24 December 2009

Riding along in my automobile...

It appears that both the year and the decade are coming to a close. This comes as something of a surprise to those of us who just assumed our calendars would never run out of pages.

The short days and longish nights bring on a kind of Scandinavian melancholy, even here in optimistic California.

You get to a certain age and you start losing things. Parents depart, then some of your friends begin to go, and damn it, where are those keys and why don’t they make floppy disk drives any more and will the sun return to the sky if we burn these sacred logs in our sacred air-tight fireplace?

This afternoon, speeding along in our automobile, my baby beside me at the wheel, we watched two different individuals walking the Coast highway on the day before Christmas, carrying their worldly possessions in a sack.

If that makes you slow down and think, you might also ponder the local distance between the well-fed and barely fed. In Mendocino County, approximately 22 per cent of children live in families whose income is below the federal poverty threshold. At the time of the most recent survey the poverty line for a five-person family with three children under 18 was $19,992 a year. Could you raise three children on $1,666 a month, plus buy shoes, toys and trips to the dentist?

The percentage of children living in poverty in Lake and Humboldt counties is a bit higher, 23 per cent; the state average is a bit lower, 19.5 per cent. In other words, one child in five in California lives in a state of statistical poverty, and it’s not getting better soon.

These numbers change depending on which survey you study, but they don’t change much.

A friend in England writes, “This is just to wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. Here in much of the UK it looks as if we might actually get the (in)famous `white Christmas'. We have about five inches of the stuff, frozen hard owing to the sub-zero temperatures. It looks nice enough, but isn't that nice when you have to go outside. Can't say I like the cold. Not my sort of weather at all, in fact.

On the subject of the Kindle and other electronic readers, discussed here the past two weeks he says, “...I don't have the Sony version, and I don't have the other version, either. Not out of conservatism, so much as from mortal fear of the face my wife would pull if I were to buy one! Anyway, would I be able to get the books on it that I want to read, should read? And can I grouse and snort in the margins? If not, pah! No good.”

The night before Christmas it was fairly silent in our house, except for the pounding diesel of a late-arriving UPS truck.

Among the packages was a copy of David Ledbetter’s definitive and highly readable “Unaccompanied Bach; Performing the Solo Works.” This book will be of interest to at least a dozen people, thus its publication by Yale University Press rather than some larger publisher. I am exaggerating, but only a smidge. No doubt thousands of performing artists and their counterparts in conservatories and universities will avidly study this wonderful work of research and synthesis.

Take the famous Six Suites for Solo Cello written by Johann Sebastian Bach in the mid 18th century. These compelling works have been a lifelong study for me, as they have been for generations of cellists. Ledbetter puts them into context, historically, and as part of a fast-changing musical tradition that encompassed the Italian, French and German baroque styles.

He writes, “Nowadays, Bach’s cello Suites are regarded as the foundation repertory of the instrument. Then, they were at the cutting edge of developments, forward-looking and innovative in technique, style, and scope.”

Ledbetter’s holiday gift to musicians is to consider together all of Bach’s compositions for unaccompanied instruments. “Bach was a connoisseur among connoisseurs of every nuance of style and genre... a performer emoting at large over the music in disregard of the composer’s mind can only seem false to those who at least have an inkling of it... instrumentalists generally are too narrowly fixed on the repertory of their own instrument and need to broaden their horizons.”

We watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV Christmas eve, and it made us cry, as it always does. Maybe there is hope, as there was in 1946.

All the best to you and yours, and may the world be a better place because you are in it.


NOTES:

“Unaccompanied Bach: Performing the Solo Works” by David Ledbetter. Yale University Press hard cover $45. ISBN 9780300141511. Thanks to Yale sales representative Patricia Nelson for providing my copy.

A Mendocino county profile

And another

17 December 2009

Electronic Books, Thoughts About, Part Two

Last week we were talking about the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony Reader. We could have added the Kobo, the iPhone, the BlackBerry, the fabled Apple Tablet, and more... All of these small machines will let you read a book not on paper, but in happy little electrons appearing on a screen that resembles the pages in a book.

There will be more developments soon: Color, easier navigation, more books to read, sharper text, perhaps useful illustrations. Students will find some text books not only available on e-readers, but ONLY available on e-readers.

Clearly, something is changing in our comfortable, comfortably old-fashioned, world of books. There always will be physical books to read in the usual way – on lap, in bathtub, commuting to work, sitting in the library, standing on your head at the beach. Millions of used books aren’t going anywhere. Every newly published book, in whatever format you find it, floats on an immense sea of books previously published and forever available to you.

A number of listeners to and readers of this program wrote to express their thoughts about this new landscape, and I read some of them last week. Here are a few more:

John Coate, manager of KZYX&Z commented: “Tony, there are a few concerns about the Kindle screen and it should be pointed out that it is an entirely different technology than you find in a laptop which makes it a far more pleasing experience than you can get from an lcd screen. When I was at the Chronicle we were sponsors of the MIT Media Lab when they developed that basic technology - I was there for the meeting where Jeff Bezos of Amazon attended and saw what it could do.”

From Donna Bettencourt in Grand Junction, Colorado: “From a library perspective, it's entirely different in that we pay the licensing fee from two vendors... and must take selections the vendors offer in their packages... The patron can download selections for free from a computer station in the library... if a patron already has downloaded ‘The Lost Symbol,’ (for example) then no one else can ‘borrow’ it until that person's time has expired... When you download these items, you have a time limit, just like a check-out period on a real book. Too bad if you haven't finished listening to something humongous like ‘The Story of Edgar Sawtelle’ or ‘Moby Dick.’

“I actually got a request from a patron who obviously doesn't understand the concept of a Kindle. She wanted us to purchase content for her... Evidently she had run into the problem (of)... Amazon sucking you in with low prices but hidden costs. This patron was hoping to get her Kindle content through the library for free. Hmm. Maybe that's next.”

From Paul Takushi, bookseller at UC Davis: (You can) report me to the Kindle police. I don't have one. I get so many... comps that I never have to buy books anyway... I don't commute far or travel very much for extended vacations so this is not an issue... I don’t crack open the spine and smell the binding. I don't go ape over first editions... I like the feel of books, but sometimes hardbacks are a pain in the neck, literally, when I'm not reading at a table or desk. Would I get one if I wasn't in the biz? ... I think (not) ... because I don't live the Kindle lifestyle.”

The Kindle lifestyle, whatever that is. The Wall Street Journal cautioned its readers “Books are having their iPod moment this holiday season. But buyer beware: It could also turn out to be an eight-track moment.”

A sampling of recent international stories: “In praise of the e-book,” “Seven reasons why e-book readers make lousy gifts this year,” “Should e-books be copy protected?” “Growing e-book industry discusses challenges at MediaBistro event,” “U.S. e-book content revenue will top $500 million next year” and so forth.

We will continue to follow this interesting phenomenon in the new year. Meanwhile, the one-person writing staff here at Words on Books wants to wish you and yours a most happy holiday season. And for those of you who still believe in Santa Claus, a hearty Ho Ho Ho.

NOTES:

An interesting note from Andrea Sharp about the Kindle as used on her iphone, too long to use on air, but not too long to reprint. If it reads a bit broken up, it’s not her prose, but the fact she was answering a string of questions I had posed:

I am using the Kindle reader for the iphone.  I think I have been using it for about a year.  I absolutely love it. The way I use it is to always have one book I am reading on it. Right now it is the John Irving book, ‘Last Night in Twisted River.’ I also read other books, in the normal way, at the same time. I usually am reading at least two books at the same time. Prior to starting to use the Kindle on the iphone, I would mostly get my books from the library, borrow some from friends and only occasionally buy new ones. Once I started with the iphone, I decided that I would indulge in always having a book on it that I am reading.

I always have a book to read, since I always have my phone with me. I can take it out anywhere, anytime.   I can read in any light since the pages are back lit. I can read a book in a hotel room in bed with my husband sleeping next to me and it won't disturb him with either a light or the noise of turning pages. I find it very comfortable to hold and actually easier to read on then books. Especially hard backs. I can buy new release books for a discounted price that normally I would be waiting for at the library or having to get another way.

I always love to share my books or pass them on, and you can't do that (at least yet) with this medium. I think that might be the biggest drawback. I find it very easy to read on my iphone, and not as easy to read articles on my computer. You can sit anywhere, or lie down, when you are reading on the iphone. Harder to be comfortable reading on your computer.

I don't think I would buy a separate reader, but I am so happy reading on the iphone that it seems irrelevant to have a whole separate device. (It is) very easy to download and use. Books take just seconds to download onto the iphone. What a great feeling to know that you can literally have almost any book within moments. I am very happy with the small iphone screen. Very easy to flick through the pages. I like the short lines.

I am amazed at how skeptical people are about this medium. I love books and I love this way of reading. I don't know that I would give up reading "real" books if I could afford to, but I really enjoy the option of having this available to me.

Andrea

 .... and more ...

Should e-books be copy protected?

Growing e-book industry discusses challenges at MediaBistro event

U.S. e-book content revenue will top $500 million next year

10 December 2009

Electronic Books, Thoughts About, Part One

Many people are pondering the new devices called e-readers, some for gifts, some to own and use themselves. They cost a couple of hundred dollars each, plus the cost of electronic books to read on them.

Some readers sense a serious threat to paper-and-ink. Others believe electronic book reading devices are not very important; simply one more format in a long line of formats, from mud to papyrus, vellum to paper, now electrons encased in plastic.

