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
As part of the launch of the Winnie-the-Pooh sequel, Return to The Hundred Acre Wood, Jim Dale, narrator of the audiobook, entertained a group of children at NYPL.
Ron Hogan at GalleyCat recorded Dale, including this brilliant dressing-down of adults who dare to keep their cell phones on:
Several more videos from the event are available on YouTube:
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We never thought we’d see a popular title, let alone a best seller, on the cover of the NYT BR. And, we certainly never expected to see the #1 fiction title in that august spot.
But, yes, dear reader, The Lost Symbol is on the cover of the October 11th issue.
And, who better to review it than a popular columnist, known for her ability to prick inflated egos, and who lives in the very city the book is set in; Maureen Dowd?
Does she like it? Well, you don’t call Maureen Dowd in to praise Caesar. Not only does she hilariously pick the book apart, she comes up with the bizarre theory that Brown’s book is a “desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with the Masons…”
She almost convinced us.
You gotta love a book with the title This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All.
You might expect it to be a short-list title aimed at LIS course adoption. But, no — it’s a general-interest trade title written by a journalist with a projected first printing of 40,000 copies.
There’s just one problem; it won’t be released until February.
But, don’t despair; you can read the first chapter online now.
Note: The author, Marilyn Johnson, will speak at the AAP’s Spring Sneak Preview for librarians on Wednesday, Oct. 21.
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Theologian Paul F. Knitter was profiled in the NYT on Saturday, propelling his new book, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, up Amazon’s rankings. Currently, it’s at #185; pretty high for a “compelling example of religious inquiry.”
Libraries catalogs we checked are not showing it. It was reviewed in Library Journal on 10/1 (“his most courageous and profound book yet”).
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We’ve been tracking the chorus of acclaim for Dan Chaon’s literary thriller, Await Your Reply. Amazingly, nearly two months after its publication, reviewers continue to write about the book. Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air added her voice on Friday, calling the book “A Smart, Twisting Novel Of Identity And Confusion.”
Not everyone is convinced, however. This weekend, the Boston Globe ran a review of it under the headline ”Reply goes for the cheap thrill.” Heaping scorn on the concept of a literary thriller, the reviewer says, “…these hopeful ventures are not only short on literature, but short on thrill: a queasy in-between.” Await Your Reply proves the point, he says; “Straining for the pace of a supermarket paperback, it’s a long way down from [Chaon's] first, You Remind Me of Me.”
By our count, including prepub reviews, that’s 15 thumbs up and just one down.
Holds continue to be heavy.
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Also available on Phoenix Audio
Downloadable eBook and audio from OverDrive.
Again this week, authors rule on the Daily Show.
Two of the three featured authors are no surprise; their books are being heavily promoted and they are owned widely in libraries.
Friday’s guest is Jennifer Burns, author of a new book on Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market. Few of the libraries we checked have it listed on their catalogs.
The Publishers Weekly review called it “…exasperatingly detailed and slow-going at times. But what University of Virginia historian Burns does well is to explicate the evolution of Rand’s individualist worldview, placing her within the context of American conservative and libertarian thought.”
Tuesday
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HarperAudio: 9780061953255; $39.99
Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive
Wednesday
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BBC Audio; ISBN-13: 978-0-7927-6669-8; $64.95
Audio downloadable from OverDrive
Friday
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Can it be? It appears that several libraries have not ordered Eoin Colfer’s authorized sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide series, which releases on Monday, the 30th anniversary of the original Guide.
The new book is heralded, but not reviewed, in the today’s issue of USA Today because,
To build suspense, the U.S. and British publishers have released only a part of And Another Thing (Hyperion, $25.99) to critics in advance.
USA Today goes on to explain how the author of Artemis Fowl became involved with continuing Douglas Adams’ popular adult series.
Hennepin has it on their catalog, showing 69 holds.
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Audio: Hyperion; 10/12/09; 9781401394226; $39.95
The biggest title releasing next week is, of course, the new Wimpy Kid book, Dog Days. Abrams announced this week that they are increasing the book’s print run to 4 million. Libraries and bookstores across the country are holding release parties, and the Menlo Park (CA) Library is hosting a signing by Jeff Kinney on Oct. 20th, in conjuction with local bookseller, Kepler’s.
