The Washington Post collects useful information for celebrating today’s 200th birthday of Charles Dickens.

Never one to shy away from controversy, Jonathan Franzen recently condemned ebooks as the harbingers of the fall of civilization:

“Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball.

The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors

“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers—including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates—”to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time- novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”

While admitting that respondents’ first task was to figure out their own definition of great, this article nonetheless proceeds to ask the question and tabulate the answers. You’ll find lists of the top vote getters in the following categories:

• Top Ten Works of the 20th Century
• Top Ten Works of the 19th Century
• Top Ten Authors by Number of Books Selected
• Top Ten Authors by Points Earned

And, because I know the suspense is killing you, I’ll tell you that Tolstoy beat out Shakespeare as the top author by points earned.

Seattle libraries: No sleeping or eating allowed, but porn-watching OK

7 Child Protagonists That Adults Can Relate To

Sharon Heath thinks that most of us probably didn’t enjoy our childhood all that much. “Which is where the catharsis of fiction written for adults with child protagonists comes in–offering us a chance to revisit our early years with imagination and wisdom and see the world and our own lives with new eyes.”

Whether the heroes and heroines of these books are precocious or tentative, suicidal or resourceful, disconnected or endearing, each of them bumbles along as we all did–as we all do!–without a handbook. Almost all of them suffer the mixed blessings of uniqueness and otherness, and a number of the current crop view life through the lens of autism–an apt metaphor in this age of preoccupation with iEverythings, where researchers are telling us our kids are losing the capacity to read facial expressions and social cues.

She offers the following books as examples of child protagonists whom adult readers can relate to:

• A Wrinkle in Time
• Ordinary People
• The Little Prince
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• The Lovely Bones
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog

To Heath’s list I would add the following child protagonists that I found endearing:

• Harriet in The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
• Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Jack in Room by Emma Donoghue

What child characters would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.

Last week saw the announcements of nominations for two big sets of literary prizes.

Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction and nonfiction in the following categories: best novel, best first novel by an American author, best paperback original, best fact crime, best critical/biographical, best short story, best juvenile, best young adult, and the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award.

Winners will be announced at a banquet in New York on April 26.

The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its book awards for the publishing year 2011 in the following categories: fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, criticism, and poetry.

Winners will be announced on March 8 in New York.

Goodreads in the News

Goodreads, a social networking site for readers and authors, has gotten a lot of press recently. Full disclosure: I use Goodreads, as you can see from the sidebar, although I have no personal stake in it. I enjoy seeing what other people are reading, and it’s a good place to keep track of my own books read. But while I like to see how my friends react to certain books, I very seldom read reviews by people I don’t know.

So I was intrigued recently when I saw a reference on Twitter to Anne Riley’s blog entry Breaking Up with Goodreads. It turns out that Riley is an author. She offers these reasons for deleting her Goodreads account:

The first two reasons are simple: childish behavior on the parts of both authors and reviewers (I’m sure you’ve all seen the Goodreads drama that has unfolded on two separate occasions within the past month, so I’ll refrain from posting links) and ineffectiveness as a marketing tool for myself as a writer.

But this is what really sealed the deal for me: Goodreads always made me feel pressured to leave favorable reviews–no matter how I actually felt about the book.

Riley explains in detail how uncomfortable she felt whenever fellow authors asked her to review their books: To avoid damaging her relationship with an author, she felt pressured to leave a favorable review, no matter what she actually thought of the book. Then those favorable reviews often caused Riley’s friends to ask her how she could have recommended such a bad book.

Once I read Riley’s explanation, I could certainly understand her situation. And it’s a situation that I, as just a reader, had not thought of. But while I was glad to see the case from an author’s perspective, I’m going to continue to use Goodreads myself, as I always have. I’m not an author, and I’m therefore just not in the same situation as Riley, although I can understand why she dumped Goodreads.

In other news, a flame war erupted on Goodreads between readers, authors, and agents, as Julie Bertagna explains in the U. K. Guardian‘s book blog entry YA novel readers clash with publishing establishment:

A literary punch-up that had been brewing for a while finally erupted between a bunch of readers, authors and agents on Goodreads – the vast online site where millions of members discuss the world’s books. In the same week that award-winning children’s writer Anthony McGowan caused a stir with his “scorching” Guardian review of Blood Red Road by Costa winner Moira Young, the Goodreads flame war flared across Twitter, sparked by writers and agents who seemed to be stamping on negative reviews.

