USA Today reports in their “Buzz” column (third story) that a relatively simple video of Kelly Corrigan reading from her memoir The Middle Place has received over 1.8 million hits on You Tube (ahead of “Shrimp Running on a Treadmill” that upset Bill O’Reilly so much) and is causing sales to soar. In the book, Corrigan writes about her relationship with her father when they were both battling cancer.
The book was published in hardcover in January. It appeared for one week on the NYT Nonfiction bestseller list and three weeks on the extended list. The paperback was released last week and is temporarily out of stock on Amazon, where it is at #76 in sales rankings.
Many libraries are showing significant holds.
It is also available in audio, from Blackstone and downloadable from OverDrive.
The book was published in September. WorldCat shows it is owned by 463 libraries; most large libraries own multiple copies. It received strong prepub reviews from Booklist and School Library Journal and a starred review from Kirkus.
Very few libraries ordered the adult memoir by the Rosenblats, Angel at the Fence. Originally scheduled for February publication, it was cancelled by the publisher, Berkley.
You knew it had to happen. Oprah recently announced she’s fallen off the health and diet wagon. Now, she’ll drag herself and her viewers back on with her “Best Life Week,” beginning Jan 5.
The week features:
Jan 5 — Your Weight — Bob Greene. His Best Life Diet was released on 12/30.
Jan 6 — Your Health — Dr. Mehmet Oz, co-author with Dr. Michael Roizen of the “YOU” series:
YOU: Being Beautiful
YOU: Staying Young
YOU: On a Diet
YOU: the Owner’s Manual
Jan 7 — Your Spirituality — a panel featuring,
ElizabethLesser, author of Broken Open and A Seeker’s Guide.
Michael Bernard Beckwith; Spiritual Liberation, Inspirations of the Heart, 40 Day Mind Fast Soul Feast andA Manifesto of Peace.
Jan 8 — Your Money — Suze Orman. Her 2009 Action Plan came out 12/30.
Jan 9 — Your Sex Life — Dr. Laura Berman, Real Sex for Real Women
Posted in Books & TV | Comments Off on On the Wagon with Oprah
Amazon’s list of “Popular Pre-Orders” is a good indicator of books that are “highly anticipated” (which is why we link to it, under “Books Coming Next Month,” to the right).
The current list is dominated by titles coming out in January and February, but at #9 is a book that won’t be out until May, Charlaine Harris’s 9th title in the Sookie Stackhouse series, Dead and Gone. Hennepin is one of the few libraries that has it on order. At this point, they are showing 83 holds on 16 copies.
HBO’s True Blood series brought the books back to bestseller lists this year. The series was recently received two Golden Globe nominations, for best dramatic series and for best actress (Anna Paquin). True Blood will return for a second season this coming summer.
I think I’ve OD’d on Best Books lists — we’ve linked to 67 lists from 29 publications (see links at right). And, we’re being selective; we’ve tried to keep it focused on the publications that have the most sway with consumers and librarians. I don’t dare to even try to count the number of lists put together by “Large Hearted Boy,” who, being large hearted and all, is going for quantity.
So, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of glee at Entertainment Weekly ‘s list of the five worst books of the year, most of them bestsellers.
They’ve also selected the top ten in fiction and nonfiction. The fiction list is the quirkier of the two.
Their #1 pick is a book that didn’t get the huge audience I thought it deserved,
Say You’re One of Them
Uwem Akpan
Hardcover: $23.99; 368 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown; (June 9, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0316113786
ISBN-13: 978-0316113786
At #2, is a first novel that hasn’t appear on other lists. The pick gave it a lift on Amazon (from the low five digits to a high of #1,557). Some libraries are showing reserves.
The Book of Dahlia
Elissa Albert
Hardcover: $23; 288 pages
Publisher: Free Press; (March 11, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0743291298
ISBN-13: 978-0743291293
It’s coming out in paperback in March:
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Free Press (March 10, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0743291301
ISBN-13: 978-0743291309
Appropriately, since Entertainment Weekly is a big supporter of graphic novels, they also include, at #5,
Yes, I do have a pile of spring 2009 galleys for kids to read and review but I devoted Boxing day to an adult title.
I didn’t mean to. I meant to spend the day cleaning and organizing.
As I was clearing the piles off my desk, I thought, “Where did this come from?” I checked the description, “Three sisters. Three Tales and a secret as dark as night.”
