Welcome to EarlyWord
Our luanch of EarlyWord YA GalleyChat on Feb. 14 was a rousing success. Join us for the second one on Tues., March 20 at 4 p.m. ET (a get-to-know-each-other social begins at 3:30). And, don't forget our adult GalleyChat, the first Tuesday of each month (info on how to join each, here).
Let us know what is happening in your library. Email me with information on books that are getting an unexpected number of holds and the titles you enjoy recommending.
Keep on reading,
NoraNora Rawlinson Co-Founder and Editor
The CBS News show 48 Hours Mystery had a sit down with Gotti family members on Saturday night, kicking off the show’s new season.
Victoria Gotti is publishing a “tell-all” book, This Family of Mine. The New York Post began a four-part series of excerpts on Sunday.
Libraries we checked do not show it on order. It is currently at #100 on Amazon sales rankings.
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Carolyn See really knows how to make you want to read a book. Her review of Jonathan Tropper’s novel, This is Where I Leave You, in today’s Washington Post grabs you from the first line:
Judd Foxman, the hapless narrator of Jonathan Tropper’s hilarious new novel can hardly believe it when his sister, Wendy, phones to say that their father is dead. But even more shocking is the news that Dad’s last request was for them to sit shiva for seven days…. If that sounds like a bad Thanksgiving dinner that goes on for a week, it is, and Judd’s heart sinks.”
Libraries we checked showed heavy holds running as high as 236, on orders of 11 to 36 copies.
As See observes, Judd and his brothers would prefer to “remain hard-punching, dope-smoking, lighthearted pranksters, but life won’t stand for that. Forgiveness, compassion and compromise are all in the cards for them now that their dad has died. This is a beautiful novel about men — their lust and rage and sweetness. Read it — or take it as a gift — when you next go on a dreaded family holiday.”
NPR also featured the novel among their “Books We Like,” along with an except.
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eBook downloadable from OverDrive.
Large Type from Thorndike; 9781410420589; $30.95.
Perfectly timed with the zeitgeist, Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression has been drawing prominent reviews. Intriguingly, the book argues that those culturally fertile times were stimulated by two conflicting desires: for the blunt truth about the country’s economic circumstances, and for the desire to escape from it. All libraries we checked own it in modest quantities (1 per each large branch), with holds of 13 or fewer.
In Maureen Corrigan’s interview with Dickstein on NPR’s Fresh Air, she describes Dickstein as ”not only one of America’s most perceptive literary critics, but also one of our best critical writers” and praises his “zesty voice” and “lightly worn erudition” that make the book “a thrill to read.”
Major critics like the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Yardley and the New York Times‘ Dwight Garner have also weighed in. Yardley takes Dickstein’s emphasis on Depression literature (in addition to film, music and other forms of entertainment) as an opportunity to reconsider the works of John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell, among others. And though Garner finds fault with Dickstein’s rambling, encyclopedic style, he also finds much to admire.
In the Los Angeles Times, Richard Schickel praises Dickstein for his ”true critical daring” in advancing the causes of artists “long since dismissed as ‘middlebrows’ by the cultural elite.”
And in the Boston Globe, Saul Austerlitz reflects on Dickstein’s description of the passivity of the American response to financial and political turmoil:
“Even when faced with unprecedented chaos, relatively few Americans took comfort in fascism and Communism. While Dickstein doesn’t come right out and say it, the conclusion after reading his book is a fairly obvious one: Americans couldn’t be mobilized for political rallies because they were all at their local movie theaters catching the latest Cary Grant comedy.”
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Though demand for Michael Jackson books languished in the aftermath of his death, that’s likely to change with today’s release of The Michael Jackson Tapes, a collection of candid conversations between the pop star and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach that were recorded for publication in book form before Jackson’s death. The book is at #147 on Amazon, but none of the libraries we checked had copies of the embargoed book, which isn’t yet listed on WorldCat.
According to the widely syndicated Associated Press story, The Michael Jackson Tapes “don’t break much new ground, but author Shmuley Boteach provides firsthand detail in Jackson’s voice about the excesses and obsessions the world glimpsed through the entertainer’s public facade.”
An interview with Rabbi Boteach is available on the Today Show website, along with an excerpt from the book. Boteach will also appear on NBC’s Dateline tonight.
