This week in What We're Reading, we return to popular fiction, check out some short stories, and run with the space nerds.
If you're traveling this holiday season, you're likely to spot a few copies of Michael Crichton's final completed novel, Pirate Latitudes, which really does contain the line "Warm day for a hanging," and we have some thoughts on that. There are short stories from award-winners Ha Jin and Alice Munro, commented upon by familiar NPR voices Jacki Lyden and Lynn Neary. Finally, we'll peek at the latest installment of an intensely researched series on the Russian and U.S. space programs -- this one looks at the history of U.S. attempts at unmanned systems.
The books over at What We're Reading are really interesting this week. I didn't read the Sarah Palin book (for timing reasons, not merit reasons), but I read all four of the others -- including the Stephen King, which I'm glad we could cover, since some of you had specifically asked that we make sure popular fiction isn't left behind.
I also have to stress: that Andre Agassi book is fantastic, and I am not a person who cares tremendously about tennis. He's very generous in the acknowledgments with his ghostwriter, and it's a good thing, because about three pages in, you will think, "Despite Agassi's name on the cover, if this was written by a tennis player, I am the starting quarterback for the Green Bay Packers."
The Zadie Smith essays are really marvelous as well, and no matter where you stand on religion, The Faith Instinct will probably bother you, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. A very thought-provoking collection of books, overall.
Take note: A new edition of What We're Reading is now available, featuring a biography of Antonin Scalia, memoirs by Mary Karr (Liars' Club) and journalist Harold Evans, and a special crime-fiction anthology assembled straight from the heart of fiction-loving and giant-bookstore-hating.
We're still taking any suggestions you have about how that feature might be most useful to you, what books coverage you like best, and -- of course -- these particular books.
This isn't actually anyone's office. (iStockphoto.com)
by Linda Holmes
When I was in college, our Conservatory Of Music (where, needless to say, I was not enrolled) used to say that it had the world's largest collection of Steinway pianos under one roof. I am convinced that NPR HQ could similarly compete for the largest office-based collection of books.
They're stacked on desks, they're on shelves, they're in boxes under tables, they're lying around on tables, they're in mail bins, they're poking out of bags, they're ... did I mention they're stacked on desks? Because they are really, quite seriously, sometimes perilously stacked on desks in gravitationally defiant towers. People read a lot around here.
And a new feature, called "What We're Reading," is designed to funnel some of that massive, book-devouring energy into a weekly list of new books that we think are worth knowing about. Maybe they're great books, maybe they're newsworthy books, maybe they're from great authors -- there are lots of reasons to know about a book. When we feature one, we'll tell you a little about it, and we'll provide a few words from someone around NPR who's read it and can share some thoughts.
In this week's edition: Guy Raz, host of Weekend All Things Considered, reacts to Jonathan Safran Foer's new book in praise of vegetarianism, and books and publishing correspondent Lynn Neary talks about Barbara Kingsolver's new novel. We'll also look at what one publication has called "scandalous frippery," check out a new Paul Auster novel and soak up a detailed examination of a company many of us patronize countless times every day.
We know that many of you, too, are voracious readers, so this is where you can help. What kinds of pointers and recommendations for new books do you find most useful? What kinds of books do you like to see spotlighted? What sorts of authors would you like to hear more about? We'll be developing the list week by week, so if you have thoughts, we'd love to hear them, and we hope you'll tell us, of course, what you're reading.
When I was reading Chuck Klosterman IV in the fall of 2007, I was commuting every day on the subway in New York, and I would see it everywhere. I remember once seeing two other people on the same subway car I was on, reading the same book I was. Klosterman's essays on Britney Spears, Val Kilmer, professional basketball, and lots (and lots) more were funny, odd and engaging. This was his second book of that kind, after 2003's Sex, Drugs And Cocoa Puffs, which I also liked a lot, and which I'd enjoyed as an audiobook.
A little more than two years later, he's back with Eating The Dinosaur, a book of essays much less concerned with their ostensible subjects and much more concerned with introspection.
The good news is that if you like his writing (and many people don't), there's lots to enjoy here about Ralph Sampson and Brett Favre, and about Garth Brooks' foray into making music as his alter ego, Chris Gaines. I'm not sure I buy the parallel Klosterman tries to draw between David Koresh and Kurt Cobain, but it's interesting to contemplate.
He still puts together a riff as well as anyone in the business. If you watch football, you've probably done your own impression of the Brett Favre Media Tongue Bath, but here's the way Klosterman depicts it:
The rhetoric never evolved: "He just loves to play the game. He just loves to throw the old pigskin around the old backyard. He just wears Wrangler jeans and forgets to shave. Sure, he throws a few picks now and then, but that's just because he's a gunslinger. That's just Brett being Brett." He was so straightforward and authentic that analysts were unable to discuss Brett Favre without using the word just somewhere in the sentence.
I consider myself a cheerful collector of Brett Favre hit pieces (here's one I also love), and that bit is pretty good. (Though he forgot the part where Brett Favre is like a kid out there.)
The less good news is that, particularly late in the book, Klosterman takes a turn into talking more about himself, and about his preoccupation with a doomed search for perfect authenticity, neither of which are subjects he engages with quite the dead-on accuracy he tends to apply to things like Britney Spears and Brett Favre.
A writer talks about writing and the search for authenticity, after the jump.
Barnes & Noble wants to go after the Kindle, and they're using a color touchscreen to do it. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
As many of you know, I have a Kindle, and it's not an exaggeration to say that it has, in a very short time, wildly increased the amount of reading that I do. I had wandered away from reading for pleasure, but e-books have persuaded me that a good part of the reason that happened is that I don't like accumulating physical books (which makes me, I know, the opposite of many of you). When I was reading The Lost Symbol, I was happy, frankly, that when it was over, I wasn't going to have a 500-page book that I'd have to (1) store; (2) sell; (3) recycle; (4) give away; or (5) burn. Better for the environment, better for my apartment.
(In fact, however, I suspect that the real reason is the ability to make impulse book purchases from home. "Hear about interesting book; press button." This is a good way to go broke and read a lot.)
There are other e-readers on the market from places like Sony, but the big dog has been the Kindle -- until yesterday, when (as you may have heard on Morning Edition, Barnes & Noble jumped into the fray with the Nook, a close cousin of the Kindle with what look like a couple of advantages and a couple of disadvantages.
Headlines of the "Pow! Zap! Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!" variety, once thick on the ground, have grown mercifully rare. Oh, these articles still crop up, but as we've mentioned before, they now read like relics of a less enlightened age, bearing all the cultural relevancy of the sock garter.
It's become increasingly difficult to argue that the comics form isn't a medium unto itself that can tell compelling human stories with emotional weight. (Some folk still do attempt to argue precisely this, of course, and it can be entertaining to watch them try.)