In other words, The book is dead – long live the book... Again!

My brother bought an Amazon Kindle for his wife’s birthday last month. “I love it, I absolutely love it,” she told me over the Thanksgiving table. Aha, I thought, how do other readers feel about these things? I sent out a set of questions and received back a veritable torrent of responses.

Questions and responses were sent and read electronically. Already we read and write in electrons and hardly notice it anymore.

One of the most informed responses came from Christie Olson Day, owner of Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino. She wrote, “As for the Kindle, I have only one problem with it: amazon.com. Amazon is the Wal-Mart of the internet -- and I mean that in the worst possible sense. The relentless downward pressure on prices (for books, for woks, for everything) has brought a slew of hidden costs to the public. Amazon is selling e-books at well below cost in order to capture the audience, and once you buy a Kindle you are well and truly captured, since you can't get your content anywhere else. It costs between $3 and $4 to print and ship a hardcover book, and that should be the price difference. If publishers allow Amazon to establish the market for e-books at $9.99, they simply won't be able to afford to publish. Who wins?”

Two major publishers did announce this week they plan to withhold electronic versions of new books for four months after publication in hard cover. This is a first attempt to separate in customer’s minds the printed book from its electronic version.

Christy continued, “I expect that some of our customers will want to read e-books some of the time, and I'd like to be able to meet that need while keeping a gorgeous selection of paper books in the store. So as a bookseller, I don't have a problem with e-readers. The Sony Reader is a nice gadget ... and I may use mine some day. I can visualize the e-book as a helpful addition to the already-successful formats offered on paper: hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, e-book. The digital version should be priced almost like a hardcover upon release, then be reduced to the trade paper cost, then the mass market. This system would keep the markets for paper books and e-books healthy.”

Deb Kvaka wrote, “Just like with newspapers, there is something gratifying about holding the printed paper in my hands to read. I do not have Kindle, nor have I ever tried it; I really don't even want to. I do use a computer, an internet radio, and other new-fangled contraptions. ...Browsing in the bookmobile or a small bookstore is one of the true pleasures in life. Carrying an engaging book with me to read in those spare moments, or cuddling up in front of the woodstove with a cup of tea and a good book......ahhhh.”

Tess Albin Smith: “I can't fathom reading a book on the computer, or watching TV on the computer either, for that matter. I use the computer
for too many other things... What I do with current technology is rent (audio books) free from the online county library, download them to my mp3 player, and play them for my walks and long drives. It gets me out of the house for lots of exercise, since I can't wait for the next installment. I still read 'real' books too once in awhile.”

Susan Lowery: “I have a Kindle, and admit to being somewhat ambivalent about it... It's nice to be able to change the type size when it feels too small – or large, for that matter. Not so great on illustrations, but then, one doesn't think of Kindle for art books or coffee table books. I use the Kindle for travel. It's far more portable than a stack of books, and I like to travel as light as I can. The built-in dictionary is really nice, as is the ability to make notes, highlight, etc. I love the battery life, weight, size, all that stuff.”

Jill Hannum: “I haven't used Kindle, or even seen it. If it's like the computer screen, it's toast in my pantheon (is that mixing a metaphor?). Paper, print -- good. Glare, electronics -- pretty hard to endure for more than an hour... Good books are everywhere -- in friends' (homes), at the library, flea market, second hand store. I've paid virtually nothing for that two-foot stack of really good reads. Remind me why I'd spend good money to buy a new device to access good words... Does Kindle automatically power off if you fall asleep on the couch while reading?”

(MUSIC) There is much more to say about the future of books, electronic or otherwise, yet no more time. We’ll continue this discussion next week. In the meantime, if you have an opinion, please send a note to amiksak@gmail.com. I'm blogging at www.wordsonbooks.blogspot.com and I also enjoy reading your comments there.

NOTES:

USA Today has a good recent article on the e-reader question... And if you search you’ll find many, many more articles from numerous sources.



How do you like your e-reader?

Questions for a new Kindle user...

1.      Are you happy with the thing?
2.      How are you using it in real life and what are you reading now?
3.      Best thing(s) about it?
4.      Aspect(s) you don't like?
5.      Are you concerned about going obsolete?
6.      Some report a drawback not being able to share Kindle books with
friends. What do you think?
7.      Have you tried reading a book on a computer? How was the experience
compared to an e-reader?
8.      How & why did you pick Kindle over other e-readers? Have you been
able to compare with other e-readers?
9.      Are you comfortable with the tech features and how to use them?
11.     Is the screen too small? Big? Just right? Howabout the font(s)?
Happy with black and white?
14.     Anything else you'd want me to know?

03 December 2009

It all started with the first book my mother suggested: One look at “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” and I was hooked.

Were these goats all gruff, or did they each HAVE a gruff? Why were all three named Billy? What’s a gruff? Mom read the book to me, over and over and over again, she once sadly said, because I kept asking and I couldn’t read it myself. And over again.

In first grade I was frustrated when Miss Cooney handed out copies of “Dick & Jane.” By then I was way beyond Look! Look! See! See! with its exclamation points and capitalized words. I had mastered the Billy goats. I was reading “The Ballad of Stewey Stinker” and I chafed having to wait for my classmates to tweeze out what S-P-O-T spelled.

By fifth grade, girls had become impossibly smart, with their straight A report cards and all, and the boys had gotten correspondingly dumber, with our kick ball and our running and our general moping around. They read Nancy Drew. We traded Uncle Scrooge for two Little Lulus and thought we were in heaven.

One boring summer I must have stumbled into the public library because I discovered the adventure books of Howard Pease. His now-forgotten heroes were all named Todd and worked second mate on tramp steamers. Then came the adventures of Dr Doolittle, a total gas.

Dr Doolittle of course set me up for “Freddy the Pig” which in turn prepared me for the assigned books of private high school English, such as “Fortitude” by Horace Walpole. “Fortitude” was so old-fashioned we laughed at it, and at Madam Ovary, I mean “Madame Bovary.” We struggled with Somerset Maugham, skipped through Voltaire’s “Candide,” read the non-technical chapters of “Moby Dick” and finally grew old enough for the smutty sections of “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Years went by and then I bought a bookstore in Mendocino and I was soon asked for book recommendations but of course I never had time to read, which was OK because I learned to say, “Well, I haven’t read that one yet, but a lot of people have said they liked it” which was often true.

As recipient of a pre-Prop 13, shallow-as-a-rain-puddle liberal arts education, I had learned many useless bits of knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, perfect for my role as bookseller. In any given half-hour I might discuss Diderot and Voltaire, compare Robert Heinlein to Frank Herbert, and recommend “Mushrooms Demystified” over the Audubon Guide. No one ever did ask my opinion on Billy goats, or “Fortitude,” and I doubt I ever sold a book by Somerset Maugham.

Now I’m on the far side of the bookselling adventure, in a good place where the alarm clock rarely rings. Friends once again feel free to suggest books. Sometimes I pay cash for a book someone mentioned, and sometimes that book turns up in review here.

The other lunchtime I was finishing up a Thai burrito when the café owner, Meredith Smith, paused for a chat. She had a book to recommend.

She was excited about Extremely Something & Incredibly Something Else by Jonathan Safran Foer, how great it was, how I’d like it even if I don’t read much fiction. I walked across town trying to remember the title: Extremely Something And Very Close, Very Loud and Extremely Close, Very (something) and Incredible (something else)...

A friend/employee at the bookstore told me I wanted “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” by the author of “Everything Is Illuminated” and we have one copy in the fiction section, and by the way, Meredith over at the café  recommends this book to everyone.

That’s OK. I’m enjoying the book, and you’ll read about it here one day. And I could use some more suggestions.

NOTES:           

“The Three Billy Goats Gruff” is out of print currently in the Golden Books edition I remember. You can find it used for very little, however. It was originally a Norwegian fairy tale, who knew. Wikipedia: “De tre bukkene Bruse” is a famous Norwegian fairy tale in which three goats cross a bridge, under which is a fearsome troll who wants to eat them. The fairy tale was collected by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe in their Norske Folkeeventyr. It has an ‘eat-me-when-I'm-fatter’ plot (Aarne-Thompson type 122E).”

“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer. Mariner Books Houghton Mifflin paperback $13.95. ISBN 0618711651.

25 November 2009

Eating History

All over Facebook this week people were wishing Happy Thanksgivings on each other. At the same time I was reading “Eating History” by Andrew F. Smith. In America it’s all about the food, and the football, but mainly the food.

We had the son of a vegetarian over to our house for Thanksgiving, because his mother doesn’t serve turkey and he likes turkey. Come to think of it, that was the only meat of our feast: every other dish, from the baked stuffed mushrooms to the sponge cake with almond flour and caramelized pears on top would suit a vegetarian just fine. Not a vegan, not a fruitarian, but a plain ordinary vegetarian.

“Eating History” is a great read, a thorough, verging on textbook-like story of how we got to where we are today, food-wise. In short and engaging chapters food historian Andrew Smith covers “30 turning points in the making of American cuisine.”

Beginning with Oliver Evan’s automated mill, which transformed flour production from a medieval, back-breaking exercise into a kind of Rube Goldberg-style automation, Smith covers representative topics that include the Erie Canal, Delmonico’s, the McCormick reaper, Thanksgiving, Gail Borden’s Canned Milk, the transcontinental railroad, and that’s just up to the Civil War.