The book delves into what Jackson describes as his lasting pain over having been robbed of his childhood by an abusive father who forced him to devote himself to his recording career from the age of 5. Jackson alleges that his father not only oiled his skin before whipping him, but told the young Jackson that he would drop him like “a hot potato” if he didn’t succeed as a singer. Jackson also talks about the resulting pressure he felt to maintain his success or risk losing his entire sense of worthiness. As a result, Jackson explains, his worldwide fame was overshadowed by profound loneliness that was relieved mainly by friendships with children, who were the only ones who accepted him as just another person.
According to Boteach, Jackson’s tragic tale holds many important lessons for parents about the dangers of neglecting and abusing children in our celebrity-oriented culture.
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As you know, Rod Blagojevich, author of The Governor appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night. The tone of the show is best summed up by this promo photo:
If you enjoy hearing someone talk REALLY fast, you may enjoy the full interview.
Despite the Daily Show‘s great track record in promoting books, this one is way down at #11,640 on Amazon’s sales rankings.
The coming to the show next week are likely to fare better:
Monday
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Tuesday
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Wednesday
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Based on holds, of the many heavily-anticipated titles arriving the week of 9/28, library users are most excited about Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (already reviewed in the NYT) and John Sandford’s Rough Country.
In the new issue of Time magazine, Lev Grossman says Her Fearful Symmetry is ultimately unsatisfying because it doesn’t have the “emotional force” of Time Traveler’s Wife, but,
…Niffenegger is an extraordinarily sensitive and accomplished writer, and Her Fearful Symmetry is a work of lovely delicacy. With its gravestones and ghosts and pallid, hollow-eyed waifs, it’s pure goth porn.
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Audio: S&S Audio; 9780743599306; $39.99
Downloadable eBook from OverDrive
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Surprisingly, holds are not nearly as heavy for the title many would expect to be the front runner, Mitch Albom’s Have a Little Faith. A few libraries have already received their copies.
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Downloadable eBook available from OverDrive
Audio: Books On Tape; 9780307704030
Large Type: Thorndike; 9781410420305
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Librarians will be looking forward to one of their BEA favorites, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, about a Malawi boy who, using what he learns from borrowed textbooks, builds a windmill from scrap metal to bring power to his impoverished village.
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Two anticipated titles that seem to be missing from a few library catalogs are Patrick Swayze’s memoir, The Time of My Life and Kimberla Lawson Roby’s A Deep Dark Secret.
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Audio: S&S; 9780743598309
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eBook Downloadable from OverDrive
Below is the full list of the upcoming week’s anticipated titles (for the rest of the season, check our Big Fall Titles — Spreadsheet ).
9/28 Nonfiction Ackerman, Diane Dawn Light
9/29 Fiction Hornby, Nick Juliet, Naked
9/29 Fiction Niffenegger, Audrey, Her Fearful Symmetry
9/29 Fiction Macomber, Debbie, The Perfect Christmas
9/29 Fiction Powers, Richard, Generosity
9/29 Fiction Roby, Kimberla Lawson, A Deep Dark Secret
9/29 Mystery Kanon, Joseph, Stardust
9/29 Mystery Sandford, John, Rough Country (Virgil Flowers)
9/29 Mystery Penny, Louise, The Brutal Telling
9/29 Nonfiction Albom, Mitch, Have a Little Faith
9/29 Nonfiction (graphic format) Apostolos, Doxiadis, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
9/29 Nonfiction Patterson, James, The Murder of King Tut
9/29 Nonfiction Prose, Francine, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
9/29 Biography Branch, Taylor, The Clinton Tapes
9/29 Memoir Swayze, Patrick, The Time of My Life
10/1 Childrens – Picture Book Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs and Lullabies
10/1 Childrens – Picture Book McDonnell, Patrick, Wag!
10/1 Teen Lennon, Stella, The Amanda Project
10/1 Fiction Eggers, Dave, The Wild Things
10/1 Nonfiction Kamkwamba, William, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
The movie, Coco Before Chanel is opening only in L.A. And New York this Friday, but its influence may be more wide-ranging. As you can guess from the title, the movie focuses on Chanel’s life before she became famous.
Today’s NYT “Style” section calls the movie a “gauzy film…that reconstructs Chanel’s early years as a Pretty Woman saga” and then proceeds to use it as a jumping-off point to write about the decidedly non-gauzy aspects of her lif as described in a new biography, Coco Chanel, by Justine Picardie, coming later this fall. An affair with a Nazi officer during the occupation of Paris, says the NYT, was “one in a series of morally compromising choices she made to ensure that even in wartime, with her competitors shuttering all around her, her business would continue to thrive.”
