If you’re experiencing a sudden run on Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, it may be because Stephenie Meyer, in her “Behind the Scenes” Oprah interview, said it’s the book she’s reading now and can’t wait to get back to. Amazon’s editors chose it for their Top 100 of 2009, at #63. It also got strong reviews in the L.A. Times, and the NYT.

Summarizing the book is next to impossible, as Library Journal demonstrated in their review:

This book is difficult to categorize. It’s a comedy, but it’s not particularly funny. It’s a novel of ideas, but it mocks intellectualism. It’s a fantasy, but it includes a cameo appearance by Sen. Olympia Snowe. This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea…

Everything Matters! Ron Currie, Jr. Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2009-06-25) ISBN / EAN: 0670020923 / 9780670020928

As most of her fans already know, she loves Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Shakespeare is a “foundation block” of her first reading experiences. Among YA authors,  she likes Scott Westerfeld and loves Shannon Hale. Science fiction is a favorite; Orson Scott Card is her “personal hero.”

In case you missed it, here’s Oprah’s interview with Stephenie Meyer on Friday:

Part One

Part Two

In this section, Bolivar Middle School librarian & kids, via Skype, say that Twilight has “created a culture of literacy” among the students:

You may have noticed that the promo to the last segment of the interview promises an answer to the burning question, “Will There Be a Fifth Twilight Book?” Oprah never asks that question (an oversight so great that Entertainment Weekly had to investigate).

Fortunately, in the following “Behind the Scenes” interview, Meyer answers the question, but with an unsatisfying “maybe.” Another completely different book is “itching” in the back of her head. Stephenie’s mom is on her daily to go back to Midnight Sun, which tells the Twilight story from Edward’s point of view. She abandoned it after a draft was leaked on the Web.

Earlier, Meyer told Oprah that her mother is a strong influence (she told her to change the ending of Twilight and “she was right, as usual”), so fans can hope.

As prep for  Oprah’s sit-down with Sarah Palin today, you may want to read Michiko Kakutani’s review of her book (supposedly embargoed until tomorrow, but widely leaked), under the headline, “Memoir is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign.”

UPDATE: This may be the least-respected embargo in history; it’s also reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. On Friday, the AP fact-checked the book. Palin calls it “opposition research” on her Facebook page.

UPDATE — Just discovered (thanks to a sharp-eyed reader) that the Hungry Girl book mentioned below is actually recipe cards, which obviously doesn’t work as a library item.

Can you cook food at home that tastes like you bought it at various fast-food chains? Entertainment Weekly put together a panel of judges to see if the latest title in the Top Secret Recipes series, Unlocked produces dishes that taste like the originals.

The book failed; the home-cooked versions tasted too good.

Most libraries own all but this, the ninth title in the series.

Top Secret Recipes Unlocked: All New Home Clones of America’s Favorite Brand-Name Foods Todd Wilbur Retail Price: $15.00 Paperback: 288 pages Publisher: Plume – (2009-11-24) ISBN / EAN: 0452295793 / 9780452295797

Speaking of cookbook franchises, the latest Hungry Girl title lands next month, in time for holiday gift giving.

Hungry Girl Chew the Right Thing: Supreme Makeovers for 50 Foods You Crave Lisa Lillien Retail Price: $16.99 Misc. Supplies: 54 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin – (2009-12-08) ISBN / EAN: 031261036X / 9780312610364

Getting the most attention of the books coming next week, of course, is Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. Palin taped an interview with Oprah on Thursday for Monday’s show. An interview with Barbara Walters will air in five parts, beginning on Good Morning America on Tuesday, the day the book is released. Copies have been strategically leaked, causing a press feeding frenzy, but most sources say there are no surprises; as the AP puts it, the book confirms that “the McCain-Palin campaign was not a happy family.”

Based on holds, next week’s biggest book is the new James Patterson I, Alex Cross. At four large library systems, holds are nearly three times higher on the Patterson title than on Palin’s (2,546 for Patterson; 885 for Palin).

Fiction

11/16

Patterson, James,  I, Alex Cross

11/17

Cussler, Clive, The Wrecker
Munro, Alice, Too Much Happiness
Nabokov, Vladimir, The Original of Laura
Weber, David, Torch of Freedom

Nonfiction

11/17

Palin, Sarah, Going Rogue

Young Adult

11/17

Horowitz, Anthony, Crocodile Tears: An Alex Rider Adventure
Noel, Alyson, Shadowland: The Immortals

Of course you expect a new John Grisham title to top bestseller lists, but could Grisham work the same magic with a book of short stories?

