EarlyWord is the home of GalleyChat, monthly online discussions where library staff share excitement about upcoming books. More information here.
Summaries of chats and announcements are posted to the right. Use them to add to your own TBR piles and for collection development.
Links on the far right of the site offer information useful to readers advisors.
Hope to see you during our next chat,
GalleyChatters
News for Collection Development and Readers Advisory Librarians
March 10th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
The movie based on Neil Gaiman’s Coraline was nominated for an Academy Award, but did not win. CBS Sunday Morning must have expected a different outcome; they ran a piece about Gaiman the day of the awards.
The author’s characteristic charm is on full display.
March 10th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
As we noted Monday, an Amazon computer glitch caused some pricey comics titles to drop precipitously in price and sales to skyrocket (the Amazon Top 100 were all comic titles at one point).
Publishers Weekly reported yesterday that some buyers received their purchases, while others received cancellation letters. Distributor Diamond Comics is in discussions with Amazon; “No doubt, they are also discussing who will take the economic hit if they honor some of these orders, a hit that could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says PW.
March 9th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
As Terry Gross says in her interview with Melissa Febos on NPR’s Fresh Air last night, “this may be the first memoir by a dominatrix who grew up listening to NPR,” a reflection of her obvious intelligence which is behind the book’s clever title, Whip Smart (listen to the interview here).
Why did she become a dominatrix? She couldn’t get a job in publishing.
The book rose to #77 (from 10,630) on Amazon.
 |
|
March 9th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
Three books are the reviewers’ darlings of the moment. Oddly, they all have extremely short titles; Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee, Infinities by Jon Banville and The Ask by Sam Lipsyte.
Leading the pack in number of holds is The Ask. It was ordered in the lowest quantities, so it also has the highest ratio of holds, averaging 8:1 in libraries we checked. Booklist starred this “darkly humorous story.” It received equally strong reviews from Kirkus and PW, but LJ felt that, despite being a “A treasure trove of brilliant asides and one-liners,” it “never really comes together as a coherent novel.”
The consumer press is also divided,
The author is also being featured in interviews,
 |
|
BBC Audio; UNABR; 9780792770794; 7 CD’s; $89.95
Audio available from OverDrive
————–
The Surrendered is the second in number of holds, but, because of an average of twice as many copies on order, hold ratios are less than 3:1. Michiko Kakutani gives it a strong review in the NYT today, ending with a Michiko-style back-hand compliment,
If the reader stops and thinks about it, there are lots of infelicities of craft in this novel…But Mr. Lee writes with such intimate knowledge of his characters’ inner lives and such an understanding of the echoing fallout of war that most readers won’t pause to consider such lapses — they will be swept up in the power of The Surrendered and its characters’ aching and indelible stories.
 |
|
ebook available from OverDrive
——-
Infinities, by John Banville has been reviewed nearly everywhere but is described most memorably by Laura Miller in Sunday’s NYT BR,
If The Infinities has the bones of a novel of ideas, it’s fleshed out and robed as a novel of sensibility and style. Its drapery is velvet and brocade — sumptuous and at times over-heavy.
Other reviewers agree with her assessment that,
Fortunately, lavish demonstrations of literary virtuosity don’t bog down The Infinities, as they often did with The Sea, the novel that won Banville the Man Booker Prize in 2005.
Library holds, however, are modest.
 |
|
RH Audio; UNABR; 9780307706652; $35
March 8th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
More national press is arriving for Letters to Jackie (see our earlier story).
The AP ran a story that was picked up by many news outlets today. Author Ellen Fitzpatrick and two of the letter writers in the book will appear on CBS Evening News tonight and the New York Times is running a story in the “National” section tomorrow. The book rose to #195 on Amazon today.
 |
|
ebook available from OverDrive.
March 8th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
On Sunday, the Amazon Top 100 list suddenly was all graphic novels in expensive hardcover versions. Our GN contributor, Robin Brenner, discovered that a pricing glitch suddenly caused prices to drop. Word traveled via Twitter and blogs, and fans began snapping them up.
Sorry, the “sale” is over; the glitch has now been fixed.
March 8th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
Lots of authors on tap for the week:
Mon, 3/8 — Harry Markopolos — the man who led an investigation that brought down Bernie Madoff.
 |
|
ebook available from OverDrive
Tues, 3/9 — Marc Thiessen who says, “Barack Obama did arguably more damage to America’s national security in his first 100 days of office than any president in American history.”
 |
|
Wed, 3/10 — Eamon Javers on the world of business warfare.
 |
|
ebook available on OverDrive
Tues, 3/9 — Annie Leonard. Her video, The Story of Stuff has been downloaded millions of times.
 |
|
S&S Audio; UNABR; 9780743599153; $26
Wed, 3/10 — Sean Carroll; ideas from the cutting edge of theoretical physics
 |
|
Tantor Audio:
Trade; 9781400115655; 13 Audio CD; $39.99
Library; 9781400145652; 13 Audio CD; $79.99
MP3; 9781400165650; 2 MP3-CD; $29.99
Thurs, 3/11 — David Aaronov on conspiracy theories.
 |
|
Tantor Audio
Trade; 9781400115921; 12 Audio CD; $39.99
Library; 9781400145928; 12 Audio CD; $79.99
MP3; 9781400165926; 2 MP3-CD; $29.99
March 8th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
Happy Monday!
