Stephen King Books That Break the Bank

Abebooks.com has posted a list of the Top 10 most expensive Stephen King books ever sold on the site. The number one book on the list is:

The Regulators, Sold in July 2004: A leather-bound copy with four Winchester bullets emerging from the front cover and the shell cases entering the rear of the book - signed by "Bachman" and dedicated to Harlan Ellison. Sold for $8,000

- C. Max Magee @ 2:16 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

In Transit

As previously discussed, I'm moving to Philadelphia this week, and then Mrs. Millions and I are heading to a wedding in LA, so don't expect to hear much from me until about a week from now. However, I will be putting up any posts I get from contributors, so stay tuned.

Also, recommendations on fun Philly stuff are still welcomed in the comments of the post linked above.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Atheism Hits the Bestseller List

The Guardian looks at the trend of books by secular skeptics, who take various angles as they pick apart religion. Leading the charge is Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion has become a bestseller if the #3 ranking on Amazon is to be believed. The other books mentioned in the Guardian sport impressive Amazon rankings as well. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris is ranked #10. Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is ranked #227. But Dawkins is undoubtedly the headliner of this trend. For a taste of what he's all about, the curious can read his recent essay at the Huffington Post.

The coverage of the Dawkins book has been varied. Publishers Weekly's review expresses alarm at Dawkins' notion that "religion generally is 'nonsense.'"

The New York Times (setting aside Levi's complaint) finds Dawkins to be compelling, but over the top in his rhetoric:

The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy. Dawkins fans accustomed to his elegant prose might be surprised to come across such vulgarisms as "sucking up to God" and "Nur Nurny Nur Nur" (here the author, in a dubious polemical ploy, is imagining his theological adversary as a snotty playground brat).

At the Philly Inquirer, Frank Wilson writes that Dawkins' characterization of God and religion "amounts to caricature."

Dawkins' rhetorical excesses aside, what interests me more is the larger trend, which, I hope, is representative of a recognition of how much violence in the world, now as ever, is committed in the name of religion. Beyond that, I'm wondering if people have grown weary so much being couched in religious terms these days, the battles over gay marriage, stem cells, and abortion, a president who is doing God's work. It seems to me that a backlash may be building among people who don't want religion's reach to extend quite so far beyond the church, temple and mosque. It also interests me to see how book sales can be an indicator of the broader cultural trends in our country.

See Also: HarperCollins Chief Says Religious Books Selling Poorly

- C. Max Magee @ 10:03 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Remembering The Cay

Theodore Taylor died this week. He was best known as author of The Cay, a book that has stayed with me since I read it in fifth or sixth grade. The book has a premise appealing to an 11 year old as it imagines a boy that age during World War II who, after the boat he is riding on is torpedoed, ends up on a small island with an old black man, Timothy, and a cat. The boy, Phillip, has been blinded in the accident, and he has an ingrained mistrust of Timothy. Though the book is a story of how Phillip comes to love Timothy, it is unsentimental and peppered with enough adventure to keep a young reader interested. Unlike The Lord of the Flies that other classic about the youthful shipwrecked, The Cay felt more real to me as it wasn't as weighted down by allegory. I hope kids still read The Cay in school.

Taylor's obit in the LA Times.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:43 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Intertwining Histories

Erik Larson has followed up his blockbuster book The Devil in the White City with Thunderstruck, another narrative history that ties together a pair of men one "good" and one "bad." This time he focuses on "the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of wireless technology (Guglielmo Marconi) and the most notorious British murderer since Jack the Ripper (Hawley Crippen), who dispatched his overbearing wife in ways most foul," according to a profile of Larson in the Seattle PI. In the PI profile Larson says that he didn't want to do another history with a parallel structure, but in the end he couldn't help himself.

I found Devil to be an engaging read, but didn't love it, writing:

Despite, or perhaps because of, Larsen's ability to craft such a readable story, the book does inspire some raised eyebrows at times. A scan through the notes at the end of the book reveals the times when Larsen speculates about his characters in the absence of hard facts. While I don't necessarily disagree with this practice, these moments in the book tend to feel transparent. Likewise, the structure of the book is a bit flimsy as the three characters within share little but being in the same city during the same period of time, and the strenuous effort put forth by Larsen to connect these three characters tends to detract from the stories themselves, as each character is certainly worthy of his own book (even the poor, bewildered Prendergast). Despite these flaws, the book was still a delight to read.

It sounds like Thunderstruck will be a book with similar strengths and weaknesses, but undoubtedly an engaging read.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:17 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Famous Quotes, Misquoted

Reuters writes up The Yale Book of Quotations

Showman P.T. Barnum never said "There's a sucker born every minute" although he wished he had. And Civil War Admiral David Farragut probably never said "Damn the Torpedoes! Full Speed Ahead" -- words that have inspired generations of fighting men.

To make things even more complicated, it is doubtful that Paul Revere warned that "The British are coming" when he would have at the time of the American Revolution thought himself British, although a revolting one. He probably would have said "The Redcoats are coming."

A new, meticulously researched book of quotations attempts to set the record straight on those beloved phrases that have crept into everyday use as signs of wisdom and wit, including Sigmund Freud's sage advice that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." (He didn't quite say that, although his biographer thinks he would have approved of the idea.)

The Yale Book of Quotations has a simple thesis: famous quotes are often misquoted and misattributed. Sometimes they are never said at all but are, instead, little fictions that have forged their way into public consciousness.

More

- C. Max Magee @ 8:22 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Wednesday Links

• I've been meaning to link to Ed's review of Stephen King's Lisey's Story in the Philly Inquirer. Jenny finds that not everyone agrees with Ed. Previously: King tells the Paris Review the he sees Lisey's Story as a "special book."
• Why Levi won't be reading Thomas Pynchon's new book Against the Day. Michael, meanwhile, already has his copy.
• Former book columnist at the Dallas Morning News Jerome Weeks has started a blog, book/daddy. Weeks took a buyout from his paper and has been vocal about the downsizing of cultural coverage in newspapers. See Weeks' comment on a recent post on this topic.
• Assigned reading too hard for schoolkids say experts.
• Google recently subpoenaed a number of companies - Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and publishers Random House, Holtzbrinck, and HarperCollins - to collect evidence that will back its side in the copyright case against Google Books being brought by authors and publishers. Now, Amazon has rejected Google's request, and the other companies are expected to follow suit.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:58 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Commenting at The Millions

Note: Irrelevant comments pitching books or other products will be deleted immediately. If you would like to promote your book, website, or other product, please consider advertising with us. You can do so through BlogAds at this link or you can email Max with questions.

