26 January 2012

World Book Night

UPDATE 2 February 2012: World Book Night (WBN) has extended the sign-up deadline to midnight on Monday, February 6, for book givers and for stores and libraries that would like to serve as book pick-up locations for the April 23 celebration of reading. The goal is to recruit 50,000 book givers and hundreds of bookstores and libraries to be book pick-up locations across the country.

The non-profit people at World Book Night want to hand you 20 free copies of a current paperback book for you to give away on Monday, April 23.

You have to apply to do this, they have to pick you, and you have to apply right now – before midnight on February 1. If selected, you will choose your book from a list of 30 provided by participating publishers. Then give away the title you chose. World Book Night.

You’re encouraged to give books to strangers, not to family and friends. Find “light” or “non” readers” and hand each a book until your 20 have disappeared. They’re looking for 50,000 readers to give away a million books. You can be one of these inspirational people.

What’s the catch? Well, you have to do this right away, as the deadline is almost here, and WBN has to chose among thousands of applications to pick the most worthy. You tell them which three books you’d give away, and why. If your application is approved one of the titles you picked will be boxed and waiting for you at a nearby independent bookstore or community library.

In the meantime you can start to think about how to spot a light reader. How you tell a light from a heavy reader. I myself have been all of those things in the past, non, light and heavy, sometimes at the same time.

When I was in my 20s I hardly read a book or looked at TV. I was busy changing the world and chasing women, not in that order. Reading furthered neither, or so I thought at the time.

I was the classic “light” to “non” reader. Read a Vonnegut here and a Catch-22 there. Pondered deeply How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot by John Muir (probably not his real name). Got oil stains on it.  Read the Berkeley Barb and The Oracle. Not much else.

When I finally stumbled into bookselling I had a lot of catching up to do.

Suddenly I was surrounded by people who read books. All the time, night and day. They talked about them. They had opinions, favorites and failures. This was a new thing for me. I was educated by customers, by the opinionated people who worked the bookstore floor, by out-of-town sales people, catalogs, and book chatter I picked up everywhere.

During the initial decade I had little time for reading. I had to open up in the morning and close down at night, add up receipts and walk them to the bank, pay bills, negotiate with landlords, fight fire and flood, make smart decisions about everything, not least of which included figuring out which titles to stock. Little time for reading anything but publisher catalogs.

In 2006 the bookselling monkey, fat and sassy, jumped off my back. Now I am the obsessed, catching-up-with-classics, free-form reader I always wanted to be.

People in their 20s and early 30s typically don’t read much. It’s not because of electronics, it’s because first-person, hands-on life does not encourage the contemplative life. This opinion may be totally wrong of course, as it is based solely on my own experience.

So.. If you successfully sign up for World Book Night you will then be presented with a list of 30 titles. Pick the book you want to give away.

I looked at the list of free books. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ll admit it – I don’t read a lot of fiction, and of the books on the freebies list I think I may have read two. Two of 30, or about six per cent. I am definitely a “light” reader in relation to these admirable books. Maybe someone will spot me on the evening of April 23 wandering the streets somewhere, and have mercy on my lightly literate soul.

Maybe she’ll hand me a copy of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Sorry – that’s the one title I think I have read. Show me The Book Thief, The Lovely BonesThe Poisonwood BibleQ is for Quarry, orThe Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. I haven’t read those yet.

Not Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – I have a copy but haven’t read it yet. Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo? I THINK maybe I read that. Let me take a look at the first page...

NOTES

Here’s where to register to be a book giver.

More information about World Book Night USA

And the British site, where World Book Night was invented

19 January 2012

Venice "La Citta' Magica"

Read the text below and do the exercise: “Venice the magical city, the city of water, dominatrix of the seas, the city of a thousand faces, the mysterious city.”

Odd that my Italian teacher, born in Vicenza, near Venice, now living in Istanbul – odd that she would send me this exercise in the Italian language just now, when I’m reading the magical book Venice: Pure City by acclaimed British writer Peter Ackroyd.

To open this beautifully constructed book is to fall into the poetry of Venice:


"They voyaged into the remote and secluded waters.They came in flat-bottomed boats, moving over the shallows. They were exiles, far from their own cities or farms, fleeing from the marauding tribes of the North and the East."

For those who love Venice, only this kind of poetry can do it justice. He continues:


"This was a solitary place, its silence broken only by the calls of the seabirds and the crash of the billows of the sea... at night it was the setting of a vast darkness, except in those places where the moon illumined the restless waters... Yet in the daylight of the exiles’ approach the silver sea stretched out into a line of mist, and the cloudy sky seemed to reflect the silvery motions of the water. They were drawn into a womb of light..."

These paragraphs open a short history of Venice, as if any recounting could conjure Venice’s magic, an admittedly unique and indescribable phenomenon. The centuries-old power of Venice is long departed, leaving ruins, mists and reflections for modern eyes to ponder.

