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Shelf Life Book news, reviews, trends, and talk

Jan 4 2010 09:08 AM ET

'Pride and Prejudice' updates: Enough!

Categories: Enough Already!, Fiction, In Memoriam, Jane Austen, Quirk, Vampires, Zombies

Yesterday, as I was rifling through the mound of galleys that publishers oh-so-kindly sent our way, I came upon a book that made me sigh. No, not Heidi and Spencer Pratt’s How to Be Famous. That book made me scream. Instead, I became immediately fatigued upon finding a copy of The Trials of the Honorable F. Darcy, by Sara Angelini — a 2007 novel (newly in paperback) that’s billed as Legally Blonde-meets-Pride and Prejudice.

Why, you ask? Because I completely, 100 percent supported the trend of Jane Austen mash-ups — until now. Can you say oversaturation? Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was hysterical, and wholly original. But the novelty has worn thin, with dozens of authors jumping on board to sell their updates of Austen’s work in every genre from romance to mystery to sci-fi. How many more supernatural remixes will we find (see: all those Prejudice-themed vampire books)? How many more chick-lit updates?

Because, really, there are hundreds of other identifiable, classic authors whose work could use an imaginative update. Let’s leave Austen alone for once. Why not desecrate the work of John Steinbeck, Louisa May Alcott, or, hell, even Dante? Tell me, Shelf Lifers, are you as tired of the Prejudice trend as I am? And whose work do you wish contemporary authors would update?

Jan 2 2010 10:30 PM ET

Poetry You Need To Read: Nin Andrews' 'Southern Comfort'

by Ken Tucker

Categories: Poetry, Review, Uncategorized

Nin Andrews is the Wonder Woman of poetry. Her golden lasso is the prose poem, a form she’s mastered with more dexterity and wit. (Just read her moving, hilarious, and highly educational 2000 collection The Book of Orgasms for proof.)

Andrews’ latest book, Southern Comfort (CavanKerry Press) is a superb volume for both dedicated readers of poetry and anyone looking for an apparent autobiography in poetic form. Born to, as the dust jacket says, “a southern father and a northern mother,” Andrews’ subjects include a the death of her grandmother, the ghosts her “daddy” sees, the mysteries of a Southern accent, and wasps and centipedes and earthworms and bees, and a boy named Jimmy in poems and prose poems including this one, called “Summer”:

Sometimes in the middle of the day, Jimmy and I’d rest on the upside-down feed buckets beside the sugar maples, sip Cokes and talk about our dreams, maybe watch the horses slurp water and swish off gadflies. Jimmy talked about Sarah Lee, his girl (he liked to say so long after she wasn’t). Then he would lie back with his ball cap over his face while I fished dead frogs out of the trough. I’d think about what it’s like to be the girl every boy talks to about the girl he likes. Sometimes I watched him sleep until the lizards ran out to wait by the water for insects to light. If I wanted to, I’d pick off their tails and show them to Jimmy when he woke.

I wrote “apparent autobiography” a while back there because Andrews is also a devillish poet. If all you’d ever read of Andrews was Southern Comfort, you’d think you were dealing with a straightforward gal reminiscing about her colorful childhood, spinning yarns and telling true tales.

But if you’ve read more than one Andrews volume, you know that she is also, at various times, possessed of a slashing sarcasm, of a confident knowledge of Kafka, William James, and how angels manifest themselves in everyday lives. She assumes different identities. She radiates a powerful assurance in writing about sex, romance, and loneliness. She’s a sly sophisticate, a raucous verse-maker, a mischievous observer with a long memory.

You could not do much better to begin your new year by reading Nin Andrews’ Southern Comfort.

Dec 31 2009 01:14 PM ET

'The Baby-Sitters Club' returns this spring

by Thom Geier

Categories: Children's Books, Fiction, Publishing Biz, Uncategorized

This April, Scholastic plans to reissue the first two volumes of its once-ubiquitous tween fiction series, The Baby-Sitters Club, according to the New York Times. The publisher is repackaging and updating the books (e.g., a “cassette player” will become “headphones”), and also releasing a prequel, The Summer Before, written by the series’ original author, Ann M. Martin. The original Baby-Sitters Club books, published from 1986-2000, grew to 217 titles and became a huge tween phenom, with 176 million copies in print. Now, Scholastic hopes to reignite fervor for 12- to 13-year-old heroines Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, and Stacey — while pitching the books to a slightly younger audience than it did originally. (As the Times notes, the publisher has had significant success with its 2008 relaunch of another dormant franchise for young readers, R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series.)

