Books

Posted October 13, 2009 by Gayle

For all of you Maurice Sendak fans, here’s an article about the “Wild Things”, movie, book, and author. I’ve always put Sendak at the top of my children’s book illustrators list and I can’t wait to see the movie that is coming out next month. This is a fun article about him, from the LA Times.

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Posted February 24, 2009 by Gayle

This is an interesting selection of books that were chosen by the MS Society, announced at their annual awards banquet. I was happy to see My Stroke of Insight, The Wise Heart, The Middle Place, and In Defense of Food on their list. Those were personal favorites of mine this past year. See what you think.

Awards: Books for a Better Life Winners

The winners of the 13th annual Books for a Better Life Awards, honoring the best self-improvement books of 2008 and sponsored by the New York City Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, are:

• Audiobook: Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman (Macmillan Audio)
• Childcare/Parenting: The Trouble with Boys by Peg Tyre (Crown)
• First Book: The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan (Voice)
• Green: Made from Scratch by Jenna Woginrich (Storey Publishing)
• Inspirational Memoir: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow (Hyperion)
• Motivational: Learning from the Heart: Lessons on Living, Loving, and Listening by Daniel Gottlieb (Sterling)
• Psychology: My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor (Viking)
• Relationships: September Songs by Maggie Scarf (Riverhead)
• Spiritual: The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology by Jack Kornfield (Bantam Dell)
• Wellness: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press)

For the complete list of finalists, go to msnyc.org.

Also at the award ceremonies last night, Michael F. Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D., co-authors of the YOU series, and Bob Miller, president and founder of HarperStudio, were inducted into the Ardath Rodale Hall of Fame.

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Posted February 7, 2009 by Gayle

This is an article that will remind you of why we read and why, even if things are tough, books prevail. And it was in the WSJ of all places!

BOOKS
JANUARY 17, 2009
The Wall Street Journal

The Triumph of the Readers

The markets may be down, but fiction is on the rise

By ANN PATCHETT

I've just come in from a meeting of the Nashville Public Library Foundation Board (of which I am a dutiful member) and after sitting through the dismal report on the state of our endowment, the conversation turned to more positive news: the use of the library computers is way up since people have been filling out more online job applications, the puppet truck is enjoying high levels of popularity, the after-school program for teens is thriving. "But listen to this," our excited director of libraries, Donna Nicely, tells us, "according to our survey, patrons say the main reason they're coming to the library is for books! We have to get the word out. It isn't over. People still want to read!"

According to a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts, our Nashville library is bearing out a national trend. For the first time in more than 25 years, the number of people reading fiction is on the rise.

Am I surprised? No, but then I see the world of reading from a very particular angle. I spend a lot of time speaking in schools and town halls and public libraries where people who read and read and read pack the auditoriums because they want to talk about literature. Inevitably someone in the audience raises their hand to ask me how worried I am about the crisis in publishing, the rise of electronic books, and the death of the reading. "What death of reading?" I say. "Look at all of you." I have long refused to participate in the last rites of what is both my passion and my profession. I meet too many people who stay up half the night racing towards a final chapter. We are a hardy bunch, we readers. The rumor is we'll play around with a Kindle or an I-Book for awhile but eventually give up on the whole endeavor, the logic being who would want to read a book when there are so many enticing video games to play and Web sites to surf. But I'm more of the Charlton Heston school: you'll get my paperback of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" away from me when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

Top Sellers

In some of the past year's best-selling books, characters ranged from vampires to wizards to God.

dpa/Corbis

'Breaking Dawn'
By Stephenie Meyer

All four books in Ms. Meyer's "Twilight" series -- about a girl who falls in love with a vampire -- were among last year's top 10 sellers, according to Nielsen BookScan. The latest, "Breaking Dawn," has sold more than 3.6 million copies in hardcover.

Zuma/Newscom

'The Shack'
By William P. Young

This Christian-themed novel was a surprise hit. In it, a grieving father meets God in the form of three unlikely characters. The book has sold about 2.7 million copies in trade paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Corbis

'Tales of Beedle the Bard'
By J.K. Rowling

The "Harry Potter" author's book of stories has sold about 1.9 million copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan -- though only a fraction of the sales of the final Harry Potter novel.