I like using Blogger as the platform for this blog, but I've found that the interface for commenting is frustratingly confusing for many commenters. Up until now, I was resigned to the fact that some of my potential commenters were giving up, but then I saw a helpful post at the Written Nerd where Jessica explains to her readers how to use Blogger's clunky commenting system. Luckily, Jessica was nice enough to let me borrow the wording from her post.

So, for anyone having trouble commenting, follow these steps:

1. Click on the "Comments" link at the bottom of the post on which you wish to comment. From there you can read comments that other people have left and/or click on "Post a Comment" at the bottom to leave your own. A new window will pop up (disable your pop-up blocker if you need to.)

2. In this new window, type in your comment in the box under "Leave your comment."

3a. If you have a Blogger or other supported user account, click on the "sign-in" bubble to use it. Type in your user name and password in the blanks that appear.

3b. If you want to comment using your name (or any name) but don't want to use, or don't have, a Blogger account, click on the bubble next to "Nickname." Type the name you wish to use in the blank marked "Nickname." The "URL" blank is optional, but you can use it to include the address of any website you want people to link to when they click on your name in the comments.

3c. If you want to post your comment anonymously, click on the bubble next to "Anonymous." You will not be asked for any identification info.

4. Click "Preview" if you want to see what your comment will look like. You can edit the writing in the "Leave your comment" box to modify your comment.

5. Click the blue "Publish Your Comment" button.

Congrats! You've left a comment at The Millions!

Note: If you are not signed in with your Blogger account, you will likely also need to fill in the "word verification" field to make sure that you aren't a robot or a spammer. Simply type in the characters you see in the picture above the pace.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:43 AM ~ ~ Links to this post

 

On the way to Philadelphia

After a long lazy summer living in a temporary arrangement (with my generous parents) in the Maryland suburbs, Mrs. Millions and I are picking up and moving again, this time to Philadelphia and this time (hopefully) we'll be there for a while.

After spending our post-college years soaking it up in LA, we left for Chicago where I went to grad school. We found it considerably colder than Southern California, as you might expect, and the whole time we were there we felt halfway home, which makes sense considering that we're East Coasters by birth. While in Chicago, we discovered that it's hard to really settle in and get to know a place if you feel like you're just stopping over, even if that stopover is nearly two years long.

But now we're moving Philadelphia with the idea that we could be there a while, "indefinitely," a word we're happy to be able to say after living out of boxes for months. We're excited about this move because it's situated nearly evenly between Washington, DC and New York, our two childhood homes, yet it is almost unknown to us. After a few visits there in the last few months to find an apartment, we've already taken a liking to the place. We're living near South Street in "Center City" as they call it. Though we've lived in cities before, we've never lived in a setting this urban, usually ending up in the grittier, cheaper outskirts of downtown areas. But Philly is small and compact, and we're a little tired of almost living in cities, so we'll be in the middle of it all, with dozens things to do just steps from our door.

The fact remains, however, that despite our being thrilled about our new city, we know almost nothing about it, and we know only a couple of people who live there, so, with that in mind, I'd love some suggestions from current or former Philadelphians. I'd especially love to hear about the city's best bookstores and good books that are about or based in the city, but I'll happily take recommendations on restaurants, cultural venues, and any other "must see" stuff in Philly. Any ideas?

- C. Max Magee @ 8:16 AM ~ comments: 12 ~ Links to this post

 

50 Words

Digging through some old files on my computer I found a document called "50 Words" that contains a couple of tiny stories that I wrote several years ago. They were meant to be for a little collection that a friend of a friend was putting together in which all the stories would be just 50 words long. As far as I know, though, the collection never happened, so rather than have the stories waste away in the depths of my hard drive, I thought I'd share them. Here they are:

"There's a difference between a woman and a girl, Jack." Jack looked dumbly at his knees, hands in his lap, bunching his slacks in his fists. Janet knew he didn't understand, couldn't understand, and though she wanted to be the good person, she knew that she had never really cared.

and,

Carl has a fishing rod and tackle. He has large engraved beer steins and four pairs of shoes. He has a steamer trunk lined with green velvet. Carl's fridge is almost empty, but there is fish in the freezer downstairs. Carl keeps Diane's pink woolen gloves in his sock drawer.

Feel free to share your own creations in the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:53 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Monday Links

• Friend of The Millions Edan Lepucki has a short story in the most recent LA Times West Magazine, "Salt Lick". Congrats!
• I've heard of publishers throwing in a free bookmark to help sell copies of a new book, but gold?
• Oriani Fallaci, the fiery (and athiest) Italian journalist who recently passed away, bequethed her library to a Pontifical university.
• Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam takes the Sony Reader for a spin and isn't impressed.
• Did you know that among this year's finalists is the first graphic novel ever to be in the running for a National Book Award? Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese has been given that honor. "I can't say it's a dream come true, because it never even would have occurred to me to dream it. It wasn't in my reality," Yang says.
• John Hodgman is at it again with one of the more antic Washington Post chats I've ever encountered. (via Books are my only friends)

- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Country Gentleman with the Mean Left Hook by Andrew Saikali

I must've been terribly annoying when I was twenty.

Infuriating and insufferable, I was so sure I knew all I needed to know about music and literature. One could document my tunnel-vision with loads of examples, but two stand out in my mind. The first was musical. At the time, my knowledge of The Kinks was minimal, a handful of hits that everyone knew, and which I liked, but which really didn't even hint at the genius of Ray Davies' songwriting. Then my friend Doug, presumably fed up with my hesitation, forced some tapes on me, and then patiently waited. Within days I was hooked, searching high and low for LPs about village greens, the British empire, the record-industry money-go-round, and Muswell Hill, along with collections of glorious and sad singles and B-sides, especially from those magical mid 60s to early 70s. The Kinks quickly became my favorite band. My early resistance is incomprehensible to me now, years later - a lifetime removed from those heady college days - as The Kinks remain on top of a very select list. And I find it baffling and more than a little irritating that more people haven't caught on. People who should know better; people who...

