Year: 2020

Do you worship or pay respect to something higher than yourself? God? Allah? The spirit of spring renewal? A divine clockmaker? The benevolent lich named Jesus? The early and mid-career works of Radiohead? That angel that didn’t kill your kid? The works of Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett (each born OTD)? Well, this sure seems to be the time of year for you! Hope you find some comfort and happiness in your rituals, even without the ability to share them face to face with friends and family.

• You knew it was coming: pandemic terms getting added to dictionaries worldwide;
• And here’s the slang version;
• The slippers and ratty hoodie of literature: comfort reads;
• Nothing is normal, so reject normalcy: a drag queen talks 7 how-to books;
• Should your agent be submitting your book right now?;
• Access Copyright donates to extend relief fund for writers;
• Here that? It’s the sound of 1000 poets groaning, thinking, “Damn, I should have done that!”
• On the importance of writing to Islam;
• On editing solo;
• I’ve made pilgrimages to only three or four bookstores around the world, which is to say I went to them like a tourist attraction — Shakespeare and Co in Paris, The Strand in NYC, and City Lights in SF. Well, City Lights is on its last legs and looking for donations to stay afloat. Hard time to be at that, but if you have a dollar to spare….
• In praise of short books (Waiting for the Barbarians!!);

Enjoyed combing through these cult movie posters reimagined as kids book covers (and other such nonsense). Have no idea if the seller is legit, but they’re fun to look at. (Also, it’s “Gorsh”, not “Gosh”.)

BookRiot is spending the day looking at social justice — an endeavour Bookninja heartily supports. So, we’re arming the populace, preparing the barricades, and constructing guillotines, right? Oh, I see. Well, baby steps.

From civil rights, to feminism, to activism for kids, we’re spending the day taking a look at social justice in literature. Take the time to expand your knowledge of important political movements, gain the tools to engage in meaningful conversations about current issues, and gain some historical perspective. We’ve got the books and conversations to help you tackle the tough stuff and make an impact.

You know those “licensed books” that the once magnificent Scholastic Books catalog is now riddled with? The ones where it’s like, Minions Go on a Picnic, or How To Train Your Dragon to Not Eat the Rich, or Dora The Explorer Participates in Colonialism, and it comes with stickers and a CD or something? Well, here is an article on how they are trying to cope with the situation at hand and still make a metric shit-ton of money off people not educated enough (or frankly, tired enough of their kids’ whining to give up) to not buy their inane garbage. </snobbery>

Publishers of licensed books tend to rely more on distribution through mass merchants than children’s publishers at large, whose sales skew more toward trade channels. This fact has helped mitigate the sales declines that have accompanied the spread of the new coronavirus. On the other hand, publishing licensees are dealing with the unique challenges that come with releasing tie-ins to feature films that are being postponed indefinitely or being watched online instead of in theaters.

“We sell an awful lot of licensed books in mass merchant accounts like Target and Walmart, and they’re still open because they sell food,” says Jon Anderson, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing. “So we haven’t seen quite the impact in licensed books as we’ve seen in some other categories.”

Coloring and activity titles in particular have been selling well during the crisis. “Our coloring and activity and preK–2 workbooks are doing very well as a category,” says Ben Ferguson, CEO and president of Bendon. “There are 57 million kids at home who are looking for in-home, quiet activities, and that’s driving our product tremendously. The sell-through is better than we’ve ever seen.”

• Andrew Marvell was not only a poet named “Marvell”, but also a Dutch spy…. Coooooool….;
• Survey of indie stores shows extent of pandemic damage;
• Authors ban together to help indy bookstores;
• B&N is big enough to be coping;
• Bookish lockdown fun listing in the Guardian;
• Bookninja pal Sheila Heti writes about Bookninja fav Tove Jansson;
• Today in irony: Lonely Planet shutting down offices;
• A Bookninja favourite poet, Carol Ann Duffy, is picking “poems to get us through” for the Guardian;
• 32 new writers make CBC short story prize longlist… I love seeing this: all names I don’t recognize. Nothing worse than seeing these lists come up with a bunch of successful/established writers on them squeezing out the newbs. Joe Blow, Raymond Carver, Jane Doe, Billy Jean, Shirley Jackson, Sally Sue, and Italo Calvino. Borf. These contests shouldn’t be for established types;
• Arts orgs raise funds to support artists during this time of crisis;

Forget toilet paper, books are the way to go (and depending on who wrote any given one, you might solve both problems at once). Steven Beattie investigates whether (more likely “when”) book collecting becomes book hoarding. Speaking as part of a pair that has about 4000 books in the house, I don’t know that we’re there yet.

