The most vivid memory I have of this past year in books was the time I momentarily stepped out of the ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel, where the Scotiabank Giller Prize celebrations were in progress, and saw a stunningly beautiful woman in a black gown surrounded by photographers snapping away. It wasn't quite as frenzied as that scene in La Dolce Vita in which Anita Ekberg steps off a plane and the cameramen go bananas, but you could definitely see that the photographers were throwing themselves into their work.
The woman was Lisa Ray, an actress who starred in Deepa Mehta's 2005 movie Water, and who was a presenter for the novelist M.G. Vassanji, one of the five nominees for the Giller Prize. Afterwards, she told the audience, in her capacity as presenter, "The path of the mystic is to see clearly, to recognize and to reveal, and these are the same qualities always found in Vassanji's art."
That may be so, but 2007 was a year notable not so much for Canadian literature as it was for the marketing of Canadian literature. That marketing was more sophisticated than ever, and more eye-catching, like Ms Ray. The Giller Prize dinner marked its high point – the five nominees were surrounded by the same electronic glow as five Oscar nominees.
Even Gordon Pinsent, a familiar face in Canadian film and television, and a presenter for Michael Ondaatje, acted as if he were the second-hand beneficiary of the authors' stardom. "This is going to do wonders for my profile," he told the Giller Prize dinner audience.
Ondaatje, himself, on the video screen described the rigours of actual writing. "I rewrite and rewrite a lot because that first draft often goes in the wrong direction," he said, and then noted that all this was in service of literature – the only important thing. "The rest is publicity."
But what publicity! Booksellers certainly appreciated it. They had many woes this year, including the rising Canadian dollar, but the Giller Prize was, as ever, a tonic for business.
The Governor General's literary awards also did their bit for promotion, although with less Lisa Ray-like glamour. Winner for English-language fiction was Ondaatje, a five-time winner of the Governor General's award and the man whose novel, Divisadero, many thought should have won the Giller Prize.
The announcement of the award was prefaced by a statement that would have made Gustave Flaubert and Jane Austen stare: "Lyricism and whimsy are necessary ingredients of brilliant narrative language."
The award also made it clear that if Vassanji was a "mystic," Ondaatje was no slouch in the spiritual department either. "Grace, after all," the jurors noted, "is the ultimate gift which Ondaatje offers us in Divisadero."
Some readers would have been satisfied with a good novel.
Always a subject of lively conversation among literati, literary awards seemed to be growing in importance in an age where the old-fashioned book tour, with the author hopping from city to city in an airplane, was becoming less and less a staple of book promotion and marketing. For one thing, it seems unnecessarily cruel to make authors endure the increasing discomforts of air travel; for another, the age of email interviews, continuous video loops in bookstores, and other digital forms of communication make the physical presence of authors seem superfluous.
With the advent of the LongPen – a device that enables authors, via the Internet and video conferencing, to meet book buyers and sign their books without being physically present – it becomes even less important for authors to venture beyond their studies. This was demonstrated in October at the World's Biggest Bookstore when Conrad Black, from his Florida home, autographed copies of his Nixon biography for book buyers, including Margaret Atwood and her partner, Graeme Gibson.
It was a night of gentle irony. "Graeme, I know how much you both admired Mr. Nixon," Black said at one point, after Gibson had complimented him. A few decades ago – as Black, of course, well knew – Gibson and Atwood, then ardent Canadian nationalists and antiwar activists, regarded Nixon as slightly less menacing than the Antichrist.
On this night, however, Atwood was the first to have her copy of the sympathetic biography signed by Black. Perhaps the good feelings in the room between Black and Atwood resulted from a bond stronger than politics – the bond of knowing what it is like to be a celebrity in a society with an ambivalent attitude toward celebrities.
LongPen or no, some writers continued to tour – writers with a fan base of individuals who wanted to see their favourite author. Fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, with a new novel, Ysabel, out in 2007, was indefatigable in his travels. Bret Hart, author of Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling – whose fan base did not all consist of voracious readers – also toured successfully during the year.
