Step away from the bar, ladies

So SLJ is in trouble with some of its readers over their cover photo of some boozin' bloggers. Honestly, you never know what's going to bring in complaints--and Letters to the Editor are far more frequently objections than compliments. As Monica Edinger (first reprobate to the left) points out, you might expect objections to the Sex and the City cast of the cast (all good-lookin' white girls) but who expected this? And too often, when you want to start a discussion--as I did with the Nikki Grimes article about black people and the Caldecott Medal--you get zip.

But here is one of the treasures from our archive, ripped from a subscriber's magazine, label carefully removed (coward), and mailed to me in an anonymous envelope:

Too damned long

I see that PW has followed up on Betsy Bird's thoughts on the Amazon Vine program; their speculation that membership in Vine might be a perk for good customers is intriguing if not substantiated. What seems oddest to me is that this program--for which publishers and other producers pay for the privilege of having their products evaluated--is being criticized for eliciting cluelessly negative reviews, which does not seem to serve the purposes of either publishers or Amazon. It's not like the books don't otherwise get customer reviews, but perhaps the Vine reviews post early enough so that any early buzz they provide outweighs what they actually say?

Vine reviews, customer reviews, and, sorry, blog reviews--they are all too damned long. That's the problem I have with 'em. Just because the technology allows one to prattle on forever should by no means encourage one to do so. The one Amazon review I remember appreciating was a negative review of a recording I adore, Adam Guettel's musical Floyd Collins. It read, in its entirety, "Too much yodeling."

Hot air didn't stop the Nazis, either.

From a San Francisco bookstore forum, reported in Shelf Awareness:

The idea for the panel, said co-owner Margie Scott Tucker, came from a statement made by Alan Kaufman, novelist, memoirist, influential in the Spoken Word movement and editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature: "When I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit." Kaufman moderated the panel, called the "Great Internet Book Burning Panel." (No books e or otherwise were actually burned despite the catchy title.)

Other panelist included beat generation icon Herbert Gold, San Francisco Noir author Peter Plate, Ethan Watters, author of several books including Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family? and Cleis Press's Brenda Knight, a participant in the Google case.

Kaufman began by reading an essay soon to be published in Barney Rossett's Evergreen Review, which is now an online-only publication, he noted. "The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now der Book," he read. "High-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle."

Even speaking as someone whose Kindle gathers dust and who views shopping at Amazon.com as an unpleasant act of last resort, get the fuck over yourself.

It's Not How Long You Make It, Is It?

A tangential question that came up when we were discussing digital review copies made me pull out my calculator. How much longer are books getting?

I compared fiction for ages 12 and up reviewed in the Magazine in the September issues of 2009, 1999, 1989 and 1979 (October issue; we were on a different schedule then).

Average number of pages in books for teens reviewed in 1979: 151
1989: 157
1999: 233
2009: 337

Now, part of this is the current preponderance of fantasy, which has always tended to run longer--the longest book reviewed in the '79 issue was Robert Westall's (fabulous) Devil on the Road, at 245pp. But when I took fantasy and sf out of the 2009 sample, I still came up with 280 pp. average for realistic YA fiction, almost twice as long as it was thirty years ago.

The success of Harry Potter must take some of the heat for this; another factor could be that YA has gotten older: there is much more published for older high school students than there was even ten years ago. Plus, realistic YA seems more character-driven than it used to be in the old problem novel days, and while this has given the genre undeniable depths, it may also have encouraged a certain amount of yammering on. And people are also blaming the nexus of word-processing, larger lists, and smaller editorial staffs combining to mean less pruning. What else? I suppose we have to consider the possibility that the current crop of Horn Book editors and reviewers likes longer books, but surely you know us better than that.

When writers attack!

I wonder what you call the Twitter equivalent to drunk dialing?

And if you're going to whine about how you used to be reviewed (and how that must hurt) by Anne Tyler, it might be politic to spell her name right.

