Ask a Book Question: The 31st in a Series (Who is Wells Tower?)

Harry writes in with this question about Kennedy’s reading habits.I have read that one of JFK’s favorite books was about the social mores of the English Royalty and their attitudes toward the commoners. Would you be able tell me anything about that?Americans like to get to know their presidents. We hear about their stature (Lincoln tall, Madison short), their culinary preferences (Reagan liked jellybeans, Bush the first hated broccoli), and their reading habits. In 2003 Bill Clinton gave reporters this list of his favorite books. Reagan was reported to have liked That Printer of Udell’s by Harold Bell Wright and Witness by Whittaker Chambers. Growing up, Ford loved Horatio Alger. JFK was known to have a predilection for books, and many of his biographers have reported that his favorite book was Pilgrim’s Way the autobiography of John Buchan, which I think might be the book you were looking for. The book wasn’t about British royalty, though, so I’m not sure it’s the book you were referring to. It was about the British aristocracy. Buchan was a Scottish spy novelist, one of the early ones, penning thrillers during the WWI era. But Pilgrim’s Way was a more personal departure from his typical work. Thomas Maier’s The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings includes this passage: “While Kathleen Kennedy partied and enjoyed the company of young British squires, her brother John devoured lessons about the aristocracy from his English friends and from such books as Pilgrim’s Way.” Apparently, Kennedy was a big fan of Buchan’s books and he quoted them often in speeches. For more on Buchan have a look at this essay from New Criterion and there’s the John Buchan Society. While most sources say that Pilgrim’s Way was JFK’s favorite book, this list at Amazon, which is supposedly drawn from a 1961 issue of Life, puts another Buchan book, Montrose as his favorite. Still, I’m not convinced that I found the book that Harry was looking for, so if anyone has a better answer to this question, please let us know.

My good and old friend Emre wrote in with this question. He just finished Hunter S. Thompson’s classic Hell’s Angels, and is pining to read a certain new book that I’ve been mentioning quite a bit lately:when’s the paperback for [Edith] Grossman’s Don Quixote coming out?Book pricing is a classic example of what we used to call price discrimination in my economics classes. The way the book publishers see it, there is a certain percentage of the population out there for whom getting a book as soon as it comes out is worth the premium of ten bucks or so. These people are willing to buy the book at this higher price, so the publishers take advantage of it. Once the demand for the higher priced edition has dried up, they put out a lower priced edition and then they can sell the same book to a second group of people for whom owning the book is worth less. It’s good business, actually, because the publishers can cash in on the pent-up demand for each title. Other businesses rarely have this luxury because products are usually not as individualized as books are. So, how long does it take for that first level of demand to dry up? When customers ask me, I usually say it can take anywhere from six to eighteen months, and that it varies from title to tile with the only real hard and fast rule being that the really, really big sellers in hardcover tend not to come out in paperback for quite a while, for obvious reasons. I suspected, however, that Emre was looking for a more specific answer. So, I tracked down the phone number for Ecco Press, the division of Random House that is putting out both the hardcover and paperback editions of this book, and rung them up. The gentleman that I reached there looked through his records and told me that they have set a tentative release date of October 2004 for the paperback. So there you have it Emre, either you can sit tight til next October or you can go ahead and pony up the cash. It all depends on how you quantify your pent-up demand.