The writer with the world's greatest fan base, J.K. Rowling, came calling during October's International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront. At a press conference at the Winter Garden Theatre, Rowling confirmed she was through with Harry Potter – for the time being.
"I would like to take a little time from Harry," she said. "I miss him. I really miss that world, but it's healthier, like a marriage breakup, not to see each other for a while."
The biggest question Rowling faced concerned her declaration that her character Dumbledore was a homosexual – a declaration some suspected of being itself a marketing ploy.
Commentators tried to hunt down other instances of novelists outing their characters. None was found. If the late critic Northrop Frye were alive, he would have noted that it was nonsensical to take seriously an author's comment about her fictional characters.
Poets and novelists, Frye pointed out, have no more authority in interpreting their creations than anyone else. To believe otherwise, he argued, displays "an inability to distinguish literature from the descriptive or assertive writing which derives from the active will and the conscious mind, and which is primarily concerned to `say' something."
The real question left by this controversy is not about Dumbledore's sexuality, but about the value of the Harry Potter books as genuine imaginative literature.
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/Books/article/289559
Sunday, December 30, 2007
The year's best science books
This year was another bumper year for top-notch books about science. Here's a smattering of those that won shelf space at my home.
Canada Rocks: The Geologic Journey
By Nick Eyles and Andrew Miall
Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 450 pages
Canada does not simply have, as Sir John A. Macdonald once noted, too much geography. As this book convincingly demonstrates, it also has a lot of fascinating geology.
Every page of the volume sparkles with information and entertainment. An article about the country's most famous building stone, Tyndall limestone, is illustrated with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II in a frock that blends into a Tyndall-faced wall at the Manitoba legislature building.
Just reading the captions in this profusely illustrated volume provides an education in the geological forces that have shaped our land for four billion years. In addition to stunning, double-page panoramas of the "knob and lochan" landscape of Newfoundland's Lewis Hills, the photographs also include the traditional geologist's standbys to indicate relative size – camera lens caps, rock hammers, and long-suffering spouses.
Two apparent omissions, one likely an oversight and the other probably intentional: With wine regions proliferating across the country, a discussion of the contribution of soil and rock to wine's character ("terroir") would have been welcome. As well, the authors credit the long history of pivotal research by the Geological Survey of Canada but don't point out that the GSC is but a shadow of its former self, thanks to budget slashing and government myopia.
Two related works worth considering are Michael Collier's Over The Mountains (Firefly, 128 pages), a large-format collection of stunning aerial photographs, and Ted Nield's Supercontinent (Raincoast, 288 pages), an accessible account of how the Earth has several times consisted of a single island landmass and will again, in about 250 million years.
Silence of the Songbirds: How We Are Losing the World's Songbirds and What We Can Do to Save Them
By Bridget Stutchbury
HarperCollins, 256 pages
A Star story about York biology professor Bridget Stutchbury sparked the commissioning of this book. Anyone whose day has been brightened by a bird's song should be grateful for this serendipity.
Writing with both passion and care for accuracy, Stutchbury traces the precipitous decline in the numbers of the songbirds that migrate between the forests of eastern North America and their southern refuges from our winters. Surveys in North America have charted a relentless loss of around one per cent a year in the population of bobolinks, eastern kingbird, Kentucky Warbler, and wood thrush.
The book includes a checklist of actions to help slow the decline but sidesteps the most important cause: rampant population growth that annihilates bird habitat.
Two more books about birds worth considering are Richard Cannings' closely observed essays on avian life in An Enchantment of Birds (Greystone, 211 pages) and Owls of the United States and Canada (UBC Press, 242 pages) with evocative words and photos by Wayne Lynch.
Ebb and Flow: Tides and Life on Our Once and Future Planet
By Tom Koppel
Dundurn, 296 pages
This wonderful resource book is nearly ruined by the penny-pinching publishing mentality that omitted an index. Fortunately, the author's admirable chapter organization is a considerable help in finding specific references.
Tom Koppel seems to have visited or read about every place with unusual tides and water currents, yet he wears this scholarship lightly.
The body count is high, with whole ships sucked down into the Norwegian Maelstrom or the Corryvreckan Whirlpool near Jura in the Hebrides, which almost claimed George Orwell.
