- Any John Keegan fans out there? Here’s a review of his latest book Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda from the New Zealand Herald. I’m looking forward to reading this one.
- The Brits have something called the WHSmith Book Award, which is basically a “people’s choice” award for books. If you are so inclined, you can vote now. Some interesting nominations include Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in the adult fiction category, former professional wrestler/current professional novelist Mick Foley‘s Tietam Brown in the debut novel category, and LA Weekly contributor Geoff Dyer‘s book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It in the travel category. I wonder how something like this would go over in the States.
This and That
Jonathan Lethem gets Autobiographical
When Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude came out, there was much discussion of how the novel paralelled Lethem's own upbringing in pre-gentrified Brooklyn. Now we're getting the real Lethem story for those who want to compare and contrast. It arrives in the form of a book of essays, The Disappointment Artist, which comes out in two weeks. An excerpt, which depicts a young Lethem immersed in obsessions with books, movies and music while trying to come to turns with his mother's death appeared in last week's New Yorker (but it's not available online). I'm beginning to wonder if this exercise in autobiography (with the New Yorker as the stage) has become a rite of initiation for American novelists who have made the big time. Most prominent among them is Jonathan Franzen, who has had a number of meandering autobiographical essays in the magazine over the last few years. I wonder what drives the phenomenon. Do people really want to know about their lives or are these novelists just good at telling a story?
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On the Road Scroll Rolls into Bookstores
Jack Kerouac's On the Road is known as much for its content as for the story surrounding its creation: Kerouac wrote in a frenzied three weeks, typing furiously on a continuous scroll of paper, or so the story goes. The truth is though, while there is indeed a scroll - it has toured the country for years, stopping at various museums and libraries - On the Road's creation is more complicated than that, as a recent NPR segment discussed.In fact, On the Road wasn't written in a three week rush, it was half formed in Kerouac's notebooks before ending up on the scroll and went through many drafts afterward. Furthermore, the version on the scroll isn't what we've read, as the novel evolved in future drafts and was fairly heavily edited before Viking finally published the book in 1957. Not only that, the end of the scroll is missing - eaten by a dog supposedly - so it's not entirely clear what Kerouac's original intention was for the end of the novel.Still, the On the Road scroll is a powerful thing symbolically, and it may be closer to what Kerouac intended the novel to be than what was published originally. In recognition of that, for the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, Viking (now a part of Penguin) is publishing the scroll (in book form, of course) with an ending taken from other early drafts of On the Road.For those who prefer the On the Road that we grew up reading (watered down though it may be), a standard 50th Anniversary edition is on its way as well. You can shelve it alongside the 40th Anniversary edition you bought ten years ago.
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Harry Potter is Dead, Long Live Harry Potter
With the announcement of a title and street date (July 21st) for the seventh and final Harry Potter book, the final chapter of a publishing industry fairy tale has begun.I witnessed the phenomenon of the boy wizard firsthand when I worked at a bookstore in Los Angeles. Even on the decidedly not family friendly Sunset Strip (we were a few doors down from the Hustler flagship store), we sold more copies of book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, than all of our other books combined in the first few days it was out, and our book buyer had to make emergency runs to Costco (where he could get the book wholesale) to keep it in stock. (You can see my thoughts at the time in this post.)Book six, of course, was even bigger, and judging by the numbers, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be the biggest of all. According to an Amazon press release, in just the first seven hours of availability, the online bookseller sold "over 200% more books than it did the entire first day of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the sixth book in the series. In fact, sales on Amazon.com in the first seven hours today have eclipsed total sales for the entire first two days of the sixth book." Once all the first-day numbers were tallied, Amazon put out another release saying that orders for Deathly Hallows "were 547% higher than first-day pre-orders for Half-Blood Prince" and that the seventh and final book sold more copies on the first day than in the first two weeks of the pre-order period for book six.Amazon isn't alone of course, Barnes & Noble reported selling Half-Blood Prince at a rate of 105 copies a second when that book came out, and I'm guessing the numbers will be even more astonishing for book seven. The books are such outliers that overall sales for the chain spike in years when Harry Potter books come out, creating lumpy year over year sales comparisons that the company's management must explain to Wall Street.Of course, nowhere else is the series a bigger deal than Scholastic, the publisher behind the books, and the company can only hope that dozens of other projects in the pipeline will make up for the revenue lost once Harry Potter is history. At the same time, I'd imagine that the series will be repackaged again and again to entice die-hard fans and newcomers to shell out cash for the books years after book seven comes out. Already there are multiple editions of the Harry Potter books, and the "deluxe" version of book seven - retailing for $65 - is #2 at Amazon right now.While it's unclear if the book industry will ever experience a phenomenon quite like Harry Potter again - the first six books have sold more than 325 million copies in 64 languages, dwarfing even The Da Vinci Code's 60+ million copies in print - we can be sure that the press will spill many gallons of ink on the end of the series over the next six months or so. And to be honest, it's probably deserved. There's never been anything else quite like it.