There are discussions of canned food, the calorimeter, Cracker Jack, Fannie Farmer and Julia Child, Corn Flakes and Upton Sinclair (not in the same chapter, of course), radar, and much, much more. Alice Waters is in there, and McDonalds, the Flavr Savr, plus mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs and the fact “the agricultural system uses about 30 per cent of the oil consumed in the United States.”

Indeed because of this careful documentation the book never ceases to be pointedly entertaining. It’s one big historical story, with startling developments and surprising connections between them.

With its much heralded opening in 1825 (it included a three-hour-long rolling cannonade) the Erie Canal showed Americans that food could be transported long distances; it also replaced the habit of buying locally.

Cyrus McCormick, “a southerner by birth who owned slaves and opposed the Civil War, became one of the major contributors to the success of the North.” His revolutionary harvester “freed up an estimated two or three farmworkers (per farmstead), many of whom enlisted in the Union cause, contributing an estimated half of the Union’s million-man army and navy.”

Readers accustomed to books that uncover the horrors and ethical compromises of American food production may find Smith’s approach too mild. In the hot house context of current food issues, Smith stands alone not only for his judicious tone, but his fairness to all sides.

Smith explains in a preface that his book is “mainly explanatory and descriptive... For those who believe that the modern American approach to food is on the right track, this book offers a partial history of how we arrived at a system that has emphasized convenience, superabundance, low cost, and consumer choice. For those interested in changing the current system, (“Eating History”) offers insight into how we ended up where we are today, and perhaps will suggest alternative approaches for the future.”

On speaking tours, Smith will ask the audience questions related to food: Do you prefer organic food to food grown with petrochemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides? Do those of you who eat meat prefer that the animals be free-range, organic, and slaughtered humanely, or doused with hormones and steroids and raised in highly concentrated animal feeding operations?

“By far, he reports, most people want the homemade, the organic, the locally grown. He finds this fascinating: “I’m a culinary historian, and the system that most (people) say they favor is pretty much what existed in America two centuries ago.”

We all say we want the good stuff, yet most Americans buy and eat the not-so-good stuff. How did we get here? Read “Eating History” and ponder what’s on your plate.

NOTES:

“Eating History, 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine” by Andrew F. Smith. Columbia University Press hard cover $29.95. ISBN 9780231140928.

On the Columbia U site the author is featured in a short video, plus you can download a .pdf of his chapter on Thanksgiving.

Smith’s own website...

05 November 2009

on Cornwell...

I've been indulging myself recently with easy readers. Not Dick and Jane or John Grisham, but something like that: the historical adventure novels of Bernard Cornwell.

For many people, reading all the time is simply what they do, no matter how hard they labor at other things. A friend of mine who works full time is forever recommending books she’s actually read. She must read several a week. And she remembers what she reads. Amazing. For me it’s always been a struggle to put aside distractions and focus on the simple joy of reading.

I’m always conscious that sooner or later I’ll be reporting on what I’ve read. This creates a kind of internal dialog where I’m taking notes for the next radio show rather than enjoying the pages in front of me. Challenging and rewarding as that can be, it also takes away some of the fun. So a couple of weeks ago I ate dessert first because life is short. I dove into a pile of books I’d been saving for fun, not for review. No pressure cooker. All fun, as reading should be.

Bernard Cornwell is a so-called “genre” author of historical novels. He’s not reviewed much in prestigious journals or newspapers, but he is read prodigiously by a large band of fans. I’m one of them.

On vacation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean I hauled out “The Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles” and pondered the American Civil War between bouts of snorkeling. I then turned to Merry Olde Before-There-Ever-Was-An-England and read the “Saxon Novels,” four of them so far.

And when those weren’t quite filling enough, I also read “The Spies of Warsaw” by Alan Furst, “The 25th Hour” by David Benioff and John Marsden’s young adult novel, “Hamlet.” Gems, all of them.

Back to Mr Cornwell. After devouring several servings of his books I discovered they follow a pattern. The stories are told from the point of view of a fighting outsider hero. It may be Nathaniel Starbuck, a displaced Northerner fighting for the Confederacy. In Ninth century Britain it’s Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a displaced Northumbrian fighting for the southerners of Wessex. Or Richard Sharpe, a common soldier raised to officer status during the Napoleonic wars, or the protagonist may be Thomas of Hookton, a skillful archer during the Hundred Years War seeking not just the Holy Grail, as if that isn’t enough, but also revenge for the massacre of his family. All of these characters are involved in various aspects of revenge, come to think of it, plus the occasional manly love affair.

Simply, these are ripping tales that don’t stop. Cornwell never bogs down in literary description or gratuitous subplots. Although the scenery’s often lovely, there’s very little of it.

He brings alive a far-off time and place as few others are able. If you time-traveled me to, say, Northumberland in the year 891, I could tell a Dane by his arm rings, a Viking by his dragon ship, and a Saxon by his stink. I have learned the old place names and fought the old battles. It’s like studying history with the most entertaining teacher you could imagine.

Now and then Cornwell does get all poetic: “...and so I turned south and rowed away from the shore, while in the west the sun leaked red fire through rifts in the cloud so that the whole sky glowed as if a god had bled across the heavens.” (from “The Pale Horseman”).

But the adventure never falters: “And next day the eight dark horsemen came.” (from “Lords of the North”). He begins well: “Darkness. Winter. A night of frost and no moon. We floated on the river Temes, and beyond the boat’s high bow I could see the stars reflected on the shimmering water.” (from “Sword Song”) and of course he ends well, too: “...but in the end he had pulled the trigger because he had to live with himself. Though God alone knew where that would take him. Night fell. The smoke of a broken city vanished in the dark. And Sharpe sailed home, a soldier.” (From “Sharpe’s Prey”).

Cornwell sets up the reader to crave more: “While at Bebbanburg, where the gray sea never ceases to beat upon the long pale sands and the cold wind frets the wolf’s head flag above the hall, they dreaded my return. Because fate cannot be cheated, it governs us, and we are all its slaves.”

Ahh. History for dessert. Delicious!

You too, can receive WOB scripts in your email and review episodes you may have missed. To be on the list, please send a note to amiksak@gmail.com. I'm blogging at www.wordsonbooks.blogspot.com and I enjoy reading your comments here.

NOTES:

Pick up any of Cornwell’s novels and you’ll find a current list of all his works, by series, and sometimes by chronological order within series. He’s written at least 42 novels, probably a few more than that, and he’s only 28 years old (I made that up. Born in 1944, he lives with his wife on Cape Cod, where the adventures roll in like the Atlantic tides).

Cornwell's home on the web.

The American publisher of all these books is HarperCollins.

A fascinating exchange on Cornwell’s site:

Hello Mr. Cornwell, I am curious about your process for developing (and writing) a story. Stephen King says that he gets the idea for a situation--say, a crazed fan holds her favorite author hostage--and lets the story develop however it happens. Do you do the same, or (for example) do you have the climax of the story mapped out inside your head in advance, and just have to figure out the way to get there? Do you outline story before beginning to write? Also, when you are in the process of writing, do you try to write a certain amount every day (like King), and do you try to write the first draft through all the way without edits, and then go back and make changes when you are finished? Anything else you can share about your process would be welcome. Thanks and best wishes, Warren Firschein Safety Harbor, FL

A:   An outline? No, I don't. I have a very broad idea of where I want the book to go, then just let the characters sort it out amongst themselves. I'm not saying this is the right way to do it - some writers plot very carefully, and their books are great, but others, like me, leave it to instinct. I write maybe eight, nine hours a day? That includes daydreaming. I always start with a stick figure . . but there ain't no rules. I like to get the story straight so I write fast, pushing the story line ahead, but I revise constantly. I always think that writing a novel (for me! not for everyone!) is like climbing a mountain - I get a quarter of the way up, look back and see a better route, so it's back to the beginning and start again and that better route takes me halfway up, I look back, and so on and so on. Once that 'first' draft is finished I rewrite the whole thing maybe two times, and it's then that I add lots of detail. (B.Cornwell)

30 October 2009

pricing update....

An update on the predatory pricing, from today's Publishers Weekly Daily newsletter (30 October 09)


Wal-Mart, Amazon Limiting Discounted Purchases
Plans by independent booksellers to buy the 10 November titles being offered at steep discounts by Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon have been foiled by the big box retailers who are limiting the number of books one customer can buy. According to the Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart is limiting purchases to two copies per customer, Amazon has a three-copy limit and Target five. There has been lots of discussion in bookseller forums about buying quantities of titles at the big box retailers as a protest to the discounting policies, but also as way to get a better margin since the 10 books would be cheaper to buy from the stores than from the publishers.

29 October 2009

Bill Petrocelli on the Price War

Under the title “Not a Simple Price War -- It's a Fight Over What You Get to Read” Marin bookseller Bill Petrocelli of Book Passage in San Francisco and Corte Madera has published an absolutely right-on screed about the current price war on books.

I mentioned the situation here two weeks ago, and was planning to say more. Writing for the Huffington Post, Bill said it for me and for all fans of good books. I’ll devote the rest of this Words on Books to excerpts from Bill’s article:

“What looks like a simple price war between Amazon, Target, and Wal-Mart over a handful of bestsellers is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the book business. The larger fight is really over what you get to read.

“The price war began October 15 when Walmart.com dropped its prices drastically on several bestsellers. Amazon.com and Target.com quickly followed suit, and within a couple of days the prices were down to $8.99 and heading lower... these behemoths were clearly selling those books below cost and engaging in an illegal form of predatory pricing.

