EarlyWord

A book with an unlikely beginning, as a Tumbler blog about an unlikely subject, a Supreme Court Justice, is now an unlikely hit.

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik (Harper/Dey Street Books; OverDrive Sample), is on the rise, reaching #52 on the Amazon rankings.

Holds are well beyond a 3:1 ratio in many libraries we checked as well, with at least one spiking over 7:1.

A collection of images of Ginsberg, The New York Times describes it as “cheery curio, as if a scrapbook and the Talmud decided to have a baby,” but one with a serious start and a serious heart:

“Notorious RBG began in 2013 as a saucy Tumblr blog by Shana Knizhnik, then a law student, shortly after the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which discarded a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act. (For the hip-hop unlettered, Notorious RBG is a play on the Notorious B.I.G., the rapper who was murdered in 1997.) Justice Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, which in the genteel, marbled universe of the Supreme Court, is most unusual — the equivalent of shaming your spouse in front of dinner guests.”

Coverage of the title was widespread upon release and is still going strong. Sunday’s NYT featured Ginsburg and Gloria Steinem in an interview about women’s rights, starting the conversation with the book (curiouslyhe piece leads the “Fashion & Style” section) and New York Magazine listed it as one of the “9 Books We’re Reading Right Now.”

Edging up into the John Grisham stratosphere, Janet Evanovich’s next Stephanie Plum novel, Tricky Twenty-Two,is the holds leader among the books coming out next week. She is closely followed by David Baldacci’s The Guilty (Hachette/Grand Central). Somewhat further behind, but still strong, is Mary Higgins Clark’s All Dressed in White: An Under Suspicion Novel, written with Alafair Burke (S&S)

The titles covered here, and several other notable titles arriving next week, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of Nov. 16, 2015

Media Attention

438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea, Jonathan Franklin (S&S/Atria).

Outside magazine recently called this “The best survival book in a decade.” It will be the subject of a CNN Special, scheduled for November 17 as well as a Univision-TV two-part story, November 17 and 18.

This Old Man: All in Pieces, Roger Angell, (PRH/Doubleday)

Don’t worry, Roger Angell may be old (he’s 93), but he’s not in pieces. Instead, this is a collection of pieces he has written over the years. On Entertainment Weekly‘s Must List at #9, it is described as having “something for everyone, from profiles to haikus: the work of an inspiring life” and the author is set to be featured on:

NPR – Weekend Edition Saturday – 11/14
NPR Fresh Air – 11/17

Consumer Media Picks

People magazine’s picks for the week have all been released earlier.

At #1 is Stephen King’s short story collection, Bazaar of Bad Dreams. The other two picks are Little Victories: Perfect Rules for Imperfect Living by Jason Gay (see our coverage here) and Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker.

The latter has received fairly heavy media attention this week (check your holds) and gets a strong B+ from Entertainment Weekly (not yet online). EW also features the audio, which Parker reads, of course. Summing up the book they say, “she tells her story through a series of letters to the men in her life. Everyone from her father to her onetime cab driver. Reading between the lines, a portrait of the author emerges.” The New York Times also praises it, saying it “is written in a smart, beguiling voice.”

Tie-ins

Hitting theaters today is The 33, adapted from Héctor Tobar’s Deep Down Dark (released last month as a tie-in using the movie’s title). Saying, “Antonio Banderas jumps into the awards race in this account of the 2010 mine collapse,” it is the #1 People Pick of things to do this week.

For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.

Tie-ins scheduled for publication this week are:

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (Norton).

As we wrote when the news broke, Deadline calls this a “Surprise Oscar Entry” saying it “adds another film to what is shaping up to be the most competitive year-end movie market in recent memory.”

Talk about your moneyball. With Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Steve Carell, and Ryan Gosling. The movie opens in limited release on Dec. 12, and nationwide on Christmas Day. The trailer is here. Below is a recently released video with the actors and directors talking about making the movie.

The Man in the High Castle (Tie-In) by Philip K. Dick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books).

From Amazon Studios, this is their next big bet after their success with Transparent (the show’s creators says it would have been  too “expensive and dangerous” for regular networks). It begins streaming on Nov. 20.

As we noted, the series is directed by Ridley Scott, known for the 1982 movie Blade Runner based, if somewhat loosely, on another iconic book by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Several Best Books list have just been released. Since the National Book Awards will be announced on Wednesday evening, we decided to use the lists to try to predict the winners in fiction and nonfiction.

Library Journal’s Best Books list was released late yesterday. It follows the Amazon Editors picks of 100 favorites of 2015 in ranked order, Oprah’s list of Top Ten Favories, and PW‘s picks of 150 Best Books.