No problem; Ford County debuts on the USA Today list at #2 (it takes a lot to beat the Wimpy Kid), making it a shoe-in for #1 on the upcoming NYT Hardcover Fiction list.

Ford County: Stories John Grisham Retail Price: $24.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2009-11-03) ISBN / EAN: 0385532458 / 9780385532457

Random House Audio; UNAB; 9780307702104; $35
Random House Large Print; 9780739377383; pbk; $24
Audio downloadable from OverDrive

At #5 on USA Today‘s list is Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which held the #1 position for 4 weeks, before being knocked down by the not-so-Wimpy Kid and then slipping to #5 last week.

USA Today’s “Book Buzz” column says Grisham’s next legal thriller, as yet untitled, will be published next fall. His first bestseller, The Firm, was published in February, to take advantage of a period that traditionally did not feature big-name competition. In the 20 years since, you could count on a Grisham legal thriller to appear as the calendar turned to February; it seems that will not longer be the case.

Entering the list at #15 is Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, making it the sixth bestselling adult hardcover fiction title on the list.

The Lacuna Barbara Kingsolver Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 528 pages Publisher: Harper – (2009-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0060852577 / 9780060852573

HarperAudio; 9780060853563; $44.99
HarperLuxe; 780061927560; pbk; $26.99
Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive

Time magazine’s “The Page” blog reports on what others report is in the book.

The big news? NO INDEX! The theory is that inside-the-Beltway types will have to actually read the book to find their names.

Going Rogue: An American Life Sarah Palin Retail Price: $28.99 Hardcover: 432 pages Publisher: HarperCollins – (2009-11-17) ISBN / EAN: 0061939897 / 9780061939891

HarperAudio; Abridged; 9780061990731; $29.99; 11/24
HarperLuxe; pbk; $28.99; 11/24

One of the people interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning‘s cover story about  the safety of flu vaccine, was Michael Specter, author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. As is probably clear from the book’s subtitle, Specter, who writes about science and technology for The New Yorker, believes that the risks of not getting the vaccine outweigh any other concerns. He also was interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday and the book was reviewed in the New York Times.

Holds are heavy on modest ordering in the large libraries we checked.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives Michael Specter Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The – (2009-10-29) ISBN / EAN: 1594202303 / 9781594202308

eBook downloadable from OverDrive.

CBS sunday Morning

Mary Karr’s new memoir Lit is a hit with critics, ranging from the New York Times’ notoriously hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani to Entertainment Weekly, which gave it an undiluted A. It’s currently at #76 on Amazon, after a week in the top 100, and rising. Library holds are growing.

Not only iss Karr getting high critical praise, but reviewers also express the sheer pleasure they found in reading the book.

The often churlish Michiko Kakutani, perhaps inspired by Karr’s Texas roots, says that the book “lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go.”

Melanie Gideon in the S.F. Chronicle says,

Mary Karr owes me. Because of  Lit, her new memoir, my week was a disaster. Laundry piled up, the dishes went unwashed, my son went without his flu shot, and our puppy peed on the couch – all because I spent every spare moment with my nose buried in Lit, a harrowing account of Karr’s descent into alcoholism and her eventual conversion to Catholicism.

Valerie Sayers in the Washington Post begins by describing herself as a “memoirphobe,” who dreads

…the depiction of yet another horrific (if colorful) childhood, drug-addled adolescence, young adult breakdown and especially — most especially — blissful spiritual recovery. It’s not that the lives revealed in so many memoirs are unworthy of examination; it’s not even that they’re necessarily Too Much Information, that bane of our hyper-therapized culture. It is, rather, that the pronoun “I” can function as a semiautomatic weapon in the hands of a memoirist: Whoever has possession controls the conversation.

Nonetheless, she says, “Karr’s sharp and funny sensibility won me over to her previous two volumes, but what wins me over to Lit is…her acute self-awareness.”

Samantha Dunn in the Los Angeles Times says,

Karr could tell you what’s on her grocery list, and its humor would make you bust a gut, its unexpected insights would make you think and her pitch-perfect command of our American vernacular might even take your breath away.

In the introduction to his interview with Karr in the Huffington Post, former publisher Steve Ross noted that PW, which caught flak for not including a single woman in its Top Ten Best Books of 2009, made an even more egregious oversight by not including Lit.