Deceptive in its languidness, a rising tide doomed a score of unwary cockle harvesters in northwest England in 2004 and – as Koppel chillingly recounts – almost snatched a New Brunswick geologist who was an expert on the Bay of Fundy tides.
An added extra is a post-script recipe for pasta con vongole, but you'll have to travel to Salt Spring Island, where the author digs the little neck clams on "his" beach.
Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History
By Dorothy H. Crawford
Oxford University Press, 250 pages
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1945, Alexander Fleming predicted that microbes would evolve to be resistant to antibiotics such as penicillin. Hardly anyone listened. Thanks to reckless misuse, people are dying of antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases that were handily defeated only a decade ago, such as tuberculosis and staphylococcus aureus.
A professor of medical microbiology at the University of Edinburgh, Dorothy Crawford has written a balanced and sensible volume about the way in which bacteria, viruses and protozoa have shaped human existence. Her tale starts with the 2003 SARS outbreak, the first pandemic of the 21st century. People died from the disease in Canada because the Chinese first hushed up the outbreak and then didn't quickly share their containment methods.
Crawford's message is that microbes do not respect national boundaries, and only a higher level of global co-operation offers any protection against a repeat of the devastation wrecked by flu in 1918.
Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments
By Alex Boese
Harcourt, 290 pages
How to Build a Robot Army
By Daniel H. Wilson
Raincoast, 176 pages
Let's call this the Science Lite category. By combing the byways of the scientific literature, Alex Boese has assembled a mind-boggling catalogue of just how far afield curiosity has lured some researchers. For example, an attractive young woman is twice as likely to be phoned by men she chats up on Vancouver's swaying Capilano Suspension Bridge than by those she encounters in a park. It's all due to a concept called "misattribution of arousal," say the researchers who carried out the experiment.
Daniel H. Wilson has a degree in robotics from a well-regarded U.S. university, where he obviously also picked up insight into smart marketing. Two years ago, he produced How to Survive a Robot Uprising. Now he's back with only slightly tongue-in-cheek advice about using robots to vanquish vampires, zombies, werewolves, a great white shark, and a rogue asteroid. You'd hardly credit how simple it is to convert a high-tech vacuum cleaner into a deadly killing machine: duct tape a steak knife to the front.
Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd
By Karsten Heuer
McClelland & Stewart, 235 pages
Just before wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer set off to follow the annual migration of the Porcupine Caribou herd to the Arctic coast, an elder in the Yukon settlement of Old Crow told him about times past when people could talk to caribou and caribou could talk to people.
Five months and around 1,500 kilometres later, Heuer and fiancée Leanne Allison had indeed talked with caribou. They had trekked with the 120,000 strong herd to the calving grounds that straddle the Yukon-Alaska border; been stalked by grizzly bears keeping pace with the herd; watched from only metres away as the animals gave birth lying on the tundra; and gently handled corpses of a few of the quarter of the calves who would perish from predators and the elements.
The continued existence of the herd making this centuries-old trek is imperilled by U.S. plans to exploit the petroleum reserves beneath the calving grounds. It might produce enough oil to fuel American SUVs and other gas-guzzlers for one year.
Allison made an award-winning documentary film about their experience, and Heuer captured it in this outstanding Canadian science book that I somehow missed when it was issued in hardcover in 2006.
Two other serious books deserve a mention. From Oliver Sacks comes another delightful romp through the human brain, Musicophilia (Alfred A. Knopf, 380 pages); and, from New York Times science writer Natalie Angier, The Canon, which the subtitle accurately describes as A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (Thomas Allen, 292 pages).
Understanding Popular Science
By Peter Broks
McGraw-Hill, 182 pages
Canadians have recently experienced the spectacle of a prime minister and two cabinet ministers pronouncing on the safety of a nuclear research reactor, even though none of them could distinguish the kinds of ionizing radiation – alpha, beta or gamma – without crib notes from their officials.
So how is scientific thinking supposed to enhance democratic culture when hardly anyone can think scientifically?
Peter Broks, a lecturer at Britain's Open University, tackles such questions in this insightful look at the fraught relationship between science and society.
