Thirty Years Later, A New Lord Of The Rings Book

From "Tolkien Jr completes Lord of Rings: The last, unfinished book by the 'Lord of the Rings' author has been completed by his son"--

The first new Tolkien novel for 30 years is to be published next month. In a move eagerly anticipated by millions of fans across the world, The Children of Húrin will be released worldwide on 17 April, 89 years after the author started the work....

The book, whose contents are being jealously guarded by publisher HarperCollins - is described as "an epic story of adventure, tragedy, fellowship and heroism."...

The author's son Christopher, using his late father's voluminous notes, has painstakingly completed the book, left unfinished by the author when he died in 1971. The work has taken the best part of three decades, and will signify the first "new" Tolkien book since The Silmarillion was published posthumously in 1977."
Neat! I hadn't heard anything but rumors about this project, so I had no idea it was actually in the works, much less nearing publication. (My former LOTR students would be so very disappointed in me!) This should prove a truly interesting read.

Girls Gone Wilde

Uncensored, Out-Of-Control, and Able to Resist Anything but Temptation, these beach blanket bookworms are a literary cut above your average co-ed!

Girls Gone Wilde
(Thanks to Bookslut for this very amusing link.)

"Schools refuse gifts of 'boring' classics"

Dozens of schools have rejected gifts of free classic books because today's pupils find them too 'difficult' to read...

Around 50 schools have refused to stock literary works by the likes of Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens after admitting that youngsters also find them boring....The titles include Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and JR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

But Helena Read, librarian at Cotelands school in Linconshire, said: "The bottom line is getting the pupils to read, whether it's a newspaper, comic novel or magazine. In an ideal world, I would love it if the pupils came into my library and requested some of the classics, but the fact of the matter is that pupils today are living in a different world."

She added that pupils are more interested in Japanese comics rather than literary greats. "Kids love action and adventure," Miss Read said. "They want books that excite them and are current. They love fantasy. The books for nowadays are Manga, the Japanese comic books that you read from back to front."

The librarian went on to say that the classics were "unattractive". She said: "I think they are unappealing to youngsters and you've got to fit them into your school bag."
Coming from a librarian--and one named "Ms. Read," no less!--these comments seem appalling. Since when do we judge literary merit by whether or not a book appears attractive or happens to fit nicely in a bookbag?

Reading this reminds me of the magazine Bible trend of a few years back (Revolve; Becoming; etc.), when publishers started repackaging the Bible, stripping off the staid, black leather cover and replacing it with a jacket designed to pass as a fashion magazine, a la Seventeen or Cosmo.



I like eye candy as much as the next person, but the idea that we must "makeover" texts--whether they be Great Expectations or The Greatest Story Ever Told--in order to make them enticing enough to read seems absurd.

So how much is too much when it comes to tinkering with texts to appeal to readers?

"Very Short Stories"

From "Very Short Stories" in Wired--

Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.
There are a bunch to choose from, but my personal favorites are--

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

I saw, darling, but do lie.
- Orson Scott Card

"Do female writers today lack imagination?"

From The Independent's article, "The Big Question: Is Muriel Gray right... do female writers today lack imagination?", some bold characterizations of female writers and their works:

Muriel Gray, novelist, television presenter and this year's chair of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (for which male writers are not eligible), accompanied the announcement of the longlist with an accusation that, by and large, the writers this year's panel assessed lacked imagination, and focused too narrowly on their own lives and personal issues.

Women writers don't work hard enough to escape from their own gender and circumstances - in short, says Gray, they're failing to make things up, surely a prerequisite for good, absorbing fiction. She's coined a phrase, rural schoolteacher syndrome, to describe the phenomenon: "the delusory condition that fools the sufferer into believing that an experience, say as ordinary as being a rural school teacher, is so interesting and unique that it's almost compulsory to chronicle it ... thinly disguised as fiction".

Say "So Long" To Vanilla Bookstores?

You'd never know it, judging by the proliferation of Borders and Barnes & Noble stores 'round here, but "real readers want bookshops with personality and choice" (or at least The Guardian thinks that "real readers" in Britain do).

The story of 21st-century retail is surely going to be about niches as much as it is good value.