Last week, David Small's Stitches was nominated for a National Book Award, making it only the second comics work to achieve that distinction. In the publishing world, and the comics world, this news has been received (at least online) with a mixture of enthusiasm and confusion.
The confusion, on the other hand, requires a bit of unpacking.
After the jump: Why the term "graphic novel" is the "Kleenex" of the publishing world; Why you shouldn't leave very young children in the Norton and Co. daycare center, and what the Young Adult category has in common with Celebrity Jeopardy!
The first 75 percent or so of John Ortved's The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History is brisk and engaging and likely to entertain Simpsons die-hards without breaking a sweat. Conan O'Brien talks about the gags he pulled in the writers' room; details emerge about the way the show developed into its current form; gossipy stories about James L. Brooks and Matt Groening (who both come off badly for different reasons) are tossed about. There are great stories about Michael Jackson and Aerosmith, and it's a fine reminder of just how crazy the show's merchandising got back in the day.
Neither Groening nor Brooks cooperated with the book, and neither did writer-producer Sam Simon (whom Ortved fingers as the primary genius at work on the show), so it's an oral history with the central figures missing. Ortved goes to some trouble in a recent Daily Beast piece to argue that the book was so daring that Fox pulled out all the stops to try to stop it from being published and to deny him access, but there's certainly nothing in the book explosive enough to justify quite that much of a dust-up.
Ortved's thesis, essentially, is that lots of people are responsible for the success of The Simpsons, and their creator, Matt Groening, has too often been viewed as the sole source to the detriment of others who also deserve to be praised. That's the nut of the story, so don't go in expecting anything particularly adventurous based on the claim that Fox was terrified of the book.
At any rate, most of Ortved's work provides a solid basic history, even if a lot of it will be familiar to fans. He weaves together interviews with writers and cast members who worked on the show, people who were on the business side, and people who knew the folks involved. There's a good balance between information and gossip; between a story about simmering creativity and a story about flawed human beings who showed their flaws -- as many do -- more and more as the money accumulated.
He works around the absences of Groening, Brooks and Simon by rolling in quotes from interviews they've done in the past and, in some cases, even quotes from DVD commentaries (that one seems like a stretch). It's not unfair, exactly, but it's distracting, and serves as a constant reminder that you are, in fact, experiencing a workaround.
The bigger problem, however, is that the book Ortved seems to really want to write is a book called To Whom Shall I Send My Letter Of Complaint Regarding The Creative Downfall Of The Simpsons? And when he gets to that final section, things go a little off-course.
After reading Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (he also wrote The Da Vinci Code and Angels And Demons, as you probably know), I can honestly say I know more about the Freemasons than I ever expected I would learn without going directly to the Freemasons for a copy of their press kit. (Which would be encoded.) (Irony!)
While the story is well constructed and kind of exciting, what has stuck with me is Brown's unusual writing style, in which -- among other things -- everything is explained in such exacting detail with such an abundance of trivia that you could personally breed, educate, deploy, command, and ultimately destroy your very own Freemason using only the information found in this book. If there's a secret society somewhere in the world, he will tell you about it. If there's a great thinker who once mentioned the Freemasons in some piece of writing, he'll quote it. Everything sounds better in Latin.
You get the idea.
What this got me thinking (naturally) is that Brown's style is wasted on these mystical thrillers. He needs to branch out. As always, I am here to help.
An excerpt from The Hidden Yolk, a cookbook by Dan Brown
"Maybe I'm a skeptic, but I just don't believe you can cook eggs that way," she said, looking at the pan skeptically with a skeptical eye.
"Ah, but you can," he said with a small smile, stepping back from the stove and watching as approximately two inches of water came to a gentle simmer. "Scientists now believe that Polynesian chickens were brought to the Americas before Columbus." He cracked the egg into a shallow dish, then slid it gently into the water, being careful not to break the yolk. "There is no nutritional difference between brown eggs and white eggs, you know."
"I don't understand," she replied. "I have always heard that brown eggs were better for you. Are you saying that isn't true?"
He spooned a little of the water over the egg. "It isn't true at all. Different colors of eggs simply come from different breeds of chickens." After the egg had simmered for three to four minutes, he lifted it out of the pan with a slotted spoon and placed it on a plate, where a piece of toast was already waiting.
She is going to really love this poached egg.
He handed her the plate and went to the refrigerator to fetch the orange juice. When he opened the door, he froze in place. It was unbelievable. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. He could not imagine how it was possible. It was huge. Nothing would ever be the same.
Craig Ferguson is probably the least polarizing guy in late-night. He's not as cranky as Letterman, as under-the-gun as Conan, as unlikely as Jimmy Fallon, or as irreverent as Jimmy Kimmel.
He doesn't make a lot of headlines; he's just there, after Letterman, being funny. And now, he's written a very, very good memoir called American On Purpose. (The title comes from his decision to become a citizen, which he did last year.)
The great majority of the book is about Ferguson's life before he was famous: growing up in Scotland, getting into trouble, casting about for what to do, playing in bands (his discussion of punk alone is worth buying the book), getting divorced a couple of times, and -- oh, yes -- doing a lot of drugs and a whole lot of drinking prior to getting sober in 1992.
Unlike most literary depictions of childhood, Jeff Kinney's Diary Of A Wimpy Kid actually feels like the childhoods many of us remember.
by Sarah D. Bunting
Literary recollections of childhood seem to exist at extremes. In memoirs and fiction alike, privation is the rule, and the rare exception involves not comfort but outright danger or trauma. The Marches of Little Women obsess over silk yardage. The Ingallses live in a Little House on the Prairie ... except when they live in their covered wagon, or in what amounts to a sod hole. Harry Potter is an orphan who has to battle black magic just to get through the school year. Mary Karr gets molested by the babysitter. Augusten Burroughs lives in a funhouse. Stephen King's protagonists in It face off against a murderous clown, S.E. Hinton's characters get killed by the cops or ditched by their parents ... and this isn't even mentioning Anne Frank.
What's interesting about the hardships and travails of kiddie lit, though, isn't their bleakness per se, but the way it contrasts with our mutually-agreed-upon cultural conception of childhood as a time of golden innocence: sledding, trick-or-treating, and valuable lessons learned.
And what's interesting about Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series is the way the daily frustrations of an acerbic, somewhat lazy and selfish middle-class kid, rendered as a stick figure, succeed as storytelling despite the absence of spell-casting, abuse, and mustache-twirling villains. Nobody is defeated; the diarist, Greg Heffley, never really learns anything. He doesn't have much of an arc. It works, though -- not in spite of that, but because of it. It feels true.
A book for the ten-year-old and the thirty-year-old, after the jump...