WireImage/Getty

'Eat, Pray, Love'
By Elizabeth Gilbert

Ms. Gilbert's memoir of spending a year trying to cheer herself up after the dissolution of her marriage was 10th among Nielsen BookScan's top 10 sellers of 2008.

In these new and improved numbers of readers given to us by the NEA, the most heartening rise is in the 18-to-24-year-old group, the ones who seem to have been born with iPod buds stuck in their ears. They've recently taken the biggest bump up in readership after years of the most significant decline. But doesn't it make sense? This is the first crop of newly minted adults who were raised up on Harry Potter novels. They came of age attending midnight release parties at their local bookstores and then faking mysterious illnesses the next day for the absolute necessity of staying in bed to read. Some of these children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micro-managing ministers. Is there any greater joy than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading? When I was a child I had to make due with a purloined copy of "Valley of the Dolls" which I thought was forbidden because it was dirty and now know was forbidden because it was just so badly written.

Like the chicken pox, getting infected by the desire to read is best when it hits us early. As a child I was so committed to "Charlotte's Web" that I pleaded for, and received, a pig for my ninth birthday, a gift that segued nicely into my "Little House on the Prairie" obsession. Was I, with my American classics, more noble than today's middle-schooler who reads and rereads his copy of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid"? Was I less noble than my straight-A sister who read "Le Petit Prince" in French? No on both counts. I am a firm believer in the fact that it isn't so much what you read, it's that you read. Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin. Whether you're in the life of Wilbur the pig, or Greg Heffley, the wimpy kid, or that little blonde prince in the desert, you've stepped outside of yourself for awhile, something that is beneficial to every child. Even if you're stepping into "Valley of the Dolls," it's better than nothing. I'm all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug. People who read bad books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.

There will be those who attribute the rise in reading to our current decline of cash, and if that is actually the case I would at least be able to think I forfeited my retirement account to a worthy cause. It's true, as a source of entertainment reading ranks somewhere between cheap and free, depending on where you get your books. A movie can give you two hours of entertainment, but a book can go on for days or even weeks. My friend Lucy loved to point out that she started reading "War and Peace" on the first day of the first Gulf War and was still reading when the war was over. But I do not give all the credit for reading's rise to the collapse of the global financial markets. I believe as a nation we have touched the cultural bottom and are ready to be smart again. I think we're reading more because we've seen as many episodes of American Idol as our collective consciousness can bear and even if we weren't flat broke we'd still be in the mood for a book. Everyone improves under good leadership, which is why we all appreciate a teacher, a librarian, or a bookstore clerk who is willing to steer a child toward a copy of William Steig's "Doctor DeSoto." When Barack Obama, our soon-to-be-author-in-chief, announced on "60 Minutes" that he'd like to see poetry readings in the White House, I found myself thinking that change was going to come.

