so odd

a couple of weeks ago, Oprah picked her latest book group title, Uwem Akpan’s “Say You’re One of Them.”  it’s a collection of 5 short stories set in different countries across war-torn Africa from the perspective of children.  in a PW interview, Akpan explains

I feel in most conflicts in the world we don’t get the perspectives of the young people. But, they suffer the consequences of conflicts. They see people being killed; they feel hunger; but, they don’t normally understand very much why what is happening is happening.

Akpan sought to give a face to the events happening in Africa, to get people to react to the current events, but cautions that his stories do not capture all that is happening in Africa.

Even as spread out as these stories are, I cannot paint the complete picture of Africa. There are many happy children in Africa. It’s not as if every child is facing these particular problems. I don’t want people to think Africa is all about suffering and misery, but at the same time there are real issues there. I also hope people will read these stories and see the influences of the outside world on these situations.

in an interview with EW’s Shelf Life, Akpan explains that he is very “humbled” by Oprah’s pick.

what’s so odd (talk about a rambling way to get to the point) is that Oprah’s pick is generating very little interest around these here parts.  the 2008 debut garnered positive reviews upon its release including an ‘A‘ from EW’s Jennifer Reese, a starred review from PW, praise from Janet Maslin in The New York Times, and more.  Sno-Isle originally ordered 9 copies (actually, conservative me bought 4 copies and we added 5 more lease to meet the holds queue).  since the announcement, we’re up to only 73 holds making it necessary to purchase a mere 6 more copies to meet the 5:1 holds to copy ratio (we overbought since it’s now in trade paper, a less durable edition than hardback).  to offer perspective, for the last Oprah pick, “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” (another debut novel), we had to buy over 100 copies to meet the holds queue.

so what is it about “Say You’re One of Them?”  is it the short story format, the setting, the fact that it’s in paperback, the fact that it’s a year old and those readers that are Oprah followers have already read it, the fact that the pick was leaked the day before so there was less excitement or…?  all speculation, but it’s certainly unexpected to have so little activity  post Oprah’s announcement.

posting by marin

not only merely dead?

Found via Facebook:

Thanks Matt!

Bad news for the boys and girls at Amazon, the Kindle DX isn’t that popular with their target audience, students.  A group of Princeton students have been participating in a pilot program to see if the DX is a valuable resource for students, and though the program has been in place for less than two weeks the early returns are not looking good.

From The Daily Princetonian:

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

To add to the bad news  Roy Tennant reminding us that single use eReaders are dead, and that the smart money is on a multi-use tool such as the predicted tablet PCs from Apple and Microsoft.  Tennant has been saying since June 2008 that the Kindle and similar devices not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

All this coupled with news out of Princeton does not bode well for the future.

posting by jim

building an exquisite corpse

Exquisite Corpse party 7-09

Originally uploaded by Anna L Conti

The Exquisite Corpse debuted on the National Mall in Washington D.C. this weekend. What is an Exquisite Corpse?  Well since I didn’t know myself until 10 minutes ago, I’ll let the nice folks at the Libraray of Congress tell you.

“….  An Exquisite Corpse is an old game in which people write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it over to conceal part of it and pass it on to the next player to do the same. The game ends when someone finishes the story, which is then read aloud.

Our “Exquisite Corpse Adventure” works this way: Jon Scieszka, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, has written the first episode, which is “pieced together out of so many parts that it is not possible to describe them all here, so go ahead and just start reading!” He has passed it on to a cast of celebrated writers and illustrators, who must eventually bring the story to an end.

Every two weeks, there will be a new episode and a new illustration. The story will conclude a year from now. To get bi-weekly updates with new Exquisite Corpse Adventure chapters, click on the subscribe link at the top of the page. “This story starts with a train rushing through the night….” No one knows where or how it will end!”

NPR has a nice interview with Kate DiCamillo and Jon Sciezka (rhymes with Fresca) if you wan to learn more.

Read episode 1, another piece of the corpse will be revealed on October 9th.

posting by jim

a huge weight lifted

"Fact is, I couldn't care less whether kids learn to read."

the “real” reaction to the end of Reading Rainbow.

(via facebook)

posting by marin

CPSIA: still no final word for Libraries

Libraries still need to wait to find out how the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act(CPSIA) will affect them. 

Publisher’s Weekly has posted that:

Although there has been no official guidance for libraries yet, the Commission has promised it would issue a separate ruling “soon.” Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s Washington, D.C., office, says,  “There is finally some recognition that a library is a different kind of entity than a store.”

via PW’s Children’s Bookshelf

posting by Lorraine

“The Lost Symbol” round-up*

Dan Brown’s blockbuster met expectations and then some.  after the first week of sales, a total of 2 million copies were sold.  on the first day of sales, the number of Amazon Kindle copies sold exceeded the number of Amazon print copies.  overall, the ebook sales are at 5%, average numbers for most titles which might quell (at least temporarily) the panic that the simultaneous release of an ebook spells the doom of the printed book.  and of course, some worried that the focus on “The Lost Symbol” would overshadow perfectly deserving titles (read more literary) including “Blame,” the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree of arcs on this very blog.

there are positive reviews of the book with the usual elitist grumblings (sorry Philip Pullman, i do love you, but really, have you even read “The Lost Symbol?”  it doesn’t sound like it.).  PW gave it a starred review saying

Jealous thriller writers will despair, doubters and nay-sayers will be proved wrong, and readers will rejoice: Dan Brown has done it again.

thriller author Louis Bayard writing for The Washington Post honestly begins his relatively negative review with “Welcome to the least relevant review you will read all year.”  ’cause really, does it matter what the reviews are?!

over at The Guardian, John Crace provides a snarky digested version of “The Lost Symbol” if you don’t want to wait or you’re not going to crack those pages anyway (useful for faking a conversation at a cocktail party).

