Bookninja

It’s Ms. Ninja’s birthday today, and in our house that marks not only a chance to celebrate a brilliant writer, mom, and partner, but the day we officially starting drinking a 3pm eggnog with Screech in it. So much giving.

• Mark Truscott wins inaugural Nelson Ball Poetry Prize;
• Allison Flood looks at how the indies thrived and survived 2020;
• Memories of Expos Past, a requiem in photos;
• How many people work in our industries? Some numbers;
• What’s André Alexis been up to?;
• On Eliot and revolutionaries;
• Grove Atlantic works to stave off unions with entry pay increase;
• Once Atwood joined Masterclass, I feel like it was open season… enter Rushie;
• The Master Stephen King ranks adaptations of his work;
• The most borrowed books at the TPL in 2020? Not a lot of Canucks;
• On becoming pen pals with Harper Lee;
• Letters between Simone du Beauvoir and Violette Leduc sell at auction for a pretty penny;
• Diversity within the Latinx poetry community, incl Ninja pal Eduardo Corral;
• NK Jemisin (nailed it!) on quitting “normal” life for writing;
• Moon Unit to publisher memoir;
• Publisher cancels Islamophobe’s book deal, bye byeeee, bigots;

I spent all of yesterday working on a poem a forgot (!) to post until later in the evening. It was worth it though. A tough little humdinger I’d been picking at for years finally came together. Anyway, any news of the day was eclipsed by the death of John le Carré, so I’ll try to catch up now.

• LPG’s indie press campaign launches;
• Canada Reads Prose is coming again, inevitable, like Thanos;
• CIBA blames Amazon for PRH/S&S merger;
• Hey! There might be more than one reason to divest yourself of JK Rowling books;
• Jay-Z is in a publishing empire state of mind;
• A year-end retrospective of the clusterfuck that was 2020 in books;
• Back in 2016, PW did a visual retrospective of ke Carré’s remarkable career;
• And the Guardian covers remembrances of him from friends and colleagues;
• What are you doing this NYE? Listening to a Japanese novelist? Go easy there, rockstar;
• Sunday Times names its young writer of the year;
• ‘Ninja pal Zoe Whittall ruminates on making art in the pandemic;
• CrimeReads looks at the lost art of “the cast of characters” in mystery novels;
• LitHub looks at the glory days of the American trade paperback;
• Was Tattered Cover the right choice for Black Bookstore of the Year?;
• New York Magazine recommends Scrivener to get that novel done… This is what Ms. Ninja uses, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe my two languishing novels in Word need a boost…;
• Cyberpunk: a primer for the uninitiated who haven’t been devouring it since the late 70s;

Beloved espionage writer, dead at 89. A giant has fallen. There’s not much more to say than that.

Ur-blogger and upstart publisher Dennis Johnson writes in The Atlantic about his experience testifying before the Department of Justice about big publisher mergers. This guy is a badass and I love him. Everyone should buy some Melville House books just to say thanks. Also, he’s wicked funny in person and his blog MobyLives (which I spent many years as an unofficial proofreader for before starting my own blog), was a foundation of the “industry”, such as it is, and is much missed.

As the big houses have become bigger and bigger, their business has become more about making money than art or protest, so that small publishers now provide a far wider variety of literature, politics, history, and journalism, of art making and truth-to-power-speaking, of actual risk taking—and from a far more diverse group of authors —than the commercial conglomerate publishers. And the bigger the big publishers get, I told the DOJ attorneys, the more risk-averse they become. The less willing they are to lose money. Audiences need to be expanded, not necessarily diversified. And then the safer, less boat-rocking, bigger-demographic-satisfying stuff they publish becomes what the marketplace they dominate adapts itself to sell. The risk aversion becomes systemic.

The attorneys didn’t disagree. And when the interview was over, I felt a huge sense of relief. They got it, I thought. They definitely got it.

The merger, of course, was approved shortly thereafter.

Thus a publishing behemoth was born, a behemoth that now, a mere seven years later, is once again taking over a leading competitor, Simon & Schuster. PRH has purchased S&S for $2.2 billion, or twice the asking price—a fee none of the other big publishers could match. News Corp, the owner of HarperCollins, blasted PRH for “buying market dominance.”

This is exactly right. Just seven years ago, the industry had six dominant giants. Now three of them have merged together. The other giants, let alone the numerous independent players, are not just smaller; they’re smaller by billions of dollars. I said it in 2012, and I’ll say it again now: The DOJ needs to stop the consolidation.

This woman spends some thought on Time’s Best Fantasy Books of All Time list, checking off books she’s read, and finds herself arguing with many of the choices made by the team that compiled it. Of course. I realize there’s a movement out there to do away with terms like “Best”, but once you realize that any such choice is just an opinion expressed for the purposes of arguing, you should be fine. Same with awards. It’s just that-particular-jury’s choice, not the actual best. And even history doesn’t always get it right, as we see with the article linked in the post below about Gertrude Trelevyan. It’s just a bunch of factors of chance and opinion that decide. But it’s always good to challenge the gatekeepers, so givver, lady.

But even as I totted up my “wins” (A Wrinkle in Time, Dragonflight, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Crystal Cave, Watership Down—check, check, check, check, check) and argued (where the heck is Charlotte’s Web?) and wondered (was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left out due to the racism underlying the characterization of the Oompa-Loompas?), I was heartened by the prominence of children’s books on the list—it’s a rarity for children’s books to appear in such numbers, if at all, in any general list of great literature.