So, yes, books. Right. I was getting to the books part. The other instance of my youthful intransigence was literary. My reading at the time consisted of two or three authors. Great ones, to be sure, Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemingway topping the list. But I was closed to everything else. Then - the ambush. I was in Toronto, riding the subway with a friend, (Doug, again) likely in one of my if-it's-not-Kurt-Vonnegut-then-I'm-not-interested moods, when he pounced. I didn't see it coming. He took out a paperback and pushed it into my hand, pointed to a passage and commanded me to read. Smart really, I tend to shrink from public confrontation, especially with someone seven inches taller than me, so a crowded subway would mean I wouldn't, couldn't put up a fight. Plus... you know... witnesses. Before I knew it I was reading colorful, vibrant narration and dialogue so explosively funny and sarcastic and bawdy that I couldn't put it down.

That writer was J.P. Donleavy, and his novel, The Onion Eaters, was the first time I heard his unique voice. I soon lapped up the first dozen of his books - novels, mostly, but also a short story collection and some other oddities.

Brooklyn-born, Bronx-raised, the Irish-American James Patrick Donleavy wound up studying the sciences in Dublin and, except for some time in England, he pretty much remained in Ireland ever since. An accomplished painter and a trained boxer, his first novel, The Ginger Man, was an audacious debut. Published fifty years ago, this comic romp tells the story of Sebastian Dangerfield, rogue and scholar, an American studying at Trinity College, Dublin, and modeled loosely on one of Donleavy's fellow expat American chums. Dangerfield has a wife and child, a friend, Kenneth, who shares his love of drink, debts piling up and an insatiable appetite for life.

There's a wonderful 45-minute audio interview from 1988 with Donleavy looking back on his work, and in particular to the remarkable back-story of The Ginger Man's publication that resulted in a 25-year lawsuit. Turned down by 45 publishers, The Ginger Man finally found a home at the Paris-based Olympia Press, publisher of equally edgy Jean Genet and Henry Miller. But, rather than treating Donleavy as one of their genuine authors, Olympia Press published The Ginger Man as if it were the work of one of their pseudonymous porno-writers, of which they had many. When Donleavy subsequently accepted proper publication elsewhere and became noted, the writs were served. Twenty five years later it was settled. Donleavy won, and... wait for it... wound up taking ownership of Olympia Press!

The Ginger Man is probably the best starting point for the neophyte, but once you've finished that, and if the ribald tale hasn't offended your sensibilities, I highly recommend the woefully overlooked A Fairy Tale Of New York, probably my favorite Donleavy novel.

Meet Cornelius Christian, orphan, Brooklyn-born and Bronx-raised, returning to New York as he closes in on thirty, after a decade of cultivation and education overseas. He arrives by ship, but, sadly, his wife died during the voyage. It's at this point that the story begins. Cornelius is bereaved, penniless and in debt to the Vine funeral home. The stuff of comedy, no? Well, indeed, this is one of the funniest comic novels I've read. Vine takes a shine to Cornelius and offers him a job. Cornelius, the returning American, erudite, sophisticated, polite, gratefully accepts. This is a pattern that develops - Cornelius, taken under the wing of an American success; though he himself is never as convinced of his own future as his mentor seems to be. It happens again, later, when a captain of industry, impressed by Cornelius' breeding and forthrightness, hires him as a sort of ideas-brainstormer. Cornelius, however, is never quite what others presumed that he would be.

The women in his world also cling to some preconceived notion of what this man is all about, and when his true nature comes out, they accuse him of failing to meet their expectations. He's no saint - a terrible drunk, a reluctant fighter who nevertheless has fists-at-the ready, his honesty which endeared him to others when sober, offends them when he's drunk.

A Fairy Tale of New York began as a play in the early 60s, then Donleavy recast it as a novel a dozen years later. It doesn't feel theatrical or stagy, though. If anything, there's a cinematic sweep to the narrative. Many chapters begin with an overhead shot of New York, then through a succession of descriptive fragments, pull down to the neighborhood, to the room, to Cornelius. And then, like a camera panning over the scene, we read:

Vine guiding Christian by the arm. Past the chapel's open gothic arched door. Four candles burning inside the blue glassed golden topped tabernacle on the altar.

Behind it all is New York - a booming, post-war New York. But Cornelius is running at a different speed. He's searching for "someone with faith in his nobility." But everyone else has his own agenda. You might be wonderful, they tell him, but can you sell it? A disappointment to others, he himself grows weary of the rat race: "No one will ever give you two indifferent minutes out of their lives to save twenty five million desperate ones in your own."

An optimist at the outset, his optimism is being steadily chipped away, and he can't shake feeling like an interloper. An American seeing America with fresh overseas eyes, he's looked upon with suspicion. He's a lightning rod, attracting America's mid-century fears and attitudes, constantly met with "you're not a subversive, are you" as he goes about politely tending to his affairs.

Like most of Donleavy's work, the language, especially the first-person ruminations and the dialogue that weave with the narration, is ribald, lusty, profane. But scathingly honest.

So if you like a cracking good tale of an educated rascal with an appetite for life, intertwined with social satire, do yourself a favor and delve into Donleavy. Yes, I suppose I'm still as sure of myself as I ever was. The only difference is that when I was twenty, I only thought I was right. Whereas now, well, I really am right! And I might just have to ambush you on a subway or show up at your doorstep and force you, with gunpoint guerilla tactics, to take that first step.

There are new rumors of a film version of The Ginger Man with Johnny Depp as Sebastian Dangerfield. And Donleavy recently shared a drink with, and was serenaded by, the great Shane MacGowan, who you may have guessed by now is a Donleavy fan. It's no accident that the wonderful Pogues song is called "A Fairytale of New York."

Donleavy celebrated his 80th birthday this year, on April 23 - a birthday, incidentally, that he shares with those two pillars of literature: William Shakespeare and... well... me.

