The Non-Threatening Future of The Book

John Updike's off the cuff bashing of the ongoing efforts to digitize books has been reverberating across the media landscape. The Washington Post has an account of Updike's remarks from BEA, where he singled out Kevin Kelly's lengthy New York Times Magazine piece on the topic, calling Kelly's view of the future a "grisly scenario."

For the record, I think Kelly overstated the promise of digitized books. As futurist-types so often do, Kelly purports to explain the wonders of technology but also revels in the idea that he can terrify the technophobes. For a little perspective on Kelly, Wired's founding editor, read his piece "We Are the Web," marking the tenth anniversary of the Netscape IPO and the start of the Internet era. It's fascinating stuff, but what can you really do with it except be a little uneasy about what mankind might unleash in the future. It's science fiction - good science fiction, even - disguised as journalism. When discussing the future of books, forecasting their demise is just an attempt to stir the pot.

The real future of books will be a lot less startling. If I can restate what I've written in the brief conversation that has occurred in the comments of my previous post, in my opinion the digitization of books isn't as exciting as those shouting for or against it would have you think, at least not in the near term. The types of books that will be better served by digitization - textbooks, reference books, and works in the technical realm - will thrive in this new medium, as it will allow for notetaking, searchabilty, and other features that will add to their value. At the same time, the threat of piracy is minimal. Books are not easily digitized like music and movies are. There's no way around the hours of labor it would take to digitize just one shelf full. As a result, companies and institutions are doing the digitizing, and thus it's highly unlikely that they will make it easy for the books to be used and traded outside of their walled systems. Finally, the digitizing of books is good for research - gathering a list of books that mention a particular person or thing - and for art. In this week's Time, Sean Wilsey does a great job of explaining how the digitization of books furthers writing in that it allows writers to more easily discover books that can inform their writing. But neither research nor art are motivations to digitally plunder the book industry.

Bringing us full circle, today's New York Times arrived containing an interview with Updike, who discussed his new novel Terrorist, and interviewer Charles McGrath leads off with Updike's aversion to the Internet, and his failed attempts to use it for research. I admire Updike, and I'm intrigued by his new book, but I think it's fair to say that his opinions on the future of books won't end up holding much weight down the line.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:22 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon Upgrade reinvents online access to books

With little fanfare, Amazon has unveiled a new feature that has major implications for the digital distribution of books. For starters, Amazon has revamped its "Search Inside the Book" interface and renamed it the Amazon Online Reader. Looking at To the Lighthouse, the familiar links allowing you to jump to the table of contents, an excerpt, and other sections of the book are visible on the left side of the new interface, but below those is a tab called "Highlights/Bookmarks." Along the top are buttons that allow you to jump to specific pages, highlight, bookmark, copy, and print. All of these features are inaccessible unless you use a new feature that was introduced jointly with the new online reader called Amazon Upgrade. For an extra five dollars when you buy the hard copy of a book, Amazon Upgrade gives you online access to the book and lets you "mark it up" with highlighting, bookmarks, and notes, a process which is explained here. Perhaps most fascinating is that Amazon allows you to make your notations public so that they can be viewed by other readers. To me this sounds like aggregating all the many jottings that populate the used books sitting on dusty shelves everywhere.

The other aspect of this that interests me is the reader itself. The old interface for viewing a book was clunky and the text was hard to read comfortably, but with the new reader the display is much larger and easier to read, and the pages load almost instantaneously compared to the old version. While not ideal, it's now possible to imagine actually reading a book in this way. Others have taken notice of this as well, and it is causing some to speculate that Amazon is looking to sell access to books online whether or not one buys the hard copy.

For more info on the new Amazon Online Reader, check out Lifehacker and ResourceShelf.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:51 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Children

Of all the things in this hectic world to keep kids away from, why books? Leslie Pinney, a school board member from District 214 (located in suburban Chicago), wanted to have the following books removed from the high school reading list because of their "inappropriate themes":

• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (It should be illegal for kids not to read this book.)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (Take that New York Times best book of the last 25 years.)
• Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (More on this later)
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
• Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
• The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollen (What are we worried about here? Plant sex?)
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

To see just how twisted and depraved these people here, check out this entry at a Townhall site in support of Pinney, where someone has lifted the prurient parts from some of these books to prove that kids shouldn't be reading them - labeling the books - in a blaring font - "pornographic." What if the children find that site, though? Then they won't even have to read the books to get to the juiciest parts! At any rate, I find it comical and depressing that people think we should keep books with foul language or "adult" themes out of the hands of high schoolers. Isn't the classroom a better place for kids to learn the appropriate context for such things than other outlets?

Thankfully this "controversy" turned out to be little more than a tempest in a teakettle as the six other board members voted against Pinney. In fact it was heartening to hear how many people were moved to discuss the banning of the books. From the Tribune: "Board President Bill Dussling said the meeting's turnout was the largest the district had seen in 25 years but evidently the issue struck chord within the community." A number of students rallied against the proposed ban as well.

Meanwhile, at the Freakonomics blog, authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, followed the situation. Their book had made Pinney's list because it proposes the theory that legalized abortion has reduced the nation's crime rate. To mark the occasion, the Freakonomics guys are doing something pretty cool. They're giving out 50 free copies of the book to the first 50 students from the district who respond to their offer, and in the end, it seems likely that more kids will read Freakonomics and the other books than if this closed-minded woman hadn't proposed the ban.

On a semi-related note, I talked to some people at BEA about what helps books and authors get mentioned by the blogosphere. One big thing is for the author or book to have a compelling Web presence, and the Freakonomics blog is a great example. It has kept readers interested in the book, while also letting readers interact with the authors and giving bloggers something to link to.