“The authors affected by this price slashing were not amused. James Patterson said, "Imagine if somebody was selling DVDs of this week's new movies for $5. You wouldn't be able to make movies." John Grisham's agent added, "I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted bestsellers take the consumer's attention away from emerging writers." The American Booksellers Association saw things the same way, saying in a letter to... (the) Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, that these companies are using books as loss leaders to sell other kinds of merchandise. ‘The entire book industry is in danger of becoming collateral damage in this war.’

“Predatory pricing is a means of driving other booksellers out of business. When this happens, the choice of books is one of the first things to suffer.

“... the literary life of America has to go through two very narrow choke points: publishing and bookselling. Both of these choke points have become more and more constricted in recent years as a result of economic concentration and market manipulation.

“Publishing is now consolidated in the hands of a few large conglomerates that control most of what is published in America. There are, to be sure, many booklovers in the publishing divisions of these giant corporations, but they are outnumbered and out-maneuvered by the bean counters... It is not an atmosphere that favors innovation or literary discoveries...

“... The chain stores had been doing their best to squeeze out the independent stores over the last 20 years or so, and now they in turn are being squeezed by the mass merchandisers... Big-box mass merchandisers, like Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco, have taken over 30 percent of the book market. These mass merchandisers are now selling as many books as Barnes & Noble and Borders combined.

“It's hard to exaggerate the consequences of this mass-merchandiser dominance. These (big-box) outlets carry, at most, a few hundred titles at any given time. This means that a handful of books -- far less than one percent of all the books published -- are probably accounting now for more than 30 percent of all sales in America. Price wars in this segment of the market... (are) driving more customers to these merchandisers in search of quick bargains on a handful of big-name books.

“Publishers are under more and more pressure to subsidize these new, ruinous prices, and they will probably end up pushing more and more of their resources in that direction. But it's a devil's deal...

“...There's a big difference, say, between 500 buyers all buying for their own stores and one chain-buyer purchasing for 500 outlets... ...when the system is dominated by a small handful of powerful buyers, their decision can make or break a book... One of the dirty little secrets of the book business is that publishers often check in advance with the buyers for the chain stores and mass merchandisers before agreeing to publish a book. If the answer they get is no, the book may never see the light of day.

“One of the ironies of the current price war is that it includes ‘The Lacuna,’ the latest novel by Barbara Kingsolver. But Kingsolver wasn't always a bestselling author. When her first novel, ‘The Bean Trees,’ was published in a modest print-run in 1988, independent booksellers recognized it as a literary treasure and sold thousands of copies. After that the chain stores climbed on the bandwagon, but without that first push from independent booksellers Kingsolver's career might never have taken off.

“Anyone who loves books should worry that the doors seem to be closing on the Barbara Kingsolvers of tomorrow.”

NOTES:

"Not a Simple Price War -- It's a Fight Over What You Get to Read" was published on the Huffington Post on October 28. Read the entire posting here, with references and attributions to document his points:

From the bookseller newsletter Bookselling This Week: “William Petrocelli is an author, a bookseller, and a former attorney. He spent a few years as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and then as a poverty lawyer in Oakland, California, before going into private practice. For the past 30 years or so, he has been the co-owner with his wife, Elaine, of Book Passage in San Francisco and Corte Madera, California.

Petrocelli is the author of ‘Low Profile: How to Avoid the Privacy Invaders’ (McGraw-Hill) and co-author of ‘Sexual Harassment on the Job: What It Is and How to Stop It’ (Nolo Press). He is also the author of the forthcoming novel ‘The Thirteen.’ ”

22 October 2009

That Cow Came Home

It started with a challenge from an author friend, Lewis Buzbee. He posted this on Facebook: “I just finished reading ‘Cow Across America’ by Dale Neal, and if you want to be reminded of how good novels can be, why we need them, and how they can, yes, make you laugh out loud and cry at the same time, read it. I guarantee it. You buy it and don't like it, I'll refund your money.”

So I went out and purchased the book from my friendly helpful local independent bookstore, and then I read it, and Lewis definitely does not owe me a cent.

I can’t say I’m quite as all-out enthusiastic as Lewis, but the book is excellent. It’s a first novel, it’s a grabber of a story, it’s multi-generational, specific to the Carolina mountains and at the same time universal as Homer.

Not to get all highfalutin about it, because the book is anything but high brow: Dwight Martin is a kid bored with visiting his grandparents in the country, but surprisingly intrigued by his grandfather’s stories. The stories may be true, or maybe not, but they’re good stories and one of the kids in the story also is named Dwight, and Pop has a story about that, too.

The title “Cow Across America” refers to a group of connected stories Pop tells about himself and a boy named Dwight and a cow named Daisy who one summer decided to walk west, all the way west, coast to coast. Pop’s stories are spread over years and many summer visits by the young Dwight to Pop’s isolated hill farm. Turns out the boys and the cow got home again. At least the way Pop tells it, they did.

The reader wonders, while wandering through these delicious tales, who, finally, is the narrator of the book, and what is HIS story? Stories about Dwight and Wylie and Daisy are set far in the past. Then there is Dwight Martin growing up in the present and learning about love and life.

In the opening scene: “Two weeks shy of turning ten, Dwight Martin wrote his first novel. It took most of the morning, far longer than he would have believed, and his finger hurt where the pencil had pressed a saddle-shaped callous against the knuckle, but he kept writing, filling the blue-ruled pages of a wire-bound notebook, nodding slowly as his sentences raced toward the red margins.”

In the last pages Dwight is grown up, waiting for a plane in an airport lounge, still wondering about things: “(He) never understood why travelers read novels in airports, noses pressed to the latest best-seller about serial killers or lawyers, while real life streamed about them in the terminal, a thousand and one stories on their way to different destinies and unforseen fates.”

This is excellent stuff, playing with our sense of time and place, moving backwards into myth and forward into the unknown, all the while staying centered on a boy’s life.

Author Dale Neal lives in Asheville and writes for a local newspaper. “Cow Across America” is his first novel, and it won the Novello Literary Award, intended to promote Carolina writers.

Lewis Buzbee dropped me a follow-up note: “Dale is a friend of mine, a writer friend. I've known him for 15 years probably. I had no involvement in the making of this book, other than being his pal... with this book, I really lost track when I was reading it, forgot that it was Dale. I was just reading a wonderful book... really glad you liked it, Tony.”

NOTES:

“Cow Across America” by Dale Neal. Novello Festival Press hard cover $21.95. ISBN 9780981519234.

Novello Festival Press announces publication of Dale Neal’s first novel.

Fascinating essay by the author on how he came to write this book.

There is a connection here with the novel “Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier. Charles and his wife Katherine in 2004  founded the Cold Mountain Foundation to promote and support other writers from the Carolinas. Their funds helped subsidize publication of “Cow Across America.”

“H.L. Mencken, in his famous book The American Language, mentions highfalutin as an example of the many native U.S. words coined during the 19th-century period of vigorous growth. Although highfalutin is characteristic of American folk speech, it is not a true regionalism because it has always occurred in all regions of the country, with its use and popularity spurred by its appearance in print. The origin of highfalutin, like that of many folk expressions, is obscure. It has been suggested that the second element, -falutin, comes from the verb flute-hence high-fluting, a comical indictment of people who think too highly of themselves.”  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright c 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

15 October 2009

News and some made up stuff too

At a recent bookseller’s trade show author Timothy Egan suggested that there should be some sort of "cash for clunkers" policy for booksellers.

WHAT IF... In record time President Obama today proposed a short-term boost for the flagging publishing industry, a set of rules and regulations promulgated by the Agriculture Department under the heading Feed Your Head (of Cattle) for Farmers, a proposal already nicknamed by Republicans the “Cash for Chapters” boondoggle.

Under the proposed new plan farmers would receive cattle cars filled with no longer fully functioning books. They would mulch them, scatter the resulting mixture on their fields, and thereby raise much more interesting and well-educated cattle at less cost than current methods.

Opponents of the plan, which included all Congressional Republicans, noted the plan pays farmers when local charities and church-sponsored bookstores could simply strew their unwanted books along highways near farms, letting the farmers do the rest.

“This book bill weakens my American values,” said Republican spokesperson Clo Miles. “Where’s the help for big corporate farmers in this proposal?”

Under the new regulations, donors of clunker books receive a gift card to purchase one new book recommended by Oprah. New books are expected to force out the old while supporting publishers and several best-selling authors.

“It’s win win win,” said Al Knopf of Random-Penguin-Harper-Houghton-Harcourt House. “We win win win!”

* * * * *

In other news, actual, real news, a church in North Carolina, with 14 adherents, plans to burn books, including copies of the Bible, for Halloween. At least 298 online news articles cover this event, so it must be true.

Pastor Marc Grizzard told the Associated Press the King James version of the Bible is the only one his church follows. He says all other versions are "satanic" and "perversions" of God's word and he’s going to burn them.

So much for North Carolina. In SOUTH Carolina, kids are being urged to trick or treat for books rather than candy at the Independent Mail newspaper 2009 Literacy Festival. Books, no candy. Guess how well THAT will go over. Children are asked to dress like a favorite character from a book and enjoy games, crafts and story-telling. A free book for every child will be donated by a local foundation. Just no candy.

* * * * * *

Friends of the Plainville Public Library holds the annual book sale this weekend... the Wall Street Journal reports the new Sarah Palin memoir is expected to sell well... Wal-Mart.com has announced it will pre-sell selected new books for $10 each, and many other titles half off list price. For comparison, books now on the New York Times Best Seller Fiction List have an average retail price of $26.47 each.