J.P. Donleavy remains one of the overlooked heroes of twentieth century literature, still going strong. Lord of the manor of his sprawling Irish estate, he's still writing and still in fighting shape. The country gentleman with the mean left hook.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:33 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Google Books Copyright Case Drags On

This week, there were a pair of updates on the copyright cases against Google that are being brought by publishers and authors.

Initially, the two groups had been pursuing two separate complaints against Google, but this week Judge John Sprizzo consolidated the two cases into one. According to MarketWatch: "Sprizzo's streamlining was inevitable because the authors and publishers accuse Google of virtually the same thing, and plan to use the same kind of evidence." It sounds like that news is probably good for the authors and publishers if not terribly consequential.

The other bit of new news, that the case won't be decided until early 2008, is undoubtedly bad for the anti-Google Books camp, both because it means the authors and publishers will have to spend more money going up against deep-pocketed Google, and because Google Books will continue operating unfettered for over a year until the case is handed down, as eWeek explains.

Now that we know that Google Books turns searchers into buyers, not stealers, perhaps it's a good time for the authors and publishers to broker a compromise with Google.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:22 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Thursday Links

• Bud offers a charming man about town piece that touches on the intersection of technology and culture.
• One of my biggest on-the-job challenges back when I was a bookseller was recommending books for finicky teenagers. In an effort to take some of the guesswork out of this endeavor, Anita Silvey, a professor of children's literature at Simmons College in Boston, wrote 500 Great Books for Teens. Scripps news prints 20 of those recommendations, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, and, of course, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
• Germany is prosecuting seven men for burning a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, in a case that highlights the symbolic power of books.
• And in Trenton, NJ, librarians are accusing a library accountant of refusing to purchase the novel Whore by Tanika Lynch for the library's collection because "he objected to the title."

- C. Max Magee @ 8:31 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Tin House Gets Graphic

Remember those kids who obsessively drew their own comics on loose leaf in school? It should come as no surprise that Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem were furiously scribbling away in their notebooks during their pre-teen years. In the latest issue of Tin House - "The Graphic Issue" - the editors have collected boyhood comics from Chabon, Lethem, Dan Chaon, Luc Sante, and Chris Offutt (who also pens an introduction.) The comic juvenalia of these now well-known writers brought me back to my fifth grade class, where comics became a craze, and nearly every kid had created his own - on loose leaf of course - which we traded and read and discussed at length. My favorite amongst those collected here is Lethem's brief opus "Fig-Leaf Man vs. Hot Dog King."

Unfortunately, none of the comics are available online, but the issue is worth a look as it includes graphic novel excerpts from Marjane Satrapi's Chicken With Plums and other new works as well as appearances by Lynda Barry, Tom Tomorrow, and Zak Smith introducing his Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated (Read Garth's recent post about the book). Also in the issue, short pieces by Anthony Swofford, Charles D'Ambrosio, and Stuart Dybek.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:43 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Death of Newspaper Book Sections

Publishers Weekly has a very interesting article about newspaper book sections which points out that, with the exception of the New York Times, book review sections do not bring in enough ad revenue to cover their costs.

Those of us who follow the newspaper industry are used to hearing all ills blamed on declining readership, but those quoted in the PW article essentially take the publishing houses to task for failing to support book sections outside of "their hometown paper, the New York Times." Of course, one could easily point out that if readership were to rebound, ad revenue would as well, but the article does make a compelling point.

Publishers (who in many ways are just as endangered as newspapers) bemoan our dying literary culture, but then fail to support it in one of the last places where it is clinging to a foothold. I've never been a publishing industry insider, so I don't know if things are just bad all over (perhaps someone can enlighten us), but I wonder if publishers are to blame here, or if they have simply found that the dollars spent in the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and LA Times, don't help sell many books.

In the Comments: Jerome Weeks, the Dallas Morning News book columnist mentioned in the PW story, gives us some additional thoughts on this issue.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:03 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Questions for the Librarians

Another installment of Ask the Librarians has arrived at emdashes, and it provides another fascinating look at the New Yorker.

In this issue you can learn how the magazine got writers in its early years; who has had the most short stories published in the magazine all time and in a single year; all about the now defunct horse racing column; and most interesting of all, a history of the magazine's editorial "Comment" column and how it took on a political tone over the years.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:44 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The LBC Autumn 2006 Pick

The LBC members have unveiled their latest selection. It's a great little book about a literary rat.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:10 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Without Feathers by Woody Allen: An Appreciation

When was the last time you read something from the humor section? It's probably been a while. If memory serves, that particular bookstore ghetto is filled with quickly dated political humor, books of redneck jokes, and similar diversions: Books some people might buy as gifts for non-readers, but never for themselves. Others wisely steer clear of the section altogether. As such, it's possible that people have gone through their reading lives without happening upon a book like Woody Allen's Without Feathers.

Though Woody Allen, of course, remains a household name because of his films, readers of my generation may not be aware that he is an equally accomplished humorist and his work was collected in a trio of books in the 1970s. Without Feathers was published in 1972, but 34 years later it remains hilarious.

The book contains an assortment of sketches, often take-offs of scholarly writings, like "Early Essays" which references Francis Bacon's Essays, in which Allen observes that "The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there is no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave." Allen also returns again and again to words and phrases that he finds funny for whatever reason, like "chives," "herring," "smelts," and having a hat "blocked." The book also includes a pair of manic, absurd plays, "Death" and "God."

It's hard for me to describe how funny this book was except to say that it may be one of the funniest books I have ever read. I kept Mrs. Millions awake because I kept guffawing as I read it. Instead of taking my word for it, though, here's a particularly funny tidbit from the first chapter, "Selections from Mr. Allen's Notebook":

Play idea: a character based on my father, but without quite so prominent a big toe. He is sent to the Sorbonne to study the harmonica. In the end he dies, never realizing his one dream -- to sit up to his waist in gravy. (I see a brilliant second-act curtain, where two midgets come upon a severed head in a shipment of volleyballs.)

