EarlyWord

The Sexiest Man Alive is Ryan Reynolds.

Oops, sorry, the real news is that the 11/29 issue of People gives three books the four-star treatment (but the lead title, Bush’s Decision Points gets only 3.5):

The Distant Hours, Kate Morton, “A nuanced exploration of family secrets and betrayal, Morton’s latest [after The Forgotten Garden] is captivating.”

The Distant Hours: A Novel Kate Morton Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: Atria – (2010-11-09) ISBN / EAN: 1439152780 / 9781439152782

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Foreign Bodies, Cynthia Ozick, “Who would dare rewrite Henry James? Ozick proves up to the task, recasting The Amabassadors with Jewish Americans in post-war Paris.” It will be featured on the NYT BR cover this week.

Foreign Bodies Cynthia Ozick Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – (2010-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0547435576 / 9780547435572

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Louisa May Alcott, Susan Cheever; “Cheever brings her characteristic lyricism to this loving, incisive portrait.”

Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography Susan Cheever Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-11-02) ISBN / EAN: 141656991X / 9781416569916

If you haven’t read the National Book Award winner in fiction, you have lots of company. Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule was just published this week, in what may be the smallest original print run in the award’s history (just 2,000 copies, with a reprint of 6,000 more ordered after the finalists were announced). However, this is the largest print run ever for McPherson, the indie that published the book. The first consumer review (unless you count the one in The Daily Racing Form) appeared yesterday, by Jane Smiley in the Washington Post. The winner is literally a dark horse; Lord of Misrule is the name of the rundown, black race horse featured in the book.

For a taste of Lord of Misrule, the author reads a selection here and an excerpt is here.

While the national press did not give author Jaimy Gordon attention in advance of the award, her local paper, The Kalamazoo Gazette, profiled her on Sunday.

The back story for the nonfiction winner is quite different. Patti Smith has already received fame in another line of work. Her memoir Just Kids hit the NYT Best Seller List in hardcover and is currently on the extended list in trade paperback and is on year-end best books lists. Nevertheless, Smith seemed genuinely moved, giving a teary acceptance speech.

In Young People’s Literature, Kathryn Erskine’s Mockingbird, won over Paolo Bacigalupi’s well-received YA futuristic thriller, Ship Breaker, Walter Dean Myer’s Lockdown, Laura McNeal’s Dark Water and Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer (the only one of the group to appear on School Library Journal‘s Best Books list).

In a reversal of the fiction category, the poetry winner is published by a large trade house. Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead (Penguin Books) won out over books published by indie presses and one university press.

Best books lists can be stuffy, requiring all that dispassionate justification of “quality.” It’s often more fun to hear what people simply loved.

The UK’s Guardian asked various writers and other public figures to recommend their favorites of 2010. Their responses are strikingly different from the often dry annotations on best books lists. For instance, a book that has received plenty of admiring attention breathes new life from this passionate recommendation,

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is as enjoyable as a Patrick O’Brian novel and much better written. It’s a brilliantly imagined journey through 17th-century Japan and Holland which is moving, thoughtful and unexpectedly funny.

Curtis Sittenfeld (author of American Wife) recommends Stiltsville, an EarlyWord favorite. Now that she’s won us over with that example of impeccible taste, we’re ready to give her second recommendation a try.

I fell in love with two American first novels. Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel (Harper) is the gorgeously written story of a marriage over several decades, and it takes place in Miami, Florida, a place so vividly depicted you feel like you’ve travelled there while reading. If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous (HarperPerennial) is about a college graduate who goes to teach English in Japan, thinking she’ll end up in Tokyo and instead landing in a rural nuclear power plant town. It’s funny in a sharp, dark, painfully true way.

So, please, help us create a “Librarian’s Favorites” list; tell us what you loved this year, complete with your heartfelt recommendation.

Reviewers say that, even if you are not remotely interested in Siberia, you will want to read Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia (S.F. Chronicle; “It’s always easy to figure out whether you should read the latest book by Ian Frazier: If he’s written it, then you’ll want to read it.”).

Frazier appears on The Colbert Report tonight.

