Month: September 2019

When I left Bookninja back in 2011/12, talking about the future of the printed book was a regular thing (how many “The Death of ______” articles did we post in a given week? Probably 666.) Anyway, new data shows the printed book still outsells the e-book. So, NYAH NYAH, Future. You suck. (Yes, I realize part of the the general hypothesis is that people like to decorate with them, but I’ll take it!)

Publishers of books in all formats made almost $26 billion in revenue last year in the U.S., with print making up $22.6 billion and e-books taking $2.04 billion, according to the Association of American Publishers’ annual report 2019. Those figures include trade and educational books, as well as fiction.

While digital media has disrupted other industries such as news publishing and the music business, people still love to own physical books, according to Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers’ Association in the U.K.

The Guardian has a listicle on top games of the century so far. Why am I including this on a books website? Because my kids are expert gamers and I’ve played a number of the games on this list, a small handful of which were narratively more interesting and accomplished than 90% of the novels I read. If I had even the faintest idea of how to write for video games, I probably would. (#halflife2forevah)

Another thing I learned since coming back: all the damn sites I used to look at for news (in this case Publishers Lunch) are now paywalled. If you have a subscription, you might be interested in this piece about Oprah no longer shilling solely for Amazon. Ah, billionaires not cooperating to screw everyone below them out of cash. It’s enough to melt a liberal’s heart.

Boomers were about “me” and millenials are about “we”? Meh. We’ll see. Boomers were damn hippies all about “we” at one point as well. Hopefully the young hipsters can see this through to the end of their very Millenial lives.

Of course, focusing on the individual runs the risk of skirting the larger responsibilities of society by holding us all fully accountable for our own well-being. But this fixation on what goes on inside of a single human heart, and the emphasis on its utmost importance, is no longer going unchallenged in the self-help realm. To better realize its potential, “self-help” must address how badly we want institutional solutions for our broken systems. We want not to be just good, but to live well. We even have a ubiquitous word for that: wellness.

You heard me. SUPER-INTERESTING.

For its purposes—minding its audience—Scooby Doo wanted to simply unleash chaos and then resolve it within a 20-minute segment. Its form was never conducive to a deep dive into the philosophical questions that plagued the gothic. And although its mysteries were watered-down to be palatable and villains were dressed up to mask their humanity when committing their crimes, the genius of the show lies, ironically, in what most people would say is its weakness: its repetition. On one level, the show performs the very function dictated to it by detective fiction, which is to reassure the viewer that justice will prevail and that order will be reinstated. On another level, the show’s very pattern allows the viewer to predict the plot of upcoming episodes: Even during the celebration of catching one villain, the viewer begins to imagine the next. Repetition is, ultimately, a cornerstone of life, and harmful cycles can only be broken if something changes.

Exactly 50 years ago the latest Canadian novel that everyone seemed to be buying, reading, and arguing about was Five Legs, a complex and innovative work by the then-unknown writer Graeme Gibson. Four Canadian publishers had rejected it, doubtlessly because they found it incomprehensible. But once Dennis Lee accepted the manuscript for the still-new House of Anansi Press, Gibson’s career was on its way. He followed with three other novels, Communion, Perpetual Motion, and Gentleman Death, all the while working tirelessly for good causes in both the real world and the literary one. 

George Fetherling remembers Graeme Gibson in the Quill.

The Extended Goodnight Moon Universe is a thing.

There’s no plot to Goodnight Moon, no characterization, no conflict. Every word written by Margaret Wise Brown and every detail illustrated by Clement Hurd is designed to build the illusion of comfort and stability—much in the same way that Star Wars presents a galaxy of infinite possibilities that includes one where your spaceship’s starter refuses to turn over, or the way that Harry Potter depicts a version of middle school where you are actually special.
In the case of Goodnight Moon, all the words and details—save one notable exception—work together to build Brown and Hurd’s fictional world. In the midst of the book’s mirrored repetition of household objects and animals, the goodnights to the clocks and socks, the kittens and mittens, is a white page with the words “Goodnight nobody” printed on it. It jolts the adult mind out of the trance the book’s murmured sibilants can produce. Goodnight nobody? What does that mean? Who’s nobody? Is children’s literature ur-cozy room haunted? This strange page feels like the point at which the book’s childhood materialism and chronic OCD list-making morph into existential despair (which makes Goodnight Moon the perfect bedtime story of grown-ups too).

“Five celebrity book clubs you should follow on Instagram“… So, this is where we are….

A longtime Bookninja favourite, Heather O’Neill, is going international.

Wouldn’t it be extra funny if he had composed the book in verse and then the DOJ was like searching everywhere for the money and holding press conferences saying things like, “He must have hidden his royalties cleverly in offshore accounts around the world” when really he was just a poet. I wish I could write the TV show known as Dumb-Ass Reality. I mean, doesn’t this pic look like it could be in an MFA brochure?