Slowly, consumers are wising up: they...increasingly relish the local, the unusual, the personal.

By their very nature, those who buy books - and most people don't - are likely to be ahead of this trend. More than many, book buyers resent blandness - even heavily discounted blandness - as the publishers who, like sheep, invested in one too many celebrity memoirs are now discovering.

Pirated Books Outnumber Pirated Movies And Audio In China

From "500 million pirated books"--

Pirates and bootleggers in China produce 120 million counterfeit audio and video products and 500 million unauthorized books a year, says an official with the General Administration of Press and Publications.

The rampant piracy of audio and video products and books has seriously affected China's international reputation and future investment prospects,said Liu Binjie, vice director with the General Administration of Press and Publication, during a movie festival organized by college students in Beijing.

"The audio and video product market alone is suffering annual losses of billions of yuan, while book piracy has left publishers and distributors with legal copyrights in a very unfavorable position," Liu said.

Latest Acquisitions

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
The Preservationist by David Maine
The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Nephew by James Purdy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
Agee On Film, Vol. 2 by James Agee
James Agee by Victor A. Kramer
The Restless Journey of James Agee by Genevieve Moreau

Thanks to a screwed-up order, I'm still waiting on The Angel of Forgetfulness by Steve Stern. Hope it arrives before too long (though it's not like I don't have plenty to keep me busy in the interim!).

Movie Ratings Now In Effect!

Updating the list of movies I've watched lately, I've realized that folks reading this blog (all three of them!) might perceive my listing a movie here as an endorsement of said movie.

Au contraire.

In fact, I've seen an unusually high number of crappy films this year. (Perhaps a sign from the heavens to read more?) Some I chose to watch (my inexplicable penchant for the horror genre leads to quite a few duds). Others resulted from spousal whims or were recommended by various well-meaning people. =]

But in any case, I've decided to add a very rudimentary rating next to each movie to distinguish the truly good ones from the truly awful. (And man, have I seen some truly awful ones this year!)

So my very rough scale (from one to five stars) is as follows:

* = The very worst. Mind-raping or mind-numbing or both. This is not the designation for "so-bad-they're-good" movies. This is for the inexcusably, through-and-through bad.

** = Poor. This movie could never be mistaken for good, but there remains some redeeming factor--however slight--that rescues it from being entirely dreadful. (The "so-bad-they're-good" flicks may find a home in this category.) Still, you probably wouldn't ever recommend this movie to anyone and may even lie about having seen it.

*** = Decent to pretty good. As I'm thinking of my 3-star rating, those faces on the hospital emergency room pain charts come to mind.

See the expression on the face above #4? That's the facial equivalent of my 3-star rating: not bad, not great, just kinda hanging out in between. Heck, a 3-star rating might even lean toward the face above #2: mildly pleased but far from ecstatic.

**** = Quite good. This is a great movie that, while thoroughly enjoyable, falls shy of complete greatness. It's the kind of movie that you'd buy a copy of, watch more than once, recommend to other people--but it wouldn't quite crack your "favorite movies ever" list.

***** = Bliss.

I'll be test driving the new ratings system and applying it to my movie list shortly. In the meantime, I really should go read a book...

Bookslut's "obligatory interview" with Alison Bechdel

QUESTION: In Fun Home, and a little bit in Dykes, you take on a very literary tone with Joycean and Homeric references. Do you see the graphic novel heading towards a literature classification?

ANSWER: Yeah, I think it’s happening now. Like the whole Time Magazine thing with my book. They called it the book of the year, not just the graphic book of the year, but the book of the year. It’s kind of startling. It makes me very happy for the graphic novel format just in the same way that I’m always happy that I get perceived as just a “cartoonist,” and not a “lesbian cartoonist” like in the old days. That’s how I would get boxed up.

It’s a similar kind of thing at work, and I think because my book is so ostentatiously literary, that it’s about literature, it got a lot of literary attention. That wasn’t my secret plan, but I think that’s part of why it got more literary scrutiny. Other graphic novels have gotten that attention too, but it just sort of reached a crescendo with my book.

