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“We’re leaving behind a third of Americans,” who cannot afford Internet access, creating a “digital divide.” As a result, some kids have to go to McDonald’s to do their homework, says Susan Crawford author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (Yale U. Press) on Friday’s Bill Moyers & Company.
This is an issue librarians have discussed for years. Although Crawford doesn’t mention it on the show, she wrote in earlier about the role libraries play in a piece for the NYT’s“Room for Debate; Do We Still Need Libraries?”
The few public libraries that own the book are showing heavy holds. An excerpt below. The full video is on the Moyers’ site.
Yesterday, Ayana Mathis, author of Oprah Book Club 2.0 selection, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, (RH/Knopf), sat down for a thoughtful interview on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday. Among the highlights, a tour of the Iowa Writers Workshop, how Mathis was influenced by Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (Random House, 2010), books that “wreck you,” and a special segment at the end with Ann Patchett celebrating her store, Parnassus Books, in Nashville. Oprah did not announce a new title for the club.
Getting a large boost from the latest of Tina Brown’s “Must Reads“ segments on NPR’s Morning Edition is Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds by Ping Fu and MeiMei Fox (Penguin/Portfolio, 12/21/12). Now at #33, it is moving up Amazon’s Sales Rankings and shows increased holds in libraries on modest ordering.
At eight years old, Ping Fu was taken from her parents during China’s Cultural Revolution and placed in a re-education camp, where she ate dung and dirt and endured gang rape. She survived, wrote a thesis about infanticide in China and, as a result, was forced out of the country. She came to the U.S. with next to nothing and went on to become a tech entrepreneur.
She was interviewed about her business on the Daily Beast yesterday:
Brown says of the book,”Her philosophical thoughts … her stoic ability to understand the patient lessons that she learned and apply them to her thoughts about survival and love … it’s very, very moving, indeed.”
The NYT Book Review features the latest Oprah 2.0 pick on the cover this week (without mentioning the Oprah connection). Since The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, by Ayana Mathis (RH/Knopf) is set during the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, the review was assigned to Isabel Wilkerson, the author of the prize-winning history of that period, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (Random House, 2010).
Wilkerson calls the novel “raw and intimate” and says “The story it tells works at the rough edges of history, residing not so much within the migration itself as within a brutal and poetic allegory of a family beset by tribulations.”
On our watch list for this week is Jojo Moyes’s potential breakout novel, Me Before You, (Penguin/Pamela Dorman Books, Thorndike Large Print), a word-of-mouth success in Great Britain. The editor of USA Today’s book reviews, Deirdre Donahue gave it her thumbs up on Friday, saying,
…it’s a bit hard to describe or stuff into a single category. There’s an unlikely love story, complicated family dynamics and a moral dilemma of an ending that Jodi Picoult might envy. Me Before You also paints a portrait of a small English village riddled with class distinctions that rings more true than J.K. Rowling’s overwrought The Casual Vacancy.
Libraries are now showing one-to-one holds. Keep your eye on this one.
Picked as a best book by both the NYT Book Review and Publishers Weekly, Jennifer A. Nielsen’s The False Prince (Scholastic, April), is being adapted as a film by Paramount.
The book is the first in the projected Ascendance trilogy. The second title, The Runaway King, is scheduled for release in March.
Adding some glitz to the announcement is the news that the executive story editor for HBO’s Game of Thrones, Bryan Cogman, has been hired to write the screenplay.
With the Christmas holiday arriving next week, it’s amazing that any new books will be shipped, but a few are on the way. Dick Wolf, creator of the TV series Law & Order, makes his fiction debut. Simon Garfield, whose book on fonts was a surprise hit, turns his attention to maps and the tie-in to a “zombie rom-com” movie arrives.
Wolf, the creator of the TV series Law & Order introduces NYPD anti-terrorism detective Jeremy Fisk, in this, his first novel, planned as the beginning of a series. Expect heavy promotion for this one. It is already connecting with booksellers, who put it on the Indie Next List for January. Prepub reviews were enthusiastic about the tense plot, but not so much about the writing or character development.
