Last night myself and my friend Edan were the facilitators for the first installment of a new book club at the book store where I work. It was the first time either of us had ever been in a book club, and I think we both had a good time. Last night we discussed The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. After a few minutes of polite discussion, it came out that half the people in attendance strongly disliked the book, which made for some excellent debate. As best as I could tell, the dislike for the book is a part of the backlash against the “virtuoso perfomances” of young writers of late, who, according to certain readers, are over-writing in order to produce a novel that is “big” and masterful. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen are two examples of this trend that came up during our discussion. I, on the other hand, am relatively lenient in my feelings about this book at least in part because I have always rather enjoyed the over-written modern novel, John Irving (see The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany) and T. C. Boyle (see The Tortilla Curtain, World’s End, and Water Music) being among my favorite practitioners. The question now is: what do we read for next month?
Book Clubbin’
My nominee
I've posted an introduction to my nominee for this round at the LBC. Unfortunately the book didn't win, but it was still a great read. You'll have to go to the LBC blog to find out who it is.
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A Buzz Word: Early Adopter
The effects of Amazon.com on the book industry, the debate as to whether it is good or bad for the cause of reading and literature, remains heated, and I find myself rooting both for and against Amazon. One thing that I AM decided on, though, is that Amazon watching is fun. Whether they are announcing a new innovation with a front page letter from CEO Jeff Bezos, like the recent introduction of the "Search within a book" feature, or just slipping new technologies quietly into their listings, there always seems to be something new popping up there, and each new feature seems like it generates another round of debate about this behemoth of a website. The feature I discovered yesterday isn't likely to ignite too many debates, but I found it interesting nonetheless. Part of what is fascinating about Amazon is the way they turn the inner workings of their operation into content for the website. Features like Purchase Circles, "Customers who bought this item... also bought these books...", and "Customers who bought books by this author... also bought books by these authors..., take information that typical companies guard closely and turn it into entertainment for readers and fodder for search engines. The new feature that I noticed the other day is called "Early Adopters." According to Amazon, "These are the newest and coolest products our customers are buying. The following lists, updated daily, are based entirely on purchase patterns." The term "early adopter" has more or less entered the popular vocabulary in recent years. Books like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point have popularized the notion that there is a certain type of person that is predisposed to seeking out, learning about, and owning the newest technologies. This idea is based on the broader theories of an economist named Everett Rogers whose book Diffusion of Innovations (1965) explained that individuals could be divided into five categories based on their openness to innovations. 2.5% of the population are Innovators; these are the extremely adventurous, willing to take risks on unproven technologies. These folks pay top dollar to be some of the first people in the world to own flat screen televisions and Segways. 13.5% of the population are Early Adopters; these are the folks who have the insight to seek out the best of new technologies and with their buying power and word of mouth, they can turn an obscure new product into a household item. Early adopters are considered among the most important consumers in the marketplace, and when a new product is introduced marketers spend millions directing ads at this population, knowing that they can make or break their new product, a fact clearly not lost on Amazon in the naming of their new feature. The rest of the population is less exciting. The Early Majority (34%) is slightly more adventurous than average, the Late Majority (34%), slightly less. Then there are the Laggards (16%) with their rotary phones and wooden tennis rackets. Clearly, marketers have no patience for folks with more "classic" tastes, and the marketers at Amazon are likely no exception, hence their choice of buzz words. What's interesting about the Amazon "Early Adopters" area is that, along with more typical applications like Electronics and Cameras, they apply the term to music and books, where new products are more likely to be derivative than innovative. Regardless of their intent, the algorithm used to generate the list for books needs some work, since the list is clearly made up of books that are being purchased in bulk by students, churches, and self-published authors, not books that are being purchased by folks with literary tastes on the cutting edge.