Update: The fallout from the District 214 attempted book banning continues, as described in this morning's Tribune. The pro-banning forces are vowing to press on with their efforts to get books removed from schools. Peter LaBarbera of the conservative Illinois Family Institute calls the 6-1 vote against the book banning "a Pyrrhic victory" (and presumably LaBarbera was able to learn about Pyrrhic victories because Plutarch's Lives was not banned in his high school.) LaBarbera's contention is that "thousands of parents, not just in Arlington Heights but statewide, have been alerted that there are some pretty racy books out there that are required reading," and so now we can expect many more book-banning battles to arise. Luckily, though, this article also contains more accounts of students fighting for the right to have these books taught: "Some said it was unfair to judge a book on isolated passages. 'You cannot ban an entire book if you take things out of context, if you're not looking at a literary whole,' said Christine Fish, a member of the Hersey High School debate team. The group passed out fliers reading 'Fahrenheit 214,' a play on the title of the Ray Bradbury novel about book burning."

The kids, as they say, are alright.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:48 PM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post

 

Reading List: World War 2 Nonfiction

After yesterday's World War II fiction post, now it's time for the non-fiction. Once again culling from the excellent comments left in my original post on the topic from a while back, here are the books:

Many readers suggested Anthony Beevor's books Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945. Writes Steve: "Beevor's Stalingrad is the better of his two books on the war. Stalingrad was the true turning point in the European war (although you will see many smart folks argue that the turning point was Pearl Harbor, the Russian Front broke the Wehrmacht and Stalingrad, with Kursk following, was the breaking point). The scale of the battle is just amazing. I loved Atkinson's book, but reading about Stalingrad makes you wonder whether we could have won a battle like that and thankful we did not have to find out." Tripp writes, "Fall of Berlin 1945 is great, but is also terribly depressing. The end of the catastrophic Russo-German conflict is described in all its brutal horror." Also fans of the Beevor books were CHatten and S. Dougherty.

Tripp also recommends Eric Bergerud's Touched With Fire: "It concerns the land war in New Guinea and the Solomons. The fighting differed from Europe in a number of ways. For one it is tropical, making the fight somewhat similar to Vietnam. For another the two sides were more closely matched in air and sea power which forced the US to fight differently. It's an excellent read." Steve also suggests Russia's War by Richard Overy, "a very good overview of the Russian Front" and Five Days in London by John Lukacs "about the period immediately following Dunkirk, when any sane nation would have sued for peace and the British decided to fight on alone," and says that "William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich sets the standard and rightly so. For a thousand page tome it is incredibly readable and never less than fascinating." Sand Storm also recommends Shirer, but S. Dougherty says "it was poor history by the time it was published."

Another controversial pick is Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose, which Sand Storm liked, but S. Dougherty suggests steering clear. Sand Storm also liked a pair of biographies, Patton by Ladislas Farago and American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur by William Manchester, as well as In Harms Way by Doug Stanton about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in shark-infested waters. Bryan D. Catherman suggests Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley. Don Napoli recommends Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles who was killed in action during the war. Kate S. likes Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War as well as Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS, "an extraordinarily powerful memoir that has to do more with the aftermath in Germany than with the war itself." "For a more personal look at the war," CRwM recommends Studs Terkel's The Good War: "I'm a sucker for almost any Terkel book, but this one stands out even that body of excellent works."

CHatten has "a couple of other suggestions on the eastern front, a side of the war which Americans tend to not know much about. Years ago I read a book by a German war correspondent: it's just called Stalingrad by Heinz Schroter. It's doubtless out of print and it's journalism more than history and only from the German side. But still, it's worth reading. The author was at the battle and the horrific stories and sheer immediacy conveyed by the book gives you a real sense of what it was like to endure this military disaster from the German side. I recently also read Writer at War by Vasily Grossman. Grossman was a Russian writer who worked as a war correspondent; most of the book is excerpts from his journals and reporting. Again, there's some vivid writing about the unbelievably horrible eastern front, and the entire book gives you a sense of the mixture of idealism and brutality which characterized the Soviet side of that monumental conflict." Grossman's newly rereleased novel also appears on our fiction list. S. Dougherty has four suggestions, The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer, "an engrossing memoir written by a German soldier." "Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler is excellent -- though there are other good ones, his is bifurcated and the second volume deals with the 1936-1945 time period, which fits your bill nicely." A World at Arms by Gerhard Weinberg is "massive and slow-going, but comprehensive)." Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning is about "the banality of evil -- a look at the killing squads that moved through Poland in the wake of the fighting."

Really great suggestions everybody. I'll be bookmarking this post as well. Obviously this list could go on forever, but if you have anything to add, please leave us suggestions in the comments.

Update: Lynne Scanlon suggests the first book on the list by a female author. To War with Whitaker by The Countess of Ranfurly is "a diary of an audacious woman who manages to follow her soldier husband to the Middle East. Whitaker is the "faithful servant" who accompanies them. Fascinating. Funny. Fraught." It was recommended to her by Grumpy Old Bookman.

See Also: World War 2 Fiction

- C. Max Magee @ 8:10 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Reading List: World War 2 Fiction

Last week you guys left some excellent recommendations for World War II books on my post about Rick Atikinson's An Army At Dawn. As promised, here is a post devoted to those recommendations. These books all sound great; I know I'll be bookmarking this post and selecting books from it for years to come. I was especially excited by the number of novels that were recommended, so I'll start with a post about those before moving on to non-fiction tomorrow.

Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres was recommended by a couple of people. An anonymous commenter wrote that the book "is the story of a Greek island that comes under the control of the Italians and then the Germans in WWII. It's a fantastic read and one of those relatively untold stories of the war you were mentioning." Steve recommends some intriguing genre fiction that takes place during the war era: "Philip Kerr wrote three detective novels that have been anthologized under the title Berlin Noir. They are set in Berlin in 1933, 1938 or so (just prior to Kristallnacht) and in post-war Berlin around 1946. Spectacular - Kerr hasn't written anything close to this good since, but these are just fantastic. The changes in German society over the course of the three books are worth the price of admission by themselves, and the stories are quite good." Steve also recommends J. Robert Janes, Alan Furst, and Eric Ambler along those same lines.

Don Napoli reminds about some classic novels that center on the war: The Naked and The Dead by Norman Mailer, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw, The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, A Bell for Adano by John Hersey, Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener, Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens, and A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown. To that list, I would add Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

The Happy Booker suggests Articles of War by Nick Arvin: "This new novel was inspired by Arvin's grandfather's service in WWll. I've heard it compared to Red Badge of Courage." And finally, Kate S. suggests Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, and S. Dougherty suggests The Book Thief by Markus Zuzek. So, non-fiction will be up tomorrow. Thanks for all the great suggestions and if anyone wants to make this list a work in progress, feel free to suggest more books in the comments.

Update: Laurie suggests The Thin Red Line by James Jones. She also proposes that we look to other countries for fiction about the war. For a Russian view, try Life & Fate by Vasily Grossman, a thick novel on the siege of Stalingrad finished in 1959 that never saw print in Russia in his lifetime. Along those lines I'd also suggest Vassily Aksynov's Generations of Winter, a sprawling Russian epic, the last part of which takes place during the war. I wrote about it last year. Laurie also points to a terrific bibliography of World War II novels from a community college library in Kansas City.

Update 2: A new World War II novel has just come out. It's called Suite Francaise and it's by Irene Nemirovsky. The book consists of the first two parts of what was intended to be a five-novel suite about the war in France. Nemirovsky started the book in 1940 but in the summer of 1942 she was sent to Auschwitz where she died. Her manuscript surfaced after being lost for more than 60 years. Scott read the book and liked it.

See Also: World War 2 Nonfiction

- C. Max Magee @ 11:14 PM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post

 

List envy

The New York Times whipped bloggers and readers into a frenzy with its linkbait list of the best books of the last 25 years along with A.O. Scott's voluminous essay on the "great American novel." The reasons why this list is silly and flawed have been discussed on a number of blogs - the panel of judges skewed male and boring, the timeframe and criteria are arbitrary, etc. What amused me about the list was that the Times made such a big production of it - with a panel at BEA, a press release, and, of course, Scott's giant essay. It's like the Times didn't realize that such lists are standard filler at glossy magazines. Was the Times' best fiction list all that different from People Magazine's annual "Most Beautiful People" list? No, not really.

The Austin American-Statesman was similarly bemused by the Times list and so it put together its own list using the Times list as fodder. It asked academics and critics to name the "most overrated" books on the Times list. The resulting comments from their judges are both thoughtful and funny. And for those of you scoring at home, the most overrated books on the Times list are A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:54 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Book Expo Dispatch: Targeting Litblogs

NB: I wrote the following post a few hours ago, and I've been letting it simmer a bit. I've since visited the blogs of several other folks who were at BEA, and it made me want to point out that despite what I've written below, BEA was a very fun event and that it was possible to get a lot more out of it than I did - for proof check out Mark, Written Nerd, and Pinky to name a few.

As previously noted, it wasn't really possible to do the sort of quick hit blogging that I wanted to do at BEA, but I've had the chance to cobble together my scattered thoughts on my overall impressions of the event in a post that will hopefully be better than a bunch of smaller ones would have been.

First, I don't think I'll ever go again. The event obviously serves a purpose as the yearly trade show for the publishing industry, and BEA embraces the promotional atmosphere that is integral to such shows. Along with the hundreds (thousands?) of booths there are also dozens of panels and talks that address many aspects of the industry and allow for people to stay up to date on various topics. Some of the topics have a literary feel - there was an emerging voices panel, a panel on the short story, and the now infamous Sam Tanenhaus best books of the last 25 years panel - but many more were about salesmanship and other commerce-related topics (as there probably should be.) There was also the well-done, but poorly titled talk that Sarah of GalleyCat gave. It was called Syndicating LitBlog Book Reviews (Sarah didn't come up with the title), in which Sarah gave a nice little overview of the LitBlog culture. The unfortunate part was that there were only about 25 people there, half bloggers and half people trying to get bloggers to notice the books they were trying to promote. The question and answer period evolved into an off the cuff conversation where, essentially, we told these people how they could get at us. It hearkened back in a way to the pre-BEA topic that came up on several litblogs, the awkward relationship between litblogs and publicists (scroll down to the bottom of that post for links to what other bloggers were saying.) By the end of BEA I came to realize that the relationship between litblogs and the publishing industry as whole is ill-defined.

At the heart of it, both sides want something. The publishers see blogs as a venue of growing importance, and, while perhaps overstating our influence, many are starting to see mentions on litblogs as a crucial aspect of bringing a successful book to market. Meanwhile, and forgive me for painting with a very broad brush, litbloggers want some grouping of the following things: we want free books; we want (often in a fanboyish way) access to authors and important publishing industry personalities; we want to be noticed and widely read, we want to feel that our devotion to book culture is filling the void left by the shrinking book review sections in newspapers and magazines; and finally - I'll admit it - some of us want to make a little coin (if litblogging isn't a dream job, I don't know what is).