Greetings from Europe
I'm sitting in a Barcelona internet cafe in the completely empty non-smoking section... The smoking section is packed. It's only noon though, so it seems like most of the city isn't really awake yet. We are staying about four blocks from Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. It is under construction as it has been for decades, and it is a bizarre building to look upon. Over the next couple of days we will see some of Gaudi's other work. Today: art museums and La Boqueria, Barcelona's massive open air food market. I had hoped to get a lot of reading done on the plane, but the trip was so grueling that I didn't accomplish much. I worked my way through the first issue of The Believer, McSweeney's magazine about books and other fluff. Heidi Julavits' article about the lost art of book reviewing is the high point, after that it's mostly uneven to dull. But, hey, at least the folks on Valencia keep churning out new and interesting projects. Til next time...
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Bridging the reading gap between kids and adults
At the Powells blog, Alexis writes about the awkward transition young readers make from young adult fiction to regular fiction.When the children are still young - toddlers to fifth grade, say - parents will sometimes make a point of telling us how advanced their kids are. It might go something like this: She's only two but she's way beyond board books; or, He's in fourth grade but he reads at a seventh grade level. But get the kids to junior high, and suddenly the parents start to fret that their intellectually advanced kids are going to be reading books that contain "mature" content.I definitely remember this experience from my bookstores, even in permissive Los Angeles. Later on Alexis writes:That said, I often wish that I could recommend more adult books to some of my teen customers. Nothing is stopping me, I suppose, except my own anxieties about parents flipping out that a Powell's employee exposed their high school freshman to Margaret Atwood's sexual dystopia.When I was a teenager, discovering Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving and T.C. Boyle was a revelatory experience, and I'd certainly recommend books by them to today's teenagers. I've also said in the past that classic novels can be a great bridge from young adult novels to adult novels. Sometimes, when I worked at the bookstore, I would recommend classics to precocious youngsters who had read "all" the young adult stuff. In this post from last summer, I and a few others put together a very short list of classics that kids might start with.Some might say that kids won't be willing to read these "old" books that they associate with school, but it's also true that kids can get a lot more out of a book they read for fun rather than for school, even if it's the same book.