Travels in Siberia Ian Frazier Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 544 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2010-10-12) ISBN / EAN: 0374278725 / 9780374278724

S&S Audio; UNABR; 9781427210531; $59.99

As part of his extensive media tour for his book, Decoded, Jay Z talks to Terry Gross about his music and growing up in a housing project in Brooklyn. He will appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight. Earlier this week, he appeared at the New York Public Library.

Decoded Jay-Z Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Spiegel & Grau – (2010-11-16) ISBN / EAN: 1400068924 / 9781400068920

Why read yet another book on the financial crisis? A Huffington Post columnist has declared the latest in a long line of them, All the Devils Are Here, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, the “Best Business Book of the Year” (he does, however, admit to being a friend of one of the authors). Time magazine says, “When the financial crisis of this decade is being taught in business schools in the next, All the Devils Are Here could be the textbook.”

The authors convinced Jon Stewart’s viewers on The Daily Show last night (Stewart used the magic words, “you have to get this [book]”); it rose to #13 on Amazon sales rankings after their appearance.

Coming tomorrow to The Daily Show, Jay-Z, Decoded (Spiegel and Grau) and on Thursday, Philip K. Howard, Life Without Lawyers (Norton).

All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera Retail Price: $32.95 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover – (2010-11-16) ISBN / EAN: 1591843634 / 9781591843634

The National Book Awards will be announced tomorrow night and the excitement in the press is less than overwhelming, in a marked contrast to the comparative frenzy that greeted the lead-up to the Bookers in the UK (is it legalized betting that makes that race seem more interesting?)

Just a reminder; although it’s accepted wisdom that the NBA has little effect on sales, last year’s winner went on the the NYT Trade Paperback Best Seller list and remained there for most of the year, occasionally slipping to the extended list (where it is now, at #29).

Among the national newspaper critics, only Ron Charles, in the guise of the “Totally Hip Book Reviewer,” makes predictions. He looks at  the fiction nominees, satirizing several of the selections, but coming down on the side of Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That (Harper, March).

For a more serious look at the field, turn to the The Barnes & Noble Review, which offers passages from each book, along with intelligent analyses of each one’s chances (the author, Tom LeClair, was a judge the year that William Vollmann’s Europe Central won). LeClair wants to see Karen Tei Yamashita win for  I, Hotel (Coffee House Press, June), because it “is the most ambitious in its cultural range, the most diverse in character, the most ingenious in form, and the most idiosyncratic in style.” However, the book may be “too off-putting” to get the necessary votes, so he predicts Nicole Krauss will win for Great House (Norton, Oct).

What about the other categories? Looks like they will have to wait until tomorrow to get press attention.

In an interview on the Austin, TX PBS station, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the NYT Book Review says what we already knew — they are going to do an eBook best seller list (the NYT’s announcement said it will debut “early next year“). He also says they are going to do “complicated, fun interesting things” with all the lists.

Unfortunately, he does not elaborate, but does go on to say how they assign books are for review.

Following the opening of HP and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 this Friday, two major children’s movies arrive to help fill family holiday time.

Tangled, based on Rapunzel, opens next week, 11/24. Several clips are available on the official Web site. Disney Books for Young Readers is doing several tie-ins.

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A new trailer for the next movie in the Chronicles of Narnia just appeared on the Web (official web site, Narnia.com). The movie arrives on 12/10.

HarperCollins Childrens is releasing the tie-ins.

Author, library supporter and hilarious speaker, Adriana Trigiani was on the Today Show last week, talking about her new book, Don’t Sing at the Table: Life Lessons from My Grandmothers. (Apologies for being a bit late in posting this and thanks to Carol Fitzgerald for mentioning it in this week’s Book Reporter newsletter).

This book must mean a lot to her; she’s actually speaking slowly.

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Don’t Sing at the Table: Life Lessons from My Grandmothers Adriana Trigiani Retail Price: $22.99 Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Harper – (2010-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061958948 / 9780061958946

One of the big films of next year is based on an ALA Notable Children’s Book from the 1950’s. Rosemary Suttcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth has been adapted for the screen as The Eagle, directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, State of Play). Starring Channing Tatum as Marcus Aquila, the movie is scheduled to open on February 25.

