We’ve already urged you to sign up for the free AAP/LibraryReads programs (two names alone should entice you — Rainbow Rowell and Ransom Riggs). We hear there are still a few spots open, but hurry, seating is limited.

Also available —  save money by buying advance tickets for the United for Libraries’ Gala Author Tea on Mon., Jan 27. Speakers include Sue Monk Kidd, the author of the latest Oprah pick, The Invention of Wings, (Penguin/Viking; Penguin Audio; Thorndike), as well as Lisa Scottoline and Laura Lippman.

The other author programs (see ALA’s highlights) do not require advance reservations and include several big names, such as  National Book Award winner, James McBride, Silver Linings Playbook author Matthew Quick (his new book, The Good Luck of Right Now is coming from Harper on Feb. 11) and Brian Floca, author of one of the best picture books of the year, Locomotive. (S&S/Atheneum).

Friday night’s Grand Opening Reception in the exhibits hall has turned into a galley stampede (please, people, have sympathy for the library marketers. They’re tired from days of stacking galleys in their booths). The same is true for the “Spotlight on Adult Literature” on Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m., when publishers feature special giveaways (a good opportunity to find out what titles the publishers hope libraries will give special attention).

You don’t have to suffer the crowds. Various publishers offer buzz sessions, opportunities to hear what the library marketers are excited about and to pick up galleys in a more relaxed setting. You could spend the entire conference in the Book Buzz Theater (we sincerely hope the listing for the first session on Saturday, at 3:30 a.m., is an error!).

NOTE: Please RSVP for the following, to help ensure they have enough galleys for the crowd.

HarperCollins Buzz — 

RSVP to librarylovefest@harpercollins.com

Saturday, January 25, 2014
10 – 11:15am
Pennsylvania Convention Center
Room 114 Lecture Hall

If you can’t attend, watch for an interactive version here on EarlyWord shortly after the show.

Random House Royal Book Brunch —

RSVP to library@randomhouse.com with “Royal Book Brunch” in the subject heading.

Sunday, January 26, 2014
10:30  – 11:30am
Pennsylvania Convention Center
Room 121B

To find specific publishers on the show floor, check the interactive floor plan.

The promotional push has begun for the FX TV series based on Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampire trilogy,  The Strain, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2009).

A creepy, Blair Witch type teaser appeared in the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead, a couple of set photos are featured on Yahoo TV and the tie-in cover, based on the poster, has been released (see above, right, next to the original cover).

The lead, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather is played by Corey Stoll, who was a character in the Netflix original series, House of Cards (minus the hair). The series is set to begin in July, but no specific date has been released.

Teaser:

Tie-in:

The Strain: TV Tie-in Edition by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, (Harper, June 24, 2014)
Mass market; 9780062344618,  $9.99

The ABC series Resurrection, based on The Returned, Jason Mott’s debut novel, published in late August (Harlequin/MIRA; Brilliance Audio; Thorndike), debuts on Sunday, March 9th.

About how people in a community would react if dead people suddenly returned to their loved ones, the book was a LibraryReads pick. It was widely reviewed (USA Today was particularly admiring) and appeared on the NYT best seller list for two weeks, hitting a high of #16. A trade paperback, with tie-in cover art, is set for release in March (Harlequin, 9780778317074).

Why is the title of the series  different from the book? To avoid confusion with a French series, also about dead people returning, which aired on the Sundance Channel recently with the English title The Returned.

A new promo for the series began airing over the holidays:

Ishmael Beah’s memoir of being a child soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone, was heavily covered by the media when it was published in 2007 and is often assigned reading in schools.

His first novel, Radiance of Tomorrow (Macmillan/Sarah Chrichton; Macmillan Audio) is being published today. Reviewing it in the Washington Post, Ron Charles applauds Beah’s “lyrical style all his own. Even as a multitude of wearying failures mounts, his characters retain their hopefulness in a way that’s challenging and inspiring.”

Beah appears on the Colbert Report tomorrow night and will be a featured speaker at ALA Midwinter on Saturday, January 25, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm.