Dee writes in with this question:Do you know when Richard Ford’s sequel to Independence Day will be published?Richard Ford’s Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award winning Independence Day from 1995 revisits Frank Bascombe, who Ford first introduced to readers as The Sportswriter in 1986. In the novels, Ford plumbs the angst of the 1980s and 90s through the everyman character Bascombe. A third book in the series would likely place Bascombe in the current decade. I’m sure the Bascombe followers out there would like to see how he is faring.As Dee suggests, Ford is indeed working on a third Bascombe novel, to be called The Lay of the Land, and while I could find no indication that he has completed it, he has been reading from the unfinished book at readings over the last couple of years. In fact, attendees of Ford’s reading tour in the UK in fall, 2004, received a bound excerpt of the new book. As for the actual release date, I don’t think they’ve set one yet, but I did spot a note on one British Web site (see the box labeled “Also of interest”) that seemed to indicate the book will be out some time in 2006, but I couldn’t confirm it. He briefly touched on the new book in a 2002 interview with Robert Birnbaum of identity theory:Birnbaum: You leave it all on the playing field…Ford: Yes. That’s kind of how I go about doing it. I get to that frame of mind perhaps a with little more difficulty. But I’m working on the 3rd Frank Bascombe [The Sportswriter, Independence Day] book…Once I finish that…Birnbaum: I thought you said you weren’t going to do that?Ford: No I said…Birnbaum: I’m kidding, I’m kidding..Ford: I hope I didn’t say that. I might have said it. I do a lot of things to remind myself of how serious projects need to be to do them.Birnbaum: So you are working on the next Frank Bascombe novel?Ford: Yes and I will be working on it. There are moments when I feel like I can really do it. There are moments when I feel like…yesterday was a bad day. You find out things, people don’t like your book, you think to yourself, “I don’t know how I can spend the next three years writing a book when I feel so shitty about this now?” But being a novelist, it is important to average your days. It’s like Olympic diving. You throw out the high score and the low score. I threw out the low score yesterday…Another interview from 2002, with Dave Weich of Powells.com, offers more details:Ford: When I began this third book called The Lay of the Land, I asked, What could I make Frank be next? And I finally decided that he can be a realtor. It seemed to me to be both plausible and to give rise to new speculative developments of his character. Obviously you can’t have him go back and do the same kinds of things – he has to have a whole different orientation to life, which is not difficult to do, really – but it wasn’t broke in the last book, so I think I don’t have to fix that.Dave: What’s the motivation for going back to his character rather than starting fresh with someone else?Ford: To write about Frank again is truly one of the pleasurable things I’ve gotten out of writing – that is to say, palpably pleasurable – so I’m writing about Frank as a gift to myself. I think it would be fun to write about him again and to see what my imagination can turn up for him. Who knows? Maybe I can’t do it. It’s always a possibility. Because you can write two doesn’t guarantee that you can write three. If I can’t, that’ll be okay.Dave: Will Frank be in New Jersey again?Ford: On the shore this time. Married, I think. Have left Haddam. This is much more involved with his daughter, Clarissa. Taking place on Thanksgiving in the year 2000.Dave: A holiday again.Ford: I gotta do holidays. They offer me so much. In particular, for me and the reader, a whole set of associations. If you write about Easter, if you write about the Fourth of July, something as important, almost invisibly important, as the temporal setting of a book…if the reader can say, “Gee, that’s a time I know. I have a whole set of memories and associations to bring to bear on whatever’s happening then,” you’ve got a lot going for you.It may still be a while yet, before we read it, though. According to this post at TEV, by summer of 2004, Ford had “completed 380 typed pages – ‘about half’ – of The Lay of The Land.” And an interview from February of this year has Ford saying, “I’m well past the middle of it, the last fifth of it probably.”Update: In the comments, Stephan notes that an excerpt from the novel appeared in the New Yorker a few months ago. You can read it here.Update 2: Lay of the Land will be released on October 24, 2006.

Patric (who’s got a pretty cool website) wrote in with this question, which tested my research skills.What was Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Fiction Title for 2003?Before I set to figuring this one out, I guessed what it might be just to see if I would be right. Knowing Entertainment Weekly’s tastes, I figured that Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was a pretty good candidate, but, no it turns out to be EW’s number two book. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger seemed like a good pick because, while a book club favorite, it broke new ground, Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude for its genre-bending hipness, and maybe Monica Ali’s Brick Lane for its multicultural bent. But: no, no, and no. It turns out that the EW editors decided that 2003’s best novel was Samaritan by Richard Price. It’s actually a pretty good choice; Samaritan was well-reviewed, and sold well, but was not considered one of the “hot” books of the year. In the book, Price (who also wrote Clockers) weaves a mystery of sorts about a man who returns to his roots in a hard-edged New Jersey town and is brutally assaulted, but refuses to implicate his attacker. It’s a bold and interesting pick by EW for best book of the year. (My pick, by the way, is The Known World by Edward P. Jones, hands down.)