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/289550
Canada Rocks: The Geologic Journey
By Nick Eyles and Andrew Miall
Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 450 pages
Canada does not simply have, as Sir John A. Macdonald once noted, too much geography. As this book convincingly demonstrates, it also has a lot of fascinating geology.
Every page of the volume sparkles with information and entertainment. An article about the country's most famous building stone, Tyndall limestone, is illustrated with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II in a frock that blends into a Tyndall-faced wall at the Manitoba legislature building.
Just reading the captions in this profusely illustrated volume provides an education in the geological forces that have shaped our land for four billion years. In addition to stunning, double-page panoramas of the "knob and lochan" landscape of Newfoundland's Lewis Hills, the photographs also include the traditional geologist's standbys to indicate relative size – camera lens caps, rock hammers, and long-suffering spouses.
Two apparent omissions, one likely an oversight and the other probably intentional: With wine regions proliferating across the country, a discussion of the contribution of soil and rock to wine's character ("terroir") would have been welcome. As well, the authors credit the long history of pivotal research by the Geological Survey of Canada but don't point out that the GSC is but a shadow of its former self, thanks to budget slashing and government myopia.
Two related works worth considering are Michael Collier's Over The Mountains (Firefly, 128 pages), a large-format collection of stunning aerial photographs, and Ted Nield's Supercontinent (Raincoast, 288 pages), an accessible account of how the Earth has several times consisted of a single island landmass and will again, in about 250 million years.
Silence of the Songbirds: How We Are Losing the World's Songbirds and What We Can Do to Save Them
By Bridget Stutchbury
HarperCollins, 256 pages
A Star story about York biology professor Bridget Stutchbury sparked the commissioning of this book. Anyone whose day has been brightened by a bird's song should be grateful for this serendipity.
Writing with both passion and care for accuracy, Stutchbury traces the precipitous decline in the numbers of the songbirds that migrate between the forests of eastern North America and their southern refuges from our winters. Surveys in North America have charted a relentless loss of around one per cent a year in the population of bobolinks, eastern kingbird, Kentucky Warbler, and wood thrush.
The book includes a checklist of actions to help slow the decline but sidesteps the most important cause: rampant population growth that annihilates bird habitat.
Two more books about birds worth considering are Richard Cannings' closely observed essays on avian life in An Enchantment of Birds (Greystone, 211 pages) and Owls of the United States and Canada (UBC Press, 242 pages) with evocative words and photos by Wayne Lynch.
Ebb and Flow: Tides and Life on Our Once and Future Planet
By Tom Koppel
Dundurn, 296 pages
This wonderful resource book is nearly ruined by the penny-pinching publishing mentality that omitted an index. Fortunately, the author's admirable chapter organization is a considerable help in finding specific references.
Tom Koppel seems to have visited or read about every place with unusual tides and water currents, yet he wears this scholarship lightly.
The body count is high, with whole ships sucked down into the Norwegian Maelstrom or the Corryvreckan Whirlpool near Jura in the Hebrides, which almost claimed George Orwell.
Deceptive in its languidness, a rising tide doomed a score of unwary cockle harvesters in northwest England in 2004 and – as Koppel chillingly recounts – almost snatched a New Brunswick geologist who was an expert on the Bay of Fundy tides.
An added extra is a post-script recipe for pasta con vongole, but you'll have to travel to Salt Spring Island, where the author digs the little neck clams on "his" beach.
Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History
By Dorothy H. Crawford
Oxford University Press, 250 pages
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1945, Alexander Fleming predicted that microbes would evolve to be resistant to antibiotics such as penicillin. Hardly anyone listened. Thanks to reckless misuse, people are dying of antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases that were handily defeated only a decade ago, such as tuberculosis and staphylococcus aureus.
A professor of medical microbiology at the University of Edinburgh, Dorothy Crawford has written a balanced and sensible volume about the way in which bacteria, viruses and protozoa have shaped human existence. Her tale starts with the 2003 SARS outbreak, the first pandemic of the 21st century. People died from the disease in Canada because the Chinese first hushed up the outbreak and then didn't quickly share their containment methods.