A MySpace for Books (and Nerds)
Goodreads is a vibrant and feisty place - if you can even call an online community a place. Its slogan boasts, "it's what your friends are reading!" and perhaps that's true: the site's more dedicated members are so busy posting the books they've read, and want to read, or are currently reading, that you might assume they no longer have time to actually read. But the opposite is true for me - since joining the site, and becoming obsessed with it, I've been reading quite voraciously. Chalk it up to a pure-hearted love of sharing my thoughts about literature; or to some illusory sense of accountability ("Everyone's breathlessly awaiting my opinion of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao!"); or to my desire to read a novel as soon as it's lauded by a friend ("Wow, Katie gave 5 stars to The Dud Avocado, I must see what's so great about it!"). Or maybe it's just a primitive lust to build up my roster of books read, to assert myself as the most bookish.Goodreads allows you to organize your books in self-created bookshelves (mine include "Theory" and "Tried but Failed to Read"), and to see if you and a friend have similar reading tastes (apparently, my taste is 100% similar to the aforementioned Katie's, which is just creepy). Most importantly, the site lets you rate books on a star system, one star signifying "I didn't like it," and five signifying, "It was amazing." The fact that there isn't an "I hated this piece of crap" option suggests that Goodreads is generally promoting a positive reaction to books. You can, however, say whatever you want in your reviews, and your friends can respond as they wish in the comments section. On my page, for instance, there's a 33-comment thread that covers Jonathan Lethem (the original subject of my review), Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Michael Chabon, hipsters, blonde women, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Kelly Ripa and Faith Ford (that is, who's hotter), Rushmore, irony, Colson Whitehead, and more. Another friend's two-star rating (denoting "It was okay") of On The Road caused another friend to comment, "You also gave two stars to The Stranger, you tool. For that I should bypass this comment box and toss a flaming bag of shit at your house." This, unsurprisingly, led to a heated ping-ponging of comments. My, my, reading is more fun than I thought.I'd say more, but I must get back to that Junot Diaz novel - which is definitely already 4 stars-good, if not 5.
What’s it like to own the Penguin Complete Collection?
So who are the lucky people who own the The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, which costs nearly $8,000, weighs 700 pounds and is available exclusively through Amazon.com? Well, a New York Times article estimates that there's only about two dozen people who have purchased the mammoth set. According to the article, one of them is Kate Bolton an avid reader who lost her entire library when her house burned down in a forest fire. I'd love to own that collection, but I'd need a separate apartment just to house it.
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Exclusive First Look: Lauren Groff’s ‘Fates and Furies’
Last week, the internet buzzed about and puzzled over the newly unveiled cover of Jonathan Franzen's Purity, forthcoming in September. While Franzen is sure to grab many headlines in the months to come, we're also intrigued by Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, which also sports a cover with a blue and white color scheme. Along with the cover above, we have the book's opening paragraphs below. Fates and Furies has so far been cryptically described as "an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception," and, as you'll see, the book wastes no time, uh, introducing us to its protagonists.
Two people were coming up the beach. She was fair and sharp in a green bikini, though it was May in Maine and cold. He was tall, vivid; a light flickered in him that caught the eye and held it. Their names were Lotto and Mathilde.
For a minute they watched a tide pool full of spiny creatures that sent up curls of sand in vanishing. Then he took her face in his hands, kissed her pale lips. He could die right now of happiness. In a vision, he saw the sea rising up to suck them in, tonguing off their flesh and rolling their bones over its coral molars in the deep. If she were beside him, he thought, he would float out singing.
Well, he was young, twenty-two, and they had been married that morning in secret. Extravagance, under the circumstances, could be forgiven.
Her fingers down the back of his trunks seared his skin. She pushed him backward, walking him up a dune covered in beach-pea stalks, down again to where the wall of sand blocked the wind, where they felt warmer. Under the bikini top, her gooseflesh had taken on a lunar blue, and her nipples in the cold turned inward. On their knees, now, though the sand was rough and hurt. It didn’t matter. They were reduced to mouths and hands. He swept her legs to his hips, pressed her down, blanketed her with his heat until she stopped shivering, made a dune of his back. Her raw knees were raised to the sky.
He longed for something wordless and potent: what? To wear her. He imagined living in her warmth forever. People in his life had fallen away from him one by one like dominoes; every movement pinned her further so that she could not abandon him. He imagined a lifetime of screwing on the beach until they were one of those ancient pairs speed-walking in the morning, skin like lacquered walnut meat. Even old, he would waltz her into the dunes and have his way with her sexy frail bird bones, the plastic hips, and the bionic knee. Drone lifeguards looming up in the sky, flashing their lights, booming Fornicators! Fornicators! to roust them guiltily out. This, for eternity. He closed his eyes and wished. Her eyelashes on his cheek, her thighs on his waist, the first consummation of this terrifying thing they’d done.
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