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.

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)

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:

• AudioGo
• Blackstone Audio
• MacMillan Audio
• Tantor Audio
• HarperAudio
• Brilliance Audio
• Simon & Schuster Audio
• Random House Audio
• Dreamscape
• GraphicAudio
• Hachette Audio
• HighBridge Audio
• Oasis Audio
• Naxos AudioBooks
• Iambik Audiobooks
• Recorded Books
• Spoken Word Inc.
• Brook Forest Voices Audiobooks
• ChristianAudio
• CSA Word
• Penguin Audio
• L.A. Theatre Works
• Scholastic Audio
• Franciscan Media

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.

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).

Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Sofie C. Brooks discusses how the rise of ebooks may change the publishing industry:

What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early stages of development. Random House has experienced a 200 percent growth in eBook sales this year, and every other company’s sales tell similar tales.

Brooks suggests some ways that authors, publishers, and distributors could work together in the changing world of literary publication.

While there are still those who continue to cling to the beauty of the traditionally printed word, literature is not dependent on its physical form. Unlike an opera or ballet, the words of Dickens, Chaucer, and Shakespeare still ring true even on an electronic screen. The essence of the art is inextinguishable, and the rest may turn out to be just details.

The Talking Cure at Work in Contemporary YA Fiction

We keep hearing that modern society has come to rely on drugs rather than psychotherapy for dealing with mental health issues. But, Kabi Hartman assures us:

Nevertheless, fictional teenagers are still talking to therapists for pages on end. Having now read a growing pile of novels, I can vouch for the fact that teen protagonists are actually having insights and getting better. In fact, the majority of these novels depict psychotherapy as transformative.

Hartman likens the several novels she discusses here to the tradition of religious conversion narratives (think John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress). And she finds hope in the picture that these novels offer, that adolescents can achieve self-knowledge through therapy:

these novels, however rife with soap operatic bad luck and sentimentality, champion the idea that self knowledge emerges in dialogue with a trusted other. Although most of them grind out cookie cutter conversion stories, I cannot be hard on these works. Ultimately, they suggest that engaging with someone else, face to face, is transforming — or, at the very least, provides more scope for plot and character development than popping a pill.

Are Rereadings Better Readings?

Writing in the New Yorker blog “The Book Bench,” Nathaniel Stein looks at the value of rereading books. He refers to “’On Rereading,’ Patricia Meyer Spacks’s charming and strange blend of memoir, literary criticism, and scientific treatise.” After retiring from teaching, Spacks undertook a period of rereading many of the literary milestones of her life.

Spacks’s constant fixation is the paradox of the simultaneous “sameness” and “difference” of rereading—how it is that the words are exactly the same but our perceptions of them so different?

Stein himself is more interested in the question “are rereadings better readings?”

What rereading tells us about ourselves, and how we have evolved intellectually, is as important as what it tells us about the books, Spacks believes. She’s endlessly interested in “how our minds, hearts, experience, personal and cultural situation, or all of the above … have changed since the last time we read those words.”

Stein further writes that Spacks believes rereadings “can reveal unwelcome truths about our past selves, and cause disenchantment—in the most literal sense—with the books we used to love.”

I haven’t read Patricia Spacks’s book, although I have now added it to my ever-growing list of TBR (to be read) books. But Spacks seems to subscribe to the reader-response theory of literature, which posits that readers bring to bear all their past experiences and learning when they read a book. In this respect, then, a rereading of a book could very well differ from the first reading because the reader is now a different person. When we reread a book we originally loved and find out that we now love it less, that realization may say more about us than about the book. I suspect this is what Stein says Spacks means by recognizing “unwelcome truths about our past selves.”

However, the experience may also work in a more positive direction. Whenever I find myself feeling down on humanity, I reread To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Immersing myself in the story of Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch always reminds me that there are many good and decent people in the world.

How about you? Are there any books that you have enjoyed rereading?

10 Famous Literary Characters and Their Real-Life Inspirations

Here’s an intriguing list. And–surprise!–not all the literary characters are human.