Wal-Mart is promoting not-yet-published books in order to utilize generous publisher rebates and promotions when most available. Amazon.com has cut some prices to match. It’s a battle of the giants. As the old saying goes they lose money on every sale but make it up on volume.

* * * * * *

The highly progressive Huffington Post online has opened a new section on books and publishing. Right now they are laying odds on the National Book Awards, publishing various book-related blogs, and generally hotting up the world of books for interested readers. You might want to take a look:

NOTES:

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hard cover $27. ISBN 0618968415.

Christian book burning in North Carolina:

Current NY Times best selling fiction:

1    THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown. (Doubleday, $29.95.)
2    AN ECHO IN THE BONE, by Diana Gabaldon. (Delacorte, $30.)
3    ROUGH COUNTRY, by John Sandford. (Putnam, $26.95.)
4    THE LAST SONG, by Nicholas Sparks. (Grand Central, $24.99.)
5    THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett. (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $24.95.)
6    HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY, by Audrey Niffenegger. (Scribner, $26.99.)
7    THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS, by Debbie Macomber. (Mira, $16.95.)
8    SOUTH OF BROAD, by Pat Conroy. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $29.95.)
9    ALEX CROSS’S ‘TRIAL’, by James Patterson & Richard DiLallo. (Little, Brown, $27.99.)
10  HOTHOUSE ORCHID, by Stuart Woods. (Putnam, $25.95.)

Total $264.67 for an average retail price of $26.47

Books, not candy, for Halloween:

17 September 2009

Letters...

We get letters... from all over. From Rodney Davey in England:

“The US continues to puzzle me enormously. At the moment it's the fuss and rage and (so far as I can tell from the news clips) the sheer insanity which has blown up around Obama's plan to introduce health insurance. What's the problem? Most of Europe has had something like it for decades. Is it the perceived cost which is likely to devolve upon the shoulders of the luckier portion of American society? If so, then that sounds like 'bugger you Jack, I'm alright' politics. Or is it because it smacks of 'socialism', a concept more appalling to the average US sensibility, it seems, than Satan himself.  Astonishing. Poor old Obama, he's got his work cut out. Will he be tougher than Hillary C was?”

In August I wrote a column that told the story of Grandma Roseby in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Grandma Roseby is one hundred and five years old and reads six books a week.

Speaking of Pembrokeshire, Tom Davenport wrote:

“The wonderful writer John Seymour lived and farmed there for some years, producing a number of highly enjoyable books on self sufficient farming...

"He eventually...  migrated across to Ireland, where he started over again and wrote “Blessed Isle - One Man's Ireland” in 1992, beginning around his 76th year... John's writing has a great deal of unvarnished charm in its descriptions of the rural and village life he savored.”

On the subject of the Internet vs. reference books. I got quite a few letters, among them this note from Dan Kvaka:

“Funny but all very true. In our health center, our doctors and mid-levels no longer have subscriptions to magazines and journals (except the ones sent for free by drug companies, and loaded with ads for.....guess what?). Instead they have online subscriptions to medical websites. The information changes so fast, printing could not keep up.

"Last week (someone) asked me to set up (her computer) so she could view a YouTube video of a white guy in a lab coat droning on about lyme disease... I asked her, is that actually interesting? She said, Yes, he's the mega-expert and she pointed to the ratings for that video, thousands of reviews and he got 4-1/2 stars.

"All of our providers still have all of their textbooks decorating the shelves in their offices. They don't read them, they don't want them taking up space at home, and they don't want to throw them away 'cause they paid so (goddamn) much for them when they were starving students in medical school.”

On a column about owning way too many books, Nancy Suib wrote:

“REALLY enjoyed this... you have put words to my addiction as well... definitely feel more comforted about it.”

Roger Luckenbach: “Makes me think that at least I am not the only crazed overly literate person. I thought that I had an over-active packrat gene but then a psychiatrist friend corrected me and said I was an esteemed bibliophile. Makes me feel better but still don't have enough room or time for all the books.”

Finally, this school memory from John Bear, concerning first sentences:

“My wonderful 10th grade English teacher, Aram Tolegian, who claimed (as did many Armenians at the time, I suspect) to be a cousin of William Saroyan, gave us the class project of choosing the best first line in American fiction. It was a wonderful and contentious time, and when the final vote was taken, and there was a clear winner, we were all commanded to commit it to memory forever, so of course we did.

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

Thank you John and thank you all listeners and readers. I truly enjoy hearing from you. Has anyone remembered what book that first sentence comes from? No fair looking it up on Google, just because I did.

NOTES:

All Words on Books scripts are archived here.

Specifically:
“Instant Books & Evil Politicians”

“Grandma Roseby in Pembrokeshire”

“Eat Your Phone Book”

“I Fear I’m Not Alone”

“Judging a Book by its First Line, or maybe its Last Line”

“Blessed Isle: One Man’s Ireland” is out of print. It can easily be obtained from a number of dealers at prices ranging from under a dollar to $212. Try this

SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read further if you still are figuring out the provenance of "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."





– “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe.

10 September 2009

Never Could Figure Out How to End It

The Books section of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle features Grabbers, “a selection of first sentences from new books.”

For example: “I was suspended in eighth grade for bringing my semen to science class” writes Ryan Boudinot at the beginning of his novel “Misconception.”

Being contrary, I wondered about the opposite of “Grabbers.” LAST sentences. From OLD books.

The hapless ending: “That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.” (from “Crime & Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky).

The famous ending: “That’s well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our garden.” (“Candide” by Voltaire).

The scratch-your-head ending: “I dwell the longer upon this subject from the desire I have to make the society of an English Yahoo by any means not insupportable,” (Jonathan Swift at the end of “Gulliver’s Travels”) “and therefore I here entreat those who have any tincture of this absurd vice, that they will not presume to come in my sight.” Swift prefers impossibly smart and civilized horses to debased human Yahoos, or at least that’s how I read it, but I could be wrong. And the novel ends.

Herman Melville began “Moby Dick” with what became one of the most famous first lines in history: “Call me Ishmael.” The novel appears to end with the sinking of the whale ship Pequod: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

Wonderful ending. But wait; there is an epilogue so Ishmael can survive to tell the tale. Buoyed by the coffin of his friend, the harpoonist Queequeg: “I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”

Back here in present reality, I asked local publisher, poet and editor Cynthia Frank to share her thoughts on the usefulness of first lines:

“If I'm bored by the first page in a manuscript submission, I'll usually skip around a bit to see if the story picks up. Many authors who are starting out seem to find their voice, their real starting point, a number of pages in. If it's a first novel and I'm intrigued enough to give the manuscript some time, the architecture of the story, and its ending are extremely important. I've read a lot of bang-up beginnings. Not everyone can write a bang-up ending.

“Some newer authors paint themselves into painful literary corners... If the manuscript is both problematic and full of errors (grammar, syntax), reeks of perfume or mold, or is full of hate (race, gender, religion), we'll reject it immediately. Neatness counts, too. I want to be working with authors who respect their own work! A publishing contract is a long-term relationship, not dinner at your favorite restaurant.

“Of course, we spend more time on submissions than the big publishing houses. If you're a Random House editor wading through 300+ submissions each week, that first page is really important! And so is the marketing information and information about the author,” she concludes.

Now Words on Books needs a good last line. Except I don’t have one.

NOTES:

My long-time friend and colleague Cynthia Frank owns Cypress House, Lost Coast Press, QED Press, and EdgeWork Books, all located on 155 Cypress Street, Fort Bragg, CA 95437.

You can reach her at (707) 964-9520 and online:

Recent books and awards include “Spanish-Live It and Learn It! The Complete Guide to Language Immersion Schools in Mexico” by Martha Racine Taylor and “The Dog Walked Down the Street: An Outspoken Guide for Writers Who Want to Publish” by Sal Glynn (winner, IPPY Gold Award for Best Writing/Publishing Book).

Someone has compiled 98 PAGES of first lines, if you dare to look.

Current editions of books mentioned:

“Misconception” by Ryan Boudinot ISBN: 080217065X

“Crime & Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 0199536368

“Candide” by Voltaire ISBN: 0140455108

“Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift ISBN: 0199536848

“Moby Dick” by Herman Melville ISBN: 0199535728

“Spanish-Live It and Learn It! The Complete Guide to Language Immersion Schools in Mexico” by Martha Racine Taylor ISBN: 1879384647

“The Dog Walked Down the Street” by Sal Glynn ISBN: 1879384663

04 September 2009

Eating Books

We’re making and using too many books. We must reduce the clutter, leave only footprints, clean the skies, save the frogs. I have chosen to recycle books by chewing and eating them raw. Note: this may cause side effects for those sensitive to colored inks or industrial glue.

I no longer eat brightly colored children’s books, by the way, because of the lead content.

Many modern users of telephone services no longer use phone books. First, the type’s too small. Then there are way too many listings in there. What’s the point of having a cell phone in your pocket if you also have to carry a big book with everyone’s numbers in it? You only need to know your friends’ numbers and the number for your dentist.

Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post’s Help File answers the question “How can I get the phone company to stop sending me phone books? They go straight to the recycling bin at our house.”

Rob’s answer: There is a new service – on the Internet, where most people now look for phone numbers, he says – that lets you see who is publishing local phone books and then tells you how to beg them to stop sending phone books to you.

We just take them as they come. We throw out the old phone books when new ones arrive, as we already do with The New Yorker, The Newsweek, various catalogs, The Sierra Club Bristly Pine Cone Courier, and other publications that end up in the big blue recycling bin outside our front door.