If you read The A.V. Club very often (that would be the non-satirical entertainment section of The Onion), you're familiar with its fondness for lists, from the sublime to the truly and gloriously ridiculous.
In the first category, you would find the list of 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, which crystallized a concept so utterly necessary to the understanding of movies, irritation and Zach Braff that it's a wonder all reviews of Garden State didn't simply say "Blah blah blah, feh" until it was written.
In the second category, you would find a list called You Got Your Moog In My Keytar!,which lists 10 Highly Pretentious Musical Instruments. (Get your Internet flamethrowers ready, grand piano fanboys! Your favorite instrument is pretentious, you hear me? Pretentious!)
Many of the A.V. Club's very entertaining lists are rolled up into Inventory, its amusing and stealthily educational new book. (Note: A.V. Club film writer Scott Tobias also contributes movie reviews to NPR now and then.) What makes these particular writers so good is that their lists are not merely a bunch of boring "greatest" compliations; these lists are built around good ideas, such that seeing them next to each other genuinely does make you think about a strand of popular culture.
Labors of love, Patton Oswalt, exclamation points, and more, after the jump.
Cake Wrecks, an Internet site maintained by Jen Yates, is the kind of project that radiates such brilliant simplicity that you wish you'd invented it yourself.
Subtitled "When Professional Cakes Go Horribly, Hilariously Wrong," Cake Wrecks is really just a blog made up of photos, sent in by readers, of professionally baked and decorated cakes that someone really tried to charge money for. Yates sprinkles them with a little witty commentary, but for the most part, it's that simple.
And now, delightfully, Cake Wrecks has spawned a hysterically funny book of the same name that, I am happy to report, sent both my co-workers at NPR and my family into fits of giggling. It's one of those great momentum-builders, where you giggle at the first one, and then you giggle more as you turn every page, and then you start laughing, and then you can't stop laughing, and you're suddenly laughing so hard you can't stop laughing long enough to tell anyone what you're laughing at. If you've ever read a book like that, you know what an unmatched joy it is.
It's true that Cake Wrecks is a big silly joke -- it's not social commentary or high-minded satire. It's just funny. But there is something about this particular project that has a sort of relentlessly upbeat and warm good nature to it that isn't always found in similar "FAIL"-type blogs.
One big part of it is that word "professional." Yates has no interest in humiliating your friend or your grandmother who was just trying to do something you would love, and she doesn't want you sending in the cake your preschooler's best friend's mother made. No, these cakes are the results of failed business transactions. They aren't labors of love; they're labors of ... labor. In fact, her FAQ mentions that she doesn't even feature anything where she's aware that the professional is an excited newbie just starting out. Why? In part "because it makes me feel like a bully."
Still, when you see some of them, any sympathy you might have for the embarrassed bakeries will likely fly out the window (those responsible aren't named, by the way, so it's not about ruining anybody's business). On the cover of the book, you'll see that cake that says, "Happy Birthday Suzanne, Under Neat That We Will Miss You." As you can imagine, that is not quite what the customer intended when filling out the order form for Suzanne's cake.
Amazon's Kindle 2 (seen here at its February 2009 unveiling) has become a major player in e-book readers, but how does it work? (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
I had a little bit of an ulterior motive for asking you all a few weeks ago whether you read e-books: I was considering getting an e-book reader myself. Yesterday, my Amazon Kindle arrived. (I should point out: I bought it. It is not a freebie or a promotional whatsit, so don't worry on that front.)
My Kindle is named Schmindle. Why? Because when you get your Kindle, they offer you the opportunity to give it a name, and that made me laugh. What do you name a Kindle? Bob? Constance? Winifred? Arsenio? Mine is named Schmindle.
So how's it going?
A few thoughts on the transition so far, after the jump.
Yes, this is a real bookshelf from my real living room. No, there is no organizational structure. (Linda Holmes / NPR)
by Linda Holmes
While looking at this amazing entry about author Neil Gaiman's bookshelves (with a hat-tip to Boing Boing), it occurred to me that my collection of physically owned books is much smaller than it used to be. In my case, this is partly because I lived for a time in a tiny apartment in which ownership of a large quantity of books was simply not possible, but I'm curious about how many feet of books most people own, in shelf space. (And, of course, in boxes.)
So here's the question: What's your rough estimate of how many feet of books you personally own and keep at home? (A four-shelf bookcase that's two feet wide would hold eight feet, in this entirely unscientific estimating process.) Do you have cartons of them in closets? What makes up the bulk of your collection? Do you hoard your college textbooks? Are you unable to resist books about French cooking? Let's talk collections.
Everyone wants kids to read, but how do you make that happen? And is all reading the same? (iStockphoto.com)
by Linda Holmes
Do required reading lists foster a hatred of reading?
That's the argument put forth by Meg Cabot, who writes a lot of popular fiction, some of which (The Princess Diaries, for instance) is aimed at younger audiences. Cabot's central question: "Why are people always making kids hate to read by forcing them to read things they don't want to read, or aren't ready to read yet?"
Cabot was responding to this article in The New York Times about how some schools are shifting away from a model where the teacher assigns a series of serious books, and toward a model where students choose what they want to read. After Cabot's comment came this terrific little essay at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.
We talked about this at length about a year ago, but these pieces are all very valuable additions to the discussion, I think. And it's hard for me not to feel appalled, I admit, by the scoring system discussed by this parent, also writing recently in the New York Times.
I think reading Harry Potter books is a perfectly wonderful way for kids to enjoy reading, but if you're going to assign "points" to books at all, assigning those books such preposterously high values -- not to mention how Hamlet wound up earning fewer points than a Gossip Girl book -- is pretty hard to understand.
I've discussed before my fondness for audiobooks, but news this morning about the decision to release the next Dan Brown novel as an e-Book and a hardcover at the same time got me thinking about the fact that I never read e-Books. At all.
I do know people who own Amazon Kindles, but I haven't gotten yet to the point where my desire not to carry books is worth carrying another thing with a charger and, of course, the potential to break. I'm not against them, and I don't share the "I love paper and glue" sentimental attachment that drives a lot of people to hang on to their physical hardcovers.
But I'd never read an e-Book on a PC, certainly. I'd never read one on a phone-sized device. I'd have to have one of the portable devices that would let me see a whole page at a time. And once I start envisioning that, then it seems like f it's heavy, then...it's heavy, and if it's thin and light, I'd be preoccupied with the idea of snapping it in half.
So I'm curious: Do you read e-Books? Do you like them? Is it satisfying? Do the negatives and positives balance in the right way for you? If you don't read them, what's holding you back? Is it cost? Logistics? Selection of titles? Most importantly, am I missing out?