Bonus Link: Millions contributor Andrew's look at Without Feathers and Allen's other two collections, Getting Even and Side Effects.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:38 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Newjack by Ted Conover: A Review by Emre Peker

When officials at the New York State Department of Correctional Services turned down Ted Conover's request to profile a new recruit in the Albany Training Academy, they did not suspect that the author would apply himself. If they had, Conover's application to become a CO - correctional officer - probably would not have gone through.

In March 1997, three years after he put in his application, Conover reported to the Academy and began his training, and subsequent career, as a CO. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing recounts the author's experiences and observations, beginning with the drill instructors at the Academy, continuing with becoming an OJT - On the Job [Trainee], and ending with the completion of his one-year stint as a newjack in the infamous Sing Sing prison.

Conover is a keen journalist. I first learned about him through The New New Journalism by Robert Boynton. Then I read his March 2006 article in The Atlantic, "The Checkpoint." Ever since, I yearned to read something by the author, who, it seemed, could objectively place himself in situations and relate extraordinary situations through an informative perspective.

Newjack shows the extent of Conover's skills as a journalist, as well as his soft, humane composure. He describes the Academy with grave seriousness and in great detail. By the time Conover graduates, the reader is familiar with the army-like drills involved in a CO's training: tightly made beds, impeccable uniforms, roll calls, shooting practice, the painful tear gas training, and the brainwashing. All to break down the soon-to-be COs and to make sure they do not go soft guarding a prison.

Next comes adjusting to prison. Conover dispels some of the popular myths surrounding COs. They are not "prison guards" for one, they work in correctional facilities, i.e., they are part of an inmate's rehabilitation. Most of them do not continually resort to violence or rape inmates, as The Shawshank Redemption or Cool Hand Luke will have you believe. And, maybe most striking among all the myths, a CO's life sucks; it is almost as hard as an inmate's. Conover quotes one CO as describing his work as "serving a life sentence in eight-hour shifts."

Conover is not supposed to be friendly with inmates - at least those are the instructions. But he discovers that rules, as in many places, are frequently broken in Sing Sing. He talks with some inmates and he is constantly harassed by others. Conover is a newjack, after all. But then again, inmates sometimes prove more friendly, helpful, and philosophical than fellow COs. Conover is quick to learn that attitude matters, both among COs and inmates. A CO cannot be indebted to an inmate, but being straightforward and accommodating helps, occasionally more so than adhering to official procedures.

Newjack also discusses the development of American prisons at length and provides a good historical insight to the U.S. penal system. Some moments, such as the birth of electrocution, are terrifying. Life in Sing Sing eventually affects Conover's, and other COs', emotional well being. The pressures of working in a maximum-security prison apparently makes it impossible to "leave work behind" after passing through the gates to go home.

One of the most interesting parts of Newjack is the Afterword of the paperback edition, where Conover discusses reactions to the book. He goes to a Q&A-book signing event in Ossining, N.Y., where the prison is located (interestingly enough the town used to be called Sing Sing. But because items manufactured at the prison bore the tag "Made in Sing Sing," and had an adverse effect on the town's trade, they changed the name to Ossining). A bunch of his CO friends - and adversaries - show up at the event. The library calls the local police, because they are afraid the COs will beat Conover for the bad publicity his book has caused.

Read the rest yourself, I am positive that you will fly through the pages and get to the end to discover what happened in two to three days, tops. That was my experience, in spite of, and at the expense of, all the work I had to do for school (I know, school doesn't sound like much, but trust me, it's more difficult than my military service).

Bonus Link: The New New Journalists

- C. Max Magee @ 8:12 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

R.I.P. & O.M.F.U.G. by Garth Risk Hallberg

"A lot of the book business is timing," editor Buzz Poole remarked Monday night. If that's true, the launch party for CBGB: Decades of Graffiti represented some kind of weird cosmic collision. On one side of a wall, in CB's 313 Gallery, ex-Voidoid (and novelist) Richard Hell, who penned the introduction, held court for friends and book-buyers and for the camera crew that's been following him around for a week. On the other side, in the original CBGB, legendary hardcore act Bad Brains was warming up for a blistering reunion set.

Through what Hell calls the "stunning and stunningly effective inertia" of club owner Hilly Kristal, CBGB has lately become a kind of meta-club: both itself and a tribute to itself. This week, Mark Batty Publisher releases a handsome document of the CBGB's densely inked walls; next week, rumor has it, those walls get dismantled and shipped to Vegas, where Kristal plans to reopen the dump. Punk is dead. Long live punk.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:14 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Rejected New Yorker Cartoons

There are dozens collections of New Yorker cartoons available, and all of the will serve you well enough if you need a fix of that particular and unique brand of humor. A new collection, however, promises something a little different, the rejected cartoons: "Some were too racy, rude or rowdy. Some are too politically incorrect or too weird. A few are probably too dumb." Those are the words of Matthew Diffee, New Yorker cartoonist and editor of the The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker. In a brief piece about the book in the LA Times Diffee writes:

So most of our stuff gets rejected; and sure, some of the rejected cartoons are pretty bad and deserve to be hidden forever. But there are always a few gems that are missed, and believe me, we remember them. So I decided to collect the best rejects from a number of my friends and colleagues - all regular New Yorker cartoonists, but all of whom, like me, have nine out of 10 of their submissions rejected.

I might have to check this one out.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:04 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Short Fiction Ripped From the Headlines

I wasn't a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates' story "Landfill" in last week's New Yorker. It felt to me a little too obvious, this story about an insecure college student's drunken and accidental death thanks to the carelessness of the brothers at the fraternity where he was a pledge. It seemed too "ripped from the headlines," too after school special, and on top of all that it was emotionally cheap - designed to provoke outrage with little complexity. So, it was interesting to discover that Oates' story was indeed ripped from the headlines. The death of Hector Jr. very closely resembles that of a young man who had attended The College of New Jersey, so much so that Oates was compelled to apologize "for any offense she caused."

