The trailer for the film version of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball has arrived. (via Kottke, whose skepticism I share)
Moneyball Trailer
Mislabeled
Can writers transcend race? LaTanya McQueen argues that labeling fiction as minority gets in the way of the story at The Missouri Review blog. Also, see our essay on the racial and gender barriers in the publishing industry.
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Alice Munro’s First Book
"I didn’t really understand what reading was for. If I wanted a story, the thing to do was to get my grandmother to read it to me. Then listening to her voice, her story-reading voice which always sounded a little incredulous, marvelling, yet full of faith, bravely insistent, and watching her face, its meaningful and utterly familiar expressions—lifted eyebrows, ominously sinking chin, brisk little nods of agreement when, as sometimes happened, a character said something sensible—then I would feel the story grow into life and exist by itself, so that it hardly seemed to me that she was reading it out of a book at all; it was something she had created herself, out of thin air... But one summer I had the whooping-cough, and afterwards I could not go swimming or jump off the beams in the barn or boss my little brother, because by that time he had the whooping-cough himself. My grandmother was off somewhere, visiting other cousins. So I swung on my swing until I got dizzy, and then for no reason in particular I took the Child’s History out of the bookcase in the front room, and sat down on the floor and started to read." Alice Munro writes about A Child's History of England, the first book she ever read.
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The Library of the Future
If you're looking forward to the next Margaret Atwood novel, you'll have to wait a century. Atwood is the first author to participate in the Future Library project, in which 100 authors will write 100 original manuscripts to be published 100 years from now. We're envious of our grandchildren. If you'd like an Atwood fix sooner, her short story collection Stone Mattress: Nine Tales comes out next week.
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Share Your Ebooks
Amazon now lets you "lend" your ebooks to other readers for a period of 14 days. And, in an interesting touch that adds a physical limitation to a digital product, you can't read a book you've lent to someone while they're borrowing it.
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The Problem with the Poky Little Puppy
"The problem is that young children have terrible taste and enjoy garbage. Another problem, which compounds the first problem, is that they want to hear the same books hundreds of times in a row. So for all the joys that storytime can offer, it frequently entails a kind of dismal self-abnegation that’s too excruciating even to describe as tedium—an actively painful sense of my precious time on earth being torn from my chest and tossed into a furnace." Gabriel Roth writes about the terrible Poky Little Puppy for Slate, and his complaints pair well with Jacob Lambert's Millions series, "Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?" and "Again, I Ask..."
Brad Pitt provides skepticism? After Sevem 12 Monkeys, Fight Club, the Oceans movies, Assassination of Jesse James, Burn After Reading, Inglorious Basterds and Tree of Life? I think the man has proven himself by now.
Well, we really don’t know what they are skeptical about, do we? Is it Pitt, is it the content of the movie, is it skepticism about popular non-fiction books made into movies, or is it the ability of this movie to earn money?
Ok. Enough mystery. I am skeptical that this very interesting book, which is primarily about ideas and numbers, will translate well to the screen. The book doesn’t have a very cinematic plot – Oakland doesn’t win the World Series, there is no pivotal game. It’s more about the methodical triumph of numbers over “instinct” over a period of a few years. Maybe there’s room in there for a great movie, but the trailer makes it seem as though the book’s plot is being shoehorned into the typical “sports movie” plot. I mean, throw in Charlie Sheen and a few wisecracks and that could have been the trailer for Major League.
This book/movie has more than numbers going for it. It’s about characters. Billy Beane was exactly the kind of player the “old school” scouts adored. But he was a failure on the field. The story is a triumph of modern analytics over “rut” thinking and a pack mentality. It’s the rebel beating the system, David over Goliath, a classic story-telling structure. Think “The Social Network” in a baseball uniform. It has all the right people in it and behind it. Write it down: This will be a hit.