Authors whose books I have read and liked: Janet Evanovich. Jennifer Weiner. Emily Giffin. Sophie Kinsella. As mentioned previously, Susan Elizabeth Phillips. So when I talk about "commercial women's fiction," or "chick lit," I am not talking down to it or up to it or through it: I'm in it. I've read it. I confess.
So when you headline an article "The Death Of Chick Lit," as Slate's "Double X" online magazine recently did for a piece by author Sarah Bilston, it at least piques my curiosity — which I guess is the point, right?
Let's put aside the following objections: (1) That the piece reads like a long advertisement for Sarah Bilston's next book. (2) That the piece does not announce, discuss or in any way imply the death of chick lit, but instead simply suggests that authors have to adjust their "commercial women's fiction" to fit the recessionary times — as Sarah Bilston did in her new book, which you should consider purchasing! (3) That the piece spends a lot more time on an author talking about her process than most people want to hear.
We will put these aside and move on to the thesis, which makes absolutely no sense to me.
I was always irritated by Carrie Bradshaw, after the jump...
When I heard Jason Kersten, author of The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter, interviewed on The Leonard Lopate Show last month, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the book, which chronicles the rise of Art Williams from two-bit gangster to one of the Secret Service's most wanted manufacturers of bad money.
Williams himself cuts an interesting figure, and Kersten's writing is highly capable; he doesn't get bogged down in biographical sidebars, and when Williams' need to reconnect with his long-absent father leads to a major, and deeply pitiable, reversal of fortune, Kersten doesn't overwrite the sequence.
It's an excellent book, with lots of drama and fun factoids -- for a civilian. I am not a civilian. Friends, I am a currency nerd.
The habits, habitat, and inclinations of the currency nerd, and how to trace your own bills, after the jump...
One:
Bradbury refers to the book as "Fahrenheit Four-Five-One," and not, as you probably do, "Fahrenheit Four-Fifty-One." Huh.
Two:
Artist Tim Hamilton struggled with the classic Adapter's Dilemma (What to include? What to exclude?).
Three:
To the surprise of precisely no one, I sound on the radio exactly like the gigantic nerd I know myself to be off the air. ("Many-tendrilled creature?" Seriously?)
Four:
Bradbury's book isn't really about censorship, it's about a creeping societal apathy toward culture in general and literature in particular.
Four Point One:
Bradbury wrote the book in the early 50's, and was way out in front of the TV-rots-your-brain movement.
Four Point Two:
A smart writer like Bradbury could see the threat TV posed to his livelihood, and no doubt wrote the book feeling the hot breath of Uncle Miltie on the back of his neck.
In the piece,I also pontificate about good graphic novels evincing "a tension between text and image." Several people have asked what I meant by that, which is my fault for talking in the abstract (see above, in re: huge nerditude, pontification).
Let me try to put it more concretely: In the best graphic novels/comics/sequential art/whatever, the art doesn't just sit there. It doesn't simply illustrate what the words are describing, because comics are more than just books with pictures.
No, the art takes over a share of the heavy lifting. It does its own, independent narrative work: it characterizes, sets the tone, advances the plot, etc.
The art, in other words, gets off its damn butt.
After the jump: Art that puts in a hard day's work, and how the Watchmen movie is -- literally -- illustrative.
The Parsifal Mosaic, the apex of Robert Ludlum's career as an author of bad spy novel titles, will soon become a film under the direction of Ron Howard.
by Andy Carvin
It's been eight years since prolific spy novelist Robert Ludlum passed away, but thanks to Hollywood's penchant for milking some authors until there are no stories left to tell, we're still able to enjoy one of Ludlum's greatest gifts: the art of the absurd spy movie title.
From his very first literary offering, 1971's The Scarlatti Inheritance to The Bancroft Strategy, published posthumously in 2006, Ludlum managed to crank out a new spy novel almost every single year of his professional career. And the vast majority of them had that same three-word formula.
(The only two books of his that broke that structure were The Road to Gandolfo and The Road To Omaha, which apparently must've been gunning for big-screen premieres starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.)
Perhaps the best-known Hollywood adaptation of Ludlum's works is the Bourne series -- The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and the Bourne Ultimatum -- starring Matt Damon. But there have been more than half a dozen other Ludlum films and miniseries, all of which utilized the same three-word formula, from The Rhinemann Exchange to The Hades Factor.
And now, director Ron Howard is getting into the mix, with last week's announcement that he'll be at the helm of a film adaptation of Robert Ludlum's -- wait for it -- The Parsifal Mosaic, perhaps the most deliciously ludicrous of all Ludlum titles.
Even for the entire spy movie genre, it's definitely near the top of the heap: earlier today, I saw documentary filmmaker John Pavlus quip on Twitter, "Ron Howard's next project will wrest honors for 'worst-titled spy movie ever' from Quantum of Solace."
John may indeed be right, but I think we can do even better than that. So here's our challenge to you: come up with the worst spy movie title ever, using Ludlum's three word formula. The only rule we'll require is that the first word is "The" and the third word is a noun; the rest of it is up to you. Personally, my favorite Ludlum formula works like this:
"The" + [Greek mythological hero OR theoretical physicist's surname] + [noun relating some type of situation]
...which gives us some potential titles such as The Heisenberg Incentive, The Szilard Conspiracy, The Achilles Dilemma and The Priapus Conundrum.
Think you can do better? Post your absurd spy movie titles below or tweet with the tag #AbsurdSpyMovies. We'll go through your suggestions and share some of our favorites. And maybe - just maybe - Hollywood will come knocking on your door.
You can follow Andy Carvin on Twitter here to keep up with lots of good stuff from the world of NPR social media. (And, as always, you can follow Monkey See here).
There are times when something comes across my desk, and while I don't necessarily have anything to say about it, I feel compelled to pass it along. Without comment.
This book, How To Be A Hepburn In A Hilton World, is by Jordan Christy, a Warner Brothers publicist who "lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Drew, and their beautiful baby girl, Paisley." The book is out August 13. Try to stay away from purse dogs and late-night trips to the pokey until then.
Two books that both are and are not about pop culture: Nathan Rabin's The Big Rewind and Quinn Cummings' Notes From The Underwire.
by Linda Holmes
It's admittedly a little unfair to refer to Nathan Rabin's The Big Rewind and Quinn Cummings' Notes From The Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward And Lovely Life as pop-culture memoirs, because neither is really about popular culture, though both are swimming in it.
Rabin is the head writer for The Onion A.V. Club, and Cummings is a one-time child actress (as much as you'd like to not mention that, and as much as you sense she'd like you not to, she's an Academy Award nominee for her performance in The Goodbye Girl, which is a hard thing to overlook). Their books are very different -- Rabin's sense of humor is substantially darker (...than anyone's), and Cummings offers more a series of essays than a real memoir. (She's a longtime blogger, so she's familiar with the format.)
