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
December 30th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
A collection of scholarly essays zoomed from #19,238 on Amazon sales rankings all the way up to #359 today.
Of course, the subject is not what you might expect for a scholarly work; the 29 essays are about the Coen brothers’ cult film, The Big Lebowski. And, unlike most academic collection of essays, it’s reviewed in the New York Times.
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According to WorldCat, the book is only owned by university libraries.
December 29th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
In the final week of the year, NPR’s Morning Edition is featuring the stories of various American lives.
Today, T. J. Stiles, author of the National Book Award winner for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, talked about the man who controlled 5% of the U.S. economy in his time, despite his lack of education.
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Books on Tape; UnAbr; 9781415965917; $100
Audiobook and eBook downloadable from OverDrive
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Tomorrow, the show will feature boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.
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eBook downloadable from OverDrive.
December 29th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
Despite the reduction in book review staffs and pages in the consumer media over the past few years, there is no dearth of best books lists, as you can see from the links at the right.
We’ve rounded up the major general lists, but there are dozens of other specialty lists, especially for mysteries. Fortunately, Janet Rudolph has rounded up the lists on her blog Mystery Fanfare.
December 28th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
With the press of thousand of new books released each week, the consumer media rarely reaches back to cover titles that came out months earlier. But on NPR’s Weekend Edition yesterday, Liane Hansen featured the debut title in a new detective series that came out back in July.
Since it is set in Africa, you might be tempted to think of a certain Scottish writer, but Kirkus said of it,
Quartey’s approach to detective work is less charming and more sociological than McCall Smith’s, his setting more rural and susceptible to the ways of magicians. There’s plenty of room for them both, and the newcomer is most welcome.
The title refers to girls who are “given over to a type of priest to atone for the crimes of their families.” Says Quartey, “They do a lot of hard work for him and once they’ve reached puberty, he has sex with them.”
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Audio: Tantor
Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive
December 28th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
Plenty of new fiction by big-name authors is hitting bookstore shelves, ready for those cashing in their gifts cards or returning unwanted gifts).
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Brilliance Audio
Audiobook and eBook downloadable from OverDrive.
Starred review from Booklist for this “…first in a trilogy connected to her brilliantly original Arcane Society series [which] displays all the signature Krentz elements her readers prize, from witty prose to a fast-paced plot rich in danger and intrigue to superheated chemistry between two perfectly matched protagonists”
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This thriller, told in reverse, is getting some extra attention because it is also being released as a Vook (today, the Washington Post took a look at it and other efforts to combine text and video).
Of the prepub reviewers, Booklist was the most enthusiastic, giving it a star. LJ‘s verdict was that “Suspending disbelief is worth every moment of Doetsch’s (The Thieves of Heaven; The Thieves of Faith) thrill ride through time, which tantalizingly reveals the true nature of all the characters involved.”
The book does have an intriguing premise, as outlined by the author:
Other big-name titles releasing on 12/29:
December 28th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
In preparation for all those New Year’s resolutions, the annual flood of self-help titles begins this week.
Several franchises are releasing new titles. The Eat this! Not That! guys have already tackled restaurants and supermarkets and now they take on the scariest place of all for dieters — Cook This! Not That!: The Kitchen Survival Guide. Unmarried, self-supporting “real” New York “housewife,” Bethenny Frankel has a new book in her Skinnygirl line, The Skinnygirl Dish and You: on a Diet is coming out in a new edition.
Our money is on The High School Reunion Diet: Lose 20 Years in 30 Days, for title alone.
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Some wimps make once-a-year resolutions, but for her “Happiness Project,” Gretchen Rubin lived a resolution a month and blogged about it (Happiness-Project.com).
The site is a model for making use of every possible form of social networking; there’s even a Happiness Project Toolbox, for people who want to create their own Happiness Project Groups. Now comes the old media version; a book. Rubin’s a library lover and includes Kansas City P.L. in her upcoming tour.
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HarperAudio: 9780061996924; 12/29/2009; $24.99
eBook downloadable from OverDrive.
December 28th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
Premiering tonight on PBS’s American Masters is Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. It was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition today.
Clips from the film:
The movie is based on a biography by Harriet Reisen, who is the writer/producer of the film.