Coco Chanel
Justine Picardie
Retail Price: $40.00
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins – (2009-11-01)
ISBN / EAN: 0061963852 / 9780061963858
Also mentioned in the article is “a self-help guide masquerading as an irreverent biography”:
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Neither appear to be on order in libraries.
If you’ll be in New York City on Sunday, Oct. 4th, make time for a rare appearance by Judy Blume, who will be in conversation with our own EarlyWord Kid (and Bank Street librarian), Lisa Von Drasek at Symphony Space.
Click here for ticket information.
Former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight.
His book is now on order, or recently received, by most large libraries, with modest holds on modest quantites.
At the time we first wrote about it, libraries had not ordered it and it had not been reviewed by the prepub media. Since then, Publishers Weekly Annex has reviewed it, saying Blagojevich is,
…surprisingly candid about the shady inner workings of local Chicago politics…but holds himself aloof from the fray of corruption and glad-handing, faking an almost willful naivety; his absolute refusal to admit wrongdoing rings particularly hollow in combination with his canny insider observations.
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[Ed Note: The Collection Development staff at Sno-Isle PL (WA) write a lively blog cleverly called "Collection Developments @ Sno-Isle." Yesterday, Marin Younker posted this round up of reactions to Dan Brown's latest. We thought is was fun and Marin agreed to let us use it as a guest post]:
Dan Brown Round Up
(or, a desperate attempt to close numerous tabs on my browser)by: Marin Younker
Collection Development Librarian
Sno-Isle LibrariesDan Brown’s blockbuster met expectations and then some. After the first week on sale, a total of 2 million copies were sold. On the first day, the number of Amazon Kindle copies sold exceeded the number of Amazon print copies. Overall, the ebook sales are at 5% of total sales, which are average numbers for most titles which might quell (at least temporarily) the panic that the simultaneous release of an ebook spells the doom of the printed book.
Of course, some worried that the focus on The Lost Symbol would overshadow perfectly deserving titles (read “more literary”) including Blame, the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree of one of our recent ARC giveaways (by the way, Blame‘s been getting good reviews and we’re adding more copies to meet demand).
Blame: A Novel Michelle Huneven
Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2009-09-01) ISBN / EAN: 0374114307 / 9780374114305 There are positive reviews of Lost Symbol, along with the usual elitist grumblings (sorry Philip Pullman, I do love you, but really, have you even read The Lost Symbol? it doesn’t sound like it). PW gave it a starred review saying,
“Jealous thriller writers will despair, doubters and nay-sayers will be proved wrong, and readers will rejoice: Dan Brown has done it again.”
Thriller author Louis Bayard, writing for The Washington Post begins his relatively negative review with this honest comment, “Welcome to the least relevant review you will read all year,” because really, does it matter what the reviews are?
Over at The Guardian, John Crace provides a snarky digested version of The Lost Symbol; useful if you don’t want to wait or you’re not going to crack those pages anyway (also good for faking a conversation at a cocktail party).
“Mwahahahaha. A stream of mysterious italics appeared across the page as the 6ft 6in initiate admired his tattooed physique in the solitary confines of the Freemason Hall. Soon the Secrets of the Universe would be his.”
Even better, is Crace’s chronicle of his day spent reading the book (though not as good as Doc Turtle’s reading of J. R. Ward’s Dark Lover).
Dan Brown says that he is not immune to the criticism in an interview with Entertainment Weekly,
EW — “Does it sting when people say you stink?”
Brown — “Yes of course it hurts. But I wouldn’t expect everyone to like what I do. When you’re a creative person, you’re creating something that you like and it’s all just a matter of taste. I’m almost amused that people go so far out of their way to say I hate this guy’s writing. It’s just a strange sort of thing for people to do. It comes with that level of success. You just have people gunning for you.”
Interestingly, just a couple of weeks before the release of The Lost Symbol, there were less than 500 holds. Now, there are over 850, more than a week after its release. Who knew it would build moment as a word-of-mouth title?
(via PW Daily, Shelf Awareness, PW Daily, Bookshelves of Doom, and EW’s Shelf Life)
Holds are starting to mount for the The Bicycle Diaries, a series of philosophical meditations on biking in cities across the world by David Byrne, the musician and artist best known as the wide-eyed, oddball star of the ’80s rock band The Talking Heads. The book is drawing scads of reviews and profiles in many major cities as Byrne tours the country (partly by bike) to promote the book. One library we checked had 89 holds, though most libraries had holds in the twenties. More copies may be needed - all libraries we checked had 13 or fewer.