But what they have in common is the rarest and most precious quality of people writing about their own lives, which is the ability to talk in a way that's genuinely warm and funny about both good things and bad things, so that stories that often involve a lot of pain don't devolve into either vein-opening agony feasts or self-aggrandizing Here's-To-Me volumes that might as well be subtitled "The Many Ways In Which, If You Think About It, I Am Kind Of A Hero." You know the ones.
Writing with a lot of drums, whimsy, paisley, and the surprising rarity of a good cat story, after the jump...
Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters: Can lightning strike twice? Quirk Books
by Linda Holmes
Quirk Books has announced the follow-up to the wildly buzzed-about Pride And Prejudice And Zombies: Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters. No, really.
The press release calls the book, which will be out September 15, "a new tale of romance, heartbreak, and tentacled mayhem." But I must admit that my favorite part is the description of the book's author -- well, co-author with, you know, Jane Austen. It says, "BEN H. WINTERS is a writer who lives in Brooklyn with all the other writers." Indeed, indeed.
Quirk is promising a different formula for the book -- they claim "60% Austen and 40% additional monster chaos," rather than Pride And Prejudice And Zombies' 85-15 split. And editor Jason Rekulak says that the use of sea monsters allowed them to draw on more sources of inspiration: "Jaws, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean, even SpongeBob Squarepants."
Of course, not every novel experiment (no pun intended) should be repeated, let alone amped up. We shall see, come September, whether we find ourselves in a pop-culture sea-monster revival.
I Love You, Beth Cooper: This is a project that was always doomed not to go well. Twentieth Century Fox
by Linda Holmes
If you're following the reviews of movies coming out this weekend, you know that critics have been not only unkind but positively brutal to I Love You, Beth Cooper, a comedy about a nerd who proclaims his love for a popular beauty during his valedictory address.
I went in really rooting for the movie, because the book on which it's based is delightful and charming, and its author, Larry Doyle, wrote the screenplay. It didn't seem like a looming disaster, though if I'd remembered it was to be directed by Chris Columbus (who came up in these pages a week ago), I'd have been more skeptical.
But now, looking back, I understand that it's an unadaptable book.
With Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince opening next Wednesday, it's time to prove your mettle.
I'm not always a big fan of quizzes, but I like this one, because it backs up the great majority of the answers with relevant clips, and because it boasts a nerd-friendly 25 questions, cutting down on the likelihood that a pretender will manage a strong score by guessing.
(Not that I tried to do this. At all.) (And not that it ended in disaster when I got ten questions right.) (None of that happened. You didn't even read this paragraph.)
Feel free to report your score and claim your bragging rights. Or, in the alternative, show off how good you are at guessing.
George Sprott:Seriously, it's really big. Glen Weldon
by Glen Weldon
... Once you're done reading it, that is.
And you really should read it; it's pretty great. Mononimal cartoonist Seth delivers an intriguing, multifaceted meditation on the life and death of a fictional small-time television personality.
It's a thoughtful, quietly compelling read: His omniscient narrator keeps apologizing to us for getting the details wrong, while a parade of Sprott's colleagues and family members offer up eulogies that intersect in oblique, surprising ways.
George Sprott was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, but now that it's been bound in a handsome single volume, you can pick up on the momentum of the thing, the intricacy of its structure and the melancholic grace of the writing.
Seth mixes in flashbacks from Sprott's life as an Arctic explorer -- we turn a page, and a coldly beautiful blue-white landscape stretches before our eyes. Turn the page again, and we're back in the sepia-toned routine of television's golden age.
And then there's the sheer size of this great honking slab of a book. At 12 inches wide and 14 inches long, George Sprott is only the latest in a slew of graphic novels that seem to have been proportioned for natives of Brobdingnag. Last year's mammoth comic anthology, Kramer's Ergot 7, clocks in at a massive 16 inches by 21 inches. Seaweed, Ben Balisteri's loopy all-ages seafaring adventure, measures 12 inches by 15 inches; even DC and Marvel's regularly published Absolute and Masterworks collected editions are super-sized.
The Shelf Of Constant Reproach: Somehow, it's never quite the right time... iStockphoto.com
by Lynn Neary
I'm on vacation this week. Of course, I took a pile of books with me to our cottage on a pristine lake. I have to read one of those books before the week is out. Another, I should read. I might be able to squeeze in a third, but the rest? Well, they're likely to land on what my colleague Luis Clemens calls his "Shelf Of Constant Reproach."
Surely some of you know what we're talking about: that shelf filled with books you meant to read or, more likely, fully intend to read some day. When Luis introduced that phrase at a meeting last week, we all admitted to some revered works of literature on our shelves. "Anything by Proust!" some of us shouted out. Then we wondered what titles our book-loving listeners might have on their shelves of shame?
So to get things going, I sheepishly offer this short list of the books I know I should have read...but haven't.
Get Lynn's list of guilt-inducing masterpieces, after the jump.
The Strain: Can one arts reporter devour it in one day? We're pretty confident.
by Neda Ulaby
[Ed. Note: Arts reporter Neda Ulaby took today to read The Strain and write about it as she went. At the bottom of the post — which is where we started with Chapter 1, so if you're just joining us you should start there too — you'll find some background on the book. She's now finished with the book. Obviously, massive spoilers follow.]
Where We Stand: The End
Chapter 15: The Clan...And Epilogue
I'm combining these two because they're both really, really short. It becomes clear that Eph will never get back together with his ex-wife, mostly because he's not into her new squidlike tongue and desire to gnaw upon their son's tender neck.
We meet a bunch of other aged vampires, who've retired to a Pennsylvania asbestos mine. Their Zen-like centeredness comes as a huge relief after all the shrieks of "Nooo!" fading from Manhattan. As befits the first part of a trilogy, the plotline simply goes slack.
Thanks for joining me in this liveblogging experiment. I hope you read The Strain, not in an office chair, under florescent lights, but on a beach or a porch, uninterrupted, reading until the sky darkens and the air chills. Enjoy.
Chapter 14: Lair
The Master has kidnapped Eph's ex-wife, making not a speck of sense. Why would an ancient supernatural entity need to borrow tactics from a drug cartel?
Finally, we get a good gander at the Master, and guess what--he looks a bit like a beast from Pan's Labyrinth, with a hairless, colorless head and worn, washed out apertures. Maybe for the screen version, GDT plans on throwing some work towards Doug Jones, whom he's used in several of his films.
Society is totally disintegrating, by the way, with most everyone in New York undead, and vampire gangs hunting each other by the light of burning buildings. It's a bit silly.