Uh, I would be wary of any study that thinks it’s proving something about the world with a sample made up from the users of Reddit. Mining Reddit data for whether the “general population” still “prioritizes white, male authors” (ftr, my hunch is, it probably does) is like saying you’re going to test cleanup workers at Fukushima for radiation and then extrapolating that the rest of world is glowing green. I mean, you can tell just by the authors listed that this study is skewed… Who with half-a-mind actually reads or listens to Orson Scott Card anymore?

A new study from SuperSummary, an online resource that offers study guides to fiction and nonfiction, highlights how white male authors remain among the most celebrated and discussed.

The study explores the r/books forum on Reddit, which has close to 18 million members. What books and authors are mentioned the most? What topics get the community fired up? Although Reddit isn’t representative of any single group, that’s a part of the appeal for exploring it as representative of the average reader. There are certainly book industry folks in the subreddit, but the bulk of the community is the end user of books, as opposed to someone within the process itself.

Over a million comments and posts between January 29, 2008, and January 27, 2020, were analyzed using Reddit’s own API and Google’s BigQuery tool. Using bestseller lists, forum opinions, and other similar resources, SuperSummary developed a list of 250 popular and well-known authors, while they did the same for individual books, which came to a list of 300 titles.

Breaking: still a nuthouse out there. Better to stay home and read insouciant book blogs. Unless you have to fortify the razor-wire perimeter, reload the automated turrets, and reset the serrated spike traps. In which case, do that first then come back here for a cup of tea while browsing.

• RIP: John Prine, 73, of Covid19 (preferred over Dylan by a longshot);
• Dylan Thomas Prize fer the young’uns shortlist;
• Pandemic postpones Pulitizer Prize;
• Bunch of authors in the NYer on living in the pandemic;
• Amazon: great if you’re a white supremacist, not so much if you’re an employee or tax payer shouldering their share of the burden;
• Hey, nerds! Hugo shortlists are out!;
• Canadian comic book awards;
• Bady day for poetic justice: UK government will not be turning Oscar Wilde’s former prison into an arts centre;
• Lockdown erotica for the win? (Baby, you can leave your mask on?);
• When Ingram goes, everyone follows;
• Orwell Prize shortlist includes…. Orwell;

Yeh fucking well better believe twere a fucking Scott on fucking pandemic lockdown, yeh wan fukkit funling.

In the documentary, Dr Joanna Kopaczyk, a historical linguistics at Glasgow University tells viewers: ‘In the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, when Kennedy addresses Dunbar, there is the earliest surviving record of the word ‘f***’ in the world.

‘It might never quite make the tourist trail, but here in the National Library we have the first written ‘f***’ in the world. I think that’s something to be proud of’

A spokeswoman for the National Library told The Scotsman: ‘It has long been known that the manuscript contains some strong swearwords that are now common in everyday language, although at the time, they were very much used in good-natured jest’.

The Griffin Poetry prize shortlists are out.

International Shortlist

• How to Dress a Fish
  Abigail Chabitnoy
  Wesleyan University Press
• Arias
  Sharon Olds
  Jonathan Cape and Alfred A. Knopf
• Time
  Sarah Riggs, translated from the French
  written by Etel Adnan
  NightboatBooks
• Lima :: Limón
  Natalie Scenters-Zapico
  Copper Canyon Press

Canadian Shortlist

• How She Read
  Chantal Gibson
  Caitlin Press
• heft
  Doyali Islam
  McClelland & Stewart
• Magnetic Equator
  Kaie Kellough
  McClelland & Stewart