul Giamatti and directed by Richard J. Lewis, who has directed many episodes of CSI.
Borders In Trouble
The blog 24/7 Wall Street lists “Twelve Major Brands That Will Disappear.” Number 2 on the list is Borders, which they predict may go away on April 1, 2010, the date the big loan they have comes due.
Mysteries and Spy Novels Doing Okay
Library Journal makes the case that mysteries and spy novels are doing okay in this slow economy—especially historical and animal mysteries. Wilda Williams, who wrote the article, follows it up with a preview of forthcoming mystery titles. USA Today would argue that it’s trade paperbacks that are doing well. And, though Williams thinks ebooks are insignificant, they are one of the few categories that is outpacing last year by a lot…and O’Reilly announced this week that book apps is the fastest growing category for the iPhone. But are books really recession-proof? Or could the book business tank in a frighteningly fast crash like the newspaper business, as Robert McCrumb warns in The Guardian?
Sour Plus Grapes Equals
Three British thriller writers, along with their “advisor,” Jeffrey Archer, have announced that they want to challenge the “reign of production-line American thriller writers” like John Grisham and James Patterson. “The tradition of thriller writing should never be allowed to die, not least because we are better at it than anyone else in the world,” said Archer. Um…okay…but where did you get the “we,” Jeffrey? Sarah Weinman skewers them here.
Should Literary Novels Be Realistic?
Is the point of writing fiction in 2009 to represent, as accurately as possible, the way the world really works? Or should fiction deliberately be timeless? This is the subject of a recent interesting BookForum article, and a speech by its author Walter Benn Michaels, a professor of American literature, who says that current American writers have “rendered the reality of our social arrangements invisible,â€? and that if they don’t change their ways, they’ll never produce great art.
The last twenty-five years have been pretty sad for the American novel, Michaels says, and the best works took history as their subject. In addition to historical works, there have been a ton of memoirs, and then you have most literary works which have any clues about their time stripped out. Michaels pleads for more works that address the social realities of our time, and says the most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of the 21st Century so far is…The Wire, the HBO series by David Simon.
The Vulture Reading Room
New York Magazine has come up with a cool idea called The Vulture Reading Room. The idea is to gather together four or five creative people and let them go to town picking at the bones of “some inherently fascinating literary object.”
Their first target is Charlotte Roche’s scandalous Wetlands. The reading room members are Kate Christensen, 2008 PEN/Faulkner winner (The Germans have obviously gone collectively insane), Jessa Crispin, founder of the literary blog Bookslut (So what if Wetlands is a total failure as a novel), Ayelet Waldman, novelist, essayist, lawyer (A loathsome little turd of a novel), Adam Sternbergh, New York Magazine editor-at-large (The writing is bad. It’s so, so bad.), and Sam Anderson, New York Magazine book critic (This is a genre novel. The genre is: a crazy book that might shock you into thinking about your life differently.)
Chinese Literature—Ignored By the World
Ninety years ago after May Day, 1919, a movement began in China, and it spawned a host of writers famous ever since in their own country for their satire, which they used to try to change what they saw as a backward and corrupt land. But to this day, these writers are largely unread outside of China, even though they still have great influence on the psyche of the country.
Understanding the Genres…of Video Games
Gamers are readers, say Lori Easterwood and Lindsey Patrick Wesson in a School Library Journal article. Today’s video games are multi-faceted experiences, and if librarians understand them, they can use game criteria to recommend books and movies to patrons.
“2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.”
Really? Yes, according to Steven Johnson in The Wall Street Journal. Why? The breakthrough of the Kindle ebook reader and the maturation of the Google Book Search service. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?
Authors
Andrew Brown – wins Orwell Prize for political writing
Ted Dekker – interview
Linda Gregg – wins $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize
Stephen Hawking – hospitalized
James D. Houston
Scott Turow – writes sequel to Presumed Innocent
Lists
Amazon’s April Best Books
Orange Prize for Fiction Shortlist
Christian Marketplace Bestsellers April 2009
Indie Science Fiction and Fantasy Bestseller List
LA Times Book Awards
Shirley Jackson Award Short List
Nebula Award Winners – Ursula K. Le Guin tops list
Lighthearted Link of the Week
Literary Apocalypse Quiz