At mainstream publications, the rules of engagement are well-defined. Journalists are forbidden to accept freebies beyond just review copies. Popular reviews and interviews bring prestige to the publication for which the reviewers write as much as they do to the reviewers themselves. But we bloggers don't have ethics committees, and when we write something that becomes popular, all prestige (and a flood of readers) flow to the name on the blog. Publishers seem to know this, and the sense I got at BEA is that they see us as easy targets, venues for publicity that can be bought by playing to the vanity that anyone who blogs seriously must necessarily have. In the end, I'm not calling for a code of ethics for litbloggers or anything like that, it's just that being there in the center of the publishing industry's profit-driven heart, where books are flogged loudly and in a mind-bending number of silly and obnoxious ways, I realized that I should put a little more thought into my relationship with the publishing industry.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:00 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Book Expo Dispatch: The People And The Books

The best part of BEA by a longshot was meeting all the people I've been corresponding with for so long and whose blogs I've been reading for what seems like forever. The LBC party on Friday night was a blast. Many bloggers were there (Most of these folks have pictures and writeups from BEA up so go check them out as they most likely went to many more parties than I did): Ed, Mark of TEV, Sarah of Confessions, Pinky of her Paperhaus, Kassia of Booksquare, Bud of Chekhov's Mistress, Wendi of the Happy Booker, Matt of The Mumpsimus, Megan of Bookdwarf, Gwenda of Shaken & Stirred, Scott of SlushPile, Lauren of Lux Lotus, Lizzie of The Old Hag, Written Nerd, Madam Mayo, and, unfortunately, Bat Segundo. (If I forgot anyone or if I mistakenly think I met you but I didn't - hey, it was dark and I'd had a few drinks - let me know.)

Some things I learned about my fellow bloggers: Ed is an intrepid gadfly, but Mr. Segundo is a menace; Megan is not as short as I had been led to believe; Gwenda and Kelly Link are the twin queens of a merry band of sci-fi fanatics; while I can say with some certainty that I will never podcast, all the coolest kids are doing it.

I also met cool folks at Melville House, Coffee House, McSweeney's, and lots of other publishers. I met Jason Bitner who put together the very cool book LaPorte, Indiana (which I wrote about a while back). I also picked up copies of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson and Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah along with lots of catalogs, all of which I left at my parents' house in Maryland because I didn't want to lug them back on the plane. But all in all it was great to see everybody.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:05 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Book Expo Dispatch: Overwhelming and Underwhelming

Overwhelming and underwhelming: that's the phrase that some bloggers and I settled upon to describe this massive event. It's overwhelming in the sense that it is truly massive (as any big industry trade show must be), with endless rows and rows of booths where publishers big, small, (and self-) hawk their wares. There is a seemingly endless spray of people flowing into the giant exhibition floor from all entry points, and you are jostled constantly as you thread through the crowds. On top of this there are wacky promotions going on at nearly every juncture - an author dressed up like an Elizabethan princess, dancing dogs and grannies wearing matching outfits, a balloon animal sculptor - along with lots of promotional freebies being thrust at passersby who must also avoid the snaking lines of people waiting to see some personality or another signing books at a publisher booth. The independent row felt like a safe haven - much less crowded and populated by less frenzied folks. But it was underwhelming too in that the interactions I have with some of these folks over email already are far more valuable than the hurried face to face meetings that end up happening at this event. While the Expo itself is an exercise in endurance, the parties that came after - including the LBC affair - were much more fun and relaxed. But more on that later, I need to get downtown to dive in again. I'll wrap things up with a more detailed report - including my finally meeting so many great bloggers whose blogs I read daily - by the end of the weekend.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:26 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Book Expo Dispatch: A Quick Rant

Book Expo is a massive event. The floor is crowded with publishers hawking their wares. There's acres and acres of books. It's quite an operation really. But whether intentionally or by design, the folks behind the Expo are making it pretty tough to cover this event, especially if you're a blogger. As Sarah and Ed have mentioned, there is almost no Internet access. Supposedly you can pay $5 an hour for wireless access, or the incredible price of $50 for the day. Everyone is subject to this charge, even those who have press passes. There is a press room (which is where I am right now), but there's no wireless access there either. Instead there's three computers with signs posted above them that say "Please limit your time to 15 minutes when others are waiting." It makes it hard to blog, is all.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:01 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Book Expo Dispatch: Blog Two Point Blah

The excitement over blogs is officially over ladies and gentleman. They are no longer new or sexy to the book industry. I just snuck out of a panel called, oddly, "Blog 2.0". The idea, I suppose, was to suggest that we are beyond the initial enthusiasm for blogs in the publishing world, but the atmosphere was remedial (and uncomfortably warm, but that might just be the bookish corduroy blazer I'm wearing.) The panel included blog and new media heavyweights like Ana Marie Cox, formerly of Wonkette, Kos of Daily Kos, and Michael Cader of Publishers Marketplace, but they were plodding the same old ground: Use blogs to promote books; blogs aren't scary, they're a part of the media landscape; blogging is so easy, anyone can do it. Though the "2.0" moniker suggested new insights in the merging of new media and publishing, the panel was decidedly "1.0", and the audience in the half-filled room wasn't exactly brimming with enthusiasm. Still, some of the comments made were worth sharing. Michael Cader suggested that blogs promote "individual voices over institutional voices," whether the blog lives at Blogspot or the New York Times. Kos decried the notion that books by bloggers have anything more than a tenuous connection to the blog medium. Blogs are not meant to be books, but blogs are a great way to find new voices with built-in audiences. All in all, though, there wasn't a sense that any new ground is being broken in the marriage of publishing and blogging.

I did, however, get the opportunity to meet Booksquare, and I'll be seeing other bloggers soon, including Sarah Weinman, who's giving a talk called "Syndicating Litblog Book Reviews," shortly.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:59 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Heading East

Sorry things have been quiet around here. I'm heading to Washington, DC, for the weekend to attend my brother's college graduation. As luck would have it, Book Expo is being held in the city this year, so my plan is to stop in and check things out. Hopefully I'll be able to get in a few dispatches about the goings on at the year's biggest book event. If you happen to be in town, feel free to stop by the LBC party, the details of which are contained within the image below.