Al Gore Makes Your Landscaping Books Obsolete

From the UK's Telegraph:

Gardening books are being rendered out of date because climate change has altered growing seasons, an expert said yesterday.

Books written in the 1980s and early 90s, such as Geoff Hamilton's The First Time Garden from 1988, do not accurately reflect the fact that many plants that would normally be killed off by cold weather are now surviving longer through the winter. Guy Barten, of the Royal Horticultural Society, said climate change could transform gardening.

Happy Belated World Book Day

Bronchitis has squelched whatever World Book Day celebrations I might have planned for March 1st. (Ermmm, right...my big World Book Day celebration plans...yeah.) But if decreased lung capacity hadn't done the trick, this list of "The ten books you can't live without" would've stomped the party spirit right out of me:

For World Book Day's tenth anniversary, we have been asking you to share with us the ten books you can't live without, and we have now compiled a list of your most life-enhancing reads. Results of the survey were announced today.

Our survey to find the ten books the nation cannot live without has revealed that classics are still the most essential reads, with Pride and Prejudice topping the poll, and the Brontë sisters appearing, along with Charles Dickens and George Orwell. JRR Tolkein's fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, came in second, with The Bible also shown to be still relevant to people - coming in at sixth.

The full ten is as follows:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 20%
2. Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein 17%
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 14%
4. Harry Potter books - J K Rowling 12%
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee 9.5%
6. The Bible 9%
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8.5%
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 6%, tied with:
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 6%
9. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 0.55%

So much for the fabled high culture of the British. (Aren't they supposed to be holding it down as the country of great readers? I fuzzily recall reading an article earlier this year pointing to the superior reading habits of the British people, both in number of books read and in the "literariness" of said books, but alas! I can't find the article.) Of course, a predominantly American poll would've probably anointed The Da Vinci Code as the pinnacle of written genius, so I shouldn't talk.

The full "top 100 books you can't live without" list is equally cheering (which is to say, not cheering at all). At least Middlemarch scrapes in at #20. Frankly, I'm surprised it makes the list at all, given that Harry Potter beats out the complete works of Shakespeare by ten places. And at least The Da Vinci Code doesn't show up 'til #42. Plus, half of the top ten are written by women--a mildly surprising silver lining.

But Bridget Jones's Diary (#68)? The Five People You Meet In Heaven (#88)? No Henry James? No Faulkner? Sigh...it's enough to send me straight back to bed.

"Our Love for Literature Dwindles in the Internet Age"

From Pace University's student newspaper, an article chock-a-block with frightening comments on the state of college students and literature:

Freshman Michael Pascale doesn't think literature is dead, but he would be one of the few. On his bookshelf lies Dante's Inferno and Mario Puzo's Omertaby, The Sicilian and The Godfather.

"I love to read," Pascale said. "It's good to stimulate the mind using comprehension skills." His friends chuckled snidely under their hands as he said this.

Pascale lamented over how most college students his age don't share his point of view on reading. "People find other means of entertainment instead of using their imaginations," he said. "If there were more books that interest kids our age - books on hip hop and drugs, you know, the stuff you see on TV - If they put that stuff into books, a lot more people would be reading."
And here comes the money quote...wait for it...

Pascale's friend, freshman Jeven Chiera, chooses to read Cosmopolitan over books, deeming the latter to be too difficult to concentrate on, especially with her busy schedule.

"I always wanted to read The DaVinci Code though," Chiera said.
(Thanks to The Literary Saloon for the link.)

Latest Acquisitions

I finally satisfied my book-buying urges with a recent binge at Half-Price Books in Corpus Christi, Texas, my favorite bookstore in the whole wide world. I think Corpus must be where literary types go to die and then leave behind their fabulous book collections, because Half-Price in Corpus has the best selection (and prices) of any used store I know.

Anyway, thanks to my friend, J/M, and my sister-in-law for financing the shopping trip with birthday gift cards. Y'all must know that the way to this girl's heart is through her bookshelves.