Crawford's message is that microbes do not respect national boundaries, and only a higher level of global co-operation offers any protection against a repeat of the devastation wrecked by flu in 1918.
Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments
By Alex Boese
Harcourt, 290 pages
How to Build a Robot Army
By Daniel H. Wilson
Raincoast, 176 pages
Let's call this the Science Lite category. By combing the byways of the scientific literature, Alex Boese has assembled a mind-boggling catalogue of just how far afield curiosity has lured some researchers. For example, an attractive young woman is twice as likely to be phoned by men she chats up on Vancouver's swaying Capilano Suspension Bridge than by those she encounters in a park. It's all due to a concept called "misattribution of arousal," say the researchers who carried out the experiment.
Daniel H. Wilson has a degree in robotics from a well-regarded U.S. university, where he obviously also picked up insight into smart marketing. Two years ago, he produced How to Survive a Robot Uprising. Now he's back with only slightly tongue-in-cheek advice about using robots to vanquish vampires, zombies, werewolves, a great white shark, and a rogue asteroid. You'd hardly credit how simple it is to convert a high-tech vacuum cleaner into a deadly killing machine: duct tape a steak knife to the front.
Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd
By Karsten Heuer
McClelland & Stewart, 235 pages
Just before wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer set off to follow the annual migration of the Porcupine Caribou herd to the Arctic coast, an elder in the Yukon settlement of Old Crow told him about times past when people could talk to caribou and caribou could talk to people.
Five months and around 1,500 kilometres later, Heuer and fiancée Leanne Allison had indeed talked with caribou. They had trekked with the 120,000 strong herd to the calving grounds that straddle the Yukon-Alaska border; been stalked by grizzly bears keeping pace with the herd; watched from only metres away as the animals gave birth lying on the tundra; and gently handled corpses of a few of the quarter of the calves who would perish from predators and the elements.
The continued existence of the herd making this centuries-old trek is imperilled by U.S. plans to exploit the petroleum reserves beneath the calving grounds. It might produce enough oil to fuel American SUVs and other gas-guzzlers for one year.
Allison made an award-winning documentary film about their experience, and Heuer captured it in this outstanding Canadian science book that I somehow missed when it was issued in hardcover in 2006.
Two other serious books deserve a mention. From Oliver Sacks comes another delightful romp through the human brain, Musicophilia (Alfred A. Knopf, 380 pages); and, from New York Times science writer Natalie Angier, The Canon, which the subtitle accurately describes as A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (Thomas Allen, 292 pages).
Understanding Popular Science
By Peter Broks
McGraw-Hill, 182 pages
Canadians have recently experienced the spectacle of a prime minister and two cabinet ministers pronouncing on the safety of a nuclear research reactor, even though none of them could distinguish the kinds of ionizing radiation – alpha, beta or gamma – without crib notes from their officials.
So how is scientific thinking supposed to enhance democratic culture when hardly anyone can think scientifically?
Peter Broks, a lecturer at Britain's Open University, tackles such questions in this insightful look at the fraught relationship between science and society.
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/289550
Sky not falling on book industry
Even by the standards of the book world, 2007 saw more hand-wringing than usual, as well as some unexpected good news. The year was punctuated by anxiety over the decline of many newspaper book-review sections and worry that publishing, with its old-fashioned way of printing books on paper and shipping them to stores or to online services, can't keep up with a fragmented, increasingly distracted and digital world.
A flurry of bookstores, especially independents, fell victim to the chains, big-boxes and Amazon.com. And because of price discounts, the final installment of the Harry Potter series didn't give many stores the shot in the arm that was hoped for.
Even literacy itself, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts, seems to be on a slow but steady decline. Add to this the destabilizing and ever-increasing pace of change.
"It's one of those years -- they come along every once in a while -- where everyone worries and pulls their hair," said Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World.
Is any of the unease justified? Some of it clearly is, but it depends on whom you ask. The uncertainty around technological change is responsible for both hopes and fears within the industry, said Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
"The delivery of the content of a book in different forms and formats is making people nervous," he said, not quite uttering the name "Kindle." "So we're trying to publish in a lot of different
formats, because we don't know where the readers are going to be. A lot of us in the publishing industry started out when we still used carbon paper and manual typewriters."