We’ve compared the top ten from all of these sources on the downloadable spreadsheet below:

Best Books — Top Ten

Based on that, the winners will be:

Nonfiction — Ta-Nehisi Coates, , Between the World and Me. (PRH/ Spiegel & Grau) — Picked by all four sources. The number 2 Amazon Editors Pick.

Fiction — Lauren Groff,  Fates and Furies (PRH/Riverhead Books) — The number 1 Amazon Editors Pick and in LJ’s top ten (but not in PW‘s Top Ten. In fact, PW is a holdout on this title, which isn’t among any of their other picks)

Note to those placing bets: this approach would not have worked last year. The fiction winner appeared on only one of these top ten lists and the nonfiction winner didn’t appear on any of them.

CBS Films is adapting James Patterson’s bestselling children’s series Middle School.

Directed by Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop), the cast will include Lauren Graham (Parenthood, Gilmore Girls) and Rob Riggle (22 Jump Street, Hotel Transylvania 2).

The series have won the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards and several titles in the series have been selected for ALSC Summer Reading Lists.

The newest title in the set is Middle School: Just My Rotten Luck (Hachette/Little, Brown; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)

Patterson will serve as an executive producer and is co-financing the film. According to the Hollywood Reporter, it is expected in theaters on October 7, 2016.

Donald Trump unwittingly sent a book of poetry rocketing up Amazon’s sales rankings.

Claudia Rankine’s award-winning poetry collection, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press; Tantor Audio; OverDrive Sample), soared to #21 (from #646) after footage went viral of twenty-three year-old Johari Osayi Idusuyi prominently reading a copy of Citizen in the background as Trump spoke at a campaign rally on  Monday.

The story is also showing up on news shows. Idusuyi told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that she had been to a Rankine reading recently and brought the book along to pass the time before the rally began. She decided to start reading rather than listening after Trump and his supporters expelled a protester, knocking off her Obama hat and flinging it into the crowd.

Trump supporters sitting near by tried to get Idusuyi to stop reading. She did not and, at the end of the rally, she held up the book as others held up Trump signs.

Citizen, which was a finalist for the National Book Award last year and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2014, explores racism in the U.S. It is now higher on Amazon’s sales rankings than Trump’s campaign book Crippled America, currently at #99.

David Mitchell just won the 2015 World Fantasy Awards for The Bone Clocks, (Random House; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample).

His most recent book, Slade House, published last month (Random House; Random House Audio and BOT; OverDrive Sample), is a blend of genres.

Few authors are in such a strong position to call out the war on genre. In Wired’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast he does so in no uncertain terms, calling it a “bizarre act of self-mutilation” for readers to avoid certain genres, such as SF or Fantasy, or only read certain kinds of fiction.

“The book doesn’t care if it’s science fiction,” he says. “The book doesn’t give a damn about genre, it just is what it is.”

In a wide-ranging interview Mitchell also talks Dungeons & Dragons and its relation to Slade House, defends and praises Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, and extols Andy Weir’s The Martian. He is a big fan of Susan Cooper as well and discusses how Ursula K. Le Guin sparked his desire to be a writer:

“I have clear memories from way back of finishing A Wizard of Earthsea on a rainy Saturday morning, and just having this incandescent urge inside me, like a magnesium ribbon, that I badly wanted to do that as well. I wanted to make those worlds and people—those imaginary worlds—and send them on journeys, and give them quests, and make other people feel what she had made me feel.”

The first preview of Miracles from Heaven, a new movie starring Jennifer Garner and Queen Latifah has been just been released

Based on the book Miracles from Heaven: A Little Girl, Her Journey to Heaven, and Her Amazing Story of Healing by Christy Wilson Beam (Hachette; OverDrive Sample), the film is highlighted in a People magazine online spread. It tells the story of a young girl who “survived a 30-ft. fall from a tree and told her parents she had visited heaven – then was inexplicably cured from her terminal digestive disorder.”

The new issue of People magazine, on newsstands this Friday, features the story in full and includes “additional photos from set and more from Jennifer Garner.”

The film’s release date is March 18, 2016. The Sony producing team behind the 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real is also heading this one.

Although the book title sounds like a several  bestsellers, this one did not hit any of the lists and was not reviewed pre-pub. It was written by the girl’s mother, played by Garner in the film, and is her first book.

Two tie-in editions are forthcoming in February.

Miracles from Heaven — Trade pbk. ISBN: 9780316311373
Miracles from Heaven — Mass Mkt. ISBN: 9780316355322

Note: Tie-in cover art is forthcoming

The chat has now ended. Read the archived version below.

If you haven’t read Black Rabbit Hall (Penguin/Putnam), request a DRC from NetGalley or Edelweiss. It will be available until publication day, Feb. 9, 2016.