Dec 31 2009 10:47 AM ET

New Year's resolutions for readers: For me, it's Jane Austen (hold the zombies)

by Thom Geier

Categories: Classic Novels, Fiction, Jane Austen, Lee Child, Michael Chabon, Mysteries, Poetry

A new year is fast approaching, and it’s a good time for me to take a good, hard look at my leisure reading and resolve to do better. Or at least to be a little more ambitious in my reading choices (even if it’s only to finally tackle that daunting pile of books accumulating on my nightstand that I really, truly do intend to get to someday). It’s rather embarrassing for a guy who regularly reviews books to admit to some of the glaring gaps in his reading, I admit, but I’m hoping that a public confession will spur me to action. So I hereby resolve that in 2010 I will read:

1. More poetry. I love poetry and find that I don’t make nearly enough time for it. First up: Amy Gerstler’s Dearest Creatures, which sounds brilliant in this review in the New York Times Book Review.

2. The zombie-free oeuvre of Jane Austen. (Yes, I was an English major in college. No, I never did read an Austen novel.)

3. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I’ve never been a comic-book guy, and I think that that aspect of this Pulitzer-winning novel always put me off. But I loved Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which boasts a comics-fixated hero, so I’m willing to take a chance.

There are other items on my to-read list (I want to chase down the acclaimed locked-room mysteries of John Dixon Carr, for instance, and go back to Lee Child’s early Jack Reacher thrillers), but that should be enough to get me started. The biggest challenge — for me, anyway — will be carving out time for already-published books when I’m so busy reviewing new titles. But what about you, Shelf Lifers? What books do you resolve to read in the new year?

Dec 29 2009 09:00 AM ET

The classics get tweeted in 'Twitterature'

by Keith Staskiewicz

Categories: Anthologies, Classic Novels, Quirk, Twitter

Tolstoy was a great novelist, but he wasn’t known for concision. That’s probably the reason why he didn’t use Twitter. Well, one of the reasons, at least.

Luckily for us, the compilers of the new book Twitterature have helped to condense into 140 characters what would have taken the Russian author 140 pages to describe. Each classic is squeezed into 20 tweets or fewer. For example, from Anna Karenina (SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t had a chance to catch the nail-biting finale):

“Alright, twenty rubles says that I can toss my bag in the air, run across the tracks, and catch it before the train arriv–”

William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, and even Dan Brown get the Twitter treatment in the book, to widely varying humorous effect. I like the premise of the whole thing, even if it’s sometimes a bit overcooked. Plus, the tweets actually cover the plot pretty well, so I can even imagine using this as a sort of jokey CliffsNotes. Here are a few more choice examples:

“SATAN HAS THREE HEADS, AND THEY ARE TOTALLY EATING PEOPLE” Dante’s The Inferno

“S—. ‘C-Section’ is not ‘of woman born’? What kind of king dies on a g–d— technicality?” Shakespeare’s Macbeth

“Robert Downey Jr. playing me in a film? Totally cool. Perfect.” A.C. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

What do you think? Are Twitter and classic lit like chocolate and peanut butter, two great things that go great together? Or is it more like chocolate and anchovy paste?

Dec 28 2009 03:46 PM ET

Amazon says e-books outsold physical books on Christmas Day

by Thom Geier

Categories: Amazon, E-Books, Publishing Biz

Amazon reports that on Christmas Day, for the first time in the site’s history, Kindle books outsold physical books. (No doubt all of those new Kindle recipients were loading up their just-unwrapped gadgets with some fresh titles to read.) The company also reported that its Kindle electronic reader became the most “gifted” item in Amazon history. Are bound books soon to be the eight-track tapes of the reading world?

In another alarming sign for traditional publishers, it seems that Amazon’s already cheaper-than-a-physical-book price point of roughly $9.99 is still too expensive for many consumers. An analysis by the lit bloggers at Galley Cat found that 64 of the 100 e-books topping the Kindle best-seller list yesterday were priced at $0.00. Yes, that’s right: free. The list of free Kindle best-sellers includes some classics that are in the public domain (e.g., Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austen’s zombie-free Pride and Prejudice). But it also features recent titles from mostly smaller publishers, like the current No. 1, Noel Hynd’s Midnight in Madrid, about a U.S. Treasury agent investigating the theft a mysterious relic from a Madrid museum.

Dec 24 2009 09:00 AM ET

What books are worth rereading?

by Keith Staskiewicz

Categories: Classic Novels, Cormac McCarthy, Fiction, Nonfiction

As the snow starts coming down and we begin nestling in with some of our favorite books next to a roaring fire fed by some of our not-so-favorite books, we must ask ourselves: Which ones are worth returning to?