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A New Feature
I know that some folks out there are interested in the travels of our friend Cem. But because he is currently somewhere near the border of Thailand and Burma, it has become difficult for him to update as often as he (or we) would like. Therefore I have taken it upon myself to excerpt some of the emails that we have been exchanging. I do this partly because it's another way to keep track of this wily character but also partly because I always find talk of travels to be a good igniter of interesting discussion. So, lets leave it at that for now. His last email bore some good news for Realistic Records (from halfway around the world no less!!) as well as the sort of scheming that would make Maqroll and Bashur proud ( You should really read this book! Gabriel Garcia Marquez loves it. And frankly, I think it might be the best book I've ever read. I gave it to Cem to read while he travels around the world. You can see how it has already attached itself to his psyche):max,couple things.1.a qoute from my friend kevin, a serious music junkie and collector, whose taste in music i respect more than anyone i know. this email was sent to me before i told him to buy your record:"music-wise, soulseek is still saving my life. i'm watching out for the RIAA these days, though. $150,000 a song! http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/07/01/download.music.ap/index.htmlmy top 8 albums in 2003 so far: (no particular order)junior senior : d-d-d-don't stop the beatdelgados : haterecoys : rekoysdat politics : plugs pluspostal service : give uporanges band : all arounderlend oye : unrestbroken social scene : you forgot it in people"thats right fooo! realistic up an runnin![2 is of little interest to you, faithful reader, so let's move on to 3.]3.i think that ill be following maqroll, thanks very much. as you know and i now fear, this will mean going dead broke and having to figure a way out of it. i have already begun the most basic level of planning for a small import venture involving Burmese laquerware from Mandalay and/or ethnic textiles for sale in small markets and possibly wholesale to shops. i need to speak with Thibault. i am not kidding max - the stuff is beautiful, cheap, pleantiful, and there is noone selling it that i can find in the US. you will hear more on this later - i really think that it might work.. if it aroused your interests, Mr Bashur, we could both perhaps share in the success.all for now,cem.Indie Rockers kan rede 2Cem's friend Kevin and his fantastic list of this year's best indie rock reminded me of, what else, a book. If you walk down the music aisle in any bookstore you will see shelves and shelves of books about the Beatles and the Stones and their compatriots in classic rock. There will also be bulging shelves of books on jazz, blues, and even world music. Punk rock, once the vanguard of the antiestablishment even warrants it's own chunck of shelf space (Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil is by far the best book on punk, by the way). But what about indie rock? Should a fan of this lowly but noble genre of music go without adequate reading material? No longer. A couple of years ago music journalist Michael Azerrad put together a book called Our Band Could Be Your Life that chronicles the rise and fall of thirteen seminal indie rock bands. Detailed chapters on Black Flag, The Minutemen (whose line from Double Nickels on the Dime supplies the title of the book), Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Husker Du, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Fugazi Mudhoney, and Beat Happening, effectively constitute the history of rock and roll for a generation of music fans.Hey Hey L. A.I've been in LA for almost 3 years now, and it long ago lost it's shiny newness for me, but it's still a big enough place that it continues to reveal itself to me bit by bit. The other day I was driving home from work and something I heard on the radio reminded me of the way radio stations in other towns that I've lived in used to do spoof versions of popular songs to make them refer to something going on in that city; like when I was growing up Washington DC and the morning drive guys were always playing Aerosmith songs that had been turned into spoofs of Mayor (for life) Marion Barry and his crack habit. For a second, whatever I was hearing on the radio made me think that they were playing a goofy made up song about LA. Then I realized that I wasn't listing to a spoof song, but a real song, probably a song that's very popular among the kids right now. It just so happened that this song, subconsciously almost, heavily references Los Angeles. The more I thought about this and the more I let it inform my music listening and TV watching and movie viewing, the more I realized that a huge portion of American pop entertainment consciously or, more frequently, subconsciously references Los Angeles in such a way that you could only really be aware of it if you have spent a decent chunk of time in this odd city. The implications of all this are somewhat startling. Many folks get upset that America's monopoly on popular entertainment results in a monopoly of American values and beliefs. The reality, though, is that America's popular effluvia is simply the values of Los Angeles and its accompanying entertainment culture masquerading as American culture. It's possible that because I am simultaineously a Los Angeles insider and a Los Angeles outsider I am particularly apt to find this disturbing. Nonetheless, I can't shake the feeling that this is not a particularily good thing.A couple more quick notesYesterday when I was out driving, I saw a car with this vanity plate: FAKE TAG. I gave a chuckle and then decided that it's only funny if the plates really are fake.
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