Year: 2020

A few years ago, I got to do the audiobook version of my book for kids book Wow Wow and Haw Haw. It was fun and I would love to record again. I’ve done some radio and some commercials and feel more at home in front of a mic than an audience. (Probably because one time when I was reading it to a class of first graders, one kid went up to the teacher and tugged on her arm and said with what was obvious disdain: “Why can’t we find a nice lady to read it?” Listen, kid, I get it. I would prefer that too. But I needed this sale and it is what it is. Get used to disappointment. Now get your raspberry-yogurt-stained ass back on your circle and lets get this over with.) Anyway, this article is about what it’s like to be a recognized voice, if not face.

At 50, Edoardo Ballerini enjoys a particular kind of stardom. He is rarely asked for his autograph; fans do not wait outside his recording studio to catch a glimpse of him, and many would not recognize him if they chanced to pass him. And yet he sits at the forefront of a new form of celebrity, like that of the YouTube or podcast star. He is paid at the top range of his field, celebrated in reviews and with honors — he has won his industry’s top awards — and his name is one that might as well appear in italics for an avid portion of audiobook listeners.

The audiobook “star,” an invisible yet intimate voice in the reader’s ear, is an artist who helps to create the experience of what it means to “read” a given book. The oldest form of storytelling has been rendered salient once more by technology: the smartphone, the app, AirPods. Before coronavirus, according to audiobook publishers, the peak use of their product came during commuting hours; more recently, they have seen consumption shift to post-dinnertime, when people are trying to wind down before bed. While sales of digital audiobooks have grown steadily over the past seven years, by an average of 27 percent, e-book sales have experienced significant declines.

They’re fine, people. The virus can’t live on paper for more than 24 hours, so just relax. If you need a place to focus the fight-or-flight bursts of anxiety-inducing chemicals your brain is manufacturing faster than a Chinese facemask plant, try thinking of this: I have worn a hole through the wool at the elbow of my favourite cardigan and I can’t get out to get suede patches, which means I appear less professorial and more hobo-like than would otherwise be the case. It’s basically the greatest tragedy in the history of humanity. Focus there.

“I currently have over 1,000 books signed out to students,” she writes. “I’d like to know if the virus could be present on returning library books. Some of the books are paperback, and some of the books have mylar or laminated plastic covers.”

According to Dr. Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, the precautions for books should be the same as anything else you come into contact with.

“Book borrowing is a bit like grocery shopping,” said Furness. “You are touching items and bringing them into your house. We can’t wash or boil books, obviously. So, the thing to do is to clean your hands after touching them before touching your face, and to let them sit for 24 hours.”\

The virus on a book should be completely inactive after 24 hours,” Furness said.

You avoided a red card and kicked that puck right into the basket at the end zone for a three-pointer touchdown, and now all that remains is to strike out the putter in midfield who seems to have … uh … SPORTSBALL METAPHOR! You made it to Friday. And everyone knows we take a break from the end of the world on Friday. So pour yourself a glass of wine or tea, depending on your preference (you know it’s wine), and relax with some various stories from around the world of books.

• Poor Griffin nominees don’t get a party this year (my call is Islam ftw);
• Print sales clinging to life;
• Thistle among nominees for Indigenous Voice award;
• When I think of cyberspace books, long-necked, socially-awkward, BBS-running beardos come to mind, but things have changed since I was wee, and for the better;
• You in the UK? Waterstones is clearing house;
• Hey, Pete: AI generated dictionary for your next novel;
• Those Randos at Penguin are still pushing the hashtag campaign;
• One of these things is not like the others: Bookninja pal Roddy Doyle and three other writers highlighted for watching in the NYT;
• Writers in LA asking council for help;
• Bryan Washington wins Dylan Thomas Prize;
• African authors fight for their books to stay in Africa;
• Could digital drama kill our cousins in the theatre?;
• Julie Andrews picks Canadian author for story time… It’s amazing what suddenly becomes news when America notices Canada…;
• Are you remembering to check Beattieblog for short story month?;
• Scotland is making sure families have books to go with their whisky;

This guy is calling out reviewers who are more interested in their own cleverness than reviewing the book at hand, and asks why we tolerate this. Oh, sweetie, you don’t actually want the answer to that. It’s the same reason the world is currently run by bombastic buffoons and reality TV stars. We value entertainment over substance. And critics are are either smart enough to know, or self-absorbed enough believe, that translates to critical writing.

Broadly speaking, then, there are two main aims of a non-fiction book review in the general press. (I’ll come onto the more specialised organs, the TLS and the LRB, in a moment.) The first is to allow a significant literary figure to write a lengthy piece displaying their erudition, and which permits sub-editors to come up with a headline along the lines of ‘Julian Barnes on Jean-Paul Sartre’ or similar. The book itself is secondary, its coverage almost an irritation. And the other is nuts-and-bolts criticism, an engagement with an author’s intentions and aims where the fascinations of the subject are secondary to whether the writer has managed to make them accessible to a general audience. This may be less lofty, but is undeniably of more use to the profession, and probably to the potential purchaser, too.

It is incomprehensible that the first category has been so popular in the books industry for years. It would not be permissible or desirable in any other art form. It is inconceivable that one would read a review of a new staging of Hamlet which muses on the difficulties of staging the play, textual issues with the First Folio etc, and then concludes with the words ‘most of the performances are fine’ or ‘the lighting is excellent’. And in a culture that decries spoiling cinematic revelations, film criticism is an even harder art to perfect: writers who spend too long on plot synopses, or inadvertently give away surprises, are likely to find themselves subject to a barrage of aggrieved abuse on social media from disappointed fans.