On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, by Simon Garfield, (Penguin/Gotham)
Garfield fed the growing fascination with fonts in his book Just My Type. Now he turns to a subject with even more enthusiasts, cartography. Published earlier this year in the UK and in several university library collections, this is a “fully Americanized edition” (besides taking out all those pesky u’s, we’re dying to know what that means).
Warm Bodies: Movie Tie-in by Isaac Morton. (S&S/Atria/Emily Bestler)
Billed as a “zombie rom-com,” the movie is based on a book that was originally a self-published success. Set in America after a zombie apocalypse, it features “R,” a young zombie who communicates mostly via grunts and moans. His favorite food is human brains, which give him a side of memories. After eating the brains of a suicidal teen, R falls in love with the boy’s girl friend. One hitch; her father, played by John Malkovich, is the country’s leading zombie killer.
Hours after Oprah announced she had picked Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie(RH/Knopf), the NYT posted a rave review from their difficult-to-please reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, who calls the book a “piercing debut.”
Although it shot up Amazon’s sales rankings, jumping from #186,959 to #130, it didn’t break in to the top 100. It’s doing much better on BandN.com rankings, however, where it is currently at #17.
All the libraries we checked ordered the book prior to the announcement, based on stellar pre-pub reviews, but we found just one that had ordered multiple copies per branch. Cuyahoga’s Wendy Bartlett reports on how she spotted it:
I snapped up The Twelve Tribes of Hattie as soon as the publisher sent me the ARC, because it deals with America’s great African-American migration. Our customers loved the nonfiction title on that subject, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House), which came out last year. Baby boomers especially enjoy books about this time period; they’ve heard these stories all their lives from their parents and grandparents, so they want to know more. Every African-American family here in Cleveland has a migration story, so I knew they’d love this book.
A reminder: the pub date for The Twelve Tribes has been moved up from mid-January to today and the original ISBN’s have been changed (see previous post), so libraries need to place new orders. Also, please note the BOT editions –
It hit the Indie Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list at #11 last week, moves up to #9 this week and is showing heavy holds in several libraries.
Consumer reviewers found weaknesses in the plot, but all agreed with Entertainment Weekly‘s conclusion that the author “has such interesting things to say about authenticity — in both art and love — that her novel …becomes not just emotionally involving but addictive.”
USA Today callsMatched, Ally Condie’s YA dystopian trilogy, “the most popular series of books for teens since The Hunger Games,” noting that Matched has “less violence and more poetry.”
The final title in the series, Reached (Penguin/Dutton) debuted at #6 on last week’s USA Today best seller list, a series high.
Condie tells USA Today that the idea for the series, which began with Matched (2010) and was followed by Crossed(2011), came from a discussion with her husband about what would happen if the government decreed who you would marry.
To what does Condie attribute the series’ growing populatiry? To “teachers and librarians who embraced it.”
And, no surprise, film rights have been sold to Disney. David Slade has signed as director. He has had some experience with teen movies; he directed Eclipsed, the third film in the Twilight Saga.
A new book about the “boring” Warren Buffet, Tap Dancing to Work by Carol J. Loomis, (Penguin/Viking/Portfolio), rose to #26 on Amazon’s sales rankings after the author and the subject appeared together on the Today Show yesterday and in a much more in-depth interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night.
On NPR’s Morning Edition today, cartoonist Ellen Forney talks about her memoir of her own mental illness in the graphic novel Marbles. Several libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering.
Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham’s new book, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, (Random House, RH Audio and BOT, RH Large Print) is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings, where it is now at #2, and in the number of holds in libraries.
Andrew Solomon wrote the National Book Award Winner and best seller The Noonday Demon, about his own debilitating depression. His new book, Far From the Tree (S&S/Scribner) examines how parents deal with children who are different from them.
Anne Lamott appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition today, to talk about her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. After the show aired, the book rose to #8 on Amazon sales ranking. Many libraries are showing heaving holds on modest orders.
“We’re leaving behind a third of Americans,” who cannot afford Internet access, creating a “digital divide.” As a result, some kids have to go to McDonald’s to do their homework, says Susan Crawford author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (Yale U. Press) on Friday’s Bill Moyers & Company.