[Update 11:45 AM. It looks like Alice Hoffman wisely thought to retreat from the field and suspended or cancelled her account. But for those who missed it, Hoffman had taken issue, via several Twitter messages, with a review by Roberta Silman of her latest book in the Boston Globe. Along with publishing the reviewer's phone number and encouraging readers to call and give her hell, Hoffman complained, "Now any idiot can be a critic. Writers used to review writers. My second novel was reviewed by Ann Tyler. So who is Roberta Silman?"]

Somebody really didn't think this through.

The name of Toni and Slade Morrison's forthcoming picture book from Wiseman/Simon & Schuster is Peeny-Butter Fudge. I can't be the only adult who has the sense of humor of a nine-year-old.

Amazoning Out

JasonB's post at Galleycat about Thomas Nelson's new program of supplying free books to bloggers on the condition that they review the book and copy said review to an online vendor such as Amazon.com brings up lots of questions, and don't miss the link to the Guardian's essay on the subject, which includes an entertaining, increasingly hostile debate in the comments section.

My own question is about Amazon review overload. It looks to me like customer reviews at Amazon have become an increasingly insidery sport, fun for the reviewers themselves but too overwhelming, in numbers and attitude, for someone wanting to buy a book. There are some excellent reviewers there (hi, Fuse!) but also a lot of amateurism--in the pejorative sense--involving competition among the reviewers themselves to one-up each other. I wonder if and when Amazon will decide that this doesn't help them sell books. Or does it?

James Joyce wins BGHB?

You know, I was there and it was nothing like this.

[Update--the link was to a German blog titled "Boston Globe Horn Book Awards" filled with English words and sentences strung together in a way that occasionally made sense but more often were simply madly stream-of-consciousness insanity. Apparently now it takes you to another site. This is the kind of spamming I don't understand. I mean, the gold-farm people want your money but this didn't have anything like that.]

From the people who brought you . . .

As Peter observed in another context last Sunday, so many people have Ursula Nordstrom spinning in her grave that it must be like a blender in there. This won't help.

I Blame America

For yet another made-up memoir. As a culture we've become convinced that only real stories are true stories, or do I have that the wrong way around?

Tangentially, does anyone else think it's hilarious that the book tour for an addiction memoir is sponsored by Starbucks?

Fantasy-astic

Gregory Maguire and Susan Cooper, photo by Richard Asch


While the rest of you were chowing down on thousand-dollar-a-plate surf-n-turf at the National Book Awards (unless you were too busy fondling--oh ICK I can't even say it) I was scarfing cookies graciously provided by Candlewick Press and Simon & Schuster as refreshment for our evening of talk about fantasy, the reading and writing of it, with Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire. The house was full (guarding the door, Cambridge P.L.'s Julie Roach told me she heard all manner of subterfuges--"my friend has my ticket"-- and brooked none) and the conversation lively. Greg is naturally loquacious and Susan more reserved, so my job as moderator kept me on my toes. MIT will be posting a video of the event on their MITWorld site and I'll let you know when that's up; in the meantime you can still catch Susan Cooper tonight, free, at 7:30 PM at the First Church in Harvard Square.

But I bet he loved Clueless

from the Globe and Mail review of The Seeker: "Whether you fully embrace the Harry Potter phenomenon or simply live with it, there's no question that J. K. Rowling is an imaginative story-spinner. The trouble is that she has ruined the field for the legions of the second-rate."

Update: here's a link to the Maclean's blog post on the movie that commenter Clare references. It's really good.

He Knows When You're Asleep at the Wheel, Too

Yep, it's 96 degrees out there but we've started pulling together our "Holiday Books" review section for the November issue. We will have some good books to tell you about there, I promise, but meanwhile I thought I would mention three concepts that might need to go back to Santa's workshop for some retooling:

--celebrating Hanukkah with a dreidel piñata

--giving the crippled kid magical legs while the rest of the family gets real presents

--a Santa who can't stop farting

The elves are waiting for your call.