Winner-take-all?
With book sections diminishing at U.S. publications, John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, said his group is asking: How do we continue having literary discussions at a high level, accessible to a lot of people, as newspapers change and the way that people get their news changes?
To Freeman, part of the problem is the way bookselling is becoming a winner-take-all game, with the lion's share of promotion going to a few best-selling authors, leaving the rest to fend for themselves in an ever-more-crowded publishing environment. (Roughly 200,000 titles were published this year.)
"It's a constant high-stakes game for the front-list," he said. "That means anxiety levels will always be very high."
The issue of book coverage is one that Steve Wasserman, a literary agent and former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor, thinks is worth taking seriously. "It has to do with the ecology of the way ideas get circulated in the culture," Wasserman said.
But, he added, the sky is not necessarily falling. "It's written into the DNA of publishers and writers to whine, to think the golden age was the day before yesterday, that publishing is in a kind of crisis," he said.
The book world's actual output was much better than these problems would lead one to believe. "It was a quieter year," FSG's Galassi said. "There were a lot of very good books published, but there weren't as many blockbuster literary books that swept everybody away."
Year's best
Dwight Garner, senior editor for the New York Times Book Review and writer of the Paper Cuts blog, concurred: "There was a lot of excitement about books by major writers -- (Philip) Roth and (Don) DeLillo and Martin Amis and (Ian) McEwan -- but the books weren't among those writers' major works. I happen to think that (McEwan's) 'On Chesil Beach' is beautiful. But all of them were mild disappointments."
The year's best work, though, was strong indeed. "You had to sort of pick around," Garner said, "but if you were paying attention, it was a great year for fiction." One of his favorites was Joshua Ferris' "Then We Came to the End," a tale of dot-com downsizing.
It was also a year in which a dead Chilean literary novelist who'd never had a large English-language following, Roberto Bolano, became a sensation here, with his 1998 novel "The Savage Detectives" translated into English and met with raves and genuine excitement.
For Wasserman, it was a great year for American writers, including books by Dave Eggers ("What Is the What"), Michael Chabon ("The Yiddish Policeman's Union") and Junot Diaz ("The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao").
"These are people of enormous reach and ambition, who are very devoted to language, and they are not oblivious to the times in which they're living."
Nonfiction drew raves as well. "I think historians will look back and see 2007 as the year of the biography," Garner said. "From Claire Tomalin on Thomas Hardy to Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison to David Michaelis on Charles Schulz. I think readers are taken with lives right now, and these are real narrative biographies that turn the lives into stories."
And at a time of turmoil in the newspaper business, Wasserman said, books are filling in some of the gap in coverage of the Iraq war.
"If you look where publishers were five or six years into the Vietnam War, you'd see we have many more books that give you a look at the characters and the historical forces and even the internal workings of the intervention in Mesopotamia than was true during a similar period in Indochina."
Attention from outside
Amid the bad news and anxiety, there was some reason for hope. For all the turmoil and tension, it was a year in which the uncompromising Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson -- longtime "writer's writers" -- broke out of the pack and experienced real sales.
"It's about a subject very much on people's minds right now -- Vietnam and America's intervention in the world," said Galassi, whose press, FSG, published Johnson's "Tree of Smoke," much of which is set among the military and intelligence worlds of 1960s Asia.
Galassi (whose press had one of its best commercial years ever) said the lesson of 2007 is that to hit, books often need a push from outside the literary and publishing subcultures.
"So you can sell a lot of books if it gets the right sort of attention," he said. "But that attention has to come from outside. The traditional review media aren't drawing the readers the way they used to."
Accordingly, this year's big sellers include Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," selected by Starbucks' book group, and McCarthy's post-apocalyptic "The Road," which received a huge boost from its selection for Oprah Winfrey's book club. For the record, these books received strong print reviews as well.
And in a noisy, busy culture, Galassi said, where books are competing against all kinds of other media, prizes become increasingly important for a book to be heard.