Those who don’t throw away publications in a timely fashion find their staircases blocked by piles of old magazines and outdated phone books.

Once in a while I still use the phone book. This morning I wanted to call my dentist, but I had forgotten his last name, so it didn’t exactly work for me. But if I still had a memory, it would have.

I googled “dentist in Mendocino” and quicker than one heartbeat I found him AND his phone number, PLUS a map to his office, PLUS an offer to compare on Ebay, whatever that means for a dentist. It was way faster than fumbling through the phone book, because I never turn off my computer.

Google: Fast, wastes electricity. Phone book: Slow, difficult to chew and digest.

I’ve come to rely on Internet look-up for words and phrases in my new language, Italian, and for English words I use www.dictionary.com much more often than “The Unabridged Random House Dictionary” I have in my office, despite the lovely polished wood revolving book stand.

If you set up a browser with your favorite reference sites (start with www.refdesk.com) you’ll find up-to-date data faster than you will by pulling out your favorite outdated reference books. I didn’t used to want to think this was true, but it’s true now.

Of course, somewhere they are mining heavy metals and burning coal to power this Internet thing; nothing that good could possibly be truly free.

Certainly I love books and the experience of sitting down with a juicy pile of them. Fiction wants to be savored. Memoirs call out to be chewed upon. But plain information needs only to be accurate and quickly available.

Did you know that Jupiter at its closest is 370 million miles or 591 million kilometers from Earth? Google does, and getting the answer took 26 hundredths of one second.

If you want to test this idea, search Google as well as your favorite reference book for the phrase “eating books” and let me know what you discover.

NOTES:

From the Washington Post online: Rob Pegoraro attempts to untangle computing conundrums and errant electronics each week. Send questions to The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071 or robp@washpost.com. Visit http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward for his Faster Forward blog.

The ALA has decided not to worry themselves overmuch over lead content in children’s books:

From Paul at the UC Davis bookstore:

First the internet tells us to be aware of our kids eating books and getting
really ill.

Then some guy comes along and writes a book about it - a book for kids!!
"The Incredible Book Eating Boy" by Oliver Jeffers, ISBN13: 9780399247491

27 August 2009

I Fear I'm Not Alone in This...

Buying books is an irrational act. I can prove this with one quick look around my office. I’ve got a thousand books here and I’ve not read half.

Why is this? For decades my excuse was “I’m running a bookstore.” Although my customers were buying and sometimes reading books, I didn’t have time for that. After I finished staff meetings, meetings with book salespeople, email and promotions, fixing things, thinking about fixing things, hiring people and the opposite, working the front counter, shipping and receiving, going to trade shows and education seminars, and the rest, I was way too busy to read books.

Booksellers don’t read. It’s as simple as that. If they do read, it’s in the corners of time, around the edges of space, in other dimensions. In this world: not enough time.

Now that I’m several years into the space sardonically referred to as “retired” I find I do have more time to read. Not enough time, but more.

Like an already-gorged gourmand who eats out too much, I find myself in bookstores wherever I go, and rarely leave without a couple of books under my arm. Often I get to read part of them, but usually I’m distracted by the next new bag of books from somewhere. It never stops, nor do I wish it to.

And I fear I’m not alone. Many listeners to and readers of this show have told me they can’t stop acquiring books, and reading them. It’s a lovely obsession.

Not long ago I found on a bookshelf in my study an uncorrected bound galley of a book to be published in April, 1998. I dug right in, eleven years late: “Sleeping Where I Fall” by Peter Coyote, the famous actor and reformed hippie. This is a scary good book. Why isn’t it more famous?

It will be good therapy for me, and perhaps instructive for you, if I describe my latest acquisitions here. First step: Admit you are powerless to stop acquiring and reading books.

First, the new, unread by anyone books: I recently purchased Peter W. Stearn’s “A Journey in Time,” a gorgeous hardbound art book depicting the wildflowers of Mendocino county arranged by month of bloom. This is a book I hand–sold many times but never snagged for myself. Now I can tell the difference between Queen Anne’s Lace and Yampah, Yarrow and Cow’s Parsnip, Angelica and Pearly Everlasting.

Other new books I plan to use or read or both: “The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume One,” “Wildlife of the North Atlantic” “The People of the Sea” by David Thomson, “Waking Up in Eden” by Lucinda Fleeson, “Coastal Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest,” “The Kingdom by the Sea” by Paul Theroux, “Coasting” by Jonathan Raban, “The 25th Hour” by David Benioff, “The Spies of Warsaw” by Alan Furst, “The Language of Bees” by Laurie R. King.

Then there’s a group of books I picked up on various whims in various used bookstores. You’ll see the patterns: “Merda! The REAL Italian You Were Never Taught in School” by Roland Delicio, “The Italian Secretary” by Caleb Carr, “The Piano Shop in the Left Bank” by Thad Carhart, “Gentlemen, More Dolce Please!, An Irreverent Memoir of Thirty-five Years in the Boston Symphony Orchestra” by Harry Ellis Dickson, “Real Men Don’t Rehearse, Adventures in the Secret World of Professional Orchestras” by Justin Locke, “Evenings with the Orchestra” by Hector Berlioz, “The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes,” “The Monopoly Companion,” and “Kipling, A Selection of His Stories and Poems.”

The Kipling book was poised on a sidewalk cart in very good condition outside a metaphysical bookstore in Ashland, Oregon. When I saw the book I knew it finally was time to get to know Rudyard Kipling. I don’t know why that made sense, but that’s what I was thinking as I picked it up and stroked its curry-yellow dust jacket.

Each of these books (maybe with the exception of the Monopoly book) was purchased for a reason. Some I’m keeping for dessert, like the Furst and the Carr; others to read or re-read as background for future travel adventures.

And a few good literary anecdotes might come in handy some time.

And I’ve always wanted to finally, just finally, win one darn game of Monopoly.

.....



20 August 2009

Andy Ross: Good Pitch / Bad Pitch

Andy Ross used to own Cody’s Books in Berkeley. Cody’s is no more. Many people miss the original, historic store on Telegraph, and the more modern store on 4th street, both now closed forever. A few even miss the short-run attempt to establish a Cody’s in downtown San Francisco.

Wishing won’t bring Cody’s back, but Andy Ross continues on in his new role as independent agent to the stars, or anyway to writers of narrative non-fiction, history, politics and current events, science, journalism, and cultural subjects in general.

Recently, Andy wrote a useful essay titled “Good Pitch / Bad Pitch: How to Impress those Jaded Publishers.” In the interest of helping would-be writers get published -- as if -- here are excerpts:

Andy begins: ...It is a tough world out there. And if you aren't a disgraced ex-governor of Alaska, it is pretty hard to get a book contract. So here are some tips and examples of weak and strong pitches to make in your book proposal.

Weak: I am willing to go on an 8 city tour (they probably won't send you, and this indicates that you might have unrealistic expectations. They used to let you travel first class and stay at the Ritz Carlton... expect to go by Greyhound).

Strong: I am willing to schedule an 8 city tour at my expense (any other ideas that include "at my expense" are always popular with publishers).

Weak: This would be a great story on Oprah (Uh-huh. It's also the oldest story in the book. Similarly unrealistic).

Strong: I am sleeping with Oprah's hairdresser. (If you are going to pitch media connections, they should be concrete and have reasonable expectations of results. But don't oversell yourself. They can smell b.s.).

Weak: I am willing to go to book signings at my local bookstore (They know that anyway. And this won't sell books).

Strong: I have arranged presentations with the staff at Google. Steve Jobs loves my book and has agreed to purchase 5,000 copies to give to key employees at Christmas time. They are also interested in purchasing non-verbatim electronic multi-media rights as an (application) for the IPod. (This is too good to be true, so you better get Steve to write a letter to that effect. Publishers love sales outside of bookstores. It is like extra money).

Weak: I will reluctantly agree to be on Fresh Air, schedule permitting. (If you are not going to aggressively flog the product, this will not be well received).

Strong: Film rights for this product have been optioned to Stephen Spielberg (There might be a possibility here, but there are many options out with few movies ever made).

Very Strong: Film Rights have been SOLD to Stephen Spielberg. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are signed up. Currently being filmed on location in Montana. (This pitch doesn't happen very often).

Strong: I am the extremely charismatic and controversial governor of Alaska and vice-presidential candidate. (Don't worry that she is inarticulate, has nothing to say, and can't write).

Almost as strong: I am the extremely charismatic and controversial governor of Alaska who has quit with disgrace and lack of dignity. (Hey, it's all about celebrity).

Weak: My friends loved this book. (Your friends won't tell you the truth).

Strong: My mother is the disgraced former governor of Alaska and she loved this book. My former boyfriend hated this book and will go public and tell tawdry and salacious tales about me. (In this business, there is no such thing as bad publicity).

So much for Andy’s suggestions to writers. If you’d like to read Andy’s full blog, you can point your browser to andyrossagency.wordpress.com

NOTES:



13 August 2009

Grandma Roseby's Story

News from all over the place...

One hundred and five year-old Clara Roseby reads six books a week. She lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales. She likes a good, old-fashioned story, but nothing American, and no swearing, please, we’re British.

Her daughter picks out books for her from the newly refurbished library in Fishguard, twelve miles to the north, on the shores of the Irish sea.

The librarians figure Grandma Roseby has borrowed more than 10,000 books in the past 35 years. And as one local politician likes to point out, it’s all free.

Go Clara! If only we had free libraries in America. Wait a minnit... we do! And when’s the last time you visited your local library?

