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.