Ackroyd describes the building of Venice as “an act of communal perseverance against nature.” Piles of oak, larch and elm were driven into the ground beneath strata of clay and sand, sixteen feet down. Cross-beams were laid on, then cement and broken stone, a decking of wooden planks, and more cement. “From these foundations Venice rose, resting upon a petrified forest” that is “almost imperishable” – if kept perpetually below the waters’ surface.

The buildings of Venice rose in brick,faced with marble facades – gorgeous Baroque and Gothic faces somewhat unrelated to the buildings behind them. This may remind an American reader of frontier towns. Jury-built wooden buildings on main streets boasted larger-than-life facades, as if the poor structures were swathed in elegant costumes with the backs cut out.

The Venetians have always been famously insecure. They live on shifting mounds of mud, at the mercy of ocean tides and the falling water table, dependent on trade to exist. Until the last century, drinking water in Venice was collected in neighborhood cisterns, compromised by sea water leaking in on the same conduits and pipes. Sometimes ships were sent to nearby rivers to collect fresh water.

The Venetians were relatively safe, but never wholly secure. I wonder if 19th Century settlers in California coastal logging towns sensed a similar insecurity.

The great redwoods were everywhere, but each mill town, and there were dozens, worked to cut them down ever more efficiently. Exposed hillsides silted up rivers and the fishing industry largely disappeared. When the big trees were gone the loggers departed. Mendocino survives now as a largely empty wooden town on its ocean-battered bluff, the remaining members of a working class serving tourists rather than industry.

Mendocino’s Historical Review Board insists their singular vision of the past be built out today. Similarly in Venice, Acroyd writes, “The contemporary restoration of many buildings... is a case history of seeming rather than being. In their devotion to appearances the restorers have created an unreal city, bearing little relation to its past or its present.”

Awash in tourists, both Venice and Mendocino ask the visitor to pretend things are as they always were. Even at its height Venice was insecure, isolated, inward looking, melancholy. Now it is our turn to tour – in museum dioramas – towns that once forged steel, built locomotives and cut down forests.

It amounts to a creation of fakes, Ackroyd believes. He quotes a German visitor from the early 20th century who remarked that Venice represented “the tragedy of a surface that has been left by its foundation.”

Still, the falseness “does not render Venice superficial,” Ackroyd writes. “Quite the contrary. The attention to surface, without depth, provokes a sense of mystery and of unknowability.”


NOTES

“The Futurist movement of Italy... in its manifesto... declared that it was time ‘to fill the stinking little canals with the rubble of the tottering infected old palaces. Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for idiots’; the entire city was a ‘great sewer of traditionalism.’”

Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd. Anchor Books paperback $21. ISBN 9780307473790.

The New York Times has a page collecting its articles on the author...

Decent article and a classic photo of the author...

12 January 2012


Spending time with new granddaughter this week. Everyone is into hugs and tickles. The women in this house have oxytocin running through their little blue veins.

Oxytocin is sometimes called “the cuddle hormone.” This drug is reputed to make women especially affectionate with babies.

This explains a lot, at least to me.

In the United Kingdom, McDonalds has temporarily begun providing books instead of toys with Happy Meals. On February 7 Happy Meals revert to the usual plastic toy delivery system along with the burgers, fries and chicken nuggets.

The books chosen – nine million of them are expected to be given away – are from the Mudpuddle Farm series, written by award-winning author Michael Morpurgo.

Morpurgo is the author of War Horse, a sentimental young adult novel set during World War I, later adapted for the stage and now a major movie by Steven Spielberg.

Each book comes with a finger puppet – a toy. McDonalds simply cannot give up on the toy idea.

Britain’s National Literary Trust is backing the promotion. They say no more than one British child in three owns even a single book. They want to change this.

In the New York Times, author David Bornstein reports on a nonprofit organization named First Book, which he says “is spearheading a new market mechanism that is delivering millions of new, high quality books to low-income children through thousands of nonprofit organizations and... schools.”

One commenter on the article noted, “The quality and diversity of books available from First Book is wonderful. Generally, with a budget of 2 dollars per book, the books that children have access to are poorly written, poorly illustrated, poorly bound, etc. With First Book, a budget of 2 dollars per book gives you hardcover books, award-winners, bilingual books, and more!”

In 2008, First Book launched its marketplace “with the goal of making books systematically available at deeply reduced prices - typically 50 to 90 percent off - to any organization certified tax-exempt and serving children in need,” Bornstein reported.

This scheme has important implications for everyone. If the experience of owning books is key to children’s motivation and learning, First Book is a wonderful thing. Publishers have an additional, dependable place to sell their books, even at deep discounts, encouraging them to keep on producing quality books. 

First Book began as a book “bank” – a means to distribute publisher overstocks to reading programs. 85 million books have been given away in this manner, but in recent times smaller print runs and increased need have shown the shortcomings of this system. First Book added the marketplace to their offerings.

First Book has many allies in the effort to get books into the hands of children. At Mendocino Coast Hospital newborns receive Goodnight Moon in English or Spanish, purchased at discount from local bookstores and donated by the teachers’ organization Delta Kappa Gamma.