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One of the commentators featured in the film is Geraldine Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her novel, March, which imagines the Civil War experiences of the fictional Mr. March, the father of the “little women” of the book.
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December 24th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
New York, with the highest concentration of large book publishing houses, ranks way down at #29 on the just-released list of the most literate U.S. cities, below Lexington-Fayette, KY (#15) and New Orleans (#17).
This is the fifth year of the study. Seattle has been #1 for three of those years. It lost out to Minneapolis in 2007 and tied with that city last year.
The rankings are based on the following per capita factors:
The top five cities in terms of libraries are:
December 24th, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
Just yesterday, we noted that The Help had appeared on only two best books lists — People’s and Entertainment Weekly‘s.
Forget about that — today, USA Today names it THE Book of the Year.
The book’s author, Kathryn Stockett was also interviewed by Michelle Norris on NPR‘s All Things Considered last night. Norris introduces the interview by saying that The Help is a book she “can’t seem to escape.” Women call her about it, email her and even approach her in the frozen food aisle to talk about it. The Help seems to compell “…white women to seek out conversation with black women about race and privilege.”
The Help rose from #2 on Amazon sales rankings to #1.
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| The Help |
| Kathryn Stockett |
| Retail Price: | $24.95 |
| Hardcover: | 464 pages |
| Publisher: | Putnam Adult – (2009-02-10) |
| ISBN / EAN: | 0399155341 / 9780399155345 |
Penguin Audio; ISBN: 9780143144182 $39.95
Downloadable from OverDrive in both eBook and audio
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Also available on the NPR Web site is a poignant essay by Norris about the 1974 edition of The Black Book, recently released in a 35th anniversary edition, and what it meant to her and her family when she was growing up.
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December 23rd, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
[UPDATE: We wrote this before USA Today named The Help THE book of the year]
Amazingly, given the enormous number of best books lists, one title hasn’t appeared on any of them, despite strong reviews and word of mouth; The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
Both People and Entertainment Weekly have remedied the oversight. People lists The Help at #2 on its Top Ten Books list (after Open by Andre Agassi) and Entertainment Weekly lists it at #2 on their Best Fiction list (after NBA nominee, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders).
[The lists are not available online, link here for the titles on a downloable spreadsheet.]
Our friends over at The Book Reporter named The Help THE Book of the Year (if you want your voice heard, they invite you to nominate your favorite titles of the year).
Entertainment Weely selected ten fiction titles, but they managed to include two more that haven’t appeared on other lists:
#8 Fiction
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Blackstone Audio:
Audio downloadale from OverDrive
Entertainment Weekly‘s annotation doesn’t explain why they consider this one of the ten best fiction of the year — “This fantastical story of three grieving siblings in windblown Nebraska might fly off into the heavens were it not for Kallos’ muscular prose.”
Kallos’ hometown newspaper, the Seattle Times makes a far better case for the book in their review.
PW gave it a starred review and called it an “enthralling second novel” (after the author’s debut Broken for You, which became a bestseller after it was selected for the Today Show Book Club).
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#9 Fiction
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Entertainment Weekly says, “Sheck’s novel, burrowing into the mind of the creature from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, is no monstrous mash of brainy bits and hot air, but an electrifying literary triumph.”
That’s not so convincing, either. When you look for other reviews, it doesn’t get much better. Ron Charles at the Washington Post began his with this observation,
The rallying cry against big publishers is that new artists can’t be nourished by an industry obsessed with bestsellers. But before grabbing our pitchforks and torching the House of Bertelsmann, consider the inexplicable appearance of A Monster’s Notes by a poet named Laurie Sheck. Gorgeously printed by New York’s premier publishing house, here is a baffling 500-page book about Frankenstein’s creation that defies description and shreds any expectations you might have for a novel.
Then he delivers the coup de grâce,
I’m sure somewhere there’s a reader smart enough (or dishonest enough) to enjoy this novel in all its rich allusiveness, but I spent the entire ordeal lurching along about 50 IQ points behind.
If Ron Charles had trouble with the book, there’s not much hope for the rest of us.
We should note that prepub reviews were generally better; Booklist starred it and the “famously grumpy” Kirkus called it “Utterly astonishing and not to be missed.”
Well, you can’t say the People list is totally focused on popular titles.
