Off till next week

Thank you all for the great discussion about adults and children reading. Richard and I are going to New York today to see Elizabeth and other assorted friends and two shows: the revival of Sunday in the Park with George, which was the first show I ever saw on Broadway, and Come Back, Little Sheba starring my favorite cop, Lieutenant Anita Van Buren.

For the Limoliner trip down and back I have the new Denise Mina, Natsuo Kirino's Grotesque, and, on Miss Pod, Ha Jin's A Free Life. Should be a sweet ride.

Going down a dark hall

I'd like to second Elizabeth's hopes (see comments in Monday's post) for a Gothic revival. I've just finished listening to Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier, narrated by Tony Britton. When I told friends I was reading it, to a woman they started talking about their adolescent (around 10 up, I think) mania for Du Maurier. I vividly remember reading her short-story collection Kiss Me Again, Stranger (could be a Mary Downing Hahn title) and then the collection Don't Look Now, with the title story providing the story for an astoundingly sexual movie in 1967. Then Rebecca, in college, and that's all.

I can see how Jamaica Inn could be kind of pulse-pounding for a young teen: there's the exciting melodrama involving the drunken, dangerous uncle (the heroine, Mary Yellan, thinks he's a smuggler, but it's worse) and then there's Mary's rather anachronistically saucy badinage with the brooding love interest, and lots of semi-veiled musings on "instinct," which Mary keeps trying to tell herself is "love" but Du Maurier, semi-misogynistically, won't let her. The atmosphere and scene-painting are as good as Rebecca--it's the same landscape (Cornwall) a century earlier.

Is Du Maurier still doing things for teens?

Excuse My Dust

A Horn Book interview with Philip Pullman is forthcoming on our website later this week; Philip and I spent a few minutes on Friday discussing the upcoming Golden Compass movie and the peculiar Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, whose job I totally want: the man makes more than 300,000 smackers a year interviewing himself for press releases.

In preparation for the interview I reread The Golden Compass, something I hadn't done since reviewing it for BCCB way back when. In all the subsequent debate re the trilogy's weighty themes and dizzying ideas, I had forgotten just how action-packed this book was, complete with cliff-hanging chapter endings. It has completely propelled me into The Subtle Knife, which I'm re-reading via audiobook, an excellently addictive production (despite some cheesy musical interludes) narrated by Pullman himself with full-cast dialogue seamlessly worked in.

Now is this work-reading or pleasure-reading? Virginia Heffernan wonders why we draw a distinction.

Walking and chewing gum at the same time

This story about headphones, etc. being banned from running races makes me think about our various discussions re audiobooks. I wonder why I'm capable of reading a printed book as a discrete activity, but listening to one requires me to either be in motion or playing solitaire or some low-level computer game. I can't just sit and listen. Are there any neuro-psych types out there who might be able to explain?

I understand the safety aspect of banning headphones from races but the "purity" aspect of it--that real runners are soooo tuned into their bodies and higher power and all--makes me laugh about how similar it is to readers who turn their nose up at book listeners.

I thought we were over this

But apparently not. Where I think listening to instead of reading a book-club selection might get you in trouble would be if another member challenged you to point out textual evidence for whatever point you were making. When the book under discussion is He's Just Not That Into You, however, maybe that problem doesn't come up.

Jon Scieszka discusses his wife's book club in the September Horn Book, saying that more often than not the book is peripheral to the discussion, which centers more on what's going on in the members' lives. What we used to call a kaffeeklatsch. And that's why guys tend to not like them. We tried one once at the Horn Book--the book was Sapphire's Push--and it was not very successful. I blame the book, though.

Tell Us What to Do

After enduring my second round with the dentist with an audiobook about a serial killer who removed his (or her, I haven't managed to finish it yet) victims' teeth, I decided for my third date with Dr. Guen to try some chicklit (chiclets, heh) again and began listening to Sally Koslow's Little Pink Slips, the roman a clef about Rosie O'Donnell's takeover of McCalls. I'm enjoying it enormously: the writing is several cuts above Sophie Kinsella's, and leagues from Plum Sykes or the Prada and Nanny girls. When the book begins, our heroine, the editor in chief, who is soon to be usurped (or something, I'm only an hour in) by the Rosie character, has just come up with a radical re-visioning of her magazine (helped by a hunky but as-yet sexually ambiguous designer) only to be outfoxed by her "frenemy," the publisher character, who has come up with her own plan to brand the magazine with the Rosie character's imprimatur.

The book's discussions' about the future of the fictitious Lady magazine made me think: What could the Horn Book Magazine do better, or more of, or more interestingly? I always have this question running around in my mind (this is not necessarily a sign of dedication; it stems as much from my default anxiety as anything else) and I've come up with plenty of ideas that usually involve money we don't have. Like becoming a monthly, or printing in color, for example. Some ideas don't cost anything, but they do collide with Tradition: changing the logo, say, or making the magazine a standard size (which would actually save money).

And while book reviews remain the number one reason people subscribe to us, more and more of our readers access them electronically, either through our own hornbookguide.com or via our licenses to the various wholesalers who sell books to schools and libraries, who provide their customers with ancillary databases of reviews and bibliographic information. So I think print book reviews, ours and everyone else's, will become less and less important to the school-and-library audience that is our mainstay.

So what should the Horn Book--the print Horn Book--do? My enthusiasm for The Invention of Hugo Cabret in great part stems from how it's so necessarily a book. It needs ink on paper to do what it does; it needs to have page-turns to convey the story. There's plenty that the Horn Book, Inc. can and does do electronically to "blow the horn for fine books for boys and girls," (our sturdy mission statement since the 1920s) but what will keep our print-self necessary? What can we do with the Magazine we can't do online? Who can we reach, and what would they want us to tell them? Yes, they pay me to answer these questions but they pay me to ask them, too. So, I'm asking.

God bless audiobooks

I spent two hours this afternoon undergoing a root canal with only novocaine as my friend. And an audiobook, Sophie Kinsella's Confessions of a Shopoholic, really very dopey but just the thing for the circumstances. I had wondered if I would be able to concentrate enough amidst the drilling and tugging and ER-like passing of pointy instruments between the dentist and his assistant, but it was eerily easy: what was actually going on in my life during that time so was so completely alienating and out of my hands that I escaped quite thoroughly into the story. You should try it.

I'm not sure just how it's supposed to work, exactly,

but we just received an audiobook edition of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, read by Jeff Woodman. Although the recording makes an attempt to convey the book's lengthy visual sequences via the substitution of sound effects (lots of footsteps!) I'm not quite sure this works for so resolutely bookish a book, one where pictures and text take turns rather than acting in concert. A separate DVD featuring many of the illustrations is also included, though, so perhaps listeners can follow the story with some time with the pictures, and put together the puzzle of Hugo for themselves.