Not really my cup of tea, but I’ll give it a try;
Malahide, just north of Dublin. Not so long ago. Long after the house had been disinfected for new occupants and the bodies rested safely in the ground, people still don’t come near it. ‘Cursed’, whispered the neighborhood gossips and nodded meaningfully.
Before I knew it, the day was gone. I barely stopped to eat and walk the dog. I was trapped in the vortex of this dark, compelling story. Gripping until the very last page.
Moerk weaves a dark suspenseful tale of three sisters, their unbalanced aunt, a seductive storyteller and an honorable civil servant. For more on Moerk, check his Web site.
[Ed. Note: Talia Sherer, Director of Library Marketing for adult books at Macmillan, has some galleys available for EarlyWord readers. You can ask for one by emailing her.
Update, 1/8: thanks to all the request from EarlyWord readers, Talia has now run out of galleys for Darling Jim, but she has galleys of Burnt Shadows. Check her post for information on that title.]
Darling Jim
Christian Moerk
Hardcover: $25; 304 pages
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (March 31, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0805089470
ISBN-13: 978-0805089479
Posted in 2009 - Spring, Fiction | Comments Off on A Grown-up Book Recommendation from EarlyWord Kids
The bestseller lists get pretty dull at this time of the year, as buyers focus on the tried-and-true for gift-giving and few new titles break onto the lists.
The new lists reflect the prime gift-buying week (USA Today, 12/15 through 12/21, dated 12/25; NYT, 12/14 through 12/20, dated 1/4/09), so there’s precious little to report.
The New York Times has just two debut titles (with “gift-giving” written all over them).
Nonfiction, #13
The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages: 1851-2008, with an introduction by Bill Keller. (Black Dog & Leventhal, $60.) Over 300 covers are reproduced in this weighty tome, the rest are on three DVD’s included in the package. It appeared last week on the NYT Extended list and is at #95 on USA Today. Some libraries are showing this available as an eBook.
Childrens Picture Books, #9
The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming, by Lemony Snicket. Illustrated by Lisa Brown. (McSweeney’s, $11).
Published last year, this is the book’s first appearance on the NYT list.
Breaking on to the USA Today list, at #140, is a title that may not sound like the perfect stocking-stuffer;
Grandma’s Dead: Breaking Bad News with Baby Animals (Collins).
Borders included it in one of their holiday front-of-store displays, labelled, “Weird, Wacky and Fun.” Zan Farr, Borders humor buyer says this collection of postcards,
…almost makes you wish you had some bad news to share with friends. For example, there is no better way to let them know ‘It’s only sunny because there’s a hole in the ozone layer’ than with a darling photo of two puppies playing in a wagon.”
Just two other new titles make their USA Today debuts:
#129 Blood Sins, Kay Hooper, Bantam (also on NYT Extended Fiction list, at #23)
Of the newspaper book review sections, the Wall Street Journal tends to cover books that others do not, including a fair number of university press books. You might expect them to focus on books on finance, but they’re just as likely to review books on the arts.
Their picks of the “most memorable” books of 2008 is also off the beaten path. Even though they selected only a dozen books, the majority of these titles haven’t appeared on the other lists we tracked (see our links to “Best Books 2008” to the right. We include only the sources that have broad consumer reach, but if you want to look at all the best lists, check out the blog Large-Hearted Boy‘s 2008 Year-End Online Book Lists). None of the National Book Award finalists make the WSJ list.
The titles that overlap with other lists happen to be the three fiction titles:
Lush Life, Richard Price
Cost, Roxana Robinson
Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles
Not a single financial title makes the list, which ranges from a book on Pixar studios to Daniel Mark Epstein’s The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage.
Posted in Best Books 2008 | Comments Off on Wall Street Journal Picks Best Books
And, now, movie critics are evaluating whether this will join the list of movies that are better than the books, or vice versa. As the New York Times‘s Manohla Dargis says today, “Revolutionary Road is the kind of great novel that Hollywood tends to botch.” While he doesn’t think Revolutionary Road is botched, exactly, he says the film just doesn’t “resonate.”
Other reviewers tend to agree. The one hold out is USA Today, which says,
…the performances are superb, and the film is beautifully shot. And the dialogue, much of it lifted directly from Yates’ book, is contemplative and incisive.