Ikea will make changes to its low-cost, high-volume Billy bookshelf this fall. And to some, that means books are dying.

Ten Crime Books You Have to Read Before You Die

This title is way misleading, since there are two lists of 10 plus numerous alternates. And there’s also some basic information about best-selling crime novelists John Connolly and Declan Hughes.

National SAT reading scores fall to record low

SAT reading scores for the high school class of 2011 were the lowest on record, and combined reading and math scores fell to their lowest point since 1995.

Writers on writing

The Washington Post asked a few writers to complete the following sentences:

• THE THING I’M HAPPIEST ABOUT IN MY WRITING CAREER IS . . .
• I WOULD LIKE READERS TO REACT TO MY WORK BY . . .
• WRITING IS A SPIRITUAL ACTIVITY BECAUSE . . .
• THE BOOK THAT HAS HAD THE GREATEST INFLUENCE ON ME IS . . .
• THE BEST SENTENCE I’VE EVER READ IS . . .
• THE COOLEST THING I’VE EVER DONE AS A RESULT OF MY WRITING IS . . .

Read answers by writers including Russell Banks, Jim Lehrer, Gregory Maguire, Jennifer Egan, Sara Paretsky, and Terry McMillan.

Novelist ditches publisher at book launch for ‘condescending’ treatment 

Novelist Polly Courtney has dropped her publisher HarperCollins for giving her books “condescending and fluffy” covers aimed at the chick lit market.

At the launch of It’s a Man’s World, her third novel published by HarperCollins, Courtney announced that she will be returning to the world of self-publishing.

Five free crime fiction classics – the best!

The Crime Fiction Lover site is making it easy for readers to download free ebook versions of “five of our favourite classic detective fiction reads that are often overlooked but are freely available.” Offerings are these five “gems hidden in the rough”:

• The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
• The Murders in Rue Morgue – Edgar Allen Poe
• The Great Impersonation – E Phillips Oppenheim
• The Secret Adversary – Agatha Christie
• The Red House Mystery - AA Milne

I started life as a classics major, so seeing these photos celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press, warmed my heart. These little green-covered (Greek) and red-covered (Latin) gems present the original text on the left page, with a translation on the right page. This series has introduced generations of readers to the big thinkers and writers of ancient Western civilization.

In this issue of NPR’s “three books” series, Adam Mansbach reflects on which books he read in childhood have stuck with him:

The ones I continue to love now, a quarter-century after first mauling their spines, tend to confront complex social issues bravely, convey emotions with tremendous, empathetic clarity, and rest on compelling narrative voices. In other words — the very elements that draw me into novels today.

Read his homage to these three works:

• The Moves Make the Man by Bruce Brooks
• Father’s Arcane Daughter by E. L. Konigsburg
• The Flight of the Cassowary by John Levert

What’s In Store: 3 Tales Of A Terrifying Future

In this next issue of NPR’s “three books” series, Drew Magary muses on fictional presentations of the apocalypse.

I think there’s probably a point to which civilization will evolve, and then all the gas and water will run out and we’ll spend the rest of eternity trying to get back to the awesome times when we had, you know, food to eat. I really hope I’m not alive when that turning point arrives, because it will be bad.

See what he has to say about these books:

• World War Z by Max Brooks
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
• Robocop by Ed Naha

E-books’ popularity is rewriting the sales story

“It’s been a watershed year for e-books,” says Tina Jordan of the Association of American Publishers. “Any publisher will tell you that a best-selling title from a branded author can run upwards of 30% to 40% in digital sales.”

Despite surges in new technology and strong e-reader and e-book sales, print books are holding their own; publishers see them as key for the future. They want consumers to have many choices in reading formats and ease of buying.

According to this article, publishers will continue to invest in new titles.  And the publishing industry is waiting to see how digital and print sales play out in the upcoming holiday season.