Well, here we are. Another milestone. One of my buddies is retiring today, which both pleases and shocks me. Pleases me because I am happy that he gets to do something with his time other than Dilbert his life away in a cubicle and shocked because: YOU CAN DO THAT? Yes, sir. If you spend 30 years in the same job, you can do that. Sadly, I am only five years behind him and I will never be able to retire. The artist’s/freelancer’s life. Work until you die. That said, I will spend two hours after this playing a video game that I’ve been waiting two years to play before I move on to editing poetry. Choices were made.

• Canadian publishing hit hard in the nads: publishers report 40% losses;
• Random and Knopf parting ways after 11 years (sounds like a midlife crisis);
• Smart move, Giller: new monthly bookclub featuring longlist;
• Obama is the Wayne Gretzky of politics… just keeps breaking records;
• Kellyanne Conway is releasing a book… 10 bucks says it’s either just blank pages the president can write whatever he wants on or there’s one of those wee electronic gadgets in the gutter so that when you open it, you hear her voice yelling FAKE NEWS over and over and over;
• Books of the Year:
  • People;
  • Vanity Fair;
  • LAT;
  • ElectricLit;
  • Slate;
• Yeats’ teenaged letters sold at Sotheby’s… imagine… (I shudder);
• Nora Roberts: sex ed instructor;
• Friday fun: GK Chesterton proudly believed in Santa Claus;
• Heard of Gertrude Trevelyan? You would had she been a he;
• Why do we call radicalized authors “raw”? And why we should stop;

• Best Canadian poetry of the year? Yes please! Glad to see some favs here!;
• Remember yesterday when Roald Dahl’s family apologized for him being an anti-Semite? Well, turns out the comments in question were delivered directly into Michael Coren’s face;
• Someone should give Bob Woodward a medal… just for work ethic, if nothing else;
• Type Books in TO continues to slay the window display category;
• PSA: The “Netfilx of books” is NOT the Neflix of books;
• Why is everything are comics moving to Kickstarter?;
• Book challenge: read the #1 books from the year you were born (The Exorcist? Egad);
• PEN gala getting to be like the Oscars;
• Hans Christian Andersen shortlists;
• What’s your opinion of Martin Amis? I doubt that will change very much, but it’s pretty easy to see which side this guy is on;
• Whatever gets you through: this woman started writing porn to get her through the pandemic unemployment skid… Maybe I should… Nah… for me the erotic is slowly changing to a recliner by the fire… mmmmm…..;

We have a rule in this house, which was a great way to get kids reading in a media-saturated world: you can’t see the movie until you’ve read the book. We broke this rule for the last three Rowling books because they were bloated and unreadable, and we also broke it for (GASP) Lord of the Rings because I didn’t know how to hint to them that they could just skip the three-page descriptions of the weather and geological formations and come back to them later when they were older. But I digress. Is this just snobbery? Just intellectual super-posturing? I’d still argue no, mostly, but a few good examples are below.

Perhaps there is another factor at play here. When we say the book is better, we’re announcing that we read, we’re cultured, we feed our brains something loftier than big, colourful moving images. This is rooted in the stubborn snobbism that film is the weak sibling of the arts. “Over the years, I’ve grown used to seeing the cinema dismissed as an artform,” wrote Martin Scorsese in 2017. “It’s tainted by commercial considerations … there are too many people involved in its creation … it ‘leaves nothing to the imagination’.”

Nobody has ever said the book is better than the play. We’d be terrified of someone countering that we’ve just misunderstood Sir Trevor Nunn’s mise-en-scène. The best a film adaptation can hope for is that it’s deemed better than the rollercoaster, like Pirates of the Caribbean.

Actually, when you line them up, the film often leaves the book for dust. Would you rather slog through Peter Benchley’s Jaws (in which, boringly, the shark slowly succumbs to its wounds)? Or choose Mario Puzo’s The Godfather over Brando’s hamster-pouching charisma? Has any child ever laughed harder at Beatrix Potter’s finger-wagging tales than when James Corden’s Peter Rabbit pumped Mr McGregor with 10,000 volts?

• Marvel collaborates with Indigenous artists for Voices series;
• Bad Sex in Fiction award cancelled this year to spare us more 2020;
• Nostalgia for reading destinations of the uninfected past;
• …And don’t get in Nora Roberts’ face if you don’t want your bodice ripped;
• Was Eliot as much of a dick as his first wife? Job to say… (I always used to assume all ye-olde-time privileged literary guys were dicks, but I’ve since learned better… They don’t have be from the past);
• Possibly related: why’s it so difficult to believe women can crack in crisis?;
• Do you like creeping about in dead writers’ houses?;
• Uht oh… Charity trying to buy Tolkien’s house linked to Morgoth somehow;
• First book prize goes to Raven Leilani;
• Gap between academic and trade publishing graduates to “chasm”;
• I love how every time I mention human smegma-smear Jordan Peterson, my comments and emails immediately fill up (like they’re hanging over the keyboard salivating for any negative mention of his name) with indignant fedora-wearing incels just want to be told what to do and think by their conman Daddy (and who call me “sir” with arch disdain), but here’s a decent core argument FOR publishing him: it’s easier to prove him wrong once it’s out there;
• Walrus gets some Canadian writers to pick their favourite books of 2020;

Say it ain’t so! Sue Carter, the driving force behind Canada’s super-important books trade magazine is leaving her post to take a spot at Inuit Art Quarterly. I have no idea what precipitated the move (besides getting to look at all that gorgeous art), but I hope she’s happy there. I know the rest of the books world will be lesser for her decision though. All the best, Sue Carter!

Sue joined Q&Q almost 10 years ago and in that time she has left an indelible mark on the magazine. She brought a clear story sense, sharp writing, and deft editing to her work as well as an ability to juggle the dozens of details necessary to keep a magazine running smoothly.

During her tenure, she led a redesign of both the magazine and quillandquire.com, introducing such popular additions as Book Making and the Agony Editor column.