It all started with a “snarky” (or “honest”, depending on who’s side you’re on) review of a much-hyped YA novel, Tempest by Julie Cross, just published in the UK by Macmillan Children’s Books (read an extract here). A sarcastic response and put-downs of reader views on the Goodreads site by Cross’s author friends, and comments by her agent, caused outrage. While Cross responded gracefully, other YA authors and agents took the fight to Twitter in a spectacularly misjudged bout of reader-bashing. . . .

This kind of thing has been going on as long as the internet has been around. And before that, we had verbal sparring in print about written literary criticism.

As any writer will tell you, along with learning the craft an author must develop a thick skin. Bertagna puts it well in her conclusion:

The hardest thing a writer has to learn is that once you publish a book, it’s no longer truly yours – even though it’s got your name on the front and it lives inside you. It belongs to the readers now. All you can do is steel yourself as you push it out into the world, stay gracious, and get busy with the next one.

Here’s a wonderful way to promote reading:

We need 50,000 book-loving volunteers to fan out across America on April 23, 2012! Just take 20 free copies of a book to a location in your community, and you just might change someone’s life.

The goal is to give books to new readers, to encourage reading, to share your passion for a great book. The entire publishing, bookstore, library, author, printing, and paper community is behind this effort with donated services and time. And with a million free World Book Night paperbacks!

The first World Book Night was held last year in the United Kingdom and was such a success that this year it’s spreading to other countries. At this site you can find out all about the event and sign up to be a book giver in the United States this April.

10 self-published novelists who made it big in 2011

As any author can tell you, getting a novel published through traditional means is hard enough – but self-publishing and then working to build up buzz for big sales by yourself is even tougher. But here are 10 novelists who struck it big last year, pushing their self-published e-books all the way to The New York Times bestseller list.

This is another of those one-item-per-page lists from The Christian Science Monitor.

Your Guide to the Man Asian Literary Prize Shortlist

The Millions offers a guide, with links to reviews, of the seven works on the short list for this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize.

Charles Dickens bicentennial, and his link to Poe

A glass case in the Free Library of Philadelphia, PA, USA, holds the stuffed remains of Grip, Charles Dickens’s pet raven:

Strange as it might sound, the dead bird and accompanying year-long Dickens program at the Free Library probably provide the perfect means for the American culture vulture to celebrate not only Dickens’s 200th birthday on Feb. 7, but also the little-known yet astonishing impact of Grip on American letters and popular culture to this day.

Read how Dickens’s bird entered literary history as the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s famous raven.

Genre in the Mainstream: 5 Literary/SF “Crossover” Books to Watch For in 2012

More recommendations to guide your reading choices for the new year:

• The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus (Random House)
• Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot (Grove Press/Black Cat)
• Dust Girl by Sarah Zettel (Random House YA)
• The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker  (Random House)
• Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret (FSG)

Novels and Television

Recent news that HBO plans to adapt the works of William Faulkner for television has prompted critical discussion of the suitability of novels for this kind of medium translation.

“The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it’s about time,” declares Laura Miller in TV and the novel: A match made in heaven. She argues that television and the novel have more in common than do the novel and theatrical film because “[r]arely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film.” Not only must much of any novel usually be cut to fit the 90- to 120-minute format of a feature film, but the standard three-act structure of film also trims much of the rich expansiveness of a novel. “A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world,” says Miller. But whereas the necessity for mass-market appeal of shows on the broadcast networks prevented more than an occasional successful adaptation of a novel until the advent of cable, “A network like HBO, however, doesn’t need to attract large audiences; rather, it aims to persuade a much smaller population of subscribers that it’s worth paying a little extra every month to see better programming.”

Craig Fehrman makes many of the same points in The Channeling of the Novel:

The cable network [HBO] has optioned a number of widely recognized literary works, including Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!,” Chad Harbach’s “Art of Fielding” and Mary Karr’s memoirs. “At some point in the last year,” says Michael London, the indie-approved producer whose Groundswell Films brought “Goon Squad” to HBO, “everyone in the business had an epiphany that the DNA of cable television has much more in common with novels than movies do.”