I recently cracked open Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, which I loved the first go-round, and it was like putting on a pair of toasty, custom-fitted toe-socks. Still, I’m ambivalent. There’s something reassuring about the familiarity of a book you’ve already read, like a second date where you get to learn more about each other. On the other hand, there are so many books out there that I haven’t read once, entire oeuvres I haven’t yet cracked, that it seems like a shame to squander precious holiday reading time on something I’ve already consumed. (Strangely enough, this feeling doesn’t extend to movies, as I’ve re-watched Jurassic Park approximately 1,587 times. This month.) And not all books are created equal. Some seem to lend themselves to multiple visits, whether it’s the addictive breeziness of Harry Potter or the pretzeled puzzles of Nabokov. Some don’t: As much as I loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I don’t think I could deal with experiencing all that again.

A quick look online shows the rereading debate to be surprisingly heated, with some thinking that it’s a waste of the little leisure time we get in this nasty, brutish and short thing called life, and others of the mindset that you haven’t really read a book until you’ve read it more than once. What do you think? Are there books that you think hold up to a second glance? Are there any you are looking forward to reopening over the holidays?

Dec 23 2009 09:09 AM ET

Ever get embarrassed because you mispronounce a word you've only seen written? Don't.

by Keith Staskiewicz

Categories: Fiction, Is It Just Me?, Publishing Biz, Quirk

I was watching The Proposal the other day and noticed something interesting. In one scene, Sandra Bullock’s book editor character, Margaret Tate, is talking about how she desperately needs to save the Don DeLillo account, a surprisingly high-brow reference amidst the usual rom-com white noise. Of course, Ms. Bullock pronounces the author’s name “duh-LEE-low” instead of the correct “duh-LIL-low,” instantly deflating the credit I had just given the movie and making me feel like Smartypants McGee for catching the mistake. (Don’t believe me? The FAQ of the Don DeLillo Society points to a radio interview the author gave in 1997 to confirm the pronunciation.)

Which got me thinking, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on the movie. Haven’t we all had a name or a word that we’ve seen many times in print, but never heard in conversation? We know what it means, how to use it, how it’s spelled; everything but how to pronounce it.

For the majority of my life, I was convinced that awry was pronounced similarly to the word orrery. To this day “uh-RYE” still rings false in my ear. I also admit to pronouncing posthumous as if it meant “following a savory Middle Eastern spread.” And I, like many others, have Googled the phrase “Goethe, how to pronounce.” (Don’t get me started on South African-born Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee.) I just wonder why there’s such a stigma attached to those of us (like poor Margaret Tate) who seem to know certain words only in writing. Surely, there is quite a large vocabulary that doesn’t appear that often in everyday conversation, so why should one feel ashamed to get it wrong now and again? In the end, it’s more important to know what it means than how it sounds. I say go forth and mispronounce because how will you ever get it right if you’re never corrected? Duh-LEE-low, Duh-LIL-low, let’s call the whole thing off.

What say you? Any particularly embarrassing mispronunciation stories you’d like to recount?

Dec 22 2009 09:00 AM ET

'Knitting With Dog Hair' and other ridiculous book titles

by Thom Geier

Categories: Uncategorized

There are tens of thousands of books published each year, and not all of them can bear memorable titles like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or To Kill a Mockingbird. Or even Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt’s How to Be Famous. Take the examples above, which are culled from Do-It-Yourself Brain Surgery and Other Implausibly Titled Books. The book compiles the 50 all-time best entries for the Diagram Prize, an annual contest that Britain’s Bookseller magazine has held since 1978 for the oddest book title of the year. By the way, the winner of the 2009 Diagram Prize was The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-miligram Containers of Fromage Frais, a rich and creamy study of the future of dairy product packaging.

Have you spotted any (other) worthy candidates for the prize?

Dec 21 2009 09:05 AM ET

Who penned EW's worst book of the year? Hint: They're blonde and star in a show that rhymes with 'The Schmills'

by Kate Ward

Categories: Bad Books, Fiction, Nonfiction, Why Did I Read This?

Will they ever leave us alone? Though it was a difficult task to pick the best fiction and nonfiction books of the year, it was fairly easy to determine which book would top our Worst list: Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt’s How To Be Famous. Because, really, when it comes to this duo, we’d rather have a step-by-step guide on how to endure their endless televised shenanigans than how to follow in their fame-whoring footsteps. (For the rest of EW’s worst books list, head to this week’s magazine, which is on newsstands now.)

But let’s turn it over to you, Shelf Lifers. Did anyone out there actually read or like Speidi’s book? (Are those crickets I hear?) And have any of you found something that might be even worse to read this year?

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