Our heroes' plans for mass immolation of the vampires is thwarted because Eph is so eager to rescue his ex-wife, even though her kidnapping makes no sense. Even more irritatingly, his rush to storm the Master's penthouse means they have to pass up a chance to destroy the Master's coffin. Which makes no sense. No sense. Hundreds of souls.
I'm a little disappointed. What started off as a tight, smart scary book has devolved, in my view, into high camp, with language along the lines of "You will taste my silver, strigoi!" and repetitive vampire/human evisceration. It's fine and even admirable to evoke the flavor of B movies but this tips over into the realm of straight-to-DVD.
Michael Cera: He's one of the actual Geeky Dreamboats in a book of the same name. Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
I recently got my first look at Geeky Dreamboats, an oddly adorable little amuse bouche of a photo album showing...well, geeky dreamboats.
Written by Sarah O'Brien and Lacey Soslow (Soslow is, wonderfully, billed as the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Michael Cera fan club), Geeky Dreamboats is styled to look like an old-school issue of Tiger Beat or Bop, and it comes with a nifty little puffy cover that really does make you feel like you're caressing one of your possessions from junior high. (Which is also how you can tell it's aimed at women who are too old for unironic discussion of dreamboats.)
I have to say, while the book does cover the usual suspects (Cera, Jason Schwartzman, Justin Long), what it really demonstrates is that "geeky dreamboat" now means "regular dreamboat who is not obviously a complete potato-head."
Long-running fictional characters: Sure, there are a lot of candidates, but who takes the prize? iStockphoto.com
by Glen Weldon
"Longest running" is open to interpretation, so let's define our terms:
In any medium, what character has been consistently featured in continuous new adventures over the longest stretch of time?
Got that? Just the three criteria, here:
Consistent:
Makes regularly scheduled appearances — no yawning gaps between adventures.
Continuous:
The character's adventures form a central narrative that builds on what has gone before. (Read: Katzenjammer Kids, I know you've been around a long time, but you're a gag strip, not an ongoing narrative. Thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts.)
New:
The constant churning out of fresh content, not simply adaptations, retellings or reprints.
So: Guesses?
After the jump: We review the top contenders, provide The Answer, and explain why The Neverending Story should really have been a horror film.
If it's Wednesday, this must be Culturetopia we're in. Yup, it's time for NPR's weekly arts-etcetera podcast, a roundup of our favorite NPR arts and entertainment stories from last week.
In this week's installment, arts reporter (and jazz enthusiast) Felix Contreras and I talked about:
• Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview with Gabriel Byrne of HBO's In Treatment;
• author Colm Toibin's new novel Brooklyn, about a journey from Ireland to ... well, Brooklyn;
• a recent installment of the NPR Music jazz-sampler series Take Five, in which NPR editor Tom Cole talks about the recordings that introduced him to the genre;
• a commemorative ride on New York City's fabled A train, to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of "Take The A Train" composer Duke Ellington; and
• from right here at Monkey See, the amazing kids of the PS 22 chorus, with their performance of "Eye Of The Tiger."
Sound good? Have a listen right here, if you like:
Secret Identity: Turns out the co-creator of Superman was up to some things you might not know about. Abrams ComicArts
by Glen Weldon
We've previously noted that the creators of some of America's most noble comic book characters got up to some decidedly ignoble stuff themselves. And yet the artist Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman, is a special case.
I don't refer here to his 1940 arrest in a Miami hotel lobby for "loitering hatless," although God knows that any man who'd indulge in acts of flagrant public hatlessness merits close watching. There's the children to think of.
No, what makes Shuster's case special — and the subject of a new book by comics historian Craig Yoe — is the newly-discovered fact that 16 years after Superman's first appearance, when faced with dire financial straits, Joe Shuster turned his artistic talents has to, well, smut. Dirty, depraved, utterly hatless smut.
After the jump: "Tales of terror and thrilling spiciness that will leave the reader spellbound!"
The Twitter hashtag: See this bullhorn? The hashtag is a little like this. Just ask Amazon. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
It looks like Twitter will only show you the last 100 pages of tweets covered by a search. Right now, that means you can only see the last three hours of tweets submitted under the hashtag "#amazonfail."
A hashtag is basically a little identifier you attach to a post on Twitter to allow people to search for it. It enables wider conversations, because you can follow the discussion about a particular topic by searching for all the tweets -- everyone's, not just the people you know -- for that tag.
In this case, "#amazonfail" was developed to track tweets about the fact that Amazon.com has apparently removed the sales rankings of many books with gay and lesbian themes on the theory that they are "adult." (This is the explanation Amazon gave to author Mark Probst early on.)
Removal of sales rankings has several effects -- it stops your book from appearing in best-seller lists, but more to the point, it interferes with searching, causing the book in some cases not to show up even when you specifically search for it.
Though it was, in early stories, referred to as an issue about "erotica," this does not only apply to fiction. As of this writing, they've also de-ranked this edition of The Mayor Of Castro Street: The Life And Times Of Harvey Milk (though some other editions are available).
Note that the edition of The Mayor Of Castro Street that's de-ranked seemingly includes "Gay & Lesbian Biographies" as one of its assigned categories, while the one that kept its rank only lists "Literature and Fiction: General."
Another edition oddity, and where we're going from here, after the jump...
America's Next Top Model: The Tyra Banks-hosted show has a book now. And it doesn't just have pictures! Brad Barket/Getty Images
by Mark Blankenship
I've watched every season of Project Runway, I know more about RuPaul's Drag Race than anyone in my family, and even though it pains me, I slog through Make Me a Supermodel every week, mostly to see what flimsy premise the producers will devise to make the boys take off their shirts.
Yet despite my taste for fashion reality, I've never seen an episode of America's Next Top Model. That's partly because modeling shows without shirtless guys strike me as wasted opportunities, and it's partly because ANTM started airing when I was in graduate school. I was just too busy reading obscure plays by cloistered nuns to get attached.
Fate's a strange mistress, though, and a few weeks ago, I opened my mail to discover an advance copy of America's Next Top Model: Fierce Guide to Life. Yes, that's right. Even though I never found the show, it finally found me.
And you know what? I decided to read the thing. I mean, I could use more fierceness in my life -- who couldn't? -- and since I'm the opposite of the book's target audience, I figured it could give me a new perspective on how to live like I mean it.
Fierceness, snacking, and much more, after the jump...
Stephen King: Later this year, he will make a welcome return to writing doorstops set in Maine towns with serious difficulties. Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Stephen King is a writer who's easy to both overestimate and underestimate.
He's easy to overestimate because he's sold something like 300 million books, and because his books regularly become high-profile movies, and because if you ask an American who doesn't really envision himself as a big reader who his favorite novelist is, you have a fairly decent chance of getting the answer, "Stephen King."