The Book Critics Circle, as a way of providing an alternative to the best-seller list for readers looking for suggestions beyond what Freeman calls "the oligarchy of brand names," has begun a monthly list of recommended books, which come from a poll of authors and critics.
Overall, as the publishing world looks back on 2007, it's hard to reconcile the unease people feel about the business with the excitement they feel about the books themselves. When he goes to publishing dinners, bookseller Doug Dutton said, the conversation swings between lamenting the state of the business and exclaiming joy over a new novel or history.
"It's about as murky a picture as I've seen," Dutton said. Then he amended that slightly: "Sort of like last year and the year before."
http://www.mercurynews.com/books/ci_7843182?nclick_check=1
A flurry of bookstores, especially independents, fell victim to the chains, big-boxes and Amazon.com. And because of price discounts, the final installment of the Harry Potter series didn't give many stores the shot in the arm that was hoped for.
Even literacy itself, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts, seems to be on a slow but steady decline. Add to this the destabilizing and ever-increasing pace of change.
"It's one of those years -- they come along every once in a while -- where everyone worries and pulls their hair," said Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World.
Is any of the unease justified? Some of it clearly is, but it depends on whom you ask. The uncertainty around technological change is responsible for both hopes and fears within the industry, said Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
"The delivery of the content of a book in different forms and formats is making people nervous," he said, not quite uttering the name "Kindle." "So we're trying to publish in a lot of different
formats, because we don't know where the readers are going to be. A lot of us in the publishing industry started out when we still used carbon paper and manual typewriters."
Winner-take-all?
With book sections diminishing at U.S. publications, John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, said his group is asking: How do we continue having literary discussions at a high level, accessible to a lot of people, as newspapers change and the way that people get their news changes?
To Freeman, part of the problem is the way bookselling is becoming a winner-take-all game, with the lion's share of promotion going to a few best-selling authors, leaving the rest to fend for themselves in an ever-more-crowded publishing environment. (Roughly 200,000 titles were published this year.)
"It's a constant high-stakes game for the front-list," he said. "That means anxiety levels will always be very high."
The issue of book coverage is one that Steve Wasserman, a literary agent and former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor, thinks is worth taking seriously. "It has to do with the ecology of the way ideas get circulated in the culture," Wasserman said.
But, he added, the sky is not necessarily falling. "It's written into the DNA of publishers and writers to whine, to think the golden age was the day before yesterday, that publishing is in a kind of crisis," he said.
The book world's actual output was much better than these problems would lead one to believe. "It was a quieter year," FSG's Galassi said. "There were a lot of very good books published, but there weren't as many blockbuster literary books that swept everybody away."
Year's best
Dwight Garner, senior editor for the New York Times Book Review and writer of the Paper Cuts blog, concurred: "There was a lot of excitement about books by major writers -- (Philip) Roth and (Don) DeLillo and Martin Amis and (Ian) McEwan -- but the books weren't among those writers' major works. I happen to think that (McEwan's) 'On Chesil Beach' is beautiful. But all of them were mild disappointments."
The year's best work, though, was strong indeed. "You had to sort of pick around," Garner said, "but if you were paying attention, it was a great year for fiction." One of his favorites was Joshua Ferris' "Then We Came to the End," a tale of dot-com downsizing.
It was also a year in which a dead Chilean literary novelist who'd never had a large English-language following, Roberto Bolano, became a sensation here, with his 1998 novel "The Savage Detectives" translated into English and met with raves and genuine excitement.
For Wasserman, it was a great year for American writers, including books by Dave Eggers ("What Is the What"), Michael Chabon ("The Yiddish Policeman's Union") and Junot Diaz ("The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao").
"These are people of enormous reach and ambition, who are very devoted to language, and they are not oblivious to the times in which they're living."
Nonfiction drew raves as well. "I think historians will look back and see 2007 as the year of the biography," Garner said. "From Claire Tomalin on Thomas Hardy to Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison to David Michaelis on Charles Schulz. I think readers are taken with lives right now, and these are real narrative biographies that turn the lives into stories."
And at a time of turmoil in the newspaper business, Wasserman said, books are filling in some of the gap in coverage of the Iraq war.