But enough of the preliminaries--on to the haul! Here's what I ended up with:

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett
The Ha-Ha by Dave King
Littlejohn by Howard Owen
Matches by Alan Kaufman
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Headlong by Michael Frayn
Big If by Mark Costello
Cherry by Mary Karr
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
The Plumed Serpent by D. H. Lawrence
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Little Children by Tom Perrotta
Postcards by Annie Proulx
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Mating by Norman Rush
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom
Finding a Form: Essays by William H. Gass

Hooray! So many good books...it warms my heart.

"With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar"

"The word 'scrotum' does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. "
Cue the controversy:

"The Newbery award winning book this year — The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron who is also a librarian — contains the word scrotum, not once, but a few times. Apparently this is a problem for some librarians and parents who have been challenging and/or removing the book from school library shelves..."
Author Susan Patron has issued a response:

"In writing The Higher Power of Lucky, I was interested in creating authentic characters who would ring true for readers. I wanted readers to trust that I respect them and would not talk down to them. Like the child-version of myself, Lucky eavesdrops on adult conversations; she is searching for a form of spirituality, a higher power.

I was shocked and horrified to read that some school librarians, teachers, and media specialists are choosing not to include the 2007 Newbery Medal winner in their collections because they fear parental objections to the word scrotum, or because they are uncomfortable with the word themselves. If I were a parent of a middle-grade child, I would want to make decisions about my child's reading myself—I'd be appalled that my school librarian had decided to take on the role of censor and deny my child access to a major award-winning book. And if I were a 10-year-old and learned that adults were worried that the current Newbery book was not appropriate for me, I'd figure out a way to get my mitts on it anyway, its allure intensified by the exciting forbidden-ness—by the unexpressed but obvious fear on the part of these adults..."

"Untouchable" authors--should we teach them?

From "Teachers defy list of untouchable authors" and "Teachers fight back over classics"...

Much controversy in Britain (and the blogosphere) as some middle school teachers object to teaching works by classic authors like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, claiming that those authors "are too difficult for many pupils aged 11 to 14 and could put them off great writers for life."

Apparently, Britain's Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, roiled the English teachers of the commonwealth by requesting that the new curriculum include a list of suggested authors:

Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Blake, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Burns, Geoffrey Chaucer, Kate Chopin, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Thomas Gray, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, John Masefield, Alexander Pope, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare (sonnets), Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Alfred Lord Tennyson, HG Wells, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Wordsworth and William Wordsworth
But the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, apparently deeming the list too difficult, planned to bin it. In defense of the suggested authors, Johnson contended that

"There are certain untouchable elements of the secondary curriculum that all teenagers should learn for a classic, well-rounded British education....For example, it's vital that teachers instil a love of literature in young people and engage them with the best-loved writers from our history."
The National Association for the Teaching of English disagreed with Johnson's statement, maintaining that "teaching texts of such linguistic complexity is completely counter-productive." And in a particularly sophisticated counter-argument, the NATE deemed Johnson "a bird brain."

Says NATE policy director, Ian McNeilly,

"The guy's a bird brain. If he wants to make an informed decision he can give me a ring. His decision is completely uninformed."
While I can see both sides of this issue, I tend to agree with Johnson, primarily because of my personal experience in this area, I taught a 7th and 8th grade literature class using a curriculum I'd designed around "classic" authors, such as Swift, Twain, Stephen Crane, etc. To my great surprise, the work that students enjoyed the most was the most difficult one in the batch, Gulliver's Travels. In fact, they enjoyed it so much that we ended up reading three parts of it, instead of just "A Voyage to Lilliput," the one section that I'd planned on reading. (The students actually requested that we read more!)

However, it's not hard to imagine students feeling utterly stymied by The Canterbury Tales or Middlemarch. It seems like careful text selection would prove the real key to making classic authors accessible--and hopefully enjoyable!--to students.

"Lichtenstein: creator or copycat?"

Thought-provoking article in The Boston Globe about Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of comic book art.

I, much like the article's author,

"never thought Lichtenstein's work was a direct copy of scenes from comic books. I assumed that he stylized certain scenes suggested by the comic vernacular of the 1950s and 1960s."
But this guy (high school art teacher David Barsalou) knew otherwise:

He has found and catalogued almost every comic book panel later blown up and sold for megabucks by 1960s Op Art icon Roy Lichtenstein. So far, Barsalou has about 140....
"He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn't," says Barsalou, who teaches at the High School of Commerce in Springfield. "The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work, he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original."
Case in point:

Which of course brings up all kinds of thorny copyright issues--copyright issues that the original comic book authors truly have a vested interest in.