In the meantime, things will be mostly quiet around here. Also, if anyone would like to add more recommendations to the list WWII books in the comments of my last post, that would be awesome. I'm loving the suggestions so far and thinking about doing a standalone post on the recommendations next week.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:43 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A Review of An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson

The more I learn about World War II, the more it fascinates me. I feel like most people have a vague, middle-ground understanding of the war. Two generations removed from the war, I have trouble fathoming both the global scale of the conflict and the impact it had on hundreds of millions of individuals. I had a child's school-taught understanding of the war until I read a novel, actually. The second part of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement tells of the British evacuation from France at Dunkirk after the Germans overran the country. It was an important event in the war, but one that I had never really learned much about, and McEwan's rich storytelling made me want to learn more. I also realized that I ought to know more about the war that both of my grandfathers fought in, one in Europe and one in the Pacific.

Wanting to get an overview, I opted for John Keegan's The Second World War, which turned out to be an ideal choice in that it was the broad, readable overview of the war that I had been looking for. (I would later read Keegan's history of the First World War and review it.) But after Keegan, I wanted to delve into the war more, to take a narrower view and learn about some of the hundreds of smaller conflicts that, taken together, comprised the war. I turned to Rick Atkinson, not least because I had the chance to meet him twice and because I read and enjoyed his book, In the Company of Soldiers, about being embedded in Iraq.

An Army at Dawn is the first book in Atkinson's trilogy about the liberation of Europe during WWII. This book covered North Africa, while the forthcoming books will cover Italy and France. An Army at Dawn won the Pulitzer in 2003 and deservedly so. I don't think I've ever read a history book that flowed so well. The book is an incredible marriage of storytelling and historical fact, so that the reader feels both entertained and very well informed. Atkinson relied on battle memoirs and letters from soldiers to augment traditional, official sources and it shows. The war's narrative is textured at every turn with the words of the men who were there, providing an insight I've not gotten from other history books. Along with using the men's words directly, Atkinson also combines these collective observations in his own way to paint a vivid picture of the goings on. An example:

The rain slowed to a drizzle, then stopped for the first time in two days. A monstrous, blood-orange moon drifted behind the breaking clouds. Backlit by desultory shell fire, British victualers darted up with tins of cold plum pudding for men who spooned it down behind their pathetic fieldstone parapets. Flares rose to define the dead.

That scene occurred near Longstop Hill as the conflict raged back and forth in Tunisia. We all know about World War II, but beyond the most familiar aspects of the War - the invasion of Poland, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust - how much do we really know? For me, it didn't go much deeper than that, but as Atkinson makes so vividly clear, the world once watched North Africa, and battles like Kesserine Pass, Mareth, and El Guettar made headlines. To me, though, the book is powerful in that it goes beyond just knowing when and where and how these battles happened, it gives us a glimpse into the lives and deaths of the men who were there. In that sense I found this book both incredibly informative while also conveying the unfathomable (to me in this day and age) emotions of war.

An Army at Dawn was one of the best books I've read in a while. I'll certainly read Atkinson's next two books when they come out, but in the meantime, as I look at my queue of books to read, I see that only Robert Capa's Slightly Out of Focus is about WWII. I need to read more books about World War II. Any suggestions?

- C. Max Magee @ 1:52 PM ~ comments: 14 ~ Links to this post

 

Book trends Google style

So perhaps you've seen the latest bell (or whistle) to come out of Google HQ. It's called Google Trends and it lets you look at the search volume over time for different keywords. It also shows you which regions search for a particular term the most. Initially, I was most interested in that geographic data. I figured perhaps this could settle that tiresome debate about which city is "most literary." Here are the results

1. Delhi, India
2. Chennai, India
3. Austin
4. Portland (Oregon, I'm assuming)
5. Chicago
6. Seattle
7. New York
8. Denver
9. Minneapolis
10. Philadelphia

I was, and still am, a curious about the two Indian cities at the top of the list, but I did recently write a post about the MV Doulos (Ship of Books) being docked in Chennai. But, anyway, to get to the more serious issue, by this metric our most literary city is Austin, and New York (pretender to the crown) comes in at number five, while our venerable Californian cities don't even make the list. Before we get too riled lets remember that these cities are just guesses. From the FAQ: "Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated."

Regardless of Google's guestimates, I was curious about some other bookish searches. "Harry Potter" shows a preponderance of international searches, and the series' impressive ability to stay in the news. Or you can see how the young wizard compares to pretender to the throne, "The Da Vinci Code." If you ever doubted how popular Harry Potter is, that graph should convince you. Getting back to Da Vinci Code, though, to those of you who have grown weary of hearing about Dan Brown's book, would it surprise you to find out that, according to Google, the book is more popular than ever?

Moving on to scandals, it turns out an Oprah tie in can help you in that department, too. Observe James Frey's drubbing of JT Leroy. Kaavya Viswanathan, meanwhile, hasn't generated enough of a scandal to register.

Turning to awards, remember when the National Book Award generated a stir in 2004 by nominating five women from New York as finalists, looks like it paid off (in search traffic anyway). And here's all the prizes I could think of going head to head (I'll call the Booker the winner, since the Pulitzer includes all those journalists).

- C. Max Magee @ 10:18 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Preach It: Tips for Publicists

Amen. Dan Wickett writes an open letter to all the pushy publicists out there and all I want to know is where do I sign. Dan is writing about "the litblogging version of the Cold Call. An email from somebody I've never heard of, asking if I'd be interested in reading and reviewing their work, possibly interviewing them, linking to their website, etc." It goes on, with justifiable frustration, from there.