Adam Niklewicz

Perhaps you've worried about the numbers of American readers in the past. Maybe you'd like to shore up this new trend but you're not exactly sure how to help. It's easier than you might think: read a book. Don't just read it at home. Read it in a coffee shop, on a bus, in a waiting room. When you're finished, loan it out. Join a book club or start a book club or, if you don't like book clubs, avoid them at all costs. Give a book as a gift. Write something nice on the inside cover. Oh, but I cherish the copy of Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" with my mother's birthday wish, the copy of Ezra Pound's Cantos that says Merry Christmas from Dad. If you can afford to buy a book, then buy it. They aren't that expensive and the publishing industry is one that isn't getting bailed out. If you can't afford a book, or you want to try a couple of different books on for size before making a commitment, then use your local library. If you use the one in Nashville you can also enjoy the free summer concerts, story hours, and, of course, the puppet truck. If you've got a little extra money you might think of giving it to your public library as most of their operating budgets have been trimmed beyond recognition. Recommend the books you like, even to strangers. I do it all the time. As someone who always has thirty books stacked in my office and beside my bed and beside my dog's bed that I'm meaning to read, it's easy to forget that other people don't know what to choose. They walk into a bookstore and feel utterly lost in the face of all those titles, and so they walk out empty handed. I have a similar experience when trying to buy a bottle of red wine. I make reading lists for anyone who will listen. Real readers can never keep their opinions to themselves, which is why I think Oprah is a hero. I shout the books I love from the rooftops. Listen to me on the subject of contemporary fiction -- read "The Maytrees," by Annie Dillard, and "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," by Junot Díaz, and "Lush Life," by Richard Price. If you like your stories true, read "Brother, I'm Dying," by Edwidge Danticat, and "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination," by Elizabeth McCracken. Poetry? "Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems" by Mark Doty, of course. And if you're looking for something older, something a little more obscure, I can do that too, "The Leopard," by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and "Independent People," by Haldor Laxness, and "Love in a Cold Climate," by Nancy Mitford. I can go on like this forever. You have no idea how much I'm leaving out, Grace Paley, William Maxwell, Henry James. If someone gave you a device with which you could see entire worlds just by holding it in front of your eyes, worlds of such beauty and complexity that they took your breath away, worlds of suffering and redemption, love and suspense and enlightenment, all of them there for the taking, wouldn't you want to show this device to everyone you knew? Why are more people reading? Because they are either discovering or remembering just how good it can be. I've got a book for you, my friend, all you've got to do is open it up.

Ann Patchett is the author of seven books, including the novel "Bel Canto." Her most recent novel is "Run."

Printed in The Wall Street Journal

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Posted January 26, 2009 by Gayle

There is a new collection from the Twain archives coming out in April. The general editor, Robert Hirst was interviewed in Shelf Awareness and I thought you might enjoy reading it.

Robert Hirst: 'Colbert Is Clearly the Offspring of Mark Twain'

Robert Hirst is the general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley and picked the 24 pieces in Who Is Mark Twain? from Twain's voluminous archives. Here he answers several questions about Twain and the book, HarperStudio's first title, which appears on April 21.

The blogger Ben Sutherland said Mark Twain's spirit 'lives as a garden gnome in Stephen Colbert's pants.' What do you make of that?

Doesn't Sutherland have that backwards? Colbert is clearly the offspring of Mark Twain, not the other way around. Besides, when Mark Twain used "deadpan," he knew enough not to shout it at the top of his lungs. Huck says, for instance, "I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks, though I ain't had no experience . . . and yet here's a case where I'm blest if it don't look to me like the truth is better, and actuly safer, than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it's so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it."

You have to take that in slowly to appreciate the point. No one is shouting.

What would Twain have said about Barack Obama?

It's above my pay grade to try to figure out what Mark Twain would have said; I have enough difficulty figuring out exactly what he did say. But I suppose it's fair to guess that whatever he might have thought of Obama, the question of his "race" would not have entered in. He told a correspondent in 1909: "To my mind one color is just as respectable as another; there is nothing important, nothing essential, about a complexion. I mean, to me. But with the Deity it is different. He doesn't think much of white people, He prefers the colored. Andrea del Sarto's pink-&-lily Madonnas revolt Him, my child. That is, they would, but He never looks at them."

How was Twain ahead of his time?

Certainly in the matter of race he was, beyond any question, ahead of his time. "I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for me; he can't be any worse."

But if you mean in his literary work, I think it's fair to say that he experimented more or less constantly with literary forms that went beyond the conventions of his day. That is surely the case with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it's also true with several of the pieces forthcoming in Who Is Mark Twain?--stories like "The Undertaker's Tale" and "The Snow-Shovelers." He was the kind of writer who tried hard never to look back on what he had done. He never revised books after they were published--only before. Once they were in print, he was eager to move on to the next challenge.

Why hasn't this work been published before?

Mark Twain wrote and published an enormous number of words, and at his death he left unpublished an equally large body of material, including literary manuscripts like those in Who Is Mark Twain? and thousands of letters, notebooks, his autobiography and so forth. Even though the Mark Twain Project has been editing and publishing these materials since 1967, we are far from done, and these 24 pieces just haven't yet reached the top of our schedule. So we're grateful to HarperStudio for giving us the chance to publish them now.

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