Obviously, quite a lot of fiction is drawn from real life events, but I think in this case, because Oates' story was so one-note and so geared toward generating disgust, the connection was simply to stark to ignore. (via Jeff)

- C. Max Magee @ 5:36 PM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

Orhan Pamuk Wins Nobel Prize

It's official. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. As the Lit Saloon had noted, Pamuk had fallen somewhat out of favor with the oddsmakers leading up to the announcement, though he has been considered a likely winner for years. Pamuk is perhaps best known in recent years for being accused by Turkish courts of insulting "Turkishness" based on comments he made in interviews. Those charges were later dropped, but not until after his case became a cause celeb for free speech around the world.

Pamuk's most popular novels are probably My Name is Red and Snow. His most recently translated book is Istanbul, a portrait of his home city. Istanbul, of course, figures prominently into many of Pamuk's books. As the Nobel Foundation put it, he is a writer "who, in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

- C. Max Magee @ 7:36 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

National Book Award Finalists Announced

Award season is in full swing now. The Booker was awarded yesterday, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature will be announced tomorrow or soon after, but today is all about the finalists for the National Book Award. As Ed remarked, in so many words, for the second year in a row, the judges have managed to deliver a crop of fiction finalists that satisfyingly occupy the sweet spot between obscurity and being, well, too obvious. On to the finalists in all categories, and, where available, excerpts from the books.

Fiction:

• Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski - an excerpt of sorts
• A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus - excerpt
• The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - (very short) excerpt
• Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta - excerpt
• The Zero by Jess Walter - excerpt

Non-fiction:

• At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch - excerpt
• Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran - excerpt 1, 2
• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan - excerpt
• Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present by Peter Hessler - excerpt
• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright - excerpt

Poetry:

• Averno by Louise Gluck - poem
• Chromatic by H.L. Hix
• Angle of Yaw by Ben Lerner - poems
• Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey - poem
• Capacity by James McMichael - poem

Young People's Literature:

• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson - excerpt
• Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt
• Sold by Patricia McCormick - excerpt
• The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin
• American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang - pages

- C. Max Magee @ 5:31 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Empire Writes Back by Garth Risk Hallberg

Kenyan writer and political dissident Ngugi wa Thiong'o's seventh novel, Wizard of the Crow, is unquestionably a work of epic ambition - a quality American readers once found commendable, and perhaps still do. Its achievements are doubly impressive, in that Ngugi first penned this 300,000-word tale of tyranny and freedom in his native Gikuyu, and then translated it himself into English. The translation is supple and swift enough that the novel, at 760 pages, never feels like a slog, and colorful set-pieces abound. Any work that swings this hard for the fences, however, will be judged on runs produced. Readers who admire Wizard of the Crow's world-historical reach - and Ngugi's storytelling gifts - may emerge disappointed that it isn't quite a homer.

Ngugi sets his story in the fictional African country of Aburiria, a republic-in-name-only run by a nameless dictator. Decked out in military garb appliqued with the skins of great cats, "The Ruler" instantly evokes Kenya's Daniel Arap Moi and Uganda's Idi Amin... and one imagines the resemblance to actual persons is not "entirely coincidental." Ngugi very much wants us thinking about the recent political geography of Sub-Saharan Africa. But Wizard of the Crow is no naturalist roman-a-clef. As the novel opens, the Ruler has contracted a Rabelaisian affliction - his body is inflating as rapidly and as wildly as Aburiria's economy. In a typical feat of dialogic energy, Ngugi treats us to five rumored explanations why - thus grounding his third-person narrative directly in the voices of the Aburirian people.

The country's cabinet, scrambling to heal and appease the Ruler, is a political cartoon come to life. Machokali, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, has had his eyes surgically enlarged "to the size of electric bulbs... so that they would be able to spot the enemies of the Ruler no matter how far their hiding places." Not to be outdone, the head of the secret police, one Silver Sikiokuu, has had his ears lengthened - the better to eavesdrop on potential conspirators. From the ministers' jockeying for position emerges the book's Maguffin, a giant construction project called Marching to Heaven (to be funded by a thinly disguised World Bank). If completed, it will allow the Ruler to talk directly to God, "to say good morning or good evening or simply, how was your day, God?"

Ngugi gets great comic mileage from his politicians, and there is something oddly sympathetic about the paranoid machinations of Sikiokuu, in particular - as in the old Dan Ackroyd sketches where Nixon talks to the paintings on the West Wing walls. But here the novel's refusal to settle for mere satire, its flirtation with psychological depth, opens up an instability; one starts to wonder why the Ruler, in a three-dimensional environment, remains flat, an object for fun.

This instability deepens when Kamiti, a penniless college graduate, and Nyawira, a receptionist, begin to lay the groundwork for revolution. Kamiti's depressive asceticism, Nyawira's spirited sass, and the chemistry between the two (including some of the hottest foreplay I've read recently), move Wizard of the Crow firmly into a textured human reality. Ngugi enlivens their romance with some wonderful magical touches. The plot strand in which Kamiti poses as a powerful "Wizard of the Crow," and then (to the consternation of the authorities) finds himself mysteriously growing into the role, would be enough to fill a lesser novel. And yet, as this book rolls on, the exploits of the Wizard of the Crow start to feel like a subplot. Dramatic cause and effect give way once more to satirical grandstanding.

Satire, in my reading, is Ngugi's least revelatory mode. Absent the historical specificity an actual location might have provided, we are treated to revolutionary platitudes, to the revelation that power corrupts and the World Bank and the mass media are accessories to the crime. Well, obviously, but...

Here I find myself running up against the problem of translation. Gikuyu, as I understand it, is largely an oral language. Since deciding for ethical reasons to stop composing in his adopted English, Ngugi has heroically pioneered the use of Gikuyu for literary purposes. And thinking back to the schematics of Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy (a useful companion text for Wizard of the Crow), I remember that the aims and techniques of the griot may differ greatly from those of the workshop-trained novelist. In particular, the oral poet's mnemonic didacticism clashes with the "literary" desire for understatement.

It seems no more fair to tax Ngugi with preachy dialogue, then, than it does to tax The Illiad with flashy similes. (I feel like John Updike missed the boat on this one in his New Yorker review.) Nonetheless, I can't deny that the antic quality of the second half of Wizard of the Crow frustrated my desire to dwell with Kamiti and Nyawira - to see diasporic political generalities given flesh, as they are in Patrick Chamoiseau's magisterial Texaco.