"If you look where publishers were five or six years into the Vietnam War, you'd see we have many more books that give you a look at the characters and the historical forces and even the internal workings of the intervention in Mesopotamia than was true during a similar period in Indochina."
Attention from outside
Amid the bad news and anxiety, there was some reason for hope. For all the turmoil and tension, it was a year in which the uncompromising Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson -- longtime "writer's writers" -- broke out of the pack and experienced real sales.
"It's about a subject very much on people's minds right now -- Vietnam and America's intervention in the world," said Galassi, whose press, FSG, published Johnson's "Tree of Smoke," much of which is set among the military and intelligence worlds of 1960s Asia.
Galassi (whose press had one of its best commercial years ever) said the lesson of 2007 is that to hit, books often need a push from outside the literary and publishing subcultures.
"So you can sell a lot of books if it gets the right sort of attention," he said. "But that attention has to come from outside. The traditional review media aren't drawing the readers the way they used to."
Accordingly, this year's big sellers include Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," selected by Starbucks' book group, and McCarthy's post-apocalyptic "The Road," which received a huge boost from its selection for Oprah Winfrey's book club. For the record, these books received strong print reviews as well.
And in a noisy, busy culture, Galassi said, where books are competing against all kinds of other media, prizes become increasingly important for a book to be heard.
The Book Critics Circle, as a way of providing an alternative to the best-seller list for readers looking for suggestions beyond what Freeman calls "the oligarchy of brand names," has begun a monthly list of recommended books, which come from a poll of authors and critics.
Overall, as the publishing world looks back on 2007, it's hard to reconcile the unease people feel about the business with the excitement they feel about the books themselves. When he goes to publishing dinners, bookseller Doug Dutton said, the conversation swings between lamenting the state of the business and exclaiming joy over a new novel or history.
"It's about as murky a picture as I've seen," Dutton said. Then he amended that slightly: "Sort of like last year and the year before."
http://www.mercurynews.com/books/ci_7843182?nclick_check=1
JK Rowling hints at eighth Potter
JK Rowling says she has not ruled out an eighth Harry Potter novel, although she is unlikely to consider writing it for another 10 years.
The best-selling author of the wizard series told Time magazine she had had "weak moments" when she has said "Yeah, all right" to an eighth book.
Rowling has previously made it clear the series would be in seven parts.
Rowling is a runner-up in Time's Person of the Year list 2007. The winner is Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The seventh - and apparently final - instalment of the Harry Potter series was published earlier this year.
Beedle the Bard
Rowling told Time her central protagonist would be unlikely to feature in any future books.
"If - and it's a big if - I ever write an eighth book, I doubt that Harry would be the central character. I feel I've already told his story," she said.
"But these are big ifs. Let's give it 10 years."
The seventh instalment - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - became the fastest-selling book when it was published in July, based on sales in the UK and US.
A handwritten copy of Rowling's new book The Tales of Beedle the Bard recently sold for almost £2m.
Rowling wrote and illustrated seven copies of the book, which will never be published, but offered only one for sale.
The collection of fairy tales is mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Proceeds from the sale went to Rowling's charity Children's Voice.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7164884.stm
The best-selling author of the wizard series told Time magazine she had had "weak moments" when she has said "Yeah, all right" to an eighth book.
Rowling has previously made it clear the series would be in seven parts.
Rowling is a runner-up in Time's Person of the Year list 2007. The winner is Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The seventh - and apparently final - instalment of the Harry Potter series was published earlier this year.
Beedle the Bard
Rowling told Time her central protagonist would be unlikely to feature in any future books.
"If - and it's a big if - I ever write an eighth book, I doubt that Harry would be the central character. I feel I've already told his story," she said.
"But these are big ifs. Let's give it 10 years."
The seventh instalment - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - became the fastest-selling book when it was published in July, based on sales in the UK and US.
A handwritten copy of Rowling's new book The Tales of Beedle the Bard recently sold for almost £2m.
Rowling wrote and illustrated seven copies of the book, which will never be published, but offered only one for sale.
The collection of fairy tales is mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Proceeds from the sale went to Rowling's charity Children's Voice.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7164884.stm
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