On another but related subject, news reports say “Competition is growing in the eBook reader market.” Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Ereader, and others, want you to download books to read on their machines.

Everyone in the biz is talking about this latest assault on the tradition of ink, paper and glue books sold in brick and mortar, or board and nail palaces called independent bookstores. Big Box outfits and tax-free Internet sales sites have dinged the independents, but many persevere quite happily. Will E books be a final blow?

I’m thinking no. For several basic reasons, electronic books will likely remain a subsidiary market to traditional paper books. Consider the basic essence of a book compared to an electronic device.

Since the first days of moveable type no one has owned “the book.” By contrast, electronic readers belong to particular corporations. They have proprietary formats. They are not compatible with competitors, unless they strike a deal.

The content of e book readers also is proprietary. Even if the book is free, or out of copyright, you are merely licensed to read it. In the end and in the fine print, you do not own what you download.

Amazon has the ability to electronically reach into your machine and simply delete a book, even one you thought you had purchased outright. Amazon recently did just this with copies of George Orwell’s novel “1984" without asking anyone. Overnight the book disappeared from Kindles everywhere. Something to do with legal rights to a particular edition.

Reconsider the printed book. It’s not just monks in cloisters anymore. Anyone and everyone can produce, distribute, sell and read books. No limit to how many you can own. No one sneaks into your study and takes back a book you bought.

With a Kindle in your pocket you will never know for sure when information is being collected about you and your reading habits. What’s to keep Amazon or Sony from inserting live adverts into your book? Internet links to products mentioned in a story? What’s to stop them?

If you buy a book and take it to a grassy bank above a quiet stream to read Shelley or Keats, or “Eat, Pray, Love” or whatever, it’s your quiet stream and your quiet book, good for several lifetimes, pretty much forever. Your book does not need to be upgraded. It will not become obsolete, require a software update or need to be recharged.

Your own personal, private, permanent ownership of what you read, and the printed book’s infinite portability and infinite lifetime is why books have endured. They will continue to be easier to use and more dependable than reading machines.

I’m pretty sure Grandma Roseby in Pembrokeshire would agree with me.

NOTES:

Grandma Roseby’s story...

Blogger Tony Bradley on the PC World online site discussed ebook readers...

Just for fun...

06 August 2009

A seamless web of green: The Shallow Water Dictionary

It’s one of those blissful quiet mornings... foggy but no wind, computer but no Internet service... forest but no forest fire.

Ensconced in this blissful quiet space, I picked out a small but lovely book from my favorite bookshelf (favorite bookshelf: the one I can reach from where I’m sitting) and rediscovered a small gem:: “Shallow Water Dictionary” by scholar and Harvard professor in the History of Landscape, John R. Stilgoe.

Professor in the History of Landscape. I wonder how many students aspire to that particular discipline?

This book immediately puts you in the mood to drop oars into shallow water, and manoeuver among the salty dunes of New England. The subtitle of “Shallow Water Dictionary” is “A Grounding in Estuary English.” Stilgoe uses words and the history of words to paint a poetical picture of the coastside transitional lands he clearly loves.

He begins, “In the shallows the oarsman pulls precisely, for in the shallows, a wrong stroke or two, a slight falling off before the wind, means a gentle grounding in clean white sand or grayish-black mud. Navigating the shoals and sandbars and negotiating the creeks meandering through almost limitless salt marsh require continuous picking along, constant choosing, countless corrections of course.”

It soon becomes apparent that the author is using precise nautical terms and their etymology in order to approach a visual description of a very particular landscape. He aims to renew local language and understand the environment by careful attention to how it is named.

Reading Stilcoe is refreshing and reassuring. Refreshing because very few writers paint as well, and reassuring because his brief essay is connected to eons of coastal seafaring and coastal lore.

Another way to say it: It’s as if Henry Thoreau wrote a dictionary.

Stilcoe continues, “Where the rower... meets no other humans, language might be as unimportant as watches or clothes or credit cards. But the rower... intends a book, a landscape history of the realm of estuary and marsh, and pulls as an explorer, as a chronicler... Oriented toward the visual, he still needs to write, and in writing wonders about the quiet, almost mute vocabulary of his neighborhood, his environs. He wonders as he pulls along the creeks. In the quiet, the old language barely whispers.”

He goes on to define “creek” and brackish, seaward, seamarks, skiff, skeg, and many more resonant terms, all the while conveying the majesty of a land that stretches from Maine to Cape Fear in North Carolina.

The entire book might take you an hour to read, but you will savor it much longer than that. It’s a small dark blue hardcover published by Princeton Architectural Press without jacket, and it comes with a ribbon to mark your place. It’s a gift book without any of the dazzle associated with pop culture.

The “Shallow Water Dictionary” is a quiet contribution to deeper understanding. It will put you in the mood to launch your skiff into shallow waters, and go exploring yourself in the landscape of sights, sounds, and words.

NOTES:

“Shallow Water Dictionary” by John R. Stilgoe. Princeton Architectural Press hard cover $14.95. ISBN 1568984081. Currently in print, but difficult to obtain. There are used copies out there for sale, too.

Other titles by John R. Stilgoe: Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape; Landscape and Images; Lifeboat; Outside Lies Magic: Discovering History and Inspiration in Ordinary Places; Alongshore; Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939; Metropolitan Corridor : Railroads and the American Scene; Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845.

His web site: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~stilgoe/index.html

"Yet the marshes are almost invariably deserted, at least away from the major channels. People tend to find them uninteresting, not variegated enough, monotonous, boring, although finding out what such people think, when such people avoid the marshes, proves a little difficult. Exploring in what is at first glance a seamless web of green undoubtedly pales besides roaring about the open ocean in an engine boat..."

30 July 2009

Harshing the Mellow

Is this yesterday? She asks, picking through the pile of recycled newspapers. No, I say. Today is today. Yesterday is yesterday.

It’s the little things, the little precise verbal things, that make a relationship go. As in go South. No, that new sweater does not make you look fat. It’s the fat that makes you look fat. Then she gets mad at me for no apparent reason.

I have harshed her mellow, as one major newspaper says they say in the marijuana patches of Mendocino county. When we travel, people look askance when we say we’re from Mendocino.

In fact, it’s worse than askance. They seriously smirk. You smokie the dopie? Shreddy the hemp-y, bogart the joint and all that? No, we explain. We live in Caspar. You’ve never heard of Caspar, that’s why we say we’re from Mendocino. That’s MEN-DO-CI-NO, on the COAST. It’s cold there. You can’t grow a red tomato, you can’t raise a green pepper, and you certainly can’t grow pot. In a hothouse, maybe. Five miles inland, no problem. but very little dope growing in lettuce peas and potatoes country. We haven’t seen the sun in five months.

When the sun does show up we go around asking each other what is that shiny yellow thing in the sky. Everyone smiles, but in fact no one knows for sure. We could Google it – What Is The Sun? – but we’re too busy watering the lettuce so it doesn’t dry out in the yellow glow.

The sun’s out! my garden-loving weed-pulling wife announces as she runs outside. It ‘s not really “out” I mutter to myself. If it was out, everything would be really dark and cold and that would be highly disturbing. The light is out, but the sun is... what is it... maybe “on.” The sun’s on! Come and look.

It’s good I don’t say this out loud. I know what’s good for me, or at least I’m learning.

An in-depth article in the Washington Post this week reviewed the Mendocino marijuana industry, interviewing pot heads, medical users, growers, politicians, the Sheriff, and others. The author notes that Mendocino’s golden age of dope growing ended when “growing acceptance of marijuana elsewhere in the Golden State unleashed a confluence of demand, tolerance and legal ambiguity rooted in political cowardice.

“The result set in motion forces that seriously harshed the mellow here and brought the ‘war on drugs’ to the one place in America it had never really reached.”

Harshed the mellow. I haven’t heard that since Sir Douglas walked and talked in the park in Mendocino, which, of course, he never did, as the closest Sir Douglas and his famous song hit “Mendocino” ever got to Mendocino was a bar in Wichita, but that’s another story, and there isn’t any park in Mendocino, unless you count Mendocino Headlands State Park, which probably hadn’t been invented when Sir Douglas first sang his famous song, and who knighted him, anyway?

Jean Jacques Rousseau once confessed, in his “Confessions,” that “women, especially great ladies, must be amused, and that it is better to offend them than to bore them; and I judged, from her remarks upon the conversation of the people who had just taken leave of her, what she must have thought of MY silly nonsense.”

Yes dear, that is yesterday’s paper, the sweater does NOT make you look fat, and the sun is out.

NOTES:

Here’s the URL for the Washington Post article, but they may make you register (free) in order to read it.

I have a lovely old Modern Library (#243) version of Rousseau’s “Confessions” complete with dust jacket and “15 cents” penciled on the top. However, it’s long out of print. Here’s the only current paperback version available as a new book:

“The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. BiblioLife paperback $18.99. ISBN 1103029916

My wife just asked: “Why does he have to confess?”

23 July 2009

Thoroughly & Completely Entertaining

What do you call a book that is thoroughly and completely entertaining from start to the final page? I call it fortunate that I accidently discovered the book in the first place. I was browsing in my local independent bookstore when a “Staff Favorite” sticker came up and waved in my face.

The sticker was attached to David Benioff’s novel “City of Thieves,” set in Leningrad during the terrible siege of 1942. Staff member Jeanette Boyer squeezed the following blurb onto a tiny Staff Fave flag:

“You wouldn’t think two young men’s quest for a dozen eggs would prove a dangerous venture, but set it in war-torn Russia in the midst of a Nazi invasion and you have a spell-binding story.”