Since your mind may be a little clouded from Oscar night (see our roundup of Oscar tie-ins), here’s a quick wrap-up of what else you need to know from the weekend:
Hurrah! This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson gets a great review in the 3/7 NYT Book Review and rises to #150 on Amazon (it’s now at #170 and, dare we say, that’s an amazingly high position for a book about a profession generally not considered that fascinating by the general public. We may actually see it on the 3/21 NYT Nonfiction best seller list).
The cover of the NYT BR features Angelology by Danielle Trussoni; remarkable because the BR rarely features a new popular-interest title with marketing muscle behind it (in what may be a first, both the NYT BR AND the People book section lead with a review of the same title). Despite some serious reservations, reviewer Susann Cokal calls it a “rousing story.” The book rose to #44; it’s destined for bestsellerdom.
In a brilliant move, the Book Review assigned Alexander McCall Smith to review Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson. Perhaps it’s no surprise that he loves this updating of the English village novel (too bad about the goofy illustration). The book has been receiving accolades from all over (we’re expecting it to be a sleeper success).
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland topped the box office and Dorling Kindersley’s Disney’s Alice in Wonderland: The Visual Guide hit the 3/17 NYT BR Childrens Picture Books best seller list. Another Alice-related title rising on Amazon is The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner, John Tenniel (W.W. Norton). Interest is coming from a different source; last week Lost featured the book. The original has been featured many times before on the show.
Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) hits the 3/17 NYT Nonfiction list at #14. It has been bringing tears to many reviewer’s eyes; including this one in Sunday’s L.A. Times.
Little Bee goes to #1 on the Paperback Trade Fiction list, surging ahead of The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks (although it’s still at #1 on the Paperback Mass-Market Fiction list). Congrats to Santa Monica for making it their One City pick.
The NYT Magazine cover story “Building a Better Teacher” mentioned the following books, which rose on Amazon as a result:
 |
|
.
ebook available on OverDrive |
The following titles also rose over the weekend on Amazon (this information is from Saturday; on Sunday, a computer glitch caused graphic novels to dominate the list):
#2 (now at #23) — Now Eat This!: 150 of America’s Favorite Comfort Foods, All Under 350 Calories by Rocco DiSpirito (Ballantine Books)
#11 (now at #35) — Courage and Consequence by Karl Rove (Threshold Editions)
#21 (now at #52) — The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson (Crown Business). It was featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Thursday.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Scott Patterson | ||||
|
||||
#50 (was 962; now at #107) — Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman (S&S) — WSJ review
#59 (now at #190) — The Coming Insurrection
As Publishers Weekly reports, Glenn Beck has been giving unwitting support to this book since he began ranting against it in July.
 |
|
#65 (was 215; now at #86)
 |
|
Martin was on NPR Weekend Edition Sat. (listen here) as well as on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report the week before (watch here). USA Today wrote about him on Wednesday — Jesuit priest James Martin moves in Mass, mass media.
March 8th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
The L.A. Times notes today that adults are reading Y.A. books; Young adult lit comes of age.
One telling, but unsourced stat:
Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children’s/young adult hardcovers were up 30.7%
Actually, the latest figures from the AAP show Adult Hardcover sales up 6.9 percent, year-end ’09 over the previous year and Children’s/YA Hardcover category down by 5.0 percent for the same period. However, that masks the fact that children’s and YA has been the bright spot in publishing for most of the decade.
Books and authors cited are:
- Stephenie Meyer, Twilight saga
- Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games trilogy
- Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians series
- Markus Zusak, The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger
- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter series
- Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied
- Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
- Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
- Anne Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series
- Adult authors who also write for YA — James Patterson, Carl Hiaasen, Francine Prose and Terry Pratchett
- Garth Nix, Sabriel
- Cecil Castellucci, Boy Proof and Beige
March 8th, 2010 By: Robin Brenner
The comics and manga blogosphere has been buzzing this week, and not in a good way: creator Nick Simmons, rock star Gene Simmon’s son, has been accused of plagiarism in the creation of his manga-style comic Incarnate. Initially reported on the blog Robot 6, part of Comic Book Resources, the infringement appears to have first been identified by fans of Tite Kubo’s extremely popular series Bleach. A post comparing scans of Bleach and Incarnate shows fairly damning evidence that Simmons did not just pay homage to Kubo’s work, as he claims, but lifted layouts and character designs directly off of the page.
The initial charges of plagiarism, however incendiary, quickly shifted into some fierce back and forth discussions between bloggers, fans, and industry commentators arguing plagiarism and the dangerous waters of copyright, artist’s rights, and fan entitlement. Heated discussions lit up Twitter, blogs, and message boards, reported by About.com’s Deb Aoki, suggesting that plagiarism by a celebrity creator is a minor aspect of a much larger issue.