He's easy to underestimate because if you remember that he wrote Christine and Cujo and that short story where the guy eats his own foot, you might forget that he also wrote Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption and Misery and a lot of other things that are really...pretty good, and are barely, if at all, "horror" fiction.
(Okay, the one where the guy eats his own foot is also pretty good.)
But if you enjoy King's writing, you eventually have to decide how you feel about the doorstops.
Walker Percy: Years after his death, a new short story has come to light. Associated Press
by Linton Weeks
Being a fan of the late Walker Percy, I was intrigued when my friend Logan Browning, a lecturer at Rice University, discovered "A Detective Story." It's a Percy short story that apparently has never seen the light of day. Until now.
It's being published in the April 2009 issue of The Hopkins Review, a literary quarterly produced by Johns Hopkins University Press.
For those who have never heard of Percy: He was a bourbon-smooth blend of Southern novelist, keen-eyed semiotician and worldly existentialist. He published a half-dozen exquisite novels - and several volumes of essays -- about the unsettlingness of being human. He was heavily influenced by the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Soren Kierkegaard. He died in 1990, at age 73.
For those who have heard of Percy: "A Detective Story" is a breezy tale of William Pinckney, a Mississippi businessman who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and never comes home. The yarn is narrated by Jamie Rodgers, a long-time friend of Pinckney's. At the request of Pinckney's wife, and to appease his own curiosity, Rodgers sets out on a quest - to Memphis, Atlanta and other places -- to find the vanished man.
The pleasures and perils of posthumous discoveries, and how this one was made, after the jump...
Audiobooks: The loss of a beloved narrator drives home the value of a great voice. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
I am an audiobook person and also a kicky chick-romance-novel person (at least some of the time), and for the several years that I've been carrying audiobooks around on my various MP3 players, I've been listening to romances by Susan Elizabeth Phillips.
Comforting and entertaining in a way that's harder than it appears, these are reliably diverting and very silly stories I tend to listen to while I'm walking or riding the Metro or doing the dishes, and the first six or seven I heard were narrated by an actress named Kate Fleming, who recorded many (many, many) audiobooks under the name Anna Fields.
[Side note: Coincidentally, Fleming also read Molly Ivins' book Who Let The Dogs In?: Incredible Political Animals I Have Known, which was one of the first audiobooks I ever heard. If you were to invent a voice you'd give Molly Ivins based solely on her writing, it would be the one Kate Fleming used for that book. (You can hear a sample here.)]
Kate Fleming drowned in the basement recording studio of her Seattle home during a flood in December 2006. (You can hear an NPR remembrance here.) Obviously, projects spend a lot of time percolating, and my particular audiobook provider doesn't necessarily get everything right off the bat, and old books and recordings have a way of bubbling back up. So for almost another two years, there would still be a Phillips book now and then that featured Fleming. But I knew it wasn't going to last.
A sad little change in my routine, after the jump...
You Mustn't Read This: Linda didn't much like Benjamin Button, but there are those who argue the movie's still better than the book.photocredit
By Linton Weeks
The literati can't stand to hear it, but sometimes a movie is better than the book it's based on. Even when the book is pretty good: Jaws comes to mind. And, arguably, Forrest Gump.
This year theaters are teeming with movies based on books. And some reviewers who've had a look at both are saying that the movies are better.
Take The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The tale, about a man who ages in reverse, is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"Having seen the movie and read the story," writes Fritz Lanham in the Houston Chronicle, "I'd say there's no comparison. As a book guy it pains me to admit it, but the movie is better. A lot better."
The film critic for the Montreal Gazette, meanwhile, avers that the movie Slumdog Millionaire is better than the Vikas Swarup book it's based on.
When it's the other way around, after the jump ...
Seven-year itch? Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston in He's Just Not That Into You. Warner Bros./New Line
By Alison Bryce
He's Just Not Into You opened in movie theaters this weekend, to scorn from critics and a box-office take of $27.5 million. The critics' dismissals were probably to be expected. But I'd say the cash haul that made the movie No. 1 this weekend was, too.
See, I was living in Montana about four years ago, and I was totally into a guy that wasn't into me. He called all the time to hang out, but just wanted to be my friend. I wanted more.
Then one day I got a package in the mail from my mother. You can guess which book it was: He's Just Not That Into You. I opened it, sobbing.
But here's the thing: Once I started reading, I couldn't stop. Seriously: As lame as it may sound, that book changed my life.
Neil Gaiman: A big award at kind of a convenient moment. HarperCollins
by Linda Holmes
The American Library Association has given Neil Gaiman the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book, a novel about a child raised by a collection of ghosts. The ALA calls the book "a delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing."
It's good news for Gaiman, certainly, but it's also nice for Focus Features, since it comes just before the release of Coraline, a film opening February 6 that's based on Gaiman's 2002 novella of the same name. It can't hurt to have another award to feature in your campaign.
Let's see that book: Is that a novel? Then you may be a reader. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
During a recent vacation, I happily devoured Nixonland, an 800-plus-page behemoth that I stuck to with such constancy that I'm fairly sure that toting it around and clutching it awkwardly with my short-lady fingers actually injured my wrist. Not kidding.
As L.A. Times book editor David L. Ulin points out today, this would not help me contribute to American "reading" under the definition used by the National Endowment for the Arts in its series of studies on reading in America. The last couple of reports had stated that reading was on the decline, but the one released this week, called "Reading On The Rise," shows that the trend is reversing itself. American "literacy," they say, is improving.
True crime? It is to laugh: David Samuels' The Runner is more a true-confessions kind of book. The New Press
by Sarah D. Bunting
A new year brings with it New Year's resolutions — to lose weight, to quit smoking, to cap the impractical-shoe budget once and for all. It's easy to make these resolutions, then break them as the second week (or hour) of January dawns.
It's even easier to suggest resolutions for other people, so I'd like to propose a New Year's resolution for David Samuels, the author of The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, to wit:
"The next time I write a true-crime book, I resolve to write an actual true-crime book, not pad a con-man profile I already wrote for The New Yorker with indictments of Ivy League admissions policies and our haves-versus-have-nots society."
In fairness to Samuels, such indictments have their place. And the book is not bad or anything; it's quite well written.
But I don't read true crime for good writing, and neither does anyone else. (Fortunately, because it's in short supply). I read it because I want to learn about a given case. Ann Rule hasn't sold a bajillion books because she's such a fantastic wordsmith; her prose is mediocre at best. But she knows how to identify a juicy story, she knows how to get access to everyone involved with it, and she knows how to keep it moving.
What happens when you don't keep it moving, after the jump ...