Barsalou correctly points that musicians who "sample" other artists' music have to pay them royalties. Does the Lichtenstein estate owe compensation to the creators of the original work?
Yikes...interesting food for thought there. Any comments from the lawyers and lawyers-in-training in the house?

DailyLit: Read Books By Email

Too busy for books? Read them by email.

If you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don't find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice.
In the words of Dr. Seuss: Try it, you might like it! (Oops -- it would appear that the actual quote from Green Eggs and Ham is "You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.")
--from DailyLit.com

Neat concept, and it's completely free. (Extra nice feature: no registration is required.) I just signed up for The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. So I suppose I'll soon see if this idea works as well in practice as it does in theory. I tend not to read electronic versions of books, but this direct-to-your-inbox approach might be just the thing to suck me into electronic texts.

For My Friends Currently Enduring Law School (And Those Who Have Already Survived)

A quote for you--

Law school, like starting a band, writing a novel, or having sex with a dolphin, is something that you should do only because you cannot imagine a life in which you have not done so.
(From Paul Ford's "Lawyering," easily one of the funniest articles I've read in a month of Sundays.)

Whittling Down The Classics

Wow, what disturbing news from the Guardian's book blog:

Cut classics: Why not cut the padding out of old warhorses such as The Mill on the Floss and Vanity Fair?
The news that Weidenfeld & Nicolson are producing slimline versions of classics has most people apoplectic but actually I don't feel as appalled as everyone else seems to be.
According to those who are anti this idea, the whole point about these works of genius - Mill on the Floss, David Copperfield and Wives and Daughters are also to get the W & N cut-off-at-the-knees treatment - is their ambling byways, baffling dead-ends and sudden jumps of pace and tone. It is this glorious "complexity" - some might call it "muddle" - that makes a classic, classic.
I don't agree...
I plan on responding to this whole concept (or should I say "half concept"?) later, but for now I am going to huddle in the corner and sob unreservedly.

Text Messages Improve Literacy?

Call me an old fogey, but I have yet to be swept up into the thrilling world of text messaging (probably because I tend to find that world more annoying than thrilling). However, I am apparently missing out on untold opportunities for erudition: "Mobile phones improve literacy, says researchers."

Researchers at Melbourne University are conducting trials in schools and technical colleges to see how mobile phones can boost learning and claim to be achieving remarkable success. Instead of seeing mobiles as simply communication devices, they say they can serve as hand-held computers, as the next stage along from laptops....
In an article in the journal Professional Educator, Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, a Melbourne University researcher, says it is time to give mobile phones a new name. Ms. Hartnell-Young said: "It's understandable that many educators view these phones as a huge distraction, dreadful intrusions and tools of the evil 'snapperazi'. But as with all tools of learning, once a purpose is established, mobile devices will have a role to play."
A rational behind the Melbourne project was that students are using technology they value and with which they feel comfortable. In the trials, students have used the phones' cameras to create 'digital stories' and share information. For some students who find writing difficult, the phones have improved their literacy.
As an example, Dr Hartnell-Young refers to three boys from Palmerston high school in the Northern Territory who are using the phones to develop their writing and reading skills: capturing images, writing about them, and emailing the work to friends, families and teachers. The school's principal said he had been looking for something to excite disengaged students and had been "overwhelmed by the resulting enthusiasm".
Adding to the text message mania, a novel composed entirely of text messages (The Last Messages by Finnish writer Hannu Luntiala) has entered the scene. (It was only a matter of time, I suppose.)
“I believe that, at the end of the day, a text message may reveal much more about a person than you would initially think,” said Luntiala.
But a few years earlier, Chinese author Qian Fuchang beat Luntiala to the punch...sort of. While Luntiala produced an actual physical book (made of paper, etc.) whose text itself was a series of text messages, Qian Fuchang composed a novel (Out of the Fortress) and distributed it exclusively via text messages (although he sold the rights to the novel, so it will most likely find its way to conventional print).