Still, as hard as it is to discover such shortcomings in a book its author clearly intends as a masterwork, it's equally hard to dismiss Wizard of the Crow out of hand. Ngugi is a masterful manipulator of narrative time and narrative voice, and the fleetness and charm of the telling tend to blur over some of the novel's deficiencies. In a particularly moving bit of analysis near the end, Nyawira laments the way the West, with all of its problems, attempts to stamp the developing world's heterotopic spaces with its own monolithic image, and it is possible to read this review as symptomatic of the problem, and the book as gesturing toward a solution. Wizard of the Crow clears a space within literary postmodernism for African traditions and African characters, and one can only hope Ngugi will use it as a platform for future works that bring his expansive vision to fruition. Haki ya Mungu!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:24 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Kiran Desai Wins Booker Prize

Kiran Desai has won the Booker for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. The Guardian's coverage has lots of interesting details. At 37 (or perhaps 35, according to the Booker site), Desai is the youngest woman to win the prize. Her mother, Anita Desai, a novelist to whom Kiran's book was dedicated, has been shortlisted for the Booker three times. With all the new talent in this year's shortlist the Guardian also wonders "The question left by the contest is whether new talent is in danger of being overmarketed and overexposed too soon."

An excerpt from the book's opening is available for the curious. It begins:

All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.

Related: The shortlist and excerpts and the longlist.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:14 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

2006 Lettre Ulysses Winner

A couple of months ago I posted about the longlist for the Lettre Ulysses Award, a prize that is given to the best book-length reporting. They have since announced the winner and runners-up, and this year the award went to The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel by Linda Grant. Her book is a ground level view of life in Israel, placing it in counterpoint to the scads of books that look at the region from 35,000 feet. In an excerpt, we read about the reaction on the street in Tel Aviv when people found out that Saddam had been captured.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:51 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Genius + Soul by Garth Risk Hallberg

It creeps up on me in the middle of a Friday, like the gnawing sensation of possibly having left the oven on: I haven't been reading enough Lynne Tillman. Thus I don't know if there's a precedent for this charming, maddening, brilliant, painstaking, and utterly mesmeric book. Certainly, there are shades of Hemingway and Stein and Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance here, passages on textiles reminiscent of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, Jamesian syntactical snarls. But the voice of Tillman's fifth novel, American Genius, A Comedy, strikes me as sui generis. And it is the voice, gradually and then suddenly, that gives this novel its form, its heft, its suspense, and its unique quality of beguilement.

Along the way, American Genius offers an effulgent answer to the question Benjamin Kunkel posed in N+1's recent symposium on American writing: Whither the psychological novel? The opening pages throw us into the mind of an as-yet-unnamed narrator who muses on food, farts, Eames chairs, the Manson family, her own family, and skin, among other things. In fact, this woman's consciousness acts not like a brain but like a skin - "the body's largest organ," she points out. That is, her genius is not for solving problems, but for registering them. She is, as she puts it, "sensitive." Which is another way of saying clinically neurotic. She has trouble living in her own skin, and retreats to the life of the mind.

Eavesdropping on her quotidian obsessions, we slowly gather that she is middle-aged, that she has studied and taught American history, and that she has endured the loss of many loved ones. And, importantly, we learn that she has checked in to an enigmatic New England retreat for scholars, all of whom seem to be in crisis somehow - Chataqua via The Magic Mountain. An eccentric cast of characters - a man who, like my college roommate, lives nocturnally; a woman longing to commune with Kafka's dead lover, a man who lugs his laptop to breakfast - seems to promise drama, or, like the title, comedy. The precise nature of this scholarly colony, and the narrator's precise reasons for being there, hover at the periphery of her consciousness, and thus at the periphery of the novel. But, in the absence of a traditional plot, our questions - Why did the narrator's brother run away from home? What is the nature of her crisis? Why this obsession with dermatology? - serve as hooks, drawing us deep into the fabric of the prose.

And what prose it is. Unlike some other experimental novels, American Genius unfolds in sentences so clear as to be pellucid. Like a sensitive skin, Tillman's language registers every flicker of doubt, every shift in the book's emotional weather. Simple clauses, phrased perfectly and spliced with Kafkan commas, double back to bite their own tails, or to measure the tension between past and present, or to erupt, via figures of speech, into fullness of feeling. Here, for example, is the narrator - Helen, it turns out (surely not the Helen of Tillman's earlier novel Cast in Doubt?)- ruminating on therapeutic massage:

When I'm in the place I call home, where I have a young wild cat and an old, frail mother who may or may not miss me, I see a Japanese therapeutic masseuse, whose attitude toward the body is vastly different from the Polish cosmetician's, who twice has massaged me with gentle strength and kneaded my body respectfully, though she may not respect it or me. The Japanese masseuse acts against my body, she forces it to comply, as if trouncing a truculent enemy, and I can see her wringing her hands and canvassing my legs before moving toward them, to exact revenge.

And here is Helen remembering her father:

I watched my father charcoal broil while sitting on the grass or on the poured concrete steps that led from the blue and gray slate patio to the storm door to the back of the house, where my mother pushed her arm through the glass, and he was happy broiling steak over a fire, which he composed of briquettes and newspaper but never doused with fuel, which would, he explain, ignite it quickly but ruin its taste.

The cumulative effect of these quiet surfaces, punctured by the abrupt humor of the masseuse's imaginary adversary or the horror of the mother pushing her arm through the glass door, is at once soothing and hair-raising. The reader is charmed and made anxious, as Helen is. Her sentences, apparently evenhanded, turn out to be deeply subjective, and in the spaces between periods, much is repressed, withheld, or held for later. Ultimately, we come to know her not as we know characters in novels, but as we know others, or ourselves... which is to say deeply and incompletely, intimately and mysteriously.

