The Olive Reader

Finally got a link for this — Steamy Book Gets Buzz From the Web

Thanks GalleyCat!

I offer this headline from Publishers Weekly without comment:

Bon Jovi to Headline BEA

Jane Smiley has a pretty interesting idea:

…I started thinking about a certain thing that is characteristic of the novel as a form, and that is that it is usually geographical in conception. It takes place in a specific spot. It portrays that spot. Quite often, the characters go on journeys from particular spots to other particular spots, and the reader’s interest is partly piqued by the specificity of that journey—how the character moves about, what he sees, what he finds at his destination, what he is leaving behind. I imagined a Google map of the world of the novel, and I wondered how grand and particular it would be, especially if it was simply a map of all novels rather than a map of great novels, or well-known novels, etc. So immediately I was in wiki territory, and this is what I propose, that we join in making a map of the world of the novel.

If it ever has an easy-to-absorb visual component, it will really be something. To find out more, and to contribute, go here.

The article is available online only to WSJ Online members (articles go for $4.95 a pop, so it might be worth it to just loiter at your local newstand), but keep an eye out for the headline “Steamy Book Gets Buzz From the Web.”

Plus Our editorial director, commonly known as DRE, is at this very moment filming a tv spot for the Average American Male. It will air tonight at 7:00pm on CNBC’s “On the Money.”

A fine site with the mission of “making reading fun again.” If reading ever stopped being fun I hadn’t noticed, I must have been busy reading. Snap.

Founded last year by the software engineer and entreprener, Otis Chandler, Goodreads.com is a community of reading friends who recommend and discuss books. As Otis says, he’d “rather turn to a friend rather than any random person, bestseller list, or algorithm” for a reading recommendation. Overall, the site is navigable and has a nice bookish feel to it. As for the quality of suggestions, well, Otis is currently reading My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. I’d read that.

The inaugural 23 books of the Caravan Project are now available, in their many formats, online and at participating bookstores. The project, though functional in an initial capacity, is more of an experiment than ready-made business model, but according to Peter Osnos, founder and editor-at-large at PublicAffairs

[T]he implications are great. The mission here is to take what’s happening in news, entertainment and movies and apply it to books so that we take a single entity — a book — and make it available a dozen ways and hope the consumer will come to it in a dozen way.

With the ability to print on demand and ship within 24 hours of an order’s placement, Osnos hopes “for publishers to sell more books by having more diverse formats, reduce the rate of returns and reduce the cost of manufacturing books in increments.”

We’ll be keeping an eye on this.

Today’s World Water Day (even more exciting than Pi day). You can help those in need just with a few sips. Follow the link and drink some.

The UN has some more info and if you want to join and event, definitely stop by here.

Sorry that things are so slow on the blog this week. Between sales conference and launch we’re totally swamped. YouTube has been doing some of the work for us…indeed.

Our authors get some exclusive treatment at Olsson’s Lansburgh/Penn Quarter store tonight in DC. CK is en route.

I once knew a store named Sundries. What an awful place of knick-knackerry, it was.

Bookwikis, a new genre of literary wikis (as of now), offers online readers a living source of information on their favorite books. Notable from the post linked to above are wikis for Thomas Pynchon, Finnegans Wake (this one’s awesome), and the works of Shakespeare.

And, to gossip, I hear there are some fantastically crude (yet honest) YouTube videos floating around that some book publisher had made (for a book!). I hear that if you go to this site and paste the words “average american male” you’ll…well, you’ll see. And you didn’t hear it from me.

An example of the online collaborative, ficlets.com brings writers together a few paragraphs at a time. A ficlet, you may be wondering, is “a short story that allows you to collaborate with the world.” It’s easy to contribute, fun to see.

Well, now that I’m writing this post for the second time (because Textpattern blows) I’ll have to work up some enthusiasm before I proceed — just give me a second — okay…there. I’m good.

Woo HOOOO! Today, 3/14 at 1:59pm the world shall unite in celebration of the trillion-digit, mind-numbing number PI! (Get it? 3.14159. Don’t tell me you don’t know the first six digits of Pi!) Maybe the whole world won’t be celebrating but some remarkable geeks will be:

[They] gather to talk about pi, rhapsodize about it, eat pi-themed foods (actual pie, sure, but so much more), have pi recitation contests and, just maybe, feel a little less sheepish about their unusual passion.

That day falls on Wednesday this year: March 14. Or 3.14. Obviously.

The question is why, of course. And if you ask the fans of pi why, a startling number of them will come back with the same question: “Why climb Mount Everest?” Because it’s there.

But then they start talking about some very simple ideas. Like the beauty of a number that seems to go on forever and yet has no discernible pattern to it. Or about the valor of the memorization gymnastics, challenging oneself always to know more.

This is how Akira Haraguchi, a 60-year-old mental health counselor in Japan, puts it: “What I am aiming at is not just memorizing figures. I am thrilled by seeking a story in pi.”

If that turns you on — and I bet it does, you nerd — than why not take the next step and consummate your passing interest by buying something! Huh? Wouldn’t that feel good?

The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy is a pretty commendable purchase as far as purchases go, so take a moment to browse inside and “exercise your options.” Make your Pi day one to remember.

I attended the NBCC awards ceremony last Thursday night at The New School, and my employer came away with two big winners — Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost took home the Autobiography prize, and Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings won the General Nonfiction category. Both winners made us proud with their books, of course, but also with exceptional acceptance speeches.

Earlier in the evening, John Leonard was presented with a lifetime achievement award, and the text of his remarks is well worth reading. Words on the screen don’t quite capture how charming and funny he was, but they convey his wisdom just fine.

This past Friday the Bookseller magazine revealed its finalists for the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. The six titles are:

How Green Were the Nazis?, edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (Ohio University Press), D. Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters), The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague (Harry N Abrams), Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, by Robert Chenciner by Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom), Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium, edited by Robert J Anderson, Juliet A Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan T Critchley (Kluwer) and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar (Clarendon Press).

Yeah, he’s Bill. I call him that. And it’s never a good thing when he leaves the bar before you do.

It started with his reading at B&N Chelsea. Full house, standing-room only and Bill delivered a superb reading. Although, I couldn’t hear the exact wording of questions, his answers were dead on. In response to a strange man, who just happened to pick up a copy of Copernicus and ended up leaving it there on a CD rack, asking why he writes what he writes, Bill said, “There’s so much reality out there. And I’m interested in it all.” An answer that’s obvious in his work. The profundity did not end there, however. It trailed behind thirty of us as we tramped over to Mc-who’s-it-whats on 19th and 7th.

Vollmann drinks Jameson, mostly. He drinks it well in and in quantity and put several of us to shame. I was lucky enough to stumble into a conversation between Bill, myself, and lovely woman who had been a fan of Bill’s for fifteen years. She was very lovely, let’s say, and Bill is a man appreciative of nature’s finer touches. The conversation moved breezily from crack to cocaine to ecstasy to pornography and, inevitably, to goats. They were moments that I will remember for a long time.

Some other stuff happened that I’m a little hazy on. An actress talked to us. She looked familiar but I couldn’t place her. She’ll be somewhere on 26th and 8th Saturday night, and so on, I have this information on a coaster at home. Bill eventually left. I think he may have been a little crestfallen when the lovely lady mentioned above went home. I called it not long after. And that was my night with Bill.