Unfortunately, it goes beyond that; not only is Lit not in the PW Top Ten, it’s not in their Top 100, nor is it on Amazon’s Top 100. It’s also not a National Book Award finalist.

You can read an excerpt here:

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Lit: A Memoir Mary Karr Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Harper – (2009-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0060596988 / 9780060596989

HarperAudio, UNAB, 9780061939006

HarperLuxe,9780061885471, pbk, $25.99

Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive.

A new Sedaris audio-only title will be released Nov. 24, called Live for Your Listening Pleasure. It consists of highlights from his latest tour; events in Denver, NYC, Durham, L.A. and Atlanta. Similar to his 2002 Live At Carnegie Hall audio, this is a standalone and will not be published as a book.

A clip is available at Entertainment Weekly ‘s “Shelf Life” blog and another is on the publisher’s web site.

We can do them one better; Hachette Audio is making a limited number of copies available for readers of EarlyWord. To enter, just send an email to EarlyWord, with “Sedaris Live” in the subject line, by 11:59 p.m, this Friday, Nov. 13. Don’t forget to include your shipping address (no P.O. box numbers). EarlyWord will select winners at random. This is only open to librarians residing in the 50 states.

Libraries we checked do not have the audio on order and WorldCat shows it listed on just one library catalog.

By the way, at least one wholesaler annotation incorrectly describes this as the 2002 Carnegie Hall recording. It is all new material.

David Sedaris: Live For Your Listening Pleasure David Sedaris Retail Price: $17.98 Audio CD: Publisher: Hachette Audio – (2009-11-24)

Also downloadable from OverDrive

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And, how retro and how David Sedaris, it will also be available in vinyl (this from the company that held a funeral for the cassette format over a year ago).

Love how different the vinyl and the CD covers are.

David Sedaris: Live For Your Listening Pleasure David Sedaris Retail Price: $24.98 Audio Cassette: Publisher: Hachette Audio – (2010-01-05) ISBN / EAN: 160788447X / 9781607884477

Amazingly, an American named Jake Adelstein managed to become a beat reporter for Japan’s most popular Japanese-language daily newspaper. Even more astounding, he wrote investigative stories about organized crime in Japan.

Adelstein has just published a book about his experiences, Tokyo Vice and was interviewed last night on NPR’s Fresh Air. The book is now at #65 on Amazon and rising. Libraries that ordered it are showing holds as high as 7:1.

The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it “..equal parts cultural exposé, true crime, and hard-boiled noir.”

Adelstein also appeared on Sixty Minutes the week before last, as part of a story on the godfather of Japanese crime, Tadamasa Goto, who made a deal with the FBI to exchange information for a liver transplant (Goto got more out of the exchange than the FBI did).

———

Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan Jake Adelstein Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Pantheon – (2009-10-13) ISBN / EAN: 0307378799 / 9780307378798

Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive.

Currently at #30 on Amazon and rising is a book that recommends investing in gold and oil rather than stocks and bonds.  Published by Portfolio, Penguin’s business book imprint, it is endorsed by Ron Paul and the author has appeared on the Glenn Beck Show. More information is available here.

Few libraries have ordered it; one library system is showing 7 holds on 5 copies.

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments Charles Goyette Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover – (2009-10-29) ISBN / EAN: 1591842840 / 9781591842842

At #16 on Amazon and rising, is a new book by the President of the  Natural Resources Defense Council, Frances Beinecke. This is her first book, but she has been posting her opinions on the NRDC site for several years. Her posts also appear on the Huffington Post and on AlterNet.

According to WorldCat, no libraries own the book.

Despite the cover’s striking similarity to a title by a certain conservative commentator, Beinecke’s book does not share the belief that author’s belief that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the left.

Clean Energy Common Sense: An American Call to Action on Global Climate Change Frances Beinecke, Bob Deans Retail Price: $9.95 Paperback: 120 pages Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. – (2009-11-05) ISBN / EAN: 144220317X / 9781442203174

Publishers Weekly set off a storm of protest last week when they released their selection of the Top Ten Books of the Year and pointed out that all the titles are by men (adding insult to injury, the editors said they didn’t see this as a reason to question their own judgment; that changing the list would be a matter of bowing to “political correctness”).

The newly-formed group WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) issued a press release amusingly titled, Why Were No Women Invited to Publishers Weekly’s Weenie Roast? and created a wiki for people to post their favorite ’09 books by women, a list that is growing by the minute. GalleyCat reports that the group is also growing, having added 1,000 new members since Wednesday.