The NYT lists as his “master works” The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Betrayal. They are available in the following editions:
The Birthday PartyandThe Room
Paperback: 120 pages
Publisher: Grove Press; Revised edition (January 20, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0802151140
ISBN-13: 978-0802151148
The CaretakerandThe Dumb Waiter
Paperback: $13; 128 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (January 18, 1994)
ISBN-10: 080215087X
ISBN-13: 978-0802150875
The Caretaker was also made into a movie, starring Alan Bates, Donald Pleasance, Robert Shaw and Pinter himself. The DVD does not seem to be available.
The Homecoming
Paperback: $13; 96 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (January 11, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0802151051
ISBN-13: 978-0802151056
The Homecoming was also made into a movie (1973), available on DVD:
Actors: Jonathan Sachar, Paul Rogers, Ian Holm, Cyril Cusack, Terence Rigby
Director: Peter Hall
Format: Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Number of discs: 1; $29.95
Rating:
Studio: Kino Video
DVD Release Date: July 22, 2003
ASIN: B00009MEJF
Betrayal
Paperback: $13; 144 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (January 7, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0802130801
ISBN-13: 978-0802130808
Grove has also released his complete works in four volumes:
Complete Works, Volume I, 1954 to 1960
The Birthday Party, the Room, the dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, A Night Out
Plus, two short stories; The Black and White, The Examination
Paperback: $13.50; 296 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (January 18, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0802150969
ISBN-13: 978-0802150967
Complete Works, Volume II, 1959 to 1963
The Caretaker, the Dwarfs, the Collection, the Lover, Night School, Revue Sketches
Paperback: $13.50; 248 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (January 21, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0802132375
ISBN-13: 978-0802132376
Complete Works, Volume III, 1963 to 1969
The Homecoming, Tea Party, The Basement, Landscape, Silence
Revue Sketches: Night, That’s Your Trouble, That’s All, Applicant, Interview, Dialogue for Three
Short Story: Tea Party
Paperback: $14; 248 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (January 13, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0802150497
ISBN-13: 978-0802150493
Complete Works, Volume IV, 1971 to 1981
Old Times, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, Monologue, Family Voices
Paperback: $13.50; 384 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (January 13, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0802150500
ISBN-13: 978-0802150509
Posted in Deaths | Comments Off on Harold Pinter Dies
Yesterday’s NYT featured a story about a book that is characterized as “The Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims.” The Taqwacores, by Michael Muhammad Knight, is about a fictional Muslim punk-rock band in Buffalo, NY and has given a name to the actual Muslim punk-rock movement. A low-budget film based on the book will be released next year.
The NYT says Knight
…wrote The Taqwacores to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only Allah.
If you’re having trouble imagining Islamic punk rock, the following seven-minute feature from Al Jazeerah helps bring it to life. It includes interviews with Knight and the cast and director of the movie. Great quote, “It’s about challenging the orthodoxy of punk as well as the orthodoxy of Islam.”
After being self-pubbed, it was released in 2004 by Autonomedia. It has not been reviewed and some, but only a few libraries, own it. The full text of the book is also available on the Web.
A new edition is coming in January from Brooklyn-based indie publisher Soft Skull Press. Requests for review copies can be sent to Soft Skull Media.
Soft Skull will publish a total of five books by Knight next year. The following information on those titles is from the publisher. For more information on upcoming titles from Soft Skull, check their catalog.
IMPOSSIBLE MAN
Michael Muhammad Knight
April 2009; $14.95; 978-1-59376-226-1
When Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of The Taqwacores, founder of American Muslim punk, and leading nontraditional scholar of Islam was six years old, he asked his single mother about his absent father. His mother answered that his father “got sick and ran away.” Several years later, he learned the true story: how his father, a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist, alternately convinced that Michael’s mother was in league with the devil and that she would give birth to a line of superhuman rulers.
This is the story of a teenager’s troubled pathway toward maturity and the influences that steady him on his way to adulthood. Knight’s encounter with Public Enemy and The Autobiography of Malcolm X leads him to embrace Islam with all the unbalanced overzealousness and naiveté of a disturbed adolescent in search of salvation. His affinity for Islam deepens and at age 17 he travels to Faisal Mosque in Islamabad to study his adopted religion, putting him on track similar to that of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber. For all its extremes, Impossible Man describes a universal journey: a wounded boy in search of a working model of manhood, going to outrageous lengths to find it.