But American Genius does not merely aspire to the level of character study or prose experiment. By juxtaposing Helen's personal concerns with her scholarly ones - or, more aptly, razing the distinction between the two - Tillman is concerned to craft a national novel. "I wanted to go for it," she tells Geoffrey O'Brien in a Bomb Magazine interview, "[to] fully write about who and where we are - or, even, how to think about being an American now." There is a feminist daring in the way Tillman goes about her work, eschewing battle scenes or historical pastiche in favor of awkward encounters in the colony's dining hall, private memories of watching the Kennedys on TV. Still, as in Mary Gaitskill's Veronica - a book whose form and mission complement this one's - a vivid sense of the Zeitgeist emerges. Tillman reaches the apogee of her powers in bravura passages where world-historical events and painful memories and wry observational comedy are all braided together, shot through with Helen's obliquely sad sensibility. And when events in the residents conspire, as they must, to goad Helen out of her inertial rut, the smallest action feels charged with the weight of centuries.

In case I haven't made this clear already: Lynne Tillman is a writer in full command of her effects. I am reminded of my recent and belated discovery of the short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg Twilight of the Superheroes, who also made me want to kick myself for having overlooked her work for so long. These writers' mastery is so evident (and so hard-won), that to critique either feels almost like arguing with her sensibility.

Nonetheless, I'm contractually obligated to record my quibbles (that is, Max has me chained in the basement here at The Millions and is withholding my gruel). The first - really more of an open question - concerns the deployment of Helen's considerable erudition. Usually, her factual disquisitions seem to spring organically from her private fixations - that is, from her character. Nonetheless, I found some of the more undigested chunks of learning, particularly those explaining various medical conditions, to be slack places in the novel. At times, I felt the hand of the writer directing her narrator's consciousness to areas of thematic fertility. Is Tillman researching this? I thought. Or is Helen thinking it spontaneously? Given the generally seamless illusion of life created here, calling attention to its status as a composed artifact felt like a mistake, however interesting. These bumpy passages generally smoothed themselves out after page 100, and perhaps it's a case of the book teaching one how to read it. Nonetheless, in a novel as deserving of broad readership as this one is, the dips into the encyclopedic may present barriers to entry.

Another initial hurdle arises from the setting. As a present-tense peg on which to hang the narrator's past, the constrained environment of the intellectual colony at first seems to limit the book's dramatic possibilities. As in a campus novel, there's a faint plumminess to the surroundings, and one wonders how Tillman will reconcile the ambitions of the title - American Genius - with a setting so socially attenuated... so uppercrust. That she does is a testament to her immense gifts. The novel took possession of me about a third of the way through, when Helen decided to explore beyond the confines of the colony. And it didn't let go until the end. Even afterward, at night, in bed, I've found myself missing the cadences of Helen's sentences, the surprising and bewildering turns of her mind.

Unlike some other ambitious novels I can think of, American Genius doesn't require that the reader be a genius, too. It doesn't try to overwhelm its audience - at least not with shock and awe tactics. Nor does it condescend to us. What it does require is patience. Readers eager for plot, dialogue, characters delivered in a single stroke... the sturdy appurtenances of conventional fiction, will have to open themselves to American Genius, to surrender to its magic, to trust. But they will be richly rewarded. And perhaps even changed.

Sidebar: Recent "American" Novels:

• American Purgatorio by John Haskell (2004)
• American Desert (2004) by Percival Everett
• American Skin (2000) by Don De Grazia
• In America (2000) by Susan Sontag
• Purple America (1997) by Rick Moody
• American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth

- C. Max Magee @ 10:37 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The British Best of the Last 25 Years

Not wanting to be left out of the fun and controversy generated by the New York Times list of the top books of the last 25 years, the Guardian has rounded up 150 celebrity judges of its own (120 agreed to particpate), like Monica Ali, Rick Moody, and Jonathan Safran Foer, to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005. "How they defined 'best' was up to them" is the caveat the Guardian gives us.

After the votes were tallied, they bestowed the honor on Booker winner Disgrace by Nobel Laureate J.M Coetzee. Money by Martin Amis was runner up, while Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie all shared third place. Will this list generate as much fevered dicussion as the Times list? I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:33 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Google's Odd Bestseller List

In order to promote its Google Book Search at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the search engine released a list of the most viewed books on the service from September 17th through 23rd, and it doesn't much resemble the bestseller lists that commonly appear in newspapers. The titles range from Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers to a translation of the Holy Qur'an to Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot.

The quirky titles on the list highlight the different ways we interact with books. The New York Times and Amazon create lists based on books we buy, LibraryThing, as I mentioned yesterday, creates lists based on what we own, while Google's list is based on books we look at. I think these different ways in which we interact with books are sometimes forgotten by publishers who assume that books exist only to be part of a commercial transaction. In reality, our relationship with books is much more varied and complex than that.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:12 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Sony Reader on its Way

The launch of the Sony Reader is drawing nearer, and it has garnered another mostly positive review, this time from the Washington Post. The Reader gets high marks for its look and feel, as well as its ability to increase the font size for readers with vision trouble. With "twice the pixel density of most conventional LCDs, and on a par with the resolution of newsprint," eye strain isn't a problem

The device's battery lasts for "7500 page turns," and its memory can store 80 average length books. Sony has set up a store similar to Apple's iTunes where readers can buy the books, and 10,000 titles are expected to be available at launch. Judging by the titles available for sale, the ebooks appear to fetch the same price as their paper counterparts. The device generally gets high marks, but not enough to make it worth the price tag for everyone, according to the reviewer: "Is the Reader worth $350? Only if you want to trim your luggage, stop collecting dead trees, or use the large-font feature for easier reading."

Given how impressed many have been with the technology, I suspect those reasons will be enough to make the Sony Reader reasonable successful, especially if it can keep expanding its library of titles. More broadly speaking, books - the old-fashioned paper kind - are far from an endangered species, but the Reader may appeal to people for whom lugging around a bunch of books has gotten to be a pain. Were Sony to add the ability to download newspaper and magazine articles (perhaps this is in the works, I don't know), it would up the usefulness of this device considerably.

According to the Web site, it looks like the Reader has begun shipping already, and is proving popular: "Due to overwhelming demand, new Sony Portable Reader orders may ship as late as mid-November," reads a notice on the site.

Bonus Links: I've written about the Sony Reader and ebooks a couple of times before: The digital future of the book and The Possibility of an eBook Summer.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:34 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post