Or, basically, any times. But, like Saunders below, her work is echoing loudly right now. I’ve been going back to read through some genre classics lately, including Solaris by Lem, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Miller, Left Hand of Darkness by Le Guin, etc. I should really put Butler on there as well to reacquaint with Kindred.

A revolutionary voice in her lifetime, Butler has only become more popular and influential since her death 14 years ago, at age 58. Her novels, including “Dawn,” “Kindred” and “Parable of the Sower,” sell more than 100,000 copies each year, according to her former literary and the manager of her estate, Merrillee Heifetz. Toshi Reagon has adapted “Parable of the Sower” into an opera, and Viola Davis and Ava DuVernay are among those working on streaming series based on her work. Grand Central Publishing is reissuing many of her novels this year and the Library of America welcomes her to the canon in 2021 with a volume of her fiction.

A generation of younger writers cite her as an influence, from Jemisin and Tochi Onyebuchi to Marlon James and Nnedi Okarafor, currently working on a screenplay for the Butler novel “Wild Seed” for the production company run by Davis and her husband, Julius Tennon. Davis, in a recent interview with The Associated Press, said she began reading Butler while attending the Juilliard school 30 years ago.

2020: the year of Saunders. Or if you’re Canadian, Peter Darbyshire. But I digress. The important part here is that years ago I ordered a pizza and this bedraggled dude who is obviously a grad student making extra cash shows up at the door with the debit machine and my pie, and as I’m fiddling with the machine he says, “Hey, do you know who George Saunders is?” I looked up in surprise and said, “Uh, yes, of course.” He paused a moment and said, “Are you him?” Then it was my turn to pause (and touch my forehead to feel if I had any hair at all left). Why can’t I be mistaken for Brad Pitt or something? Oh, right. The sallow, ageing redhead thing. Sigh.

We live in dystopian times. This seems undeniable as we’re locked down in a pandemic exacerbated by government ineptitude, corporate corruption and widespread disinformation. (If all that wasn’t enough, we also have murder hornets heading our way.) We should have been prepared for this after decades of dystopian works — 1984, The Hunger Games, Blade Runner, Terminator, etc. — but while these works led us to expect how dark and deadly our dystopia might be, none of them prepared us for how fundamentally dumb an American dystopia would be. Huxley can’t ready you for a reality TV president screaming in all caps on Twitter. Orwell doesn’t warn you of protesters in athleisure ware doing push-ups to demand gyms reopen during a global pandemic.

But there is one author who predicted these dumb and absurd times: George Saunders.

Ask women, they’ve been at it a while now.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising that it should have been women, who historically have all-too-well understood the paralysing parameters of enforced distancing (and not just social, but economic and political as well), who were compelled to fashion new words to cope with the feeling of being cut off from the pulse of life.

Taking as our inspiration such gifted wordsmiths as George Eliot and Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Dorothy Wordsworth, perhaps we can distil some helpful principles – some New Rules, to do a Dua Lipa – for sculpting a vocabulary to describe the surreal realities that will surely come to define these tense and trying times.

• Mannequins… coming soon to a horrific experience near you;
• Sofia Coppola (browr) is adapting Wharton’s The Custom of the Century;
• Wattpad getting into TV and movies;
• Stuck in wait list purgatory? Vox highlights some with shorter waits;
• Can’t read? Neither could Richard Ford, who was/is dyslexic;
• John Scalzi is a quitter (like me);
• B&N slowly starting to reopen… hopefully without mannequins;
• Superstar Erin Moure up for translation prize;
• Are you a nature writer? How do you account for all the, you know, shit everywhere?;
• I don’t know who Sally Rooney is, but she’s back on top, baby;
• Here’s a strong opinion on Benjamin Moser’s Pulitzer win;
• What happens if the Instapoets turn out to be a new Beat generation?;

French author who writes about serial killers has had his lifetimes of lies catch up with him. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that lying is (almost) never worth it. I try to impress this upon the kids: there’s never just “one lie”. It’s like a cancer. It needs to take over and kill everything or it fails.

Bourgoin is the author of more than 40 books and is widely viewed as a leading expert on murderers, having hosted a number of French television documentaries on the subject. He has claimed to have interviewed more than 70 serial killers, trained at the FBI’s base in Quantico, Virginia, and that his own wife was murdered in 1976, by a man who confessed to a dozen murders on his arrest two years later.

But in January, anonymous collective the 4ème Oeil Corporation accused him of lying about his past, and Bourgoin has now admitted to the French press that the wife never existed. He also acknowledged that he never trained with the FBI, never interviewed Charles Manson, met far fewer killers than he has previously claimed, and never worked as a professional footballer – another claim he had made.

“My lies have weighed me down,” he told Paris Match last week in his first interview about the accusations. “I have arrived at the balance-sheet time.”

So, how is this nonsense shaping up for bookstores? Not well if you don’t get out there and start buying from them. Do it. Do iiiiiiiit! See below:

• NYT looks as the peril of reopening tiny, close-quartered spaces;
• An Aussie store is offering a personal therapist to pick books for you;
• Will things go all-mail/curbside?;
• The UK is looking to a June reopening, but not all booksellers agree;
• More on indie ingenuity;
• Christian bookstores offer updates, but sadly no message from God as to why this is happening;
• Historic black bookstore fights for survival;
• Halifax indies have loyal customers keeping them afloat;