“Indeed, where a movie means paring a novel down, a TV show can mean breaking it wide open,” Fehrman adds. He reports that many authors are now eager either to write their novels with an eye toward later TV adaptation or to collaborate on an adaptation after book publication. He compares this trend to what happened in the 1930s, when authors such as William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all headed for Hollywood to try their pens at writing for the new medium of the feature film.

Defining Words, Without the Arbiters

You may remember learning in school that there are two kinds of dictionaries:

1. descriptive: those that describe how language is used
2. prescriptive: those that dictate the standards for how language should be used

In school your teachers used the second type almost exclusively, admonishing you to check the dictionary to find out whether a particular word in your paper was acceptable. You remember: “Ain’t ain’t in the dictionary” and that kind of thing.

This article describes the rise of Worknik and a few other linguistic databases that have arisen with the explosion of electronic communication. For these databases “automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources” to discover exactly how language is currently being used. Without the intervention of human evaluation, such databases serve only to describe how language  is used rather than to prescribe how it should be used.

25 literary resolutions for 2012. What’s yours?

The Los Angeles Times asked writers, editors and publishers what their literary resolutions for 2012 will be. If you’re looking for some literary resolutions, you’re bound to find some inspiration here. These resolutions range from “I’m going to reread “Moby-Dick,” “Crime & Punishment,” and “The Scarlet Letter” to “Read more poetry. Use fewer commas.”

And, in a related article, the LA Times checked back with some of the people who had offered their literary resolutions for 2011. Reading through this piece might soothe your conscience a bit. Lots of these people didn’t quite fulfill their annual resolutions, either.

A loose young woman in Nazi-era Berlin. A titanic failure of courage on the Titanic. A Supreme Court justice with a thing for hot blondes. An American president’s scandalous love child. Book authors answered questions about these earthy topics and many more – from sandwiches to Shakespeare – during Monitor interviews with me this year. Here’s a baker’s dozen of the memorable things that these authors had to say.

Randy Dotinga offers these choices in The Christian Science Monitor.

Warning: This is one of those each-item-on-a-separate-page lists. Click only if you have the time and the patience.

Tipped off by a Facebook post by literary scene fixture Miss Sara Rosen, we just discovered the most amazing treasure trove of handcrafted, miniature versions of some of our favorite writers of all time over on Etsy — and they’re all available for purchase. Just think, you can make a tiny Kurt Vonnegut chat up a pint-sized Flannery O’Connor! Joyce Carol Oates can have a deep conversation about heartbreak with Sylvia Plath! JRR Tolkien and Isaac Asimov can arm wrestle to determine who is more popular! The possibilities are endless.

via Flavorwire » Gallery: Famous Writers as Handcrafted Dolls.

OMG. I’d like the Harper Lee. Or the Dorothy Parker. Or the Joyce Carol Oates. Or. . .

David Guterson beat out “stiff competition” (his award-accepting spokesperson’s pun, not mine) Tuesday night to win the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel Ed King, a modern Seattle-set reworking of the Oedipus myth. The prize, now in its 19th year, was founded by the Literary Review’s then-editor Auberon Waugh (the novelist Evelyn’s son) to “discourage” the “crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel,” sex scenes that were included, he argued, purely to boost sales figures.

William Faulkner called him “…the first truly American writer.” Ernest Hemingway declared that all American writing comes from “Huckleberry Finn,” and “there has been nothing as good since.” And Norman Mailer said “Huck Finn” stands up “page for page” to the “best modern American novels.” Wednesday marks the 176th anniversary of the birth of the matchless Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain. His genius lay in his distinctive ability to convey profound wisdom and profane wit in the same breath. Here, in tribute to the man Faulkner called the “father of American literature,” are 10 quotes from Mark Twain.

via Mark Twain quotes: 10 favorites on his birthday – A recipe for contentment – CSMonitor.com.

Writing in the Guardian, Wayne Gooderham concludes: “Judging by the stories that have been written about it, writers do not make the best of friends.”