Scott Stossel tells Terry Gross about his many phobias on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday. As a result, his book, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, And The Search For Peace Of Mind (RH/Knopf; RH Audio), rose to #14 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

The book is receiving a mini media blitz, with coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe (which calls it a “first-rate study of anxiety and [the author’s] candid personal history as an acute sufferer”), The New Republic, and The Atlantic (where Stossel is the editor).

Last month, he and his sister, Sage Stossel, were profiled by The New York Times. She recently released a book of her own, the graphic novel Starling, (Penguin/InkLit), featuring a female superhero who “exhibits some of Sage’s own nervous qualities and frequently scarfs Xanax.”

On the cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine, the lions outside the New York Public Library morph into polar bears in Bruce McCall’s image of the city currently in a deep freeze.

In the issue, author Jennifer Weiner gets a warmer reception in a profile by Rebecca Mead, who says this “unlikely feminist enforcer … has waged a campaign against the literary media for being biased against female writers, and against books written for women … In 2010, when Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was published, Weiner and Jodi Picoult, another best-selling novelist, objected to the attention garnered by Franzen and his work.”

Meade gives Weiner’s work serious, if not completely admiring, consideration, “Sometimes the reversals of fortune and the discoveries of love in Weiner’s books can feel forced, given the anger and hurt that precede them. Her characters can appear to be mouthing lines they have read in self-help books rather than expressing authentic emotions. It often seems that inside these calculatedly lightweight books there is a more anguished, and possibly truer, work trying to get out.”

Weiner’s next novel, All Fall Down (S&S Atria; S&S Audio) is scheduled for release in April.

Holds are heavy on Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Blackstone Audio; Thorndike) and are likely to continue to rise. It jumped to #1 on Amazon’s sales rankings soon after Christmas, indicating that this was the gift people were disappointed not to find under the tree and that it will continue to sell in to the new year.

New York’s Frick Museum has been an unexpected beneficiary of the interest. It is host of a traveling exhibit from the Mauritshuis museum, which features the painting of the book’s title, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch. The book was published just as the show opened, causing attendance to spike. The marquee piece of the show, Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, is now vying for attention with the lesser-known, tiny Goldfinch (one weird reflection of its popularity; the museum shop added a Goldfinch tote bag to the one featuring The Girl).

The painting has a power of it’s own, as Malcolm Jones attests in an appreciation of it in the Book Beast and was even featured in the Wall Street Journal back in 2010.

If you are planning a visit, take a look at 5 Things You Should Know About The Frick. The Mauritshuis exhibit runs through January 19.

Gathering the most reviews of the new year is the new novel by Chang-rae Lee, On Such A Full Sea, (Penguin/Riverhead; Penguin Audio; Thorndike), which arrives on Tuesday. In a cover review in the New York Times Book Review, Andrew Sean Greer (The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells) announces he is a fan from the  opening paragraph, 

Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more. It’s a wonderful addition not only to Chang-rae Lee’s body of work but to the ranks of “serious” writers venturing into the realm of dystopian fantasy.

Lee didn’t set out to write a dystopian novel, but a social realist novel about Chinese factory workers, as he tells the NYT BR editor, Pamela Paul in this week’s “Inside the New York Times Book Review” podcast. Instead, he ended up writing about an enclosed settlement of Chinese-American refugees in a city called “B-Mor,” built on the ruins of Baltimore. He sees that city as a symbol of “a certain kind of urban decay,” but admits his only contact with it has been the view from a train window (something he has in common with songwriter Randy Newman who, 35 years ago, wrote the bleak song “Baltimore” based on the same experience. Up in arms, the city insisted on a visit and an apology).

The majority of the rest of the reviews equal the NYT BR in their praise:

Los Angeles Times – ‎‘On Such a Full Sea’ a cautionary tale of the future —

Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?

Chicago Tribune – Review: ‘On Such a Full Sea’ by Chang-Rae Lee —

… not just a fully realized, time-jumping narrative of an audacious young girl in search of lost loved ones, but an exploration of the meaning and function of narrative, of illusion and delusion, of engineered personalities and faint promises of personhood, and of one powerful nation’s disappearance and how that indelibly affects another.

