this time from Library Journal.  in introducing their titles, the reviewers explain:

So many books, so many best books lists. What makes ours special, and how do we make our choices? It’s an especially interesting question in light of the controversy stirred by PW’s top-ten, all-male list. For the record, about a third of the authors on our main list are women—and a bunch of titles are by and/or about people of color. Are we consciously striving for a balanced list? In fact, it’s more complicated than that.

When LJ’s book review editors sit down with our best books candidates, we’re obviously looking for the strongest writing on key topics—books that will last. But we aren’t just thinking in terms of Big Books: we’ve found that unimpeachably big books are often unimpeachably dull. So we look for a little edginess, a little risk that sets a book apart and makes us sit up and see things anew even when the narrative isn’t perfect.

new to LJ’s list of genre bests is the inclusion of “Street Lit” as a category.  other genres are “Mystery,” “SF & Fantasy,” “Romance,” “Christian Fiction,” and “Thrillers.”  missing from the “Romance” list is Sherry Thomas’ “Not Quite a Husband” which Lorraine and I (veteran romance readers) both thought highly of and received a very positive LJ review.  and i don’t agree with including Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ “What I Did for Love,” which, while enjoyable, did not bring any originality to the contemporary romance field.  ahhh, the subjective nature of “Best of” lists.

what are your best books of 2009?

posting by marin

Monica Hesse of the Washington Post posted ‘Twilight,’ the love that dare not speak its shame.  The subtitle says it all: Good, smart, literary women tried to resist the romantic-vampire phenomenon. And then, alas, they bit.

Hesse shares stories of women who avoided reading the books about star-crossed vampire love and then got sucked in when they started to read them (pun intended).  Some examples:

The woman who read the series so that she could be an informed hater:

She snuck the books into her house, at first reading them in the bathroom so her husband wouldn’t laugh. The floodgates opened. “I’d locked away a lot of emotions,” she says. “I’d numbed out.” It had been a terrible year, with unrelenting job stress, and yet suddenly she was feeling alive again.

Sarah Seltzer, a freelance literary critic and writes for a reproductive rights Web site:

“I wanted to write about the abstinence subtext,” Seltzer says, which is why she read the books to begin with. She planned on questioning the allegorical “abstinence only” theme that runs through the series. “But the books are kind of hypnotic, so it’s very much that while you’re reading them you’re sucked in, and then you take a step back and you think, this is kind of troubling. She jumps off a cliff because she misses her boyfriend?” What?!

Twilight sat on my bookshelf for months after a friend loaned it to me back in 2005.  I have to say, I never did read it — I just don’t do vampire stories.  I’ve heard from people who love the series and people who hate the series.  Have you read them?  Will you be standing in line tonight to see New Moon?

via Shelf Awareness

post by Lorraine

Teens and Distracted Driving was published by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.  Their findings are that:

One in four (26%) of American teens of driving age say they have texted while driving, and half (48%) of all teens ages 12 to 17 say they’ve been a passenger while a driver has texted behind the wheel.

Reading this reminded me of a story on NPR’s All Things Considered last September on High-Tech Solutions to Help Deter Driver Texting.

What struck me in this was the story of Brandi Terry, a 17-year-old high school junior who was not in one bad accident because of texting while driving, but two when she slammed into a semi while texting a year later.

“I tried really, really hard not to,” Terry says. “Then it got to the point where I would do it only once every 5 minutes. I would rarely do it — it got to the point where when I was alone in the car, I would do it,” she says. “I don’t know — it’s just so addicting, I just can’t put it down.”

Every five minutes constitutes rarely??

via SLJ’s Extra Helping.

posting by Lorraine

From Ars Technica comes the extraordinarily strange tale of  some “new “Beatles songs, a man named Hank Risan, and a process described as psychoacoustic.  What is psychoacoustic?  Well let’s start with what it’s not.  Psychoacoustic Beatles songs are not created by recording Charles Manson singing the White album while playing an acoustic guitar in his prison cell.

Okay, I’ll admit that was a long way to go for a joke, but seriously…psychoacoustic simulation the process that Risan claims allows him to create “new” works out of old Beatles tunes, and until a few days ago stream, them or sell them through his website bluebeat.com is pretty weird. The RIAA says that this all psychobabble and doublespeak nonsense and have taken Risan to court.  Seeminly, the court is in agreement, because they’ve shut down bluebeat.com for the time being.

Read how Risan described the process on November 7th to reporters from the LA Times, who didn’t seem to buy it either.

But if that’s still Paul McCartney’s voice and Ringo’s drums, how is it a new recording?

It’s not his voice. It’s an independent simulation of his voice. It sounds like it, to most ears, but if it’s independently created — just as if some guy sounded exactly like Ringo or Paul — it would OK.

But you didn’t record people playing.