"Out of the Fortress," showed up on tens of thousands of mobile telephone screens on Friday. It is the text-message novel, a new literary genre for the harried masses in a society that seems to be redefining what it means to be harried.
Weighing in at a mere 4,200 characters, "Out of the Fortress" is like a marriage of haiku and Hemingway, and will be published for its audience of cellphone readers at a bite-size, 70 characters at a time - including spaces and punctuation marks - in two daily installments. Other "readers" may choose to place a call to the "publisher," hurray.com.cn, a short text-message distribution company, to listen to a recording of each day's story as it unfolds. All this for a small fee charged, like any text message, directly to the readers' mobile phone accounts.

Where do persecuted writers go? Vegas, baby!

I just found this out and cannot get over how weird it seems:
Las Vegas was the first official U.S. City of Asylum for persecuted writers from around the world.

(Really? Las Vegas? I was thinking more along the lines of Walden Pond...or at least any locale not so well known for celebrating mindlessness. And not the good, yogic kind of mindlessness; the boozing, "Girls Gone Wild" kind of mindlessness that doesn't really mesh with my conceptions of the writerly life.)

Anyway, I digress.

In 2001, City of Asylum Las Vegas was founded, the first such program in the United States. Groups in Ithaca, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Iowa City, Iowa, have since formed similar programs. The IIML is now in discussion with groups in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. about developing programs in those cities.
Each City of Asylum in the network provides a safe haven for a writer whose voice is muffled by censorship, or who is living with the threat of imprisonment or assassination. The writer receives a $30,000 annual stipend, a home or apartment, health insurance, and help securing an appointment, if the writer wishes, at a leading academic institution.

In summary: really cool program; really (fill in the adjective: awful; depressing; just-plain-odd; soaked-in-intellectual-depravity) location.

(Thanks to Chekhov's Mistress for the link to the story.)

The 10 Most Expensive Books Of 2006

Forbes runs down the list of 2006's priciest tomes.

Unexpected revelation: "The top 10 list for 2006 includes a surprising number of atlases--five, including three versions of works by Ptolemy."

So much for the stock market; looks like atlases are the way to invest (who knew?).

(Link courtesy of the Literary Saloon--thanks!)

Jenna Bush, author?

First Twin Jenna Shops a Book

You can soon add the title of author to first daughter Jenna Bush's résumé. Whispers learns that the 25-year-old blond twin of Barbara Bush is shopping a book proposal to major publishers in New York City.
(Thanks to Rake's Progress for the link.)

"Lest We Forget": The Best Forgotten Authors/Books

The Guardian's book blog explores forgotten authors, particularly recommending Alfred Chester, an American author whom I'm admittedly unfamiliar with, although he sounds worth tracking down. (Coincidental sidenote: Chester's papers are housed at my alma mater.) One can only hope that his writing is as interesting as his life:

Here was someone who was courageous enough to be openly gay in the 1950s, but who vainly tried to hide his baldness (brought on by a childhood disease) under a crazy ginger toupee, and who forbade any words relating to hair or wigs to be mentioned in his presence.

After shining briefly, his supernova-like talent burnt out when he was still a young man. Unrecognised by the public, and not enough loved by the critics, he was driven to despair and madness.
More generally, this post got me thinking...what authors or books do I like that may have drifted into obscurity (or out of fashion)? I don't consider myself an especially exotic reader in that sense, but I do cherish a few favorites that most people seem to pass by. I'll list them for now and probably describe their individual merits at a later point.

Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist
Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlöf
(the first female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
(I like my Swedes, obviously!)
The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic
A Death in the Family by James Agee
(I know this won a Pulitzer and all, but I've met very few people who've actually read it.)
And the most prominent move from obscurity to critical favor that I can think of,
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

Oh, and let's not forget John Grisham...

For more info on books that have fallen by the wayside, check out Forgotten Classics blog, The Neglected Books Page, Moorish Girl’s Unappreciated Books Archive, and The Lost Books Club.

Also, any recommendations from anyone out there? I'm always on the prowl for good reads!