Like Dan, I'm extremely grateful to the publicists, publishers and authors who regularly read this blog and who, based on their knowledge of what sort of books I like to write about, will let me know about titles that might interest me. But I think the problem is that somebody has convinced publicists, authors, and other publishing-industry types that getting talked about on blogs is a key ingredient in the secret elixir of publishing success. Sure books now hit number one on Amazon thanks to the Internet presence of their authors, and bloggers individually or in groups have raised the profile of certain titles, but no bestsellers have been made by cold calling. No way. Bloggers care about the books they write about, so the publicists have to do a better job of making bloggers care. So with the knowledge I've gained from being the recipient of countless pitches - too many of them cold calls - here are my thoughts on how to promote a project to bloggers. Hopefully, the following tips will be useful to anyone, not just book industry types, trying to pitch something to a blogger.

My tips for pitching to bloggers:

1. Most importantly, read blogs. Why spend the time and effort pitching a project to bloggers if you don't read blogs in the first place. If you don't get blogs and how they work, how can you expect to use them to promote your project?
2. As Dan suggests, stop pitching projects that aren't appropriate to the content of the blog. It's rude and borderline spammy.
3. Do not pitch any blog that you haven't been reading for at least a month. Bloggers are used to corresponding with their regular readers both on and off the blog, and, frankly, it's very unlikely that I'll mention your project if you just appear, out of the blue, in my inbox.
4. Do not mass email. First of all, I don't care what kind of fancy email program you use, it's pretty obvious when I get a mass email. If you don't care enough to write me a personal email, then why should I care enough to support your project?
5. Finally, don't oversell. If you are trying to let me know about something that you think I'll be genuinely interested in, then your email and a link ought to be enough. If I say sure send the book (or whatever), then send it along, but don't try to buy me off with swag, let your project stand on its own.

I'd love to hear any other ideas people might have in the comments.

See also: MJ Rose's post "Don't Do This" from today. Maud has encountered this as well. And Ed, too. Scott devotes a Friday Column to publicists.

Update May 24, 2006: Mark has written a thoughtful counterpoint to the outpouring here and at other litblogs, which makes me think that the use of the term "publicist" was perhaps cavalier here and elsewhere. Please see my comment on his post as well as my more recent post-BEA post on the topic.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:42 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Load

At the Freakonomics Blog, Steven Levitt explains how the publishing industry is putting out more bullshit than ever these days.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:39 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Covering the Catalogs: Riverhead

We're moving this summer. I'm already dreading the packing, loading, moving, unpacking part, but other than that, I'm pretty excited. In July we'll be departing for temporary digs in the Washington, DC area as we figure out our final destination. One thing's for sure, though, our short stint in the Midwest is coming to an end. I never quite fell for Chicago, not the way I did for LA, anyway, but I have come to see why this place has a particular hold on people. I think part of it is the way the city wears its history on its sleeve. The city also has a rich literary history that is still very much being added to.

All of this brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to the Riverhead catalog, which is next in the stack that I got from Penguin not too long ago. A couple of books in there - paperbacks of hardcovers that are already out - are worth sharing, one of which is a worthy addition to Chicago's literature. Adam Langer's The Washington Story brings readers back to West Rogers Park, a thickly multicultural neighborhood not far from where I live. The book is named after Harold Washington, who was mayor of Chicago during the 1980s, when the book takes place. The Washington Story is the sequel to Crossing California, Langer's much praised debut (which is in the queue). The hardcover has been out since last August and the paperback comes out in September.

Also coming out in September is the hilarious The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman. Hodgeman is now a regular on the Daily Show, where he does a nerdy expert shtick that is pitch-perfect, and he also appears in the new Mac commercials. The book - a compendium of fake facts, essentially - is perhaps most famous for the 700 hobo names contained within. You can hear Hodgman read the hobo names to music, and you can look at illustrations people have done of some of the hobos. Hodgman also has a blog. He ends all posts with "That is all." The hardcover came out last October.

Extras: From Penguin's New American Library imprint comes The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right. The book is by Robert Lanham creator/editor of freewilliamsburg.com, and author of the Hipster Handbook. This time, Lanham turns his "anthropological eye" on conservative evangelical culture. The book comes out in September and would go well - or not - with this forthcoming "Compete Idiot's" title. Finally, as if to prove that we're all just one silly idea away from a book deal, the International Talk Like A Pirate Day guys have a book (which is already out, but I guess the publisher wants to remind booksellers to stock up each year in preparation for the lucrative Talk Like A Pirate Day shopping season).

- C. Max Magee @ 5:49 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Google Blogs Books

The folks at Google have set up a blog dedicated to Google Book Search. Google's plan to digitize the world's books has been one of the most interesting and controversial publishing industry stories of the last couple of years. Is anyone surprised that it's Google using a blog to get its side of the story out and not the publishers? Me neither.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:49 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

News Roundup

• Like bestseller lists? The Book Standard's giving them away for free for the next two weeks.
• Alibris is bought by a private equity firm. PW article suggests Abebooks could be next. (via BookFinder blog)
• Small publishers book big rewards (via Mumpsimus), but...
• Bookshops fall prey to online sales.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:56 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Covering the Catalogs: Plume

The weather is nice, and we've got all the windows open in the apartment. We ran some errands earlier today - although the task of going to Whole Foods to buy cheese and olives deserves a term with better connotations than "errand." Now I'm flipping through a stack of catalogs from Penguin while I listen to baseball on the radio. This is why I look forward to weekends.

I think I'll start with the Plume, Portfolio, Overlook, etc. catalog. These imprints do both paperback editions of books that have already come out in hardcover, and paperback originals, which are initially published as a paperback without a prior hardcover release.