In Wisconsin and Minnesota the volunteer group Neighborhood Little Free Libraries builds simple "take a book, leave a book" wooden structures in front yards, by a sidewalk, coffee shop or park. They hold 20-30 books that kids and adults can give and take.

In southern California the organization Access Books collects and donates books to local libraries under the slogan “Give a child a book, she’ll be happy. Give a child a library, she’ll be literate.” Book Ends in Los Angeles has donated over 2 million books to classrooms and youth organizations.

There are many more such organizations, and some are listed in the Notes section of my wordsonbooks blog.

In Mendocino county citizens last fall voted a sales tax increase to permanently fund public libraries. As someone said, we need another Andrew Carnegie to fund a wave of new library construction so we can have as many libraries as Starbucks.

Wouldn’t that be interesting!

NOTES



David Bornstein in The New York Times on children owning or not owning books


Access Books “With Literary and Access for All”

The Book Thing, where every book in the store is free but your daily take-away is limited to 150,000 books.

The name of our organization is "Look. It's My Book!" That says it all. When people ask where the money comes from, we reply with the simple truth: "people like you and me." The need is enormous, and for the children, the time is now. For fifteen dollars a year, someone can buy a school child 6 books -a small act of kindness that may make a big difference to that child.

The Libri Foundation donates children's books to rural libraries.

Another way to donate, and for free, is through sites like Click to Give. Advertisers pay for your daily click, and people get books.

Behind the Book, a NYC-based literacy organization, donates new books to students as part of a classroom reading promotion program, where we bring in the author of the book to lead several workshops and where the students work with the author to create their own original written work


04 January 2012

How to Write a Thriller

I was standing around in the mysteries section of my favorite local independent bookstore Christmas week – specifically that lost week between Christmas and New Years – looking for another Lee Child novel to read. Child writes thrillers, not mysteries, but that’s where I found him.

Brought Worth Dying For to the counter. A woman spotted the flashy red cover and exclaimed, “Wow – Lee Child – he’s a great read!” as if I wanted her opinion. It is good to meet a fellow fan.

You don’t get that on a Kindle. Gray sweater, gold chain on her neck, about 50. Real person, standing on a real carpet, in sight of the ocean. Nothing electronic about her.

Why do so many readers find these sometimes gory, always suspenseful Jack Reacher novels so gripping? Why do I read these books so fast? I try to stop at midnight but rarely can.

Lee Child’s ongoing character Jack Reacher is ex-military – definitely a John Wayne type. He’s a drifter without fixed address. Trouble finds him. He’s a never-lose street fighter, accurate with any weapon that comes to hand. And in all these novels Reacher vanquishes whatever he sets out to vanquish. John Wayne all the way. Also a Mission Impossible Tom Cruise type, except Reacher is way taller and would crush Tom Cruise.

Lee Child uses all the tricks known to successful thriller writers and he does it well. Even the most plain descriptive passages advance the action:

“The Pentagon is the world’s largest office building, six and a half million square feet, thirty thousand people, more than seventeen miles of corridors, but it was built with just three street doors, each of them opening into a guarded pedestrian lobby.”

Soon Reacher is striding through radial three across B wing to A wing, pursued by a bunch of – probably -- cops.

And you keep on reading because chapters end like this:

“I thought: should I be worried? I was under arrest. In a town where I’d never been before. Apparently for murder. But I knew two things. First, they couldn’t prove something had happened if it hadn’t happened. And second, I hadn’t killed anybody.

“Not in their town, and not for a long time, anyway.”

And the books begin well. Take this, from Killing Floor:

“I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.”

From Gone Tomorrow:

“Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of telltale signs. Mostly because they’re nervous. By definition they’re all first timers.”

You read that, you hang on for the ride, in this case a fateful subway ride.

In a 2006 essay, writer Linda Adams said for a thriller to work you need High Stakes. Planning. Pacing. A Goal. Credibility.

No Unnecessary Details: "In one of Clive Cussler's books, he interrupts a scene where a helicopter is about to crash to explain why the helicopter has to crash on a particular side. This stops the fast pace of the action scene, and it isn't needed for the reader to understand what's going on."

You have to have the Ticking Time Bomb. Dot the I's and Cross the T's. Be thorough.

Readers whip through Lee Child’s 500-page books faster than insomniacs eat ice cream, faster than a .338 mm bullet leaves the barrel. Almost faster than that.

Chapters are short and punchy. Reading Worth Dying For by page 100 I had finished Chapter 15. Six point six pages per chapter. Can’t get more entertaining than that.


NOTES

Linda Adams’ essay ...

Lee Child’s home on the web ...

The first five Reacher novels are Killing Floor; Die Trying; Tripwire; Running Blind;  Echo Burning.

The most recent five: Nothing to Lose; Gone Tomorrow; 61 Hours; Worth Dying For; The Affair. 

All published in paperback by Dell; Delacorte Press in hard cover.