Entertainment Weekly  — ON SUCH A FULL SEA Chang-rae Lee — A-

The dystopia of On Such a Full Sea isn’t showy … instead Lee relies on specific, indelible images … and his usual perceptive writing to get at the warped morality that can drive a world into decline.

Cleveland Plain Dealer — Chang-Rae Lee charts a rocky course toward freedom 

A new book by Lee is cause for giddy expectation … His latest … is both a detour and a confirmation: a detour because, as a dystopian vision, it is unlike his previous narrative forms; a confirmation, because despite that difference, his prodigious talents are still everywhere evident.

There are a couple of holdouts, however:

San Francisco Chronicle — On Such a Full Sea,’ by Chang-rae Lee

On some level, “On Such a Full Sea” feels totally characterless. It continually keeps the reader at arm’s length, declining to make us care much about its nearly faceless heroine…In part, this is due to the novel’s nature as a cautionary tale…As a consequence, the narration is rendered in a flat, somewhat formal, old-fashioned style that never allows us to get too close to the story’s emotional truth. For all its plot convolutions, the book still feels abstract and cold.

New York magazine, “A No-Frills Buyers’ Guide to January Books“:

The tired dystopian tropes Lee uses to evoke our current predicament—stratified societies, cruel market forces, a broken health-care system, etc.—are so heavy-handed that the book sometimes reads more like a diagnosis than a believable human story.

Arriving next week, Sue Monk Kidd’s new book, The Invention of Wings, (Penguin/Viking; Penguin Audio; Thorndike) already has a powerful endorsement as the first pick of the year for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Entertainment Weekly, adds its endorsement, saying The Invention of Wings, “isn’t just the story of a friendship that defies an oppressive society; it’s a much more satisfying story of two people discovering together that their lives are worth the fight.” (for those attending Midwinter, Kidd is one of the speakers appearing at United for Libraries’ Gala Author Tea on Mon., Jan 27).

It is second in terms of holds for the week to Stuart Woods’ 28th title in the Stone Barrington series, Standup Guy,  (Penguin/Putnam; Penguin Audio; Thorndike).

Jane Pauley was in the news last week for simply making an appearance on her old Today Show stage. Her new book, Your Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life, (S&S; S&S Audio, read by Pauley) is also likely to get media attention.

Several LibraryReads picks arrive next week:

Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart, (Random House)

“Little Failure is the marvelous tale of the Shteyngart family’s journey from Leningrad to Queens in the 1970s. Gary Shteyngart captures an amazing snapshot of that time in history, and this engaging memoir is suffused with conflict, love, and a lot of hilarity.” — Laura Scott, Park Ridge Public Library, Park Ridge, IL

Also, it gets a strong review from Entertainment Weekly.

The Wind Is Not a River, Brian Payton, (Harper)

“A tender love story about a reporter stranded during World War II on one of the Aleutian Islands, and his feisty wife, who travels to find him. The geographical and historical setting of American warfare in the North Pacific, little known to most, is very intriguing. Readers will fall in love with the main characters’ fierce determination to survive and love against all odds.” –Paulette Brooks, Elm Grove Public Library, Elm Grove, WI

And in movie tie-ins:

Winter’s Tale (Movie Tie-In Edition), Mark Helprin, (HMH/Mariner Books) — starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, the adaptation opens on Velentine’s Day.

Official Web site: WintersTaleMovie.com

Flowers in the Attic, V.C.  Andrews, (S&S/Gallery Books and Pocket Books; AudioGo) — Lifetime explores new territory with this remake of a cult classic, set to debut on Jan 18.

Official Web site: MyLifetime.com/movies/fFowers-in-the-attic

All the above titles, and more coming next week, are listed on our downloadable spreadsheet, New Title Radar, Week of Jan 6

Nancy Pearl inadvertently goes Hollywood in her most recent  interview with Jon Cohen, the author of  The Man in the Window, (Amazon Publishing; Brilliance Audio; originally published by Warner Books in 1991).