Reviewers give the books high marks. The Miami Herald finds that the rock star
“who sang about burning buildings, highways and life during wartime turns out to be an acute observer of the urban condition… Byrne delivers pithy indictments of the damage wrought on cities by the onslaught of the automobile and planners’ blind obedience to it, even as the artist in him can’t resist admiring the strange grandeur of urban ruins like Buffalo and Detroit.”
The San Francisco Chronicle adds, that
“if you’re a cyclist who appreciates the bicycle for the ways it helps to erode the atomization and social mediations imposed by cars, mass media and modern life in general, then you’ll find in Byrne’s ruminations a kindred spirit and a critical thinker who doesn’t stop at the first obvious insight.”
The twist to the coverage in each city is what Byrne thought of cycling there. The Los Angeles Times reports that he didn’t like biking in L.A., finding it “a residential theme park in what is essentially a desert.” The review also notes that he calls hilly San Francisco “philosophically and politically bike-friendly, but not geographically.”
Reviews of the book and profiles of Byrne have also appeared in the Philadelphia Enquirer, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, New York Magazine and Austin 360.
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Dan Chaon’s new suspense novel, Await Your Reply, has piled up an amazing number of major reviews. And that’s helped drive up reserves in all the libraries we checked (all have to 100 or more holds each), in the month since we wrote about the first wave of reviews in the Washington Post, People and the Los Angeles Times.
This twisted tale about about three characters who go searching for themselves after losing members of their families puts a new spin on the idea of identity theft and what it means to “find yourself.”
The New York Times Book Review compares the novel to ”an unfunny Coen brothers movie,” since it mostly takes place in the Midwest, and praises Chaon’s “intricate and suspenseful plotting” and ”some of the most paranoid material to hit American literature since Don DeLillo’s White Noise.”
Like the Times reeviewer, those at the Chicago Tribune and Pittsburg Post-Gazette concur that the book really picks up in the second half. The Post-Gazette sums it up best:
These stories, at first, present a lot of detail but not a lot of direction, but all the ink spent on backstory and character development prove to be worth it when the characters’ lives intersect, and the novel turns from stories about people trying to find themselves to a page-turning mystery.
Mystery-book blogger Sarah Weinman also chimes in:
I marvel at how Chaon can juggle so many storylines and merge them together at differing points, letting the reader discern connections. . . The payoff is great but AWAIT YOUR REPLY is less about how things resolve and more about how life defies resolution.
In the month since Await Your Reply was published, it’s also become quite popular on Good Reads, the social media site for readers, where 183 readers rated it, with 39% giving it a 4 star rating (out of 5), and it received 111 reviews.
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Also available on Phoenix Audio
I’m all for efforts to build anticipation for a new book, but I wonder if the game of unveiling a new cover isn’t getting a bit silly. The cover of Stephen King’s Under the Dome is being released in four stages (via Publishers Marketplace).
I date the beginning of this particular marketing technique to Breaking Dawn (or was one of the Harry Potter‘s? Chime in if you remember a earlier instance). Then there was the upcoming Wimpy Kid, followed by the reveal of The Lost Symbol (making it the first use of a dramatic reveal for an adult title?)
Below is Under the Dome‘s cover as it currently appears on Amazon. Stage one of the real cover is now available here and stage two will be revealed on Friday.
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Welcome to our new abbreviation; MIL = Missing In Libraries. Fortunately, it’s not as ubiquitious as LOL.
A few new self-help titles by previously bestselling authors are coming out this season that are not showing on most of the library catalogs we checked:
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Don’t hate her because she’s a husbandless Real Housewife revious title; her previous title, Naturally Thin was a bestseller.
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The Oprah spin-off, The Dr. Oz Show, hosted by one of the book’s authors, debuted the week of 9/14 (Variety’s review was not a rave). The first edition You on a Diet was published in 2006.
I often see people in midtown Manhattan, taking pictures of skyscrapers with their cellphones and wonder what kind of images they end up with.
They may not be as bad as I imagine. The current New Yorker cover was created using “Brushes,” an iPhone app.
And, rising on Amazon is a book of iPhone photographs. The author clearly has a big following on his blog — he mentioned the book yesterday and it rose to #213 on Amazon. The book is part of the launch of his iPhone photo app., which is also called “Best Picture.”
He describes both in the following video:
The book is published by a small publisher; both B&T and Ingram are showing it on their title files. Libraries we checked don’t own it.
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