There's a nifty little collection coming out in August as a paperback original. The Subway Chronicles "offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives on this most public of spaces," New York's legendary subway system. Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Francine Prose and Calvin Trillin are among 27 contributors whose essays look at New York's subterranean city from every angle. The anthology's editor, Jacquelin Cangro, runs thesubwaychronicles.com.

I've heard sections of Dan Savage's book The Commitment read on This American Life. Savage writes in the David Sedaris, David Rackoff, public radio funny man vein. Like those two Davids, Savage is gay and his sharp comic timing and casual mastery of the memoir style transcend any label. In The Commitment, Savage recasts the gay marriage "debate" as his own family drama, injecting some much-needed humor and personality into a controversy that is so often portrayed as faceless. The hardcover is already out and the Plume paperback comes out in October.

Under the Portfolio imprint is the paperback of John Battelle's book The Search. The book tells the story of how a goofy little search engine called Google grew into a $120 billion company that enjoys global ubiquity and is seemingly able to reinvent any industry it touches (publishing for example). Aside from my general fascination with Google, I'm also interested in this book because I read and enjoy Battelle's blog. As the creator of FM Publishing and the "band manager" of Boing Boing, Battelle is someone to watch in the world of new media. The paperback edition comes out in September.

Extras: Andy Riley's morbidly hilarious The Book of Bunny Suicides and The Return of the Bunny Suicides are being collected in a box set called A Box of Bunny Suicides due in September. Haven't seen the bunny suicides? Go here and click excerpt. Also, Plume is putting out great-looking new editions of Fences, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson. (The snazzy new covers aren't showing up at Amazon yet, but I'm assuming they'll switch out the old ones soon.)

- C. Max Magee @ 5:02 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions - Akutagawa, Ott, Jason, Brown, Miller, Hanuka

In January I posted scans of a bunch of fantastic new editions of classic books from Penguin with covers designed by famous comic book artists. I'd heard that another batch was on the way, and I finally got my hands on the images so here they are. They come out this fall:

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Cover by Yoshihiro Tatsumi	We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, Cover by Thomas Ott
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, Cover by Jason	Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, Cover by Chester Brown
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Cover by Frank Miller	Philosophy in the Boudoir by Marquis de Sade, Cover by Tomer Hanuka

See the full-size pictures here

Some other notes: I first saw some of these covers posted at the Fantagraphics blog. Tomer Hanuka has a really cool post about designing his cover at his blog Tropical Toxic.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:10 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

This Week in God: Da Vinci Code Edition

The God Machine was first conceived by Da Vinci, who called it "The Elliptico Godsmackulator." So brilliant.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Blurb Silliness

Ed points to a great article about silly blurbs, namely Dave Eggers' blurb for Daniel Handler's novel Adverbs: "Adverbs describes adolescence, friendship, and love with such freshness and power that you feel drunk and beaten up, but still want to leave your own world and enter the one Handler's created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs." I've noticed that a lot of Eggers' blurbs tend to draw attention to the blurber rather than the blurbee.

Another notorious blurber is Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight. Here's his blurb for Apocalypse Culture II edited by Adam Parfrey: "Adam Parfrey's astonishing, un-put-downable and absolutely brilliant compilation... will blow a hole through your mind the size of JonBenet's fist. This book should be in hotel rooms." And how about this for Mall by Eric Bogosian: "Eric Bogosian writes like an M-16 ripping through the brain pan of Western civilization. A read-till-your-eyes-bleed chronicle of American appetites run amok." There's a whole bunch of them collected in this old LA Weekly piece (scroll down). Interesting note: The compiler of the aformentioned piece called the book store where I was working with the list of books, and I read the blurbs to her over the phone. Ah, the magic of journalism. At any rate, the experience inspired me to, much much later, compile some collected blurbs here, here, here, and here.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:52 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New Books: Ben Ehrenreich, Jeffrey Ford, Kate Grenville

The Suitors, a debut novel by Ben Ehrenreich, draws from Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. The story is another rewrite of those famous epics - there are so many, but then again it's a fertile place to start - set, as PW puts it, "in a never-never land equal parts contemporary America and classical antiquity." Ehrenreich is best-known as a widely published journalist whose work regularly appears in the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and The Believer. Ehrenreich is the son of participatory journalist, Barbara, author of the best-selling Nickel and Dimed, in which she tried to get by on minimum wage.

Jeffrey Ford's excellent novel The Girl in the Glass is currently being discussed in exhaustive detail at the Litblog Co-op blog, but he's got a new book out, too. The Empire of Ice Cream is a collection of stories. Ford, as I recently had the pleasure of discovering, is like very few others writing today. Though he might be labeled as a writer of "speculative fiction," his work doesn't really need a label at all, as it is sure to be enjoyed by anyone who likes a good story told well. To see what I mean, check out a few stories from The Empire of Ice Cream: "The Annals of Eelin-Ok," "The Empire of Ice Cream," and "A Man of Light."

Kate Grenville's novel, The Secret River, has already won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and has been shortlisted for the Miles Frankin Prize awarded to the year's best Australian novel. The Secret River is a historical novel about the convict settlement of Australia and follows the story of a particular convict named William Thornhill. The Guardian writes: "There isn't much underlying moral ambiguity in this book: the costs of settlement are appalling, which makes Thornhill its villain, even while he carries its sympathetic weight." Grenville previously won the Orange Prize in 2001 for her novel The Idea of Perfection.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:38 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New Books: Clare Allan, Scott Anderson, Guillermo Arriaga, Peter Carey

A debut novel called Poppy Shakespeare is getting rave reviews in England. The book, by Claire Allan, follows the narrator "N" and the eponymous Poppy at the Dorothy Fish, a mental institution, among 25 residents, one for each letter of the alphabet, "the 'X' chair is vacant." Some quotes from the British press: "Allan's story comes armed with a voyeuristic potency, because she spent 10 years inside the kind of institutions she satirises so well." - from The Independent. "Her voice is so idiosyncratic in its rhythms and terminology... her habit of exaggeration so surreal and her use of metaphor so extravagant, as to subtly transform the reader's perspective of the natural order of things." - from the Telegraph. In the Times (London), a profile of Allan charts her course through mental illness to become a published author. Also, the British cover is way cooler than the American one. An excerpt is available.