It’s one of the titles in Nancy’s Book Lust Rediscoveries series, which brings some of her favorites back in print. We asked Nancy for some background and she replied, “the hardest part of getting this book signed up was finding Jon Cohen.” Google kept taking her to the author of the screenplay for the Steven Spielberg movie starring Tom Cruise, Minority Report. That made no sense to her because “it’s so different from The Man in the Window.”

Finally she and her editor at Amazon decided it was worth getting in touch with that Jon Cohen, just in case, and it turned out he was indeed the same person. “He was thrilled to learn that we wanted his novel to be part of the series, and I was thrilled because it’s long been one of my favorites.” Cohen explains in the interview below how he went from a career as a registered nurse to one as a full-time writer.

About the book, Nancy adds,

It’s the kind of novel you just want to hug, and, as I say in my introduction, it’s the sort of novel that I don’t usually enjoy because this kind of plot can feel manipulative and awfully saccharine. But Jon leavens the plot both with both humor and a bit of magic realism, and it all works wonderfully well. [Main characters] Louis and Iris are indelibly sketched in my heart.

What’s on people’s minds for the new year?

In a word: Diets.

Today, Amazon’s Movers and Shakers list of books that have moved up the most in terms of sales rankings in the last 24 hours, is filled with diet books. How much this is self-motived and how much is the result of  media attention (such as People‘s new issue featuring those who lost Half Their Size!), is anyone’s guess.

Soon, the media will turn their attention from the best books of 2013 to previews of what’s coming in 2014. Meandwhile, check out our links at the right, under “Coming Soon” for a quick overview of titles coming in the next few weeks. Highlights, below:

New York Magazine picks their favorites of January, recommending:

Rachel Joyce’s Perfect (Random House, Jan 14) by the author of the 2012 librarian favorite, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry),

Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh (RH/Crown, Jan 14;), calling it  a “darkly funny first books the the culture editor of The New York Times Magazine)

Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure (Random House, Jan. 7). This memoir also got attention on NPR’s All Things Considered this week, where it was called an “unambivalent success“).

Costco’s influential book buyer, Pennie Ianiciello, picks the paperback edition of Jennifer Chiaverini’s novel from last year, Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker as the featured book of the month. Chiaverini’s next book, Mrs. Lincoln’s Rival, (Penguin/Dutton, Jan 14) is one of the month’s picks by The Book Reporter.

On the IndieNext list for February is one of our Penguin First Flights titles, Archetype by M.D. Waters, (Penguin/Dutton, Feb. 6) — check out our live online chat with the author here (and please join us tomorrow for our chat with Timothy Lane, author of Rules for Becoming a Legend).

Librarians have been tweeting that they can’t wait for the next in Waters’ series, Prototype (they won’t have to wait long, it’s coming in July). For those attending Midwinter, the author will be featured on the AAP Debut Author Panel, Sat., Jan. 25, 3:00–4:00 pm (RSVP HERE with your interest in attending by Monday, January 13th).

There’e nearly universal acclaim for one debut, The Kept, by James Scott (Harper; Jan 7) — it’s picked for January by LibraryReads, IndieNext the BookReporter, and is an Amazon featured debut. The following is the annotation from LibraryReads:

“Scott has written a haunting novel about two characters who are tormented by regret and guilt and who do all the wrong things to find redemption. Beautiful writing and unforgettable characters mark this first novel that has been compared to the work of Cormac McCarthy and Michael Ondaatje.”

Alison Kastner, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR

Digital advanced readers copies are still available from Edelewiss and Netgalley (but hurry, they may no longer be available after next week’s pub. date).

Ransom Riggs’ Hollow City, the second in the planned trilogy that began with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, (both from Quirk Books, dist. by Random House), will be released in two weeks. In anticipation, The New York Times profiles the author.

Click the following for an excerpt from Hollow City.

Tim Burton’s film adaptation of Miss Peregrine is scheduled for release on July 31, 2015 .