"The Hardest Novels to Film": Guess what tops the list?

The Unfilmables: A List of the Hardest Novels to Film.
Naturally, Ulysses features first in the unfilmable list:

Considered to be the greatest novel ever written, Ulysses is ripe with obscure references, wit, and a style of lyrical writing that makes the book better said than read. There have been two Irish films, one in 1967 and other recent version in 2003, called Bloom. Both are utter failures, and the best they can do is have passages read over the basic action in a desperate attempt to maintain James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness style of writing. It’s the cardinal sin of adaptation. A true adaptation of this novel would have to substitute the written associations and wordplay with a solely visual language, allowing the power of the image and editing to represent the novel’s essence. I should also give Joyce’s last novel ‘Finnegans Wake’ a nod for being the most unfilmable novel of all time, despite this.
If anyone can do it: Quentin Tarantino has displayed a habit of… just kidding. If the novel does truly require a focus on imagery as opposed to the word, then Wong Kar Wai has proven his ability for doing just so. In The Mood for Love was a simple story about forbidden love, explored in the most luscious of ways. It’s sort-of sequel 2046 was even more abstract, a rough circle around the idea of first love unregained filmed in the most mesmeric and sensual of ways. Unconvinced? Then check this out.
This article also cites 100 Years of Solitude as unfilmable, but there I'd have to disagree. Not only are today's audiences more accepting of the surreal, but today's filmmakers also have access to the kind of technology that can bring surreal images to life on screen (without distracting, cheesy visuals). One point of the article I do agree with: it would be most interesting to see a Wes Anderson production of Catcher In The Rye.

(Thanks to From the Mind of Manxom Vroom for the link.)

Refreshing and Amusing: "75 Books I Failed to Read in 2006"

From thumb drives & oven clocks, the "Howevermany Books Challenge Round-up Extra: 75 Books I Failed to Read in 2006":

"What I read this year" lists: they're great fun, but incomplete portraits of the blogger as a human being. Because for every great book we glide through, for every satisfying book we consume then forget, for every middling book we choke back like cough syrup, there are 37 other books we're thinking about reading, and 4376 other books we could be reading.
Hooray for someone who finally owns up to the fact that even the best of readers doesn't read anywhere near the number of books he'd like to. And an extra hooray for crafting a hilarious post; it will truly make you laugh out loud.

Take, for instance, #22: Underworld by Don DeLillo.
I have this theory that outside of White Noise, nobody actually reads Don DeLillo's books. People just talk about them at dinner parties so they can attract mates, but if you gave them a pop quiz on the contents of the books, they'd all fail miserably.
Or #50: Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahaaaa.

Amen, brother.

Latest Acquisition: Fun Home

Just arrived: Fun Home, the graphic novel reviewers have been raving about (written by Alison Bechdel, the artist behind the Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip).

I've never read a graphic novel before, but if this one proves even half as fantastic as people make it out to be, I'll be thrilled.

Wildly enthusiastic press coverage:

"Fun Home" is a beautiful, assured piece of work, by far the best thing Bechdel has done in over two decades as a cartoonist. Her language and drawings are impressively sensitive to the details of her physical experience and to the trickier folds of her own self-consciousness; she dives over and over into the cloudy waters of her past, swimming deeper every time. A compulsive self-documenter, she nonetheless glossed over or omitted some of her life's crucial details as they were happening, and now she's gone back to reconstruct them.
Salon

If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own.
The New York Times Book Review

The unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. Oh, and it's a comic book: Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.
Time's "10 Best Books" of 2006

Simon & Schuster & Garfunkel

Turns out that Art Garfunkel is not only a delightful harmonizer but a voracious reader. Who knew? And he's kept a list of the near 1000 books he's read since 1968. (Thanks to Bookslut for the link.)

Way to go, Art! Fronting a wildly successful pop duo and managing to read a thousand books at the same time? Suddenly I feel less accomplished...