Set in the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar in 1983, Scott Anderson's Midnight Hotel sounds like a broad satire of America's travails in that region. Diplomat David Richards first toes the party line, but ends up abandoned in the country watching as American meddling goes awry. An excerpt is available. Scott Anderson is also a war correspondent like his brother Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for the New Yorker, author of The Fall of Baghdad, and one of my favorite writers.

Guillermo Arriaga wrote the screenplays for Amores Perros (which I loved) and 21 Grams (which I hated). The Night Buffalo is his first novel to be published in the U.S, though he originally wrote it 11 years ago. He's also bringing it to the silver screen (as El Bufalo de la noche). In a profile, the Financial Times compares the novel to Amores Perros, saying that both are steeped in violence, but it sounds to me like 21 Grams, steeped in melodrama. From the jacket: "The Night Buffalo is set in Mexico City, revolving around the mysterious suicide of Gregorio, a charismatic but troubled young man who was betrayed by the two people he trusted most." Still, I'll see any movie he writes, so perhaps his novel is worth a try, too.

Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey has a new book out, Theft: A Love Story. The big news about this book is the claim that it is a thinly veiled attack on his ex-wife. The Independent has ex-wife Alison Summers' side of the story: "The phrase 'alimony whore,' repeated within the pages of Theft: A Love Story, has left her feeling 'devastated' by Carey's version of events." Controversy aside, the Sydney Morning Herald sidesteps the drama and says of the book, which is, indeed, about a man who has been divorced and bankrupted by his former wife, "All in all, Carey's new show contains much that is lively, engaging and teasingly self-referential." An excerpt is available.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:36 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month Club: May 2006

For me, one of the great feats is to find a book that is so good you can't put it down. I mean literally - a book that engulfs every spare moment you've got, forcing everything else that isn't necessary to the side. A book that, after reading just the first few chapters, you know is going to be one of the best you've ever read.

A book this good doesn't come around very often. To Kill a Mockingbird. East of Eden... Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Okay. I swear I'll stop talking about Jonathan Safran Foer. I have to. I've read everything he's written. And I'm glad I saved Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for the end. So you'll have to forgive me this month - I guarantee I'll stop from now on.

My first encounter with a Foer was actually with his brother, Franklin, in How Soccer Explains the World. I ran across Jonathan Foer later on, thanks to the Penguin Pockets 70th anniversary set, and then finally read Everything is Illuminated last month. The Penguin Pockets book - The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightning, was a Vilhauer Book of the Month. Everything is Illuminated would have made it last month, except I chose Other Electricities instead.

The reason I chose Other Electricities is because I didn't want to "over-Foer" my welcome. This month I can't say the same.

Our narrator is nine-year-old Oskar Schell. And his grandmother. And his grandfather. In true Foer style, there are three separate voices embarking on three separate missions - Oskar is looking for a lock. The lock needs to match the key he found on top of his father's dresser. Oh, and just to add a little timeliness, his father died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Meanwhile, his estranged grandmother and grandfather are writing letters that will never be read.

First of all, EL&IC is not a novel about September 11th, 2001. It is, however, a book that feeds off of the misery and fears of that day. Because really, everything that happens has a shadow of the 11th looming above it, a constant reminder of the fact that someone so kind, so unassuming - in this case, Oskar's father - has died. You can see it in everyone he meets - the sorrow and the sudden protective nature in their actions. No one wants to talk about it, yet here, in the middle of New York City, you've got a boy that's trying to solve a riddle that is nearly directly tied to that fateful day.

You can't expect a young boy to understand fully what happened on September 11th, and Oskar is a great example. He's a genius, a boy that considers himself a Francophile and gets his news from international news sites. He's wise beyond his young age, but he's still a scared boy. He's picked on at school, and he at times takes on the role of "pretentious little twit," the smartest guy in the room - a kid that knows too much and isn't afraid to say it.

It's Foer's ability to twist relationships - the stranded relationship of Oskar's grandparents, the strained relationship between Oskar and his mother, the lost relationship of Oskar and his father, the one man that he truly respected and looked up to - that makes the book work. The themes are dreadful, if you think about them too long, but you're not doing yourself any justice by ignoring them and moving along. All three narratives chronicle disappointment. Sadness. The threat of never being able to say goodbye.

But most of all, you find the dead hope of an unanswered question, the "what ifs" that torture each character as they try to go on with their lives. Oskar tries so desperately to be strong in the face of every unanswered question, but he keeps remembering back to that day, to the things he missed and the things he didn't. What if his father would have lived? To Oskar's grandmother, it's a "what if" about her husband, a man who has been gone for years. To Oskar's grandfather, it's a series of questions from the 40s that have never been touched.

September 11th. The bomb at Hiroshima. The napalm storm of Dresden.

A lack of communication. The lost years of childhood. The connections between father and son.

How can you spell out the feelings invoked in EL&IC? Because that's exactly what this book does. It invokes feelings. It brings all of your emotions to your throat. It's that powerful.

What if a book was so intense, so full of questions, so full of the exhilaration that comes from discovering a character's secret that you couldn't put it down, and when you finished, all you could do is close the book, stare at the ceiling and think?

What if?

Corey Vilhauer - Black Marks on Wood Pulp
CVBoMC Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:20 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post