Charlotte Abbott, who writes for EarlyWord as well as the blog Follow the Reader, is organzing a group to look into creating an American prize similar to the Orange Prizes in the UK, which are for women writers in English (Americans are eligible; Marilynne Robinson won the Fiction prize for her 2008 book, Home).

The outrage has focused on Publishers Weekly, because they had the temerity to announce their lack of female authors. However, Amazon’s Editor’s Top Ten includes only two women, one of whom is a YA author (PW does not included children’s and YA authors on their list). If, for comparison’s sake, we exclude the YA title, #11 on Amazon’s list is by a man, so only one female author appears on Amazon’s list of Top Ten adult titles.

Women do better with the National Book Awards; of the fifteen finalists in the adult categories, 6 are women.

Amazon and PW also issued Top 100 lists and we were curious to see how women fared on them. To that end, we’ve created a spreadsheet with all the titles (available on the right, under “Best Books ’09; List of the Lists — Spreadsheet) as well as one with just the titles by women (List of the Lists; Women Authors). As the lists show, women make out somewhat better on the full lists, but still represent just 30% or less of the titles:

Of PW‘s Top 100, 30 are by women (we included Half the Sky because the co-author is a woman) = 30%

Of Amazon’s 100 titles, 25 are by women = 25%

If you remove the childrens/YA titles from Amazon’s list to make it more comparable to PW‘s, the total is 94 titles, with 19 by women = 20.20%

Clearly, PW is not alone in underrepresenting women.

In childrens and YA, women fare much better, but it’s difficult to say how this compares with the proportion of women who publish childrens and YA titles;

Of the 30 titles on PW‘s childrens list, 19 are by women = 63.33%

Of the 30 on Amazon’s list, 15 are by women = 50%

There are, of course, many other issues to discuss with “best” lists. PW covers categories that are overlooked elsewhere, such as graphic format and mass market titles. They also give attention to the lesser known; one writer found the PW list refreshing (We can’t help but note that that writer is a “he”);

“Publisher’s Weekly announces 10 best books of the year – ALL by men“, by Oliver Marre, The Telegraph

…the PW list is more interesting for its joyful disregard of the trendy highbrow authors of 2009 – be they  men or women. It shows an admirable indifference to the efforts of the Booker prize nominees like Byatt (whose Children’s Book was extraordinarily heavy going), the omnipresent Sarah Waters and her ghosts, even Hilary Mantel and her epic bestseller (I tried it twice but couldn’t get excited), Wolf Hall. With each of these exclusions, I cannot help agreeing.

If you will be in the New York/Brooklyn area on Saturday, Nov. 21 area, you have the opportunity to brunch with Nancy Pearl. The brunch is a benefit for the upcoming production of Terrible Things, performed by Katie Pearl (Nancy’s daughter, of course) and Lisa D’Amour. It’s being held at the Packer School in Brooklyn, which served as the  location for episodes of Gossip Girl.

You are invited to Brunch with
Nancy Pearl
Librarian, Action Figure, and Book Recommender to the World!

Saturday November 21st 11-1:30pm
At the Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn Heights, NY

To benefit the upcoming production of
TERRIBLE THINGS
A new performance by Katie Pearl (Nancy’s daughter!) and Lisa D’Amour
Premiering 12/4-12/20 at Performance Space 122, NYC

When you join us, you will:

Feast on local eats, coffee and cocktails
Indulge in book lust and conversation with Nancy Pearl
Luxuriate in the Cathedral-esque wonderland of the historic Packer School

SNEAK-A-PEAK at Nancy’s OBIE Award-winning daughter’s new performance, featuring stories from Nancy’s pre-action figure life!

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE:http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/87806

Ticket Information:
$35 – one ticket to the benefit
$50 – one ticket to the benefit, PLUS a ticket to opening weekend of TERRIBLE THINGS
$85 (15% off!) – two tickets to the benefit, PLUS two tickets to opening weekend of TERRIBLE THINGS
$250 – two tickets to the benefit, two tickets to any night of TERRIBLE THINGS, plus a one-on-one get together with Nancy!

The OBIE-Award winning team of PearlDamour turns PS122 into a low-rent IMAX in their newest dance theater piece TERRIBLE THINGS. Let them take you on a T-R-I-P inside the quarks, molecules, and memories of  Katie Pearl and her Action Figure Mom.  CLICK HERE for more info on the show, or visit us at PearlDarmour.com.