"Liberals have more books"

In Psychology Today's article, "The Ideological Animal", we are treated to such nuanced observations as follows:

Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics.
And that's just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.
Really, how scientific is this? Evangelicals with empty (but extremely clean!) bookshelves? Effeminate male liberals crying during "chick flicks"? Yeesh... This article reads more like caricatures of both ideologies than a substantive examination of differences between their adherents. (Besides, on a purely anecdotal level, who can't think of a million exceptions to these profiles?) I'd be curious to read the full publication of this study to see if its conclusions are as cartoonish as this summary implies (surely not, I hope!).

McEwan's long-lost brother and the color of his collar

Currently reading Ian McEwan's Saturday (yes, I know I'm the last person in the world to get around to reading this, etc., etc.), so this Guardian article about McEwan's long-lost brother ("Bricklayer traces his long-lost brother, Ian McEwan") caught my eye.

What strikes me as extraordinary about this story is not so much that Ian McEwan's long-lost brother is a bricklayer but that Ian McEwan has a long-lost brother at all. (I mean, how many people meet a full-blood sibling that they never had the slightest idea existed?) Yet the article seems very blasé about the whole 'family-I-never-knew' aspect and instead strains to point out the blue collar history of the brother (prime example: the title of the article; why use "bricklayer" as the lead-off word?). Perhaps I'm reading hypersensitively*, but the article comes across as somewhat elitist, particularly when Dave Sharp is referred to as "the bricklayer" instead of simply using his name or even saying "McEwan's brother."

At least Mr. Sharp seems to be keeping the discovery of his sibling in perspective: "I had never heard of him. Of course, I've read all of his books now, but whether he's a road-sweeper or an author is immaterial. He's just my brother to me."


*BTW, I am hereby campaigning for "hypersensitively" to be acknowledged by the dictionary as a "real word." So useful!

"The thinking person's American Idol..."

Literary wannabes get Pop Idol treatment

"They are billing it as the thinking person's American Idol, a search for the next big superstar but with literary, as opposed to pop celebrity, pretensions.
Touchstone, an imprint of the publishers Simon & Schuster, yesterday launched First Chapters, a competition designed to find writing talent through the internet. It is inviting unpublished authors to submit the first three chapters of a manuscript to the scrutiny of the voting public. The winner's book will be published and distributed by Touchstone and the author will enjoy a $5,000 (£2,575) cash prize."
Isn't "the thinking person's American Idol" a contradiction in terms?

Reading 24

This is going to be, ostensibly, a literary blog--or more precisely, a blog about books (as the actual literary merit of this blog will be questionable, at best!). I've decided to write about books because that's what I like best, what I think about the most, and what strikes me as worthiest of being written about. (Other things I like that would not make for stirring blog topics: basil; Sensodyne toothpaste; checking the mail; etc.)

However, now that I've outlined my blog's purported intent, I am immediately going to disregard it. There will be moments when other non-book topics creep in. Like right now, for instance. Because no matter how much I like to think about books, the one topic endlessly thought about in my home right now is 24.

Yes, certain members of my household have a predilection for--nay, a downright obsession with--Fox's television thriller. And since the new season debuted this week, I'd feel remiss if I let this much anticipated event pass by unheralded.

Thus, I attempted to uncover some link between 24 and books of some kind, hoping to relate back (however remotely) to the supposed purpose of this blog. This proved trickier than I'd thought. Since Kiefer Sutherland has yet to grace us with the next Pulitzer, the only books I could find in the meantime were direct product tie-ins to the show, sporting charming names like Trojan Horse, Veto Power, Cat's Claw, and my personal favorite, Operation Hell Gate. (Although to Kiefer's credit, he did write the forward for 24: Behind the Scenes.)

(BTW, who actually reads books that are based on TV shows or movies? Have any of these ever been good!? I'd like to know...)

Oh, and lest I forget, the other book/24 connection I stumbled across was Stephen King's review of the new season in Entertainment Weekly, which describes season six as "a book you can't put down...even though there are times when you may want to." (Heck, couldn't that phrase apply to a fair bit of King's own work?!)

Here we go again...

I am, for what seems like the millionth time, attempting to start a blog. (Perhaps 2007 is the year of the blog for me? Time seems to think so, anyway, in what seems like one of the lamer "Person of the Year" selections in recent memory.)

I guess we'll just have to wait to see if this blogging resolution sticks.