When you open “City of Thieves” you meet the narrator in Florida, where he has traveled to interview his Russian emigre grandparents.

“I brought a tape recorder with me. I thought maybe we could talk about the war.”

... “You’re forty years old. Now you want to know?”

“I’m thirty-four. I looked at my grandfather and he smiled at me. ‘What’s the matter? You guys were Nazis? You’re hiding your Nazi past?

“‘No, he said, still smiling. ‘We weren’t Nazis.”

Any reasonable reader at this point would expect he’s about to encounter yet another war memoir. But the author undercuts that assumption at the start. Pestered for names, locations, weather conditions on certain days, grandfather counsels the author: “David, he said. ‘You’re a writer. Make it up.”

And so he does, creating a highly believable true-ish story based on highly likely situations. Benioff thus has freedom to tell his compelling tale the way he imagines it. Every page seems real as old shoes stuck in frozen mud. You will get your fill of death and starvation, selfishness and courage, suspense and danger, bizarre scenes and painfully romantic ones. It’s as if Tolstoy had managed to make “War and Peace” both short and very personal.

The story begins, “You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, we dreamed of the feasts we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier... In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.”

Leningrad has become a forlorn city littered with frozen corpses, abandoned to fate, cut off from the countryside, bombed from the sky and mortared from nearby emplacements.

The survivors deal with it in a variety of surprising accommodations. “The boy sold what people called library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper. The stuff tasted like wax, but there was protein in the glue, protein kept you alive, and the city’s books were disappearing like the pigeons.”

An NKVD colonel pulls from prison the narrator and a charismatic friend named Kolya, sparing their lives in return for an impossible task: Go out into the starving city and somehow locate a dozen fresh eggs. The colonel’s wife wants to bake a wedding cake for her beautiful (and well-fed) daughter.

Impossible eggs or instant execution: Kolya and Lev choose eggs. They have four days. The rest of the book details their adventure.

If I was still on staff I would have made “City of Thieves” my favorite as well. When I came to the final page, I said “Wow” out loud. I don’t do that very often.

Author David Benioff is a screen writer and novelist. His first novel, “The 25th Hour,” was made into a feature film directed by Spike Lee; and he has published “The Nines Roll Over,” a short story collection.

NOTES:

“City of Thieves” by David Benioff. Plume Books paperback $15. ISBN 0452295297.

“When the Nines Roll Over: And Other Stories” by David Benioff. Plume Books paperback $15. ISBN 0452286646.

“The 25th Hour” by David Benioff. Plume Books $15. ISBN 0452282950.

In the Land of Long Fingernails

I picked up “In the Land of Long Fingernails” for the macabre title and the nice purple cover. I stayed for the jokes, for the gory details, for the sense of reliving the Sixties, stoned, all over again, but this time stoned in a graveyard in Canada.

The book is subtitled “A Gravedigger in the Age of Aquarius,” and it’s a hoot, especially if you’re a coot who lived through the short-lived Age of Aquarius. Aquarius lasted a couple of years, max.

“In the Land of Long Fingernails” is less deep, so to speak, than “Stiff” by Mary Roach, and not as poetic as books by Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet, author of a number of seriously literary works.

Following his graveyard employment, “Fingernails” author Charles Wilkins went on to publish a dozen books and became a writing teacher. Here he dives back into his memory, perhaps with a bit of fiction thrown in, to recall a long summer he spent forty years ago at what he euphemistically names Willowlawn Everlasting Cemetery.

“To call (the cemetery) by its real name in this era of inquisitional conformity,” he explains, “would be an open invitation to, at best, a law suit, at worst a contract hit – on me.”

Perhaps Wilkins exaggerates, perhaps not. There are issues of union rules and the abuse of these rules. There are employees hailing from southern sections of Italy, graves dug or undug in the night. Who knows, maybe there’s a whole other story of criminal conspiracy hiding under the surface of this tale, but the surface of this story is strange enough.

How strange? For example: Hundreds of “welfare graves” in the oldest section of the graveyard – city burials, no gravestones – are secretly dug up, the plots emptied, cleaned up, resold.

ACTUAL LATE BREAKING NEWS: “A group of Illinois grave diggers were charged Thursday with running a morbid scam in which they exhumed corpses in a black cemetery so they could resell the empty plots, cops said.
Investigators suspect more than 300 bodies were dug up in the suburban Chicago graveyard and discarded in a pit so the ghouls could cash (in).”
Back to our story: Nearby neighbors find femurs and hip joints in their back yards. They are assured they are animal bones, nothing more, and the objects are hastily gathered up and reburied. “The problem, shrugs (one employee) is that ground pressure and frost keep pushing the bones to the surface. And the dogs and coons just keep digging down to get them.”

Then there’s the gravediggers’ strike that took place during a heat wave. Don’t ask.

Those five months during the Canadian summer of 1969 were an education for Wilkins, more or less as wild as the stuff going on every other place in the Western world in those years.

“For those of you who missed it, or have forgotten,” he writes, “1969 was, among other things, a time of flower children, free love, campus protest, the battle for civil rights, the death of God.” That year half a million seekers got themselves back to the garden at Woodstock, and a pair of US astronauts “planted an American flag on the moon... (and) knocked a golf ball around amid the rocks and moon dust.”

On his first day at Willowlawn Everlasting, Wilkins is shown how to bury the “ornate little caskets” containing cremated human remains.

“Luccio dug a knee-deep hole and said, ‘Throw me one of those birdhouses.’ ‘Which one?’ I said, examining them on the ground. ‘Any of them.’ “I looked at him, thinking I had misunderstood.

“‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same.’”

That sets the tone. So does this advice from another gravedigger: “‘There are two things you have to do to survive around here,’ he told me as he twisted a bud of shredded marijuana into a rolling paper. ‘The first is to pay no attention whatever to anybody in any position of authority – that’s crucial. The second is to spend as little time as possible thinking about reality.’”

Still useful advice for some of us. “In the Land of Long Fingernails” finds humor in the rituals of death and entertainment in the earthy details. All probably much more fun to read about than experience first hand.

NOTES:

“In the Land of Long Fingernails, A Gravedigger in the Age of Aquarius” by Charles Wilkins. WW Norton hard cover $24.95. ISBN 9781602397095.

Cover blurb: “I don’t know how Charles Wilkins escaped my notice until now, but I intend to read as many of his books as I can before I, too, end up in the land of long fingernails.”
– Mary Roach, author of “Stiff”

News | 07/09/2009: Four nabbed in ghoulish scheme at historic cemetary by Bill Hutchinson

11 July 2009

Do evil, get rich

Let’s see... Pacifica Foundation, a non-profit progressive radio network founded by pacifists in 1949 currently is $740 thousand dollars in the hole. Our community radio station, KZYX, is about $140 thousand behind. Mendocino’s Symphony of the Redwoods is suffering from lack of funds, so are any number of other non-profits.

Is there anyone or anything not currently in the red zone?

Oh yes, this headline: “Dick Cheney gets $2 mill to pen memoir.”

The most secretive, torture-embracing politician of our time, main brain behind the Bush disaster, gets two million dollars to speak about mishandling the economy, spying on Americans and shooting his duck hunting partner.

Do evil, get rich. It’s the American way.

Publisher Simon & Schuster is paying Cheney, and the same publisher is about to unleash the world’s biggest/fastest most tasteless instant book in history, 500,000 copies of “Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson.”

One day after Jackson’s death, Simon & Schuster bought the rights and undertook a race with the pallbearers. Jackson died on June 25; the tell-all will be published on July 14.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the publisher took only four days from first hearing of the manuscript until it delivered files to the printer. Seven copy editors worked on the manuscript during that period.

Meanwhile, newly-resigned Alaska governor Sarah Palin is writing a book, due next year, for a reported advance of “several million dollars,” according to her agent. At least 20 books have already been published about Ms. Palin, with another half dozen scheduled. No one knows if her resignation will hurt or help her own book, but the betting in publisher world is that it’s better to get these books out fast than to wait.

One former Penguin editor said, “The truth about all these books is that you treat the authors like stocks: You want to buy low and sell high, or buy high and sell even higher. With Palin, you don't know where her stock is going to be in a few years. So you want to sell now.”

Finally, consider the new yearbook published for Vineland High School in New Jersey. When students unpacked their yearbooks they discovered the wrong year printed on the spine.

The publisher apologized and sent 525 stickers to cover 08 with 09. They did not offer to return the $75 to $85 each student paid for a copy of the yearbook.

One graduating student told her local newspaper, "I think they should have checked it out -- just to see if there were mistakes -- before giving them to the school. Or they should've given us better stickers," she said, noting the decals aren't adhering very well.

I can’t finish this litany of bad news without mentioning Amazon and their book reading device The Kindle. News this week is that they’ve lowered prices so you can obtain one for just under $300.

The other news, more technical but potentially much more important: Amazon has applied for a group of patents that may allow them to insert adverts into books you would read on your Kindle.

Lessee... You’re reading along in “Oliver Twist” and you get to the part where little Oliver pleads, “Please sir, I want some more” and up pops an ad for McCann’s Finest Steel Cut Oat Meal. You’re reading Kerouac’s “On the Road” and you find yourself staring at a Ford truck video. Pickapeppa Sauce for Faulkner. Marlboros for Sedaris. Won’t reading be fun one day!

notes...

The Wall Street Journal on the instant Michael Jackson book