December 23rd, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
An appearance on the Today Show this morning propelled Kevin Michael Connolly’s Double Take from #67,933 on Amazon sales rankings to #197.
Connolly was born without legs, but became a competitive skier and photographer. The title of the book refers to the fact that, wherever he goes, he’s stared at.
Kirkus called it “a courageous, immensely rewarding chronicle expressed in arresting words and pictures.”
(Thanks to Marin Younker at Sno-Isle P.L. for pointing this out on the library’s Collection Developments @ Sno-Isle blog. Check it out, if only for the falling snow! How DO they do that?)
UPDATE, Ed. Note — I guess the above comment was too much for the EarlyWord Web guys (that’s adcStudio, in case you’re curious). A few minutes after this post, it began snowing on EarlyWord! Thanks for the laugh you guys — you’re the best!
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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HarperAudio; UNAB CD; 9780061981562; $16.99
Book and Audio downloadable from OverDrive
December 23rd, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
A new program for teachers and parents of toddlers with autism is producing encouraging results.
The NYT “Well” blog points to a report in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics that shows the Early Start Denver Model (E.S.D.M.) resulted in increased I.Q.’s.
The “Well” blog also interviews one of the co-authors of a new book describing the program. Libraries we checked have not ordered it.
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December 23rd, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
THE biography catching reviewers’ attention this month is Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith.
Highsmith’s books have had an enduring appeal, but were brought to a greater audience through recent movies based on the Ripliad, five novels featuring the charming sociopath Tom Ripley.
In the Washington Post, Jonatham Lethem’s review of the bio. is not as laudatory as others have been. Instead, he encourages readers to turn to the novels themselves.
As Lethem says, “The antidote to literary biography is literature.”
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The following are the Highsmith titles that Lethem recommends.
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December 22nd, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
If you just can’t get enough of best children’s books lists, rejoice. Horn Book has named their top picks of the year, 27 in all. The Barnes & Noble Review enlisted Lisa Von Drasek to pick her favorite Picture Books and Liz Rosenberg for the Best Chapter Books. The dearly departed Kirkus managed to get their lists of the Best Children’s and YA Books out in the knick of time.
We’ve updated our spreadsheet of all the picks, so you can check holdings, test your book knowledge, and identify titles you might have missed. The list includes ISBN’s for your ordering pleasure.
So, which titles seem to be on everyone’s list? Jerry Pinkney’s beautiful The Lion the Mouse got the most nods, with seven picks. The only list it’s not on is the NYT BR Notable Children’s Books, but it is on the NYT BR‘s Best Illustrated.
The NBA Winner, Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose was on every list it was eligible for, six in total, except the NYT Notable.
Following it are Francisco X. Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World, tied with Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, which each got five picks (this time, BOTH are on the NYT Notable list). Two picture books also got five picks; Moonshot by Brian Floca and Yummy by Lucy Cousins.
December 22nd, 2009 By: Nora Rawlinson
What books get the fewest consumer reviews?
No, not midlist titles — books by bestselling authors. Most reviewers feel they don’t need the attention (with the notable exceptions of People and Entertainment Weekly).
The Daily Beast is jumping into the breach. William Book has begun a new column that sorts through the bestsellers to identify “which, if any, are readable” (I guess that assumes people buy the books, but don’t read them?)
Here’s how he describes his brief:
I’ll render the kind of blunt verdict you get when reading about toasters in Consumer Reports. I’ll tell you which of the bestsellers, if any, are readable. If they’re semi-readable, I’ll tell you which pages to skip. With any luck, you’ll know which one to pack for the flight to Jakarta. If you want a different approach, try The New York Review of Books.
The first up is Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow. True to his word, he recommends that if you want to “cut straight to the whodunnit … skip over pages 25-26, 226-233, and 253-260,” although, “that’s not recommended, because U is for Undertow isn’t much of a mystery.”
Does he recommend reading it, “Absolutely,” although he doesn’t present a convincing case for doing so.
It’s a good idea for a column, but, generally, the prepub reviewers, who are not allergic to covering potential bestsellers (all four reviewed this one), were more articulate in their recommendations.
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Random House Audio, UNABR CD; 9780739323212; $45
Large Print; Thorndike; 9781410420374
Book and audio downloadable from OverDrive