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Monday Miscellany

Mary Daniels Brown — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:29:35 +0000

Print Books vs. Ebooks Debate (cont., ad nauseam)

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

“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.

“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.

“But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

After the news coverage of Franzen’s press conference the Huffington Post, never one to shy away from an opportunity to add its two cents, chimed in with Jonathan Franzen Hates EBooks. This article reminds us:

This isn’t new territory for Frazen – back in 2007, when the first Kindle appeared on the scene, he told the LA Times that “the difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in a cathedral,” adding “Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.”

HuffPost then provides a list of other personages who have spoken out against ebooks:

Maurice Sendak
Ursula Le Guin
Sherman Alexie
Penelope Lively
Ray Bradbury
Stephen Colbert

I really don’t see what all the hub-bub is about. Why do we have to be for one type of book and against the other? I love print books, audiobooks, and my Kindle. I just see these as different forms of basically the same thing, a work of literature. Audiobooks allow me to consume the written word in situations when I couldn’t read a printed book, such as when driving, exercising, or doing chores around the house. And my Kindle is a lot easier to carry around than printed books, especially books the size of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Freedom. The Kindle makes it possible for me to read when I’m in waiting rooms and to take lots of books on vacation. These three versions of literature are not inherently different. They are not mutually exclusive. And the increasing use of ereaders is not going to result in the collapse of modern civilization.

Thank goodness at least one other person in the world understands this, NPR’s Jonathan Segura. In No More E-Books Vs. Print Books Arguments, OK? he very sensibly points out:

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It’s not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats! Crazy, right? To have choice. Neither is better or worse — for you, for the economy, for the sake of “responsible self-government.” We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.

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

The Seattle Public Library has a long list of rules of things you can’t do in the library, to ensure “comfort and safety” of staff and patrons. You can’t eat, sleep, look like you’re sleeping, be barefoot, be too stinky or talk too loudly.

But you can watch graphic porn on a public computer in front of kids. Despite repeated complaints from female patrons about men watching porn in full view of their children, the library has held fast to its policy of unfettered online access for grown-ups.

The reason: It’s not in the business of censorship.

The issue of censorship in libraries is more complex than this article’s set up suggests, as the rest of the piece does, in fact, admit.

The Big Reasons Indie Authors Aren’t Taken Seriously

With the publishing industry in turmoil, more and more authors are bypassing the traditional route to publication by publishing their books themselves. Yet, with no editorial staff to insist on writing standards, the quality of such books is often—though not always—quite low. And Melissa Foster and Amy Edelman know why:

Big Reason #1: Bad Editing
Big Reason #2: Quantity Over Quality
Big Reason #3 – The Lack of Gatekeepers
Big Reason #4 – Crappy Covers

They have a lot to say about each reason, so click through and read their explanations.

Personally, I’m not too concerned about the covers. But I am concerned about the lack of gatekeepers, or those editors who insist that authors write well and make sense. How about you?

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.

Monday Miscellany

Mary Daniels Brown — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:49:00 +0000

Welcome to World Book Night

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)

Monday Miscellany

Mary Daniels Brown — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:02:22 +0000

Finally, Out with the Old Year. . .

In what I promise will be the last list of “best books of 2011″ reported here, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles summarizes his favorite novels of 2011 in the following categories:

most devastating
best Western
weirdest sex
best seafaring tale
most metaphysical
best novel about novels
best modern-day feminist “Huck Finn”
best novel about Katrina
second best Western
easiest to recommend
best environmental novel
best foodie novel
best magicians
best music novel
best novel about the Apocalypse

. . . And in with the New

The Millions (and if you haven’t yet seen this site, you should take a look) offers its extensive list Most Anticipated: The Great 2012 Book Preview:

readers this year can look forward to new Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Peter Carey, Lionel Shriver, and, of course, newly translated Roberto Bolaño, as well as, in the hazy distance of this coming fall and beyond, new Michael Chabon, Hilary Mantel, and John Banville. We also have a number of favorites stepping outside of fiction. Marilynn Robinson and Jonathan Franzen have new essay collections on the way. A pair of plays are on tap from Denis Johnson. A new W.G. Sebald poetry collection has been translated. And Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer have teamed to update a classic Jewish text. But that just offers the merest suggestion of the literary riches that 2012 has on offer.

The list comprises 81 titles and is arranged by month of publication.

The Christian Science Monitor joins in with its list 20 non-fiction books to watch for in 2012. The CSM always offers its lists in one-per-page format, so don’t click on this one when you’re short on time or patience.