In most libraries, holds are outstripping those for Michael Connelly’s Nine Dragons and Vince Flynn’s Pursuit of Honor.
Fiction
10/12 Colfer, Eoin And Another Thing: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Novel
10/13 Cole, Kresley & Showalter, Gena; Deep Kiss of Winter
10/13 Lethem, Jonathan; Chronic City
10/13 Stoker, Dacre; Dracula: The Un-Dead (by a descendent of Bran Stoker’s)
10/13 Flynn, Vince; Pursuit of Honor
10/13 Connelly, Michael Nine Dragons (Harry Bosch)
Childrens
10/13 Kinney, Jeff; Dog Days, Wimpy Kid
Nonfiction
10/13 Ehrenreich, Barbara; Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
10/13 Janzen, Rhoda; Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home
10/13 Sullenberger, Chesley; Highest Duty
10/14 Collins, Gail; When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
[UPDATE: No more copies left! Thanks to Talia Sherer, Macmillan Library Marketing, for making copies of Blame available to EarlyWord readers, but they are all gone now. Subscribe to her e-newsletter here.]
Reviewers have been giving the love to Michelle Huneven for her new book, Blame. This week, Laura Miller declares it a “Must Read,” in Salon.
Apologizing for revealing the book’s crucial plot twist, Miller notes that she feels less guilty about doing so because the publisher did it first and further justifies the transgression with this trenchant comment,
…there’s a difference between mere plot and story, the latter of which consists of a sensation of irresistible forward movement created in the mind and emotions of a reader.
That’s as good an explanation as any I’ve heard for why people sometimes enjoy a movie or a book when they already know the ending.
Stripping Blame‘s plot down to the bare minimum, it’s about a woman who is jailed for killing two people while driving drunk, does jail time, gets out and spends the next twenty years trying to rebuild her life, only to find out, as the publisher says, “her life has been based on wrong assumptions.”
It’s worth reading all the reviews, because each reviewer sees the book differently; a story of sin and atonement, of people trying to create ad hoc families, of learning to live with regret and moral ambiguity. The book gives no easy answers, as Entertainment Weekly puts it,
Readers looking for a drum-tight denouement won’t find one here; for Huneven, the blame of the title isn’t some black-and-white object to explain or assign so much as it is something to explore in countless shades of gray.
All of which makes it sound like an ideal candidate for reading groups.
Consider buying extra copies, not for holds, which are modest, but for RA purposes.
Other reviews:
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Unabridged audio from Blackstone
Large Type:
Thorndike; Hdbk; 12/1/09; 9781410420930; $31.95
Downloadable audio from OverDrive
Talia Sherer, head of Library Marketing for Macmillan, just alerted us that two of Nobel Prize Winner Herta Müller’s titles, The Appointment and The Land of Green Plums, both currently OSI, are going back to press today.
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Hopes that Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth might win the Nobel Prize for Literature were dashed today, when the prize went to Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller.
The LA Times gives background on her career.
Three of her books are still in print in English in the US (although wholesalers are showing little or no inventory).
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World Cat; 222 libraries own
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World Cat; 228 libraries own
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Reviewed in the NYT BR, 12/1/96 — World Cat; 591 libraries own
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Two other titles by Müller in English translation are no longer in print, but available in libraries:
The Passport, Serpent’s Tail, 1989 – World Cat; 103 libraries own
The Appointment, Metropolitan Books/Picador, New York/London 2001 — Reviewed in the NYT BR, 10/21/01 — World Cat; 460 libraries own
Imagine you’re from a small village in Malawai. Suddenly, you’re brought to America and are thrust on to the stage of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. How do you deal with Stewart’s sardonic humor and American pop culture references?
[see answer, below]
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| William Kamkwamba | ||||
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After last night’s show, Kamkwamba’s book rose to #13 on Amazon.
It also received a starred review in Publishers Weekly‘s “Web Exclusive” reviews this week.
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Downloadable eBook from OverDrive.
That question is already partially answered; Wolf Hall is now outranking The Lost Symbol on Amazon.
At this moment, the Booker winner is #2 on Amazon’s sales rankings. At #1 is Sarah Palin’s forthcoming memoir, Going Rogue (HarperCollins, 11/15), with The Lost Symbol at #3. Overall sales, obviously, are another story, since Amazon’s rankings are a snapshot of hourly sales.