Listening to books: It's got some occupational hazards you might want to take into account. iStockphoto.com
by Sarah D. Bunting
I have a problem. I founded an online true-crime book club, but believe it or not, that isn't the problem -- it is highly unseemly, and bound to make my parents regret picking up the tab for my college education (I've still never read Hamlet), but the actual problem is that I prefer to consume my true crime via audio book. While it does make long trips in a teensy car without cruise control more palatable to listen to faraway detectives bungle a murder case, it has an unwanted side effect, to wit: at some point in the duration of the narrative, I will unconsciously but inevitably begin mimicking the book's narrator in my own speech.
I can't help it. It's an issue for me generally, this accent-sponginess. I grew up in Jersey, but somehow, I don't have an accent of my own -- so it's as though other speech styles rush in to fill the void. A 45-minute conversation with a Louisiana friend leaves my speech studded with chicken-fried might-coulds and my-starses for a full day afterwards (and she doesn't even use these expressions herself); a conference call with my British boss and his IT team...if I don't learn to tone down the tally-ho-guvnah, I'll lose my job.
But the true-crime speech-pattern absorption is far more ridiculous, because it's impossible to explain without appearing bonkers -- but then if I don't explain it, I seem even more bonkers.
Phony Italian accents and surprising Kris Kristofferson references, after the jump...
Word's getting around about the death of Jurassic Park author (and ER creator) Michael Crichton, who'd been battling cancer but had kept it mostly quiet.
The news was announced earlier today at Crichton's Web site. (Which is apparently crashing under the traffic hit -- as I'm typing this, it's timing out and refusing to load.)
We'll have an appreciation in a little bitHere's an appreciation, courtesy of our guy Linton Weeks.
Garfield Minus Garfield: Without Garfield's retorts about how glad he is the day is over, things look a little more bleak. Ballantine Books
by Laurel Maury
Early in 2008, Irishman Dan Walsh started posting online copies online of Garfield -- with Garfield removed. The goofy, 30-year-old comic strip featuring the lasagna-loving tabby and Jon Arbuckle, his girlfriend-less owner, has been adored since the early '80s. Without the cat, a dark humor emerged that resonated through the growing world of webcomics. Within a few months, www.garfieldminusgarfield.net was receiving 500,000 hits a day.
Garfield creator Jim Davis became a fan and asked Walsh to work on a book. Now accompanying the rather lavish Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs and Lasagna, by Jim Davis is a small green book, Garfield Minus Garfield.
How the project started, how the fan mail looks, and teaming up with Jim Davis, after the jump...
Sure, she looks like she's having a good time, but how much is that book worth?
iStockphoto.com
This opinion piece in the L.A. Times got me thinking about the way I read as a kid. The basic thesis is that California's system of measuring and scoring every bit of reading that students do is making it impossible for them to explore their own interest in reading. And I have to say, that argument makes a certain amount of sense to me.
When I was in middle school, probably somewhere around 6th or 7th grade, the school librarian gave me a copy of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, the first piece of fiction aimed at adults that I had ever read on my own.
She chose it for me, not because of the length of the sentences or the difficulty of the vocabulary, but because she thought I would like it.
And she was right. I read Gone With The Wind shortly thereafter, as I recall, and big, brick-like romantic paperbacks kept me company through much of my teenage life.
And, okay, my life now, too.
Stephen King, Jackie Collins, and why books don't need points, after the jump ...
J.K. Rowling: Winning the battle, but not the way she hoped.
Daniel Barry, Getty Images
You may have heard that on Monday, a federal judge stopped publication of a Harry Potter fan's reference guide to the series. J.K. Rowling herself appeared to testify — rather dramatically — about the agony she would suffer if the unofficial guide were to be published. There was a fine discussion of the case on Talk Of The Nation yesterday, which lays out the basics.
What's interesting about the case, and you can read the judge's decision for yourself, is how Rowling won the case while losing the basic argument she was making.
The author's argument throughout the case, at least in her public statements, was that she was entitled to control the use of her characters and books, and that it was unfair to allow anyone else to capitalize on it.
She explained that she wanted to write a reference guide for charity and said, "I cannot, therefore, approve of 'companion books' or 'encyclopedias' that seek to pre-empt my definitive Potter reference book for their authors' own personal gain."
This kind of sweeping "my books; my reference guides" theory was not embraced by the judge, whose decision was far narrower.
Two things got Steve Vander Ark, the writer of the lexicon at issue here, in the most trouble: he quoted and paraphrased too much of the books directly in writing his encyclopedia entries, and he not only created a reference guide to the information in the novels; he created a reference guide to two companion books — really encyclopedias themselves — that Rowling had created to further explain aspects of the novels.
What would make a reference book less dangerous? After the jump...
"Yeah, I used to read mysteries, but I found the plots a little fishy." "Speaking of a little fishy, want to grab a bite to eat?"
iStockphoto.com
Ever since The New York Times ran a piece in March about dumping prospective suitors because of what they read (or don't read), there's been more talk than usual about the way literary tastes may influence our choice of romantic partners.
Now, inevitably, a publisher has started a dating site where you can search for people to date who read the same books you do.
Discouraged by love? Saddened beyond anyone's ability to console you? PenguinDating is there to help you find that Proust-reading person of your dreams.
The pleasures and perils of PenguinDating, after the jump ...
While Paper Cuts not-unreasonably refers to the list as something of a "carnival of obscurity," some of the books are out of print because they were controversial or, in the case of The Autobiography Of Howard Hughes, because they were total frauds. Oops.
What else is on the list? We explore, after the jump...
Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters: Can lightning strike twice? 
I Love You, Beth Cooper: This is a project that was always doomed not to go well. 
George Sprott:Seriously, it's really big. 
The Shelf Of Constant Reproach: Somehow, it's never quite the right time... 
The Strain: Can one arts reporter devour it in one day? We're pretty confident.
Michael Cera: He's one of the actual Geeky Dreamboats in a book of the same name. 
Long-running fictional characters: Sure, there are a lot of candidates, but who takes the prize? 
The Twitter hashtag: See this bullhorn? The hashtag is a little like this. Just ask Amazon. 
America's Next Top Model: The Tyra Banks-hosted show has a book now. And it doesn't just have pictures! 
Stephen King: Later this year, he will make a welcome return to writing doorstops set in Maine towns with serious difficulties. 
Walker Percy: Years after his death, a new short story has come to light. 
Audiobooks: The loss of a beloved narrator drives home the value of a great voice. 
Neil Gaiman: A big award at kind of a convenient moment. 
Let's see that book: Is that a novel? Then you may be a reader. 
True crime? It is to laugh: David Samuels' The Runner is more a true-confessions kind of book.
Listening to books: It's got some occupational hazards you might want to take into account. 
Garfield Minus Garfield: Without Garfield's retorts about how glad he is the day is over, things look a little more bleak. 
