Month: October 2019

You seldom see publishers as passionate about their books as on award day. But here old Bookninja pal Sam Jordison describes what goes through one’s mind on not only losing, but losing in the middle of a massive clusterfuck.

Toxic thoughts and questions flood your mind when you can’t trust the process. And the worst of it is that all this mess reflects badly on two fine and noble writers. I wish only good things for Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. I love their books and agree with Hirsch that their careers deserve recognition. But that wasn’t supposed to be the point. I have another fear. Naturally, a lot of my sadness about this mess stems from the feeling that my beloved author and her masterpiece have both been mistreated, not to mention the other shortlisted writers. But there may be an even bigger, separate problem. I still find it impossible to work out the maths that made five jurors unable to vote on the outcome, as Peter Florence claimed.

Personal essay on landing in the library.

It wasn’t a well-planned career move. When I was in college I fell in love with a major that let me read big fat novels for credit. As I neared graduation, I bristled when my mother suggested, “why don’t you go to library school?” As a child of the Great Depression she had a practical bent, and she knew my chosen major wouldn’t be able to support me in a long-term relationship. “Something to fall back on,” she added, which only made it worse. I loved being in libraries, I even worked in one, but it was the life of the mind that swept me off my feet. The kind of work I imagined librarians did – safe, boring, routine – nope, not for me. I had dreams.

Good guys haul in a decent netful of fish while the massive waves of idiots continue to crash on the shore. The UK is re-investing in libraries right in the middle of their scarily entertaining meltdown.

In 50 years, I’ll be either dead or dressed in biker leathers and helping the tribe scrounge canned goods from whatever Walmarts remain above water.

“In 50 years … Peter Handke, just like Beckett, will be among the most obvious choices the Swedish Academy ever made, of that I am certain,” he wrote.

Peterson argued that Handke is “radically unpolitical” in his writing, and said his support for the Serbs had been misunderstood. The main thrust of his argument was that the Serbian point of view was missing in German and Austrian media.

Periods added for illustrative effect. GRR Martin knows you want him to write faster, but, please stop being a dick about it. (FTR, if you’re a whiner about the speed of him or Rothfuss, or Star Wars having POC, or Marvel having powerful female characters, or any other kind of toxic fanboy, this site isn’t for you. And I say that as a recently reconstituted nerdlinger from back in the day.)

MARTIN: I often say that there are two types of writers, architects and gardeners. We had an architect here who was one of the authors who came up. I’m sure that he plans all of his buildings well in advance before he starts building them. He draws a blueprint, and he knows what they’re going to be made of and how many stories they’re going to be, where the bathrooms will be and how they’ll be heated and what the roof will be made of – everything before they even dig the foundation. That’s the way the architect writers work. They plan their novels out in advance – what’s going to be everywhere, every turn, every twist, everything. They have these very detailed outlines.

And then there are the gardeners who dig a hole, and they plant a seed. And they water it, in the case of writers, with their blood and their tears and their sweat. And they hope that something comes up. And they have a general idea. They know whether they planted an acorn or a tomato plant. But there’s lots of surprises. Sometimes, it doesn’t come up at all, or it comes up and dies. And sometimes, it gets very wild.

Q&Q runs a Q&A with massively successful Girly Book Club leader Erin Woodward.

How do you work with publishers?

Because we have so many book clubs we started a pay-to-play program. We accept four to five books per month, and it’s sold out in the United States until next March. We haven’t launched it in Canada yet – we are still messing around with shipping costs and Canada Post.

[Participating publishers] send us advance reading copies of books to include in these book bags that go out to all of our hosts. What ends up happening is these books get circulated around the book club. Even though it’s not an official GBC pick, some of them are so successful that they have mini book clubs.

Whoa, can we back that up a minute? What does “pay-to-play” mean here?

Charlie Foran, rocking the day job.

Tipster Michelle sends in this piece knowing I’d be weak to it. Of course, it doesn’t have that one movie with Lisa Loeb an Liz Phair in buns, tight sweaters, glasses, and stockings. You know the one. I was in it too. I played the pizza delivery guy…. Wait…. I think that might have been a–never mind.

So this is an article about a serial bank robber that identified as an author because he self-published something. But it seems to me he’d be better off defining himself by what gets him the press. Bank robber also sounds way way sexier.

After a years of dealing with children begging me for plastic crap, video games, an other garbage from the Scholastic “Books” catalog that comes home through school, I can dig this piece from McWeeney’s: “BOOKS YOU WANT YOUR CHILD TO BUY AT THE BOOK FAIR AND THE BOOKS THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY BRINGING HOME INSTEAD.”