The NYT notes that Miss Peregrine was “not conceived or composed with a young-adult audience in mind, but its central premise — about people who are ‘peculiar’ in various ways and must struggle not only to survive, but also to save the clueless rest of humanity from violent evildoers — is certainly adolescent-friendly.”

The decision to publish the book as a YA title proved momentous. As a result, Riggs got to know several YA authors, including Tahereh Mafi, who became his wife. The two, says the NYT, “have become something of a golden couple on the young-adult literary scene, with fans lining up to meet them at events and rushing to post their words on Twitter when either shares details of their life together on Twitter.”

Riggs will appear at ALA Midwinter, as part of the:

AAP/LibraryReads BookTalk Breakfast
Monday, Jan. 27th, 8:30 – 10:00 am
RSVP required, see official invitation here:
ALA Midwinter Booktalk Breakfast 2014 Invitation

The other member of the “YA golden couple,” Tahereh Mafi, will release the final book in her best selling trilogy on Feb. 4, Ignite Me, (HarperCollins). It follows Shatter Me  (2011) and Unravel Me, (2013).

In addition, two companion novellas, Fracture Me and Destroy Me, originally published as eBooks, release in print today, Dec. 31, under the title Unite Me.

We’ve just posted updates to our compiled best books spreadsheets, adding picks by New York Magazine, the New York Times daily reviewers,  People magazine, Shelf Awareness and the Wall Street Journal, resulting in the following:

2013 — Best Books, Adult Fiction, Version 5
536 picks, 302 titles, 20 sources

2013 — Best Books, Adult Nonfiction, Version 4
396 Picks, 267 titles, 19 sources

2013 — Best Books, Childrens and YA, Version 3
447 picks, 283 titles, 10 sources

We are not the only ones obsessed with best books lists. The Daily Beast has also combed the lists to come up with the ultimate “best of the best” lists, the top ten picks in fiction and nonfiction (their tag line is, after all, “Read This Skip That”). They claim 40 sources (sorry to quibble, but by our count, it’s actually 32), including some British sources that we did not include.

The result? The top fiction titles are very similar to ours, in somewhat different order, but the nonfiction top ten is quite different. For instance, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee is tied at #4 with 6 votes. It hasn’t been released in the U.S., so wasn’t available for any of our sources to pick. Also tied at #4 with 6 votes is Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallet (RH/Knopf), which was only chosen by one of the sources we tracked (the Washington Post).

Which seems to prove what we know, but sometimes forget; no matter how many heads you put together, there is no definitive way to arrive at the best books of the year and it can be more fun to make your own discoveries among the titles on the lower rungs of the lists.

Slate explores the cultural implications from Amazon’s list of the year’s best sellers (still being updated as we near the actual end of the year, so the positions fluctuate a bit). In the top ten, The Great Gatsby, shows that “We’ll tolerate the occasional work of actual literature as long as it’s super-short and there’s a movie.”

Are our British cousins any more high brow? Not according to the list from Nielson’s Book Scan (published in the Guardian), where not a single classic appears in the top 100, movie-related or not.

Their list is as influence by popular culture as ours. At #1 is My Autobiography by Alex Ferguson (he’s “the most important football man of the past 25 years,” according to the Guardian‘s own, not particularly admiring, review). The rest of the list is dotted with tv and movie tie-ins.

It seems the Brits are even more obsessed with their weight than we are. The Fast Diet is at #4 on their list, but  only comes in at #70 on ours. And, shudder, at #8, there is a book called The Hairy Dieters by some guys formerly known as “The Hairy Bikers,” who seem to have gone through a Paula Deen-like conversion (minus the racial slurs) from a less-than-healthy lifestyle exemplified by their previous titles like The Hairy Bikers’ Perfect Pies (hope they wear hair nets).

Many other titles are recognizable; Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which made its appearance in the UK in January, comes in at #3. Others, not so much; there’s British comedian/author David Walliams, who has 5 children’s titles on the list, including Gangsta Granny, adapted into a Christmas BBC TV special this year, but not yet available here. (The Guardian offers a deeper dive into the list).

Hope you enjoy making your own cultural comparisons.