BLUE-EYED DEVIL
Michael Muhammad Knight
May 2009
Knight embarks on a quest for an indigenous American Islam and for the true story of Nation of Islam mystery-man, W.D. Fard, in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way.
The result is this semi-autobiographical book, with multiple histories of Fard and the landscape of American Islam woven into Knight’s own story. In the course of his adventures Knight sorts out his own relationship to Islam as he journeys from punk provocateur to a recognized voice in the community, and watches first-hand the collapse of a liberal Islamic dream. The book’s extensive cast of characters includes anarcho-Sufi heretics, vegan kung-fu punks, tattoo-sleeved converts in hardcore bands, spiritual drug dealers, Islamic feminists, slick media entrepreneurs, sages of the street, the grandsons of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and a group called Muslims for Bush.
OSAMA VAN HALEN
July 2009
Michael Muhammad Knight
Amazing Ayyub, an Iranian Shi’ite skinhead, and burqa-wearing punk Rabeya have kidnapped Matt Damon, and are holding him hostage. They demand that Hollywood depict Muslims in a positive light—“just one movie where we’re not these two-dimensional al Qaeda stereotypes.” But Damon’s concerned they’re playing into that same terrorist paradigm and furthering a neo-conservative perception of Islam.
Meanwhile, Ayyub embarks on a mission to rid the taqwacore scene of a Muslim pop-punk band called Shah 79. Along the way, he makes himself invisible, escapes punk-eating zombies in a mosque off the desert highway, and runs into some psychobilly jinns. Things turn existential when Ayyub finds himself face to face with his creator—no, not Allah, but the author. This riotous journey of enlightenment reads like a religious service for teenagers on Halloween. But it isn’t all raucous fun; written into his own novel, the author finds he is at the mercy of his creation
JOURNEY TO THE END OF ISLAM
Michael Muhammad Knight
November 2009
Most hajj narratives are written as glowing religious propaganda, painting a utopian and simplistic image not only of Mecca but Islam itself. Knight’s personal experience with Islam is very complicated; he has traveled the extremes of both blind faith and apostasy, and currently stand somewhere between. Embarking on the Hajj, then, touch on Knight’s confusions, wounds, conflicts with religion and with the Muslim community at large. Examining the historical background and origins of Islam, as well as the inherent challenges of organized religion, Knight asks the hard questions. What does the Qur’an mean to me? What do I know of Muhammad? And does sacred history have to be fact to be valid? He also asks, Who funds the Hajj? What role does the Saudi government play? What role does the bin Laden family play?
Says the author, before leaving for the Hajj four weeks ago: “These are the two voices that I bring with me to Mecca: Kerouac, the earnest writer-as-spiritual-seeker, and Thompson, gonzo journalist, exposer-of-hypocrisy.”
Posted in Fiction | Comments Off on ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ for Young Muslims
We’re happy to see that more book and author programs are sneaking their way in to MidWinter (shall we abandon the charade that this is an all-meeting event?).
ALA’s Deidre Ross sent out an email recently listing the ALA-sponsored events, but don’t overlook these off-the-program opportunities, sponsored by the Trade Libraries Committee of the Assoc of American Publishers (including one I am moderating — a great opportunity to learn about upcoming Spring titles):
Sunday, January 25th, 8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.
Denver Convention Center, Room 605/607
Breakfast and BookTalk
Featuring:
Mary Kay Andrews, author of The Fixer Upper, (HarperCollins, June, ’09)
Brian Dennis Monaghan and Geraldine V. Monaghan, authors of The Power of Two(Workman, May 15, 09)
P.C. Cast and Kristen Cast, authors of Hunted, “House of Night,” Book 5, (St. Martin’s/Griffin, March 10. 09)
Craig Johnson, author of Another Man’s Moccasins (Viking Penguin, May 29, ’09)
Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting For Stone(Alfred A. Knopf, Feb. 3. ’09)
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North (Little Brown, May 19. ’09)
As part of NPR’s series on the “Best Books of 2008,” librarian Nancy Pearl presents eight titles “Beneath the Reading Radar.” The selections reflect the amazing range of Nancy’s taste, from Sam Savage’s Firmin, featuring a book-loving rat, to Jeff Talarigo’s The Ginseng Hunter, a novel about life in China at the turn of the century.
For other “Best Books” lists, check our links to the right.