If you enjoy the book, remember to recommend it for LibraryReads.

For those who enjoy the skewering of accepted wisdom, like “the book is always better than the movie,” read this:

The Girl on the Train Movie Will Surpass the Mediocre Book

The movie debuts Oct. 16, 2016, so we have a year before we find out if this prediction os accurate.

Do audiobooks still need defending?

At least one person thinks so. Ten years after the New York Times looked into whether listening to audiobooks was “real” reading, or just “oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights,” Claire Armistead asks a similar question in the Guardian, “Reading with your ears: do audiobooks harm or help literature?” She quotes American literary critic Harold Bloom, who told the NYT that reading text is superior, “Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear. You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.”

She also quotes Neil Gaiman, a brilliant reader of his own work, who said that same year (via his blog) that Bloom’s comments are,

“just snobbery and foolishness … I don’t believe there are books I’ve never ‘read’ because I have only heard them, or poems I’ve not experienced because I’ve only heard the poets read them. Actually, I believe that if the writer is someone who can communicate well aloud (some writers can’t), you often get much more insight into a story or poem by hearing it.”

The New Yorker jumped into the fray seven years later,  also refuting Bloom.

Armistead explores the issue for herself by comparing the experience of reading and then listening to Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster, (S&S Audio, 2014).  The novel left her flat in print but thrilled her in audio (listen to an excerpt here, read by the brilliant Fiona Shaw, who also talks about reading the book here).

You have to wonder if Bloom, now 85 and at an age when many discover new appreciation for audiobooks, still feels the way he did ten years ago.

“An app-based novel that aspires to be the most bonkers book ever written.”

That is how BuzzFeed begins a very long profile about the newest project by Eli Horowitz, one of the driving forces behind the indie publishing house McSweeney’s.

Horowitz wants to change how books and reading are understood. His newest effort in that undertaking is The Pickle Index.

Unlike most books that might be described with a plot summary what really matters here is what The Pickle Index is.

As reviewer Carmen Machado describes it for NPR’s Arts & Life review, it is three books and an app.

One is a paperback illustrated with small black and white images: The Pickle Index (Macmillan/FSG Originals; OverDrive Sample).

There is also a hardcover two-book slipcase set edition with illustrations by Ian Huebert, that a la Brian Selznick, have strong story-telling power: The Pickle Index (Sudden Oak Books).

As Machado puts it,

“the illustrations in each [of the hardback volumes] encourage the reader to read the books back and forth, or at the very least turn and twirl the illustrations to see how they connect with, compliment, or contradict each other.”

If that were not enough, the hardcover books are not, as Machado describes, “simply the paperback with color” but are structured differently than the paperback.

Then there is the app, of which Machado says,

“is [a] different thing entirely, while still being more of the same … Once the reader has read the necessarily elements, they can progress through the story in real time, or with the narrative accelerated. Additionally, the app has one-off jokes and minor side plots — including two soldiers trapped in a submarine together, squabbling in the Q&A section. You, the reader, are also integrated into this frustrating world, and have to (among other things) manipulate the Index’s deliberately clunky interface.”

Lost? Horowitz describes it this way to Anne Helen Petersen of BuzzFeed:

“There are all these different ways that you can read that are valid, so I wanted to fully imagine all of those formats. So: the book-iest book I could do, and the app-iest app. Even the paperback, and the Kindle version. They’ll have their own sort of thing, with different reaches and different audiences.”

It might sound overly elaborate and precious, but Horowitz knows his stuff. He has worked with big-named authors including Dave Eggers, Miranda July, Michael Chabon, and Joyce Carol Oates and, says Petersen, “every book he’s written has been optioned for film or television: The New World, published in May, was optioned by Olivia Wilde; The Silent History, a digital app turned paperback from 2012, is slated to become AMC’s new prestige drama.”

There are plenty of people thinking about the future of the book. Horowitz is one of the most creative, telling BuzzFeed, “That’s why I made The Pickle Index in so many forms … To say there’s not a future; there are futures.”

Still wondering what the book is about? Petersen describes it as featuring “a delightfully unskilled circus troupe against the backdrop of a fascist dystopia, united by a forced devotion to fermented items.”

Described as an “instant classic,” Jeannette Walls’ best selling memoir The Glass Castle,(S&S/Scribner), tells the amazing story of a growing up with dysfunctional, sometimes homeless parents. In 2012, it was set to be adapted as a film starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Plans have changed and now Brie Larson is in talks to star, as is Woody Harrelson, reports Deadline. Larson is currently enjoying Oscar buzz for her star role in another book adaptation, Room (she was interviewed about it on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday).

Glass Castle‘s Director Daniel Cretton has worked with her before, on the well-received movie Short Term 12.