We do. We do it in a virtual 3-D environment. That’s the whole point of psychoacoustic synthetic sounds. You can reproduce voices and instruments synthetically. The court will make a determination in two weeks, as to whether or not that is an appropriate interpretation of the [114(b) of the Copyright Act].

posting by jim

Phillip Hoose won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose.

Colvin first came to Hoose’s attention while he was working on his book, We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History (Farrar, 2001). When Colvin, who was 15 at the time, refused to give up her seat, two policemen arrived, dragged the slim and bespectacled teenager backwards by her wrists off the bus, handcuffed her, and threw her in jail. Yet it was Parks’ action that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and it was Parks whom the U.S. Congress later called the “Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement.”

This book was selected out of 251 books submitted for consideration in the young people’s category.

via School Library Journal

posting by Lorraine

Colum McCann won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for Let the Great World Spin, a novel featuring a sprawling cast of characters in 1970s New York City whose lives are  touched by the mysterious tightrope walker who traverses a wire suspended between the Twin Towers one morning.  McCann dedicated his award to fellow Irishman Frank McCourt, who died earlier this year.  The nonfiction award went to T.J. Stiles for his biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt (The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt) and special awards were given to Dave Eggers and Gore Vidal.

posted by Nancy (with help from Marin)

as a former teen librarian, i am a little bit ashamed to admit i haven’t read Sapphire’s “Push.”  but, to be fair, it was never on the shelf, either lost or stolen despite frequent replacement.  then the buzz about the movie started a few months ago and i put the audio book on hold to remedy this oversight.

when the audio book arrived, it sat in my car and sat and sat.  for those of you who don’t know the story of “Push,” it’s about Precious Jones, an overweight black teen growing up in Harlem, pregnant with her second baby (her father is the father of both of her children), illiterate, and enduring the abuse by her mother.  you can now imagine why i wasn’t eager to start the audio book.  but from the first sentence, i knew it would be magic.  Bahni Turpin who narrates the audio book completely captures the poetry of the language in a way that i could never imagine through reading the book.  it is stunning, brutal, and hopeful.

Sapphire’s “Push” is not autobiographical, but does draw on her experiences as a literacy teacher in Harlem, the south Bronx, and Brooklyn.

in interviews, Sapphire explains that the moment the book was published in 1996, she was approached by movie types, but she refused to hand over the story until she knew someone could handle the tough issues raised in the book.  after seeing “Monster’s Ball,” Sapphire changed her mind about Lee Daniels who had been turned down by Sapphire just a few years earlier.  the film has won both the 2009 Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Toronto People’s Choice Award (the only film to have ever won both awards).  Oprah is one of the producers and along with Tyler Perry, the two are promoting the movie. apparently their promotion is working:  after a couple of weeks in a very limited run, “Precious” has pulled in almost $9 million.

Mo’Nique talks about what it was like to play Precious’ mother, a woman so easy to characterize as a monster.

despite earlier reservations, i will go see the movie – will you?

(via Shelf Awareness)

posting by marin

Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner of Awful Library Books which we featured shortly after its inception, were interviewed last week on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

(youtube video embedded)

if you want to knit a sweater out of dog hair, let me know.

(via PW)

posting by marin

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the pulp novel.  The covers were generally provocative and eye popping.  Pulp novels came in all flavors detective stories, westerns, science fiction and many others.  Authors such as Raymond Chandler, Robert Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, and many others either began their careers, or made a name for themselves by writing pulpers.  Pulp novels are experiencing a revival of interest amongst consumers and academics.

Hard Case Crime is bringing back the pulp novel  by re-issuing some stories while also providing authors such as Stephen King to write in the hard boiled style.  King’s novel The Colorado Kid, was the first story published in the series.  Sno-Isle has quite a few of these fun stories, you can find them by doing a series search in the catalog. ( //shard case crime book)

I just finished “Quarry in the Middle” by Max Allan Collins and enjoyed it alot.  The story was fast paced, and perfect for a quick read on a rainy evening. I was hooked after the first few paragraphs.

“I had a body in the trunk of my car.

I hadn’t planned it that way, but it wasn’t that kind of job. It wasn’t a job at all, really, rather a speculative venture, and now I’d made more of an investment than just my time and a little money.

This was in the summer, and Reagan was still president, early enough that he wasn’t showing his Alzheimer’s yet and late enough that he was keeping a good distance between himself and the Press Corps, waving and smiling and pretending he couldn’t hear them….”

So if you’re looking for something to read this weekend try one of these retro pulp novels, you may like it so much you’ll want the tee shirt.

posting by jim

not sure why ALA is taking so long on rolling these out….

“Tender Morsels” is a phenomenal and sometimes brutal fantasy revealing the dangers of one’s dreams coming true.

posting by marin