The 5 Worst Workers in Literature

I’m a little late with this one, but it’s not my fault–really. This post, in honor of Labor Day here in the United States, didn’t appear on the PW blog until the day after Labor Day.

Anyway, here’s a look at the five worst workers in literature:

1. Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

2. Tom Mota from Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

3. Jim Dixon from Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

4. Henry Chinaski from Post Office by Charles Bukowski

5. Bartleby from Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville

All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books

Time magazine has chosen “the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME … magazine” in the following categories:

• autobiography/memoir
• biography
• business
• culture
• essays
• food writing
• health
• history
• ideas
• nonfiction novels
• politics
• science
• self-help/instructional
• social history
• sports
• war

10 Can’t-Miss Nonfiction Books For Fall

Kirkus Reviews recommends books to curl up with by the fireplace this fall. There should be at least one here to appeal to just about everyone.

The Article Everyone Who Loves Books Should Read

Keith Gessen’s new Vanity Fair e-book, How a Book Is Born: The Making of “The Art of Fielding” (available for Kindle and Nook), is a thorough and riveting study of books and their business, and anyone with an interest in writing should do themselves a great favor by buying it right now. It’s $1.99 well spent.

Gabe Habash, who wrote this post, also says:

At 17,000 words, Gessen’s article is long-form journalism done right (something e-books are really starting to figure out)–it’s long enough to bury you in its story but also short enough (and told briskly enough) to fight off any inclinations toward boredom. It’s overall message: content is king. For all of the brisk narration Gessen engages in, and for all the uncertainty creeping into the publishing conversation, it still comes down to the fact that people want to read good books. And Gessen’s piece is a really good article about a good book.

Forbes contributor Avril David has put together a list of “10 women [who] can tell (and sell) a good story”:

Although there are many more women throughout history who have proven to be powerful authors, this list is limited to those who are living, with a focus on personal narrative and fiction writers.

She emphasizes that this list is a matter of personal opinion, so I guess she has the right to set whatever parameters for inclusion she wishes. But Joyce Carol Oates and Danielle Steel on the same list?

Top Earning Authors

Another list from Forbes, this one based solely on profits and including both men and women. How many can you guess before looking at the list?

Sherlock Holmes Banned from Reading Lists for Being Anti-Mormon

The Albemarle County School Board in Virgina has voted to remove Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tale  A Study in Scarlet from sixth-grade reading lists because it portrays Mormonism in an unfavorable way. Although the book was found not to be age-appropriate for the sixth grade, it will continue to be available to older students. According to this news story:

Not everyone was happy about the removal of the book from sixth grade reading lists. Apparently “more than 20 former Henley students turned out to oppose the book’s removal from the lists.”

Book battles heat up over censorship vs. selection in school

U.S. schools have banned more than 20 books and faced more than 50 other challenges this year, the American Library Association reports, and many more are expected this fall.

USA Today has a round-up about censorship in schools.

Sleuthing Around Dublin’s Darkest Corners

NPR talks with Irish author John Banville, who publishes mysteries under the name Benjamin Black.

“If you are going to write noir fiction, Dublin in the ’50s is absolutely perfect . . . All that poverty, all that fog, all that cigarette smoke, all those drink fumes. Perfect noir territory.”

Black’s mysteries feature sleuth Quirke, a consulting pathologist in a Dublin morgue:

“He has a very dark and troubled past,” Black explains. “He was an orphan. When he looks back to his earliest years, he sees only a blank, which is I think what drives him. What drives his curiosity. His itch to know about other people’s lives, other people’s secrets.”

Black describes Quirke as the exact opposite of Sherlock Holmes:

“In these books, nothing is ever resolved,” Black says. “The baddies are not put away. Poor old Quirke is as dumb as the rest of us, you know.”

Five essential books about 9/11

As the tenth anniversary of the event that changed the world as we knew it approaches, The Los Angeles Times offers a list of five books that memorialize it.

My own addition to this list is the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.

The United States isn’t the only fish in the publishing sea. Here’s a look at books Canadians will be reading this fall.