Shortly after A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat  (RH/Schwartz & Wade, Jan.) was selected as one of the ten Best Illustrated Book by the NYT Book Review, NPR’s Code Switch reported on the simmering controversy over the book’s portrayal of an enslaved mother and daughter in a story titled,”The Kids’ Book A Fine Dessert Has Award Buzz — And Charges Of Whitewashing Slavery.”

The story comes full circle with an article in the New York Times, online Friday (in print on Saturday), “A Fine Dessert: Judging a Book by the Smile of a Slave.”

The book portrays history through the making of a single dessert, blackberry fool, in four different centuries, 1710, 1810, 1910, and 2010. The section from 1810 portrays an enslaved woman and her daughter making the dessert for a white family, then licking the remains from the bowl while hidden in a closet. Many objected that the mother and daughter appear to be enjoying the process of creating the fool, feeding the myth of the “happy slave” and that the closet scene, while stark in contrast, needs more context (see the NYT story for images of the pages).

The reactions have caused a soul-searching on the part of the books’  creators as well as at least one reviewer.

As the NYT notes, author Emily Jenkin has posted an apology online, saying that she will donate her writing fee to the campaign We Need Diverse Books.

Illustrator Sophie Blacknall, however, defends the book, as she did on Tuesday, responding to direct criticisms from author Daniel José Older at the Fall Conference of the New York City School Library System (section begins at time stamp 21:15).

The book received four starred reviews (the only holdout and the only prepub reviewer to raise a flag about the issue was Publishers Weekly). The Book Review Editor for School Library Journal, Kiera Parrott, wrote that publication’s starred review. She has posted comments on Twitter, and published them on Storify as “Reflecting on A Fine Dessert,” saying that at first she first felt the book’s depiction offered “a great opportunity to talk to [children] about America’s dark and painful history.” After reading what others have had to say, she says that she now realizes she was wrong and that, “It may feel odd for those of us who want to see more diversity to realize that sometimes NO representation is better than bad representation.”

For those who want to dive deeper into the issue,  SLJ, has published a bibliography of discussion.

The Selected Poems of Donald Hall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) tops the December Indie Next list, the first time a book of poetry has led the list.

Hall, former US Poet Laureate, is one of the most beloved and respected poets writing today. This collection spans over seven decades of writing.

Katharine Nevins, of MainStreet BookEnds of Warner, Warner, NH says:

“This is a gift of honesty, intimacy, and the pure genius that is Donald Hall, as he hand-picks what he considers to be the best of his poetry from more than 70 years of published works. From this former U.S. Poet Laureate comes one essential volume of his works, where ‘Ox-Cart Man’ sits alongside ‘Kicking the Leaves’ and ‘Without.’ As he is no longer writing poetry, this ‘concise gathering of my life’s work’ is the perfect introduction to Hall’s literary contributions, as well as closure for his many ardent followers.”

December is traditionally a slow time for publishing as booksellers are up to their ears managing holiday sales. Perhaps as a consequence, just over half of the Indie Next December list features November titles including Umberto Eco’s Numero Zero, Mitch Albom’s The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto, Carly Simon’s memoir Boys in the Trees, and Michael Cunningham and Yuko Shimizu’s A Wild Swan: And Other Tales.

Others on the list pubbing in December are paperback originals, including A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton (Penguin; Blackstone Audio), also our most recent Penguin Debut Authors Pick.

Sandi Torkildson, of A Room of One’s Own bookstore in Madison, WI says:

“An intimate look at the devastating effect of the bombing of Nagasaki on one family, this is a story of love — parental and sexual, selfless and selfish, and, in the end, healing. Amaterasu Takahashi opens the door of her home in the U.S. to a badly scarred man claiming to be her grandson, who supposedly perished along with her daughter during the bombing nearly 40 years earlier. The man carries a cache of letters that forces Ama to confront her past and the love affair that tore her apart from her daughter.”

There is not a LibraryReads list in December. Instead librarians will celebrate the full year of reading with a “Favorite of Favorites” list to be issued on Dec. 1.

Librarian picks published in December 2015 will appear together with the January 2016 picks on the January LibraryReads list.

The November Slate book club is an intense conversation regarding Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (RH/Doubleday; OverDrive Sample).

Laura Bennett, Andrew Kahn, Dan Kois, and Katy Waldman, all of Slate, gathered to talk about Hanya Yanagihara’s novel just a few weeks before she discovers if the book wins the National Book Award (to be announced Nov.18).

In what might be the best expression of the group’s reaction, one of the panelists said she has never had as complicated a relationship with a novel, finding it both riveting and deeply unpleasant, a book she could not stop reading even as she found herself emotionally manipulated at every turn.

Another National Book Award finalist, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, will be the subject of the December discussion.