In four large libraries, the total number of reserves has more than doubled since before yesterday’s announcement, going from 194 to 482.
The Times of London noted that the prize was originally set up to sell books. The prize’s director Ion Trewin, who accepted the position in 2004, but didn’t take over completely until 2006, told the Times that it was meant “not only to reward superb fiction but to encourage people to go out and read it.”
Last year’s winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, achieved that goal in both the UK and the US, where it was on the NYT paperback list for 11 weeks, rising to #8, and continues on the extended list after 38 more weeks.
In London, booksellers expect Wolf Hall to outsell all previous Booker winners. Here, however, many wonder if Americans will sit still for a 650-page book that requires deep interest in Tudor history.
If you’re looking for a good, quick description of the book to give customers, you won’t do much better than Carolyn Kellogg‘s in the L.A. Times,
…a minutely researched yet sweeping historical novel of the Tudor period. Told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, the book follows the courtly machinations that keep Henry VIII in power as he breaks with Rome to marry Anne Boleyn.
And, if you have a little more time, you can add,
In Mantel’s telling, historical tropes get a freshening-up. Cromwell is more bureaucrat than revolutionary, Sir Thomas More is not the heroic man of faith as we’ve come to know, and Henry VIII is not the virile sex fiend of the Tudors.
HarperTeen recently had the clever idea of drawing on the signature look of the Twilight series covers to make the classics more appealing to teens. Both Wuthering Heights (“Bella and Edward’s Favorite Book”) and Pride and Prejudice got the treatment.
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Now comes the news of a parody of Twilight by the Harvard Lampoon, which also plays on the distinctive Twilight covers.
According to the publisher’s press release, the book,
…follows a “pale and klutzy” girl named Belle Goose, who moves to Switchblade, Oregon, and meets Edwart Mullen, a “super-hot computer nerd with zero interest in girls.” The vampire-obsessed Belle becomes convinced Edwart is one of the undead after witnessing events she considers otherworldly (”Edwart leaves his Tater Tots untouched at lunch! Edwart saves her from a flying snowball!”).
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As for the classics, they continue being rewritten and mashed up.
Coming in January is a “Pride and Prejudice for the 21st Century that reveals the underlying, scandalous sexual longings of the story’s main characters,” according to the publisher.
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Other publishers have looked to the success of Quirk Book’s mashups, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
PP&Z‘s author, Seth Grahame-Smith, is at work on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter for Grand Central; Del Rey Books just bought Little Women and Werewolves; and Kensington acquired the brilliantly-titled Wuthering Bites.
Even though the Quirk editor responsible for starting this trend, Jason Rekulak, was recently quoted by the Boston Globe, saying the “genre feels exhausted to me,” it seems Quirk Books is not out of the mashup business [UPDATE: be sure to note clarification of this remark from Jason in the Comments section]. Jeffrey Gegner, Popular Material Specialist at Hennepin P.L., spotted two as-yet-unnamed Quirk Classics titles recently on Title Source 3:
Quirk Classic 3; Paperback; $12.95
ISBN: 9781594744549
Publish Date: 2010/03/03
Quirk Classic 4; Paperback; $12.95
ISBN: 9781594744600
Publish Date: 2010/03/03
As President Obama reviews U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, The Wall Street Journal reports, two books that draw different lessons from the Vietnam war, may be helping to shape the discussion.
Obama and several on his staff recently finished reading Lessons in Disaster, (Harcourt Brace, 1999), while many military leaders are reading A Better War, (Holt, 2008).
The WSJ says D.C. ares booksellers are having trouble keeping the two titles in stock.
All the large libraries we checked own Lessons in Disaster, with holds averaging 7 to 1. Only one in four libraries own A Better War. Both are now available in trade paperback.
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In his book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, William Kamkwamba describes how, at age 14, he brought electricity to his small Malawian village by building a windmill from scrap material and what he gleaned from textbooks borrowed from the local library.
Everyone who has met Kamkwamba says he is totally charming and guileless, qualities on display in the following video. Expect to see Jon Stewart charmed this evening when he interviews him on The Daily Show. Also expect to see holds rise.
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Downloadable eBook from OverDrive.