10 Most Reclusive Literary Geniuses in History

The world’s greatest writers use their literary genius to illustrate and comment on the human condition. And yet, those who could be considered to have the best understanding of human feelings often choose to hide themselves away from the public eye. The stereotype of the reclusive author is not always true, but for these literary greats, a life of solitude had more appeal than the draws of fame and awards.

Novelist Fights the Tide by Opening a Bookstore

NASHVILLE — After a beloved local bookstore closed here last December and another store was lost to the Borders bankruptcy, this city once known as the Athens of the South, rich in cultural tradition and home to Vanderbilt University, became nearly barren of bookstores.

A collective panic set in among Nashville’s reading faithful. But they have found a savior in Ann Patchett, the best-selling novelist who grew up here. On Wednesday, Ms. Patchett, the acclaimed author of “Bel Canto” and “Truth and Beauty,” will open Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore that is the product of six months of breakneck planning and a healthy infusion of cash from its owner.

Neal Stephenson, Digital Publishing, and Why Books Will Survive

Hefting Neal Stephenson’s latest 1000+-page tome, Reamde, prompts science and technology writer David DiSalvo to consider the contrast between traditionally published books and books on an ereader. He admits to participating in the ereader culture:

I own a Kindle and like it quite a lot, especially for travel, and I’m sure the latest volley of tablets arriving on the market all have something to offer—but none of these devices can offer the sense of achievement one gets from working through the pages, seeing them amass one after another behind a thumb pressing down against the satisfying weight of quality stock.

But, he adds:

Books are much more than words on a page or screen, though what that “more” is seems to irrationally persist against every notion of progress a digital economy trumpets.

I’m not sure what his notion of that “more” is, but my notion of it is the transactional building of a textual world that occurs when an individual reader interacts with a written text to create the poem, as described by Louise Rosenblatt in The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. In Rosenblatt’s terms, the text is the words the author wrote, while the poem is the imaginal world that the reader builds while interacting with the author’s text. And I don’t see how it makes any difference whether the text is printed on paper or appears on an electronic device. Yes, “Books are much more than words on a page or screen,” but that “more” is created in the reader’s mind, regardless of which form the presentation of the text takes.

DiSalvo continues:

The poet John Ashbery, speaking at the 2011 National Book Awards this week, said “Reading is difficult…[it is] pleasurable and painful…it can change a person.”  And that is precisely why I will keep buying books like Reamde as true to form books and not digital uploads to my Kindle. I want the difficult experience of reading a challenging book to resonate beyond my eyes. I want the entire experience, and I want to feel the sense of accomplishment from embracing the challenge.

All right. But, for my money, he’s begging the question. How does using an ereader prevent him from having “the entire experience” of engaging with the text? What is it about the inherent nature of ink on paper that makes a printed book essentially different from an ebook? Begging the question means assuming that something is true, then asserting that assumption as “proof” of the fact in question, and that is exactly what DiSalvo does here.

He also writes:

If we attempt to relegate reading entirely to a one-dimensional form, no matter how stylized or convenient, I think we are mystified by an illusion of progress masking regress. Maybe the loss from doing so can’t be quantified, but it’s real nonetheless, in the same way that watching the world through a TV screen instead of imbibing it through experience is a profound negation of what it means to be human.  There will never be a digital prosthetic capable of replacing what’s lost when we trade fullness for immediacy.

A “one-dimensional form”? An ereader is just as three-dimensional as a printed book; it’s just that one of those dimensions, thickness, is a lot smaller than the book’s, particularly in the case of Reamde. And his comparison of reading to “watching the world through a TV screen instead of imbibing it through experience” is simply not apt in this context. There IS a real world outside, and watching it on TV is not the same as experiencing it. But the world produced by reading a book–the poem, in Rosenblatt’s terms–does not have an objective existence; it only comes into existence when a reader creates it by interacting with a text. So this argument, too, begs the question.

In the end, the entire ebook vs. printed book argument comes down to personal preference. Some people will prefer one over the other all the time; other people may prefer one over the other depending on circumstances (an ereader is much easier to lug on vacation than a stack of books, after all). And it’s certainly all right to express one’s personal preference. Just admit that that’s what it is.