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Official Website: FindtheEagle.com

Tie-in:

The Eagle of the Ninth (The Roman Britain Trilogy) Rosemary Sutcliff Retail Price: $8.99 Paperback: 240 pages Publisher: Square Fish – (2010-11-09) ISBN / EAN: 0312644299 / 9780312644291

Laura Hillenbrand’s second book after her mega seller Seabiscuit is breaking records for media attention in advance of its release tomorrow. Library holds are growing on modest orders, so the issue now how many more copies to order.

Newsweek asks the central question, Can Laura Hillenbrand Top Seabiscuit?, and answers with a resounding “yes,”

Unbroken is wonderful twice over, for the tale it tells and for the way it’s told. A better book than Seabiscuit, it manages maximum velocity with no loss of subtlety. With a jeweler’s eye for a detail that makes a story live, Hillenbrand compresses pages of explanation into a paragraph and sometimes just a line. Even the planes come alive. One pilot describing what it was like to fly the unwieldy B-24s compares it to “sitting on the front porch and flying the house.”

But this doesn’t address how many readers will be willing to live through the book’s detailed descriptions of suffering. The hero of the story, Louis Zamperini, survives 47 excruciating days at sea after his WWII bomber crashes, only to be “rescued” by the Japanese and endure 2 more years of captivity in a brutal POW camp.

Janet Maslin, in today’s NYT says Unbroken tells a “much more harrowing, less heart-warming story” than did Seabiscuit and notes, “there’s a limit to how many times Ms. Hillenbrand can present a man-socks-shark-in-the-nose anecdote before it begins to get old.” But even so, she says, the book “manages to be as exultant as Seabiscuit.”

Hillenbrand, herself, addresses the differing appeal of the two books in the Wall Street Journal,

“Seabiscuit’s story is one of accomplishment. Louie’s is one of survival. Seabiscuit’s story played out before the whole world. Louie dealt with his ordeal essentially alone. His was a mental struggle.” That struggle, she adds, feels particularly resonant in 2010. “This is a time when people need to be buoyed by something, and Louie blows breath into people by making them realize that they can overcome more than they think.”

Our take; libraries that have ordered modestly should order more copies now as demand will be driven by the book’s considerable publicity (upcoming this week; the Today Show, NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, as well as the NYT BR). Will you need even more? That depends on whether readers are put off by the grimmer scenes, or whether they see it as a story of “survival, resilience and redemption” as the book’s subtitle describes it.

Will Unbroken follow Seabiscuit to the big screen? That would seem a no-brainer, but there are some sticky rights issues that have to be worked out, as outlined in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Zamperini is still living (at 93, he is excited about promoting the book. Ironically, he is better equipped to do so than Hillenbrand, who suffers from chronic fatique syndrom). Universal optioned both Zamperini’s “life rights,” and his own earlier autobiography, Devil at My Heels, first in the 1950’s, with plans to star Tony Curtis and again in the 1990’s with Nicholas Cage in mind. It seems Universal still has the rights to the autobiography, although Zamperini says he’d rather they base the movie on Hillenbrand’s book.

If, like Nora Ephron, you no longer know anyone in People magazine, this Daily Beast article’s for you; A Baby Boomer’s Guide to Jay-Z.

Jay Z’s autobiography releases tomorrow. It’s also reviewed in the B&N Review.

Decoded Jay-Z Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Spiegel & Grau – (2010-11-16) ISBN / EAN: 1400068924 / 9781400068920

According to the latest rumors, Carey Mulligan is now the lead contender to play Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s version of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Earlier bets were on Scarlett Johansson, but she is now set to star in a movie based on a much more recent book, We Bought a Zoo (Weinstein Books, 2008), directed by Cameron Crowe.

Meanwhile, a movie based on fellow jazz age writer Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Garden of Eden, was recently scheduled for release in the U.S. on Dec 10,  in a bid for Oscar attention.

Hemingway did not publish The Garden of Eden in his lifetime, abandoning it after 15 years of work. It was edited and released in 1986, years after his death. It is said to be based on Hemingway’s honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.

Official Movie Web Site: GardenofEdenMovie.com

An Evening with Nancy Pearl is being broadcast on the local Seattle cable channel this week.