Bookninja

Like almost every other aspect of culture, women are swimming upstream. But this article argues the time for change is at hand. Is a change coming to Tesco?

Back in 1995, though, Lynds sent her debut spy thriller Masquerade to a New York publishing house. Its president, she told the Wall Street Journal, at first agreed to buy it, but changed her mind the following day. “Her reason? ‘No woman could have written this novel’,” Lynds told the WSJ. She went to another publisher, and it became a bestseller.

“I hope no one would say that now,” says Manda Scott of Lynd’s experience. Scott is qualified to speak on the topic: the spy thriller author won the McIlvanney prize for best Scottish crime book of the year for A Treachery of Spies. Disclaimer: I judged the McIlvanney, and A Treachery of Spies blew me away: it’s ridiculously gripping and complex. Scott is also the author of a series of spy novels set in ancient Rome, which were published under the name MC Scott – a deliberate decision by her publisher before the first, Rome: The Emperor’s Spy, was published in 2010. “They made my name gender neutral because somebody had said ‘nobody in Tesco will buy a spy book by a woman’,” says Scott. “I don’t think that would happen now. Publishing has become much more gender-blind. If it’s a good book they’ll publish it, whereas before it was: ‘Only blokes can write this’.”

My understanding is that the InterLibrary loan is now known as “The Internet”. But I might be mistaken. Regardless, they are important to fabric of western life, says this LitHub article.

InterLibrary Loan services are sometimes included in library budget cuts—the perception being that the service is not essential—but as Heather Robinson, chief executive of the St. Thomas Public Library in St. Thomas, Ontario said when their service was cut, the loss of InterLibrary Loan affects rural communities the most. The same is true in America—where swaths of people need libraries for internet access, let alone the wealth of knowledge afforded by a book sharing service. InterLibrary Loan is also essential for the democratization of research: you would be hard-pressed to find an acknowledgments page in a book of academic scholarship that doesn’t include the phrase “interlibrary loan.”

I grew up in rural Ontario and this was never even presented as an option to me. So I got a job at Coles and used my discount to fill my room with “liturniture” (piles of books which I used as everything from coffee tables to chairs.) Also, my library didn’t look like this ^^. It looked like Costco shelving in a 1970s rec room reno.

I learned two things today: 1) The Romance Writers of America cancelled their yearly RITAs awards due to a raging racism problem, and, 2) there was a yearly awards event called the RITAs.

“Due to recent events in RWA, many in the romance community have lost faith in RWA’s ability to administer the 2020 RITA contest fairly, causing numerous judges and entrants to cancel their participation,” the organization said in a statement Monday. “The contest will not reflect the breadth and diversity of 2019 romance novels/novellas and thus will not be able to fulfill its purpose of recognizing excellence in the genre. For this reason, the Board has voted to cancel the contest for the current year. The plan is for next year’s contest to celebrate 2019 and 2020 romances.”

The TLS offers a list of books that are ripe for being brought back into print. Any you’d add?

A discussion on selling outrage at the Boston Review. I would be happy if they just had to all be literate. But we live in the Fox era. Baby steps. (Older article, but worth the read.)

Last week, President Donald Trump assailed CNN reporter Jim Acosta and suspended his press pass, echoing past comments that the media is the “enemy of the people.” In this context, I sat down with Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and faculty codirector of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, to discuss the media’s role in the polarization of U.S. politics. Our conversation drew on Benkler’s recent book, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, coauthored with Robert Faris and Hal Roberts.

Citing their study about the creation and sharing of news stories surrounding the 2016 election, Benkler argues that online platforms are not primarily to blame for spreading misinformation and radicalizing the electorate. Our conversation focused instead on the rise of right wing traditional media and the new norms he believes mainstream media should adopt.

Fucking right. Now maybe the world will get fixed, because obviously we can’t do it. The BBC looks back on 2019 as a year of “rage” in women’s essays.

The old adage ‘the personal is political’ is finding truly exciting new applications. The feminist women’s essays of 2019 combine stringent forensic analysis with fearless movement in and out of autobiography. The personal is elbowing its way rudely into the discourse, and altering the definition of being rude. In the process, new kinds of personhood are being created.

I’ll be posting in starts and stops today as we dig our way out of our house and towards the mounds where our cars were last spotted. Only a foot and a half, but we’re at the end of a wind tunnel and in the summer we get the entire street’s garbage in our yard and in the winter we get the drifts. Also, it’s our first big snow of the year and we’re out of practice. Also, I am old and in pain just looking at it. Also, someone please come plough us out.

As above. This should have been the first response, not what followed a strong attempt to quash criticism. Glad he did it though. (Thanks to Paul for the tip.)

“After further reflection about the issue of my proposed lecture at the University of Regina, scheduled for January 23, it is with great sadness that I have decided to withdraw from this presentation,” George Elliott Clarke said Friday morning in an email statement sent by his literary agent to Global News.

…

In Friday’s statement, Clarke said he “never intended to cause such anguish for the family of Pamela George and the Indigenous community.

I wanted to say

something clever

about ……………. this

but first I barfed

in my mouth a little

only to find

you there.

CBC News covered this debate back in 2018, while also making note of supporters of her and Instagram poetry in general; Kaur’s first book, Milk and Honey became a New York Times bestseller, selling over three million copies and translated into 35 languages, while numerous young poets cited her as the reason they started to write and publish at all.

At the same time, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that the amount of adults reading poetry grew by 76 per cent between 2012 and 2017, which the Washington Post partially linked to the popularity of poets like Kaur. 

Actually, that was gratuitous. I am fine with people reading and even loving Rupi Kaur. I just wish news outlets would stop reporting things like “the amount of adults reading poetry grew 76 per cent…” when what happened was the number of adults reading Rupi Kaur grew by 76 per cent. I had hoped her little doodles and accessible, bare bones style might encourage people to pick up other works by contemporary writers with merit, but I’m pretty sure they just picked up works by other Instagram poets. If you go into Chapters, the endcaps and half the poetry section (which is, let’s be honest, two shelves, max) is stuffed with books that would have failed a night school mail-in Intro to Poetry course.

That said, I remember back when the CBC started changing its programming to “attract a younger audience” I thought to myself: why? Just wait for the audience to grow into the CBC. Maybe we should apply that here. Let a generation enjoy their 10 lines of pseudo-poetic platitudes and hope a percentage of them grow into deeper work as they age and start to seek a way out of the shallow end of the pool. We’d still end up with significantly more readers from this generation than the last few. Food for thought?

The Fox News of print reports on 50 Shades of Grey being the dominant book of the decade. Not actually wrong, just the stupidity of the situation is in line with the stupidity of the paper, so I chose them as the landing page for the news.

“Fifty Shades of Grey” by British author E L James sold 15.2 million copies following its release in late 2011, grabbing the title of best-selling book of the past decade, according to NPD Bookscan, which tracks about 80 percent of the books sold in the US.

Even more astounding, the Nos. 2 and 3 best-sellers of the decade were the other two novels in the mommy porn trilogy: “Fifty Shades Darker” (10.4 million) and “Fifty Shades Freed” (9.3 million).

Actually, between this, the fan fic article, and what’s coming up, today’s theme seems to be the slow erosion of merit in literature. I wish someone would write a similarly stupid book aimed at stupid men called 50 Shades of Bay and have it riddled with gratuitous explosions like in Transformers.