For audiobook fans, Publishers Weekly provides its January Audiobook Release Roundup with links to offerings from the following audio publishers:

Cat Women of the Moon

This link will take you to a two-part BBC audio program by Sarah Hall about the popular motif in science fiction of an all-women society surviving without men.

Street-smart Walter Dean Myers named national ambassador for children’s literature

Walter Dean Myers, the author of “Fallen Angels,” “Sunrise Over Fallujah,” Monster,” “Hoops” and other hard-hitting novels for youth, has been named the new national ambassador for children’s literature. He succeeds Katherine Paterson (“A Bridge to Terabithia”), who had served in the spot since 2010.

Further:

“The choice of Mr. Myers represents a departure from his predecessors and is likely to be seen as a bold statement,” Julie Bosman wrote in The New York Times.”His books chronicle the lives of many urban teenagers, especially young, poor African-Americans. While his body of work includes poetry, nonfiction and the occasional cheerful picture book for children, its standout books offer themes aimed at young-adult readers: stories of teenagers in violent gangs, soldiers headed to Iraq and juvenile offenders imprisoned for their crimes.

“While many young-adult authors shy away from such risky subject material, Mr. Myers has used his books to confront the darkness and despair that fill so many children’s lives.”

Humans have the need to read

Gail Rebuck reports on research about how getting lost in a good book transforms the human brain:

Psychologists from Washington University used brain scans to see what happens inside our heads when we read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative“. The brain weaves these situations together with experiences from its own life to create a new mental synthesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways.

Anyone who has ever gotten lost in a good book knows about the transformative power of reading. Perhaps the most important quality of reading “is its emotional role as the starting point for individual voyages of personal development and pleasure. Books can open up emotional, imaginative and historical landscapes.” Without the kinds of experiences reading provides, Rebuck warns, the species will suffer: “The research shows that if we stop reading, we will be different people: less intricate, less empathetic, less interesting.”

In related news, Nicholas Carr, whom Rebuck cites in her article, offers an excerpt from his essay “The Dreams of Readers,” “in which I mull over my own experience as a reader and try to connect it with some of the interesting new research, by scholars like Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto, that’s being done on the psychology of literary reading.” The complete essay appears in the book Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!, published by Vintage Books, which is available as a paperback in the U.K. and as an e-book in the U.S. Other contributors to the book include Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Tim Parks, and Blake Morrison. The work of Keith Oatley and others is available at OnFiction: An Online Magazine on the Psychology of Fiction.

2011: The Literary Year in Review

Mary Daniels Brown — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 03:56:18 +0000

It’s New Year’s Eve, a good time to look back on what’s happened in the literary world this year.

Here are two more “best books” lists I think I’ve missed, NPR’s choices of The Best Music Books of 2011 and 2011′s Best American Poetry.

Britain’s The Telegraph provides comprehensive coverage in The Literary Year 2011. If you weren’t able to keep up with all the controversy over literary awards this year, you can beef up your knowledge here. This article also summarizes major publications in various fields (such as memoir, biography, politics, and sports) and concludes: “If it was a listless year for fiction, the non-fiction market fared little better.” PBS Newshour offers Conversation: The Year in Fiction, a discussion with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles.

Book lovers are also word lovers. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary people, offer 2011: The Year in Words, a compendium of “Defining Moments: In politics, culture, sports and more, these words spiked in lookups because of events in the news.”

The Christian Science Monitor challenges your knowledge of the year’s highly touted publications with 2011 fiction quiz: Can you recognize the opening line? [Warning: Each individual item is on a separate page, so click at your own risk.]

I’ll be creating my own list of best books read in 2011 and posting it separately. If you have a similar list of your own, you can include a link to it in the comments section.

Finally, if you’d rather focus on the year ahead than on the year past, Christian Science Monitor contributor Rachel Meier has this list of 6 books you should resolve to read in 2012 (one recommendation per page, annoyingly).

Best Books Read in 2011: My List

Mary Daniels Brown — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:51:57 +0000

Most of the “best books” list that come out at the end of a year refer to books published during that year. My list, however, comprises books that I have read during the year, regardless of when they were published. My list also combines fiction and nonfiction.