Mwahahahaha. A stream of mysterious italics appeared across the page as the 6ft 6in initiate admired his tattooed physique in the solitary confines of the Freemason Hall. Soon the Secrets of the Universe would be his.

even better, the play-by-play reading (though not as good as Doc Turtle’s serialized reading of J. R. Ward’s “Dark Lover”).

Dan Brown says that he is not immune to the criticism in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

Does it sting when people say you stink?

Yes of course it hurts. But I wouldn’t expect everyone to like what I do. When you’re a creative person, you’re creating something that you like and it’s all just a matter of taste. I’m almost amused that people go so far out of their way to say I hate this guy’s writing. It’s just a strange sort of thing for people to do. It comes with that level of success. You just have people gunning for you.

interestingly, just a couple of weeks before the release of “The Lost Symbol,” there were less than 500 holds.  now, there are over 850, more than a week after its release.  who knew “The Lost Symbol” would build momentum as a word-of-mouth title?

(via PW Daily, Shelf Awareness, PW Daily, Bookshelves of Doom, and EW’s Shelf Life)

posting by marin

*also known as a desperate attempt to close numerous tabs on my browser

Hollywood treatment for classic children’s books

This past weekend, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs based on the picture book by Judi and Ron Barrett opened with box-office success.  The original story was padded with extra characters and events to make a feature-length film.

Entertainment Weekly’s Keith Staskiewicz came up with more ideas for converting classic children’s books into film.

My favorite:

Goodnight, Moon: The source material consists nearly exclusively of scenes of a young boy saying goodnight to various things in and around his bedroom. Director Michael Bay hopes to maintain the original’s basic structure while replacing “saying goodnight to” with “exploding into an infernal fireball” and “a young boy” with “Will Smith.” Also, the Moon killed Smith’s family and he’s out for revenge.
Sample Dialogue: “Say goodnight, Moon.” *EXPLOSION*

Let’s see, what has already been done…

Robin Williams in Jumanji.  Ingrid Bergman in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Debbie Reynolds in Charlotte’s Web. Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  The list can go on and on.

What would you like to see?

via Bookshelves of Doom

posting by Lorraine

Multitudes of books about Madoff

Madoff Heads To Jail, And The Books Head To Stores

NPR Morning Edition , September 21, 2009

It’s been about six months since Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Already, half a dozen books have been published about the scandal — including four just in the last month.

NPR’s Jim Zarroli says the most provocative of the bunch is Madoff’s Other Secret, by Sheryl Weinstein. In it, the former chief financial officer of the Hadassah charitable foundation claims to have had a lingering affair with Madoff.

Zarroli recently spoke to Weinstein. And he tells NPR’s Renee Montagne that he doesn’t think Weinstein would have written the book if her family hadn’t lost all their money by investing in Madoff’s company.

For more of the article and the transcript, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112409211&ft=1&f=103

All of the titles mentioned are in our collection.  I have been buying heavily in the financial area.  People are interested in what has happened on Wall Street and how to deal with it.

Posted by Becky

 

 

Updike boo boo

“Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel” was sent in for review.  an added bonus to the book, a reader’s correction of Updike’s description of a car:

of course, being avid readers, we’ve all stumbled upon errors, but i have never felt the need to pen corrections in the margins.  i am reading Julie Buxbaum’s “After You” in which the narrator recounts how the Challenger crash of 1986  (p. 28) occurred during 8th grade (me too) and then proceeds to mention that Nirvana was big in high school (p. 35)  – “Nevermind” wasn’t released till 1991, the second 1/2 of my freshman year in college which is why i noticed this error in chronology.  in “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landeau-Banks,” it’s mentioned that Frankie is in the library, browsing the “8000 section of the stacks to look for something fun to read.” (p. 58)  any nerdy librarian knows that type-o should read the 800s.  any funny or egregious errors you’ve noticed in your reading?

posting by marin

Philip Pullman doesn’t like The Lost Symbol

Philip Pullman comments on author Dan Brown in Author’s attack on Da Vinci Code best-seller Brown.

“His basic ignorance about the way people behave is astonishing – talking in utterly implausible ways to one another. The basic quality of the prose is flat, stunted and ugly – all the usual literary things he just doesn’t know how to do.“But he’s not interested in those and obviously nor are his millions of readers. There’s nothing wrong with writing as he does, but it’s not great writing.”

There seems to be a lot of people who don’t quite agree…

via PW Children’s Bookshelf September 17, 2009

Posting by Lorraine