Scanlations have a long been a part of comics and manga fan culture here in the US. Scanlations are digital copies scanned from original Japanese language manga, translated by fans into English, and then posted online for anyone and everyone to read. Scanlations arrive promptly after a story is published in Japan, often in a matter of days, compared to the years it often takes publishers here to license, translate, and print the same story. Publishers have been tangling with this problem for years, especially in how the practice has created fans that want immediate access to titles. Titles become old news, and fans move on to the latest hot series, and in the process the eventual print releases are left sitting on the shelves.
In the many discussions on the internet surrounding justifying scanlations (check out the comments on Deb Aoki’s initial post, if you dare), fans claimed that reading scans online was the same as reading manga from the library. Both provide free, easy access to titles. Several distinctions are lost on fans. One, libraries pay for licensed translations, meaning the manga creators and publishers are compensated for their creations. While libraries serve a specific community, scanlations are available to thousands of readers and can be downloaded and copied indefinitely. Libraries lend out one copy to one person at a time, and the number of copies they purchase increases with the number of readers interested in a title. At this time, it’s very difficult to judge what percentage of manga fans read scans. At conventions and within fan circles online, it is a widely spread practice. In the general public? So far, no numbers have been authoritatively gathered. Anyone who works with teenagers has undoubtedly seen it — I have as many teens sitting around reading stacks of manga as I do teens logged into our computers reading the latest chapter of Naruto. It’s free, scans are easy to find, and readers have little reason to care that it is officially illegal.
Librarians are already contending with the problem of how to meet fan demand in their collections, and we should start thinking about how we might fit into a future scheme for online access. If manga publishers start providing free access to manga before it arrives in print, as VIZ is already doing with their sites for IKKI (http://www.sigikki.com) and Shonen Sunday (http://www.shonensunday.com), how can we as librarians show our patrons the way to the sites that comply with copyright? It may be as simple as maintaining a website which encourages readers to visit publisher sites, or it may eventually be a library model for gaining access to online editions for our patrons a la Overdrive.March 8th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
Below are the movies either based on books, or with tie-ins that won Academy Awards last night (for the books, go to our listing of movies In Theaters Now — with Tie-ins).
The Blind Side — Best Actress (Sandra Bullock)
 |
|
Crazy Heart — Best Actor (Jeff Bridges) and Best Song (The Weary Kind)
 |
|
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire — Best Supporting Actress (Mo’Nique), Best Adapted Screenplay
 |
|
El secreto de sus ojos — Best Foreign Film — Eduardo Sacheri’s novel La pregunta de sus ojos (The Question In Their Eyes), Buenos Aires : Galerna, 2005.
Hurt Locker — Best Picture, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow), Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing
 |
|
Avatar — Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects
 |
|
Star Trek — Best Makeup
 |
|
Up — Best Animated Feature, Best Music
 |
|
————————
 |
|
————————
 |
|
————————
 |
|
March 8th, 2010 By: Nora Rawlinson
A couple of new vampire series have joined the many others on the NYT children’s lists. Cynthia Leitich Smith’s second YA dark fantasy, Eternal, debuts on the 3/14 NYT Children’s Paperback best seller list at #5.
The NYT annotation reads, “Vampires plus fallen angels equal romance.” Horn Book puts it this way,
Teen readers have lapped up the steady outpouring of vampire books, most of which feature a forbidden mortal/immortal romance. Here Smith creatively revamps the star-crossed pair as a “newly risen” eternal (read vampire), adolescent Miranda, and her fallen guardian angel, Zachary.
She also brings a refreshing touch of humor to the mix.
Eternal is a companion book to the author’s earlier title Tantilize (Candlewick, 2007). Coming next year is Blessed, in which the casts from the previous two books will cross over.
 |
|
Audio from Listening Library; UNABR; 9780739385616
Audio and ebook available from OverDrive
 |
|
Audio from Listening Library; UNABR; 9780739363997
Audio and ebook available from OverDrive
——–
Heather Brewer’s Chronicles of Vladimir Tod entered the competitive Series Books list at #5 two weeks ago and is now at #7. The series began with Eighth Grade Bites (Dutton, 2007). The fourth book in the series, Eleventh Grade Burns came out in hardcover last month and the paperback of Tenth Grade Bleeds came out in January, with Twelfth Grade Kills scheduled for September.
Brilliance is releasing the series in audio this summer.
 |
|
ebook available from OverDrive.
 |
|
ebook available from OverDrive.
 |
|
——–
Stretching a bit to zombies, Carrie Ryan debuts on the Series Books list with The Forest of Hands and Teeth. The second book in the series, The Dead-Tossed Waves was just released. PW said the new book, “…functions as something of a retelling of [the previous] story, albeit with a different protagonist.”
 |
|
The paperback of the first volume was released last month.
 |
|