I finished my dissertation mid-year and read 30 books during 2011. Here are the best of them, arranged alphabetically by author:

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games
Connelly, Michael. The Fifth Witness
Donoghue, Emma. Room
Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad
Harbach, Chad. The Art of Fielding
Hillenbrand, Laura. Unbroken
Hoffman, Alice. The Story Sisters
McLain, Paula. The Paris Wife
Shapiro, Alison Bonds. Healing into Possibility
Watson, S. J. Before I Go to Sleep

My lists for previous years (1996-2010) are here.

Healing Reads: The Year’s Five Best Books

Mary Daniels Brown — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:08:25 +0000

Healing Reads: The Year’s Five Best Books – WSJ.com.

Health and medicine books tend to be long on advice and how-to, and short on compelling narrative and literary merit.

But several new books this year proved to be welcome exceptions, from a lyrical history of the human heart to an absorbing tale of one of the country’s toughest inner-city hospitals. Here are my top-five picks.

Here’s a different kind of list. Read why Laura Landro chose these five books:

Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery by Nicholas L. Tilney
The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear by Seth Mnookin
County: Life, Death and Politics as Chicago’s Public Hospital by David. A. Ansell
The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart by Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon
Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You by Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband

PW Staff: The Best Books We’ve Read This Year « PWxyz

Mary Daniels Brown — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:04:40 +0000

PW Staff: The Best Books We’ve Read This Year « PWxyz

PW has already named its Best Books 0f 2011, but since readers rarely get to see the faces behind the scenes, we thought we’d let our staff share the best book they read in 2011, because deep down, we’re all just book nerds. Here are our staff picks.

A few of the books on this list are the ones you’ve been seeing on all those lists of best books released in 2011 (e.g., Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder). But most of them are not because this list isn’t limited to books published this year. In fact, I’ll bet there are a lot of titles on this list that, like me, you’ve never heard of.

The overlooked sci-fi of 2011 – Salon.com

Mary Daniels Brown — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:21:35 +0000

The overlooked sci-fi of 2011 – Salon.com

When compiling best-of lists at the end of the year, it’s easy to overlook certain classes of deserving books. In a year filled with massive, highly publicized releases — a new Neal Stephenson, a Vernor Vinge sequel awaited for twenty years — wonderful books with less flash can go unnoticed in the shadows. A debut novel, perhaps. Or the second book in a quiet series. Or a novel published right at the busy holiday end of the calendar year.

I have selected one of each of these oft-neglected types to bring to your attention. But besides highlighting these superior books, this essay hopes to remind you to cast your own literary nets widely when selecting your personal candidates for the year’s finest.

I read very little science fiction and fantasy myself, but here’s some thoughtful reckoning for those of you who do.

Crime Fiction Lover | Top Books of 2011

Mary Daniels Brown — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:57:37 +0000

Crime Fiction Lover | Category Archive | Features.

I love a good mystery. If you do too, you’ll want to take a look at the top 5 mysteries as chosen by each of 4 reviewers for Crime Fiction Lover.

Best of 2011: 3 More Lists

Mary Daniels Brown — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:12:31 +0000

Yes, the lists just keep coming. Here are 3 more from NPR:

Fired Up: The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fantasy

Here are five of the best, most interesting, most mutated science fiction and fantasy novels published this year.

A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente
Rule 34, Charles Stross
The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie
Delirium, Lauren Oliver

7 Books With Personality: Nancy Pearl’s 2011 Picks

Nancy Pearl speaks:

Although all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction have characters — be they animals, hobbits, dragons, humans, werewolves or whatever — I’ve found that there are some books in which these characters are three-dimensional and awfully interesting. (Whether or not they’re likable is another question.) These characters become, as the story progresses, more and more real to me. It’s as though they’ve become good friends.

I’m always on the lookout for this kind of book, but they’re not always easy to find. Oh, I’ve read plenty of novels in which the characters are pleasant enough, but they’re not particularly memorable. The sort of book I’m talking about here leaves you with a longing to find out what happened to the characters after the book ended. Here are some books — six novels and a work of history — that have marvelously evoked characters.

Read why she chose each of these books:

In Zanesville, Jo Ann Beard
A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, Amanda Foreman
Blind Sight, Meg Howrey
The Summer of the Bear, Bella Pollen
By George, Wesley Stace
Vaclav & Lena, Haley Tanner
Down the Mysterly River, Bill Willingham

Year-End Wrap-Up: The 10 Best Novels Of 2011

Maureen Corrigan has chosen these:

Swamplandia! Karen Russell
Open City, Teju Cole
The Submission, Amy Waldman
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
The Illumination, Kevin Brockmeier
The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta
The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel, David Foster Wallace