It seems like the biggest news this week is the publication of Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer’s conclusion to the Twilight saga. I haven’t read any of the books, and don’t know anyone who has (with the exception of my department head’s 14-year-old daughter), but it got me thinking about books or series with this huge level of hype, where people often openly scorn you if you haven’t read them. My own personal example of this would be Harry Potter. When the last book was released, several of my co-workers just couldn’t accept that not only had I not read any of the books, but I had no desire to. Zero. And I was not ashamed.
Of course, Harry Potter and Twilight are hugely hyped books, but the hype can get out of control for any book if everyone around you is into it. I can imagine how someone who had no interest in Dandy in the Underworld would have felt when everyone at Harper Perennial (me included) went nuts for it. Then again, how could you not find this guy to be completely and utterly charming and intriguing? (bonus, that’s CK’s voice in the video).
(And PS, I’m intrigued enough that I probably will read Twilight. Another, non Harper Perennial related part of my job involves a lot of vampire books, and I’m curious. But I’m still no-Harry-Potter-4-life.)
I’m not a big fan of memoirs. There are exceptions, of course, but I find that I often end up wishing the writer had just sucked it up and stopped whining. Or I end up bored. Drug memoirs are probably my least favorite. Everyone knows stories about being high are only funny to other people who are high, and often they have a self-congratulatory tone (I did xx drugs and I’m still here! Using drugs was so hard, but I survived!) that appalls me. I think I will make an exception, however, for The Night of the Gun, David Carr’s new memoir of his life of drug addiction. I first heard about it a few weeks ago but just read an article about his unusual (or maybe not, if you read the comments) reporting method. Assuming that his drug-addled memories were unreliable, Carr approached the story of his life as a reporter, seeking out sources to verify facts.
It’s an interesting tactic, and one that may prevent some backlash (and get him a whole lot of publicity), but I do wonder if there are events in the book that could not be confirmed, times when recollections did not collide. Our own Ecco/Perennial author Rachel Sontag, whose House Rules details her life in her father’s terrifying grasp, had to deal with her parents’ angry reactions (and even angrier Amazon reviews) when her book was published, and I’m curious to see if there is anything that could engender a similar experience for Carr.
Oh, and even though I’m not a memoir-lover, here are a few that more than pass muster with me:
Wasted: Marya Hornbacher has a new memoir, about her struggles with manic depression, out now, but this classic is about her struggles with eating disorders. Brave, brilliant, uncensored and unhinged.
Jubilee City: reminded me of The Basketball Diaries, another favorite.
The Tender Land: Not just a favorite memoir, but one of my favorite books of all time, it details the suicide of the author’s 15-year-old brother and its aftermath for her Irish-Catholic family. It’s notable in my reading history for the fact that it took me way longer than usual to read the last 50 pages, because I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t breathe.
It’s that time of year again — the time when thirteen writers of the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth raise their hopes to new heights in vying for the coveted Man Booker Prize for fiction. Bookie Darling Salman Rushdie, with three of these babies already under his belt, is among the contenders, and apparently, word in the back room has it that he’s a prime contender for the prize. Interestingly, the BBC ran a handy chart of the odds each book has of winning, which I hope had something to do with strapping each novel to a horse at the Belmont Stakes earlier this summer. Below, the longlist, which includes five first novels, two prior winners, and a load of books that share common ties in their largess of scope and the fact that they’re all funny in one way or another. Write on, writers, but remember: THERECAN BE ONLYONE.
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
From A to X by John Berger
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
With the announcement yesterday that Raj Bhavsar, my favorite male gymnast, has been promoted from alternate to full member of the men’s Olympic gymnastics team, I thought it would be a good time to post about some books that might help Olympics nuts like me get excited:
Chalked Up: the story of Jennifer Sey, a U.S national gymnastics champion in the 80s, and how the crazy world of gymnastics almost destroyed her. I read this book a few months ago but was reminded of it as I watched the women’s Olympic trials recently. I don’t know that at 16 or 18 or 20 I would have had the dedication that most of these girls have to practice and to work through injury (for better or for worse, as Jennifer’s book shows).
Oracle Bones: In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said that “Everyone in the Western world should read this book.” As we get closer to the Olympics and protests increase, I feel more and more like I don’t know enough about China. Oracle Bones, along with Peter Hessler’s other book, River Town goes beyond what you read in newspapers to explore and observe a China that westerners don’t often get to see.
Berlin Games: And speaking of politics and the Olympics, the 1936 games were more than just sporting events (though, is the Olympics ever just about sports?).
I know where I’ll be in 9 days, 21 hours, and 24 minutes (approximately). Read those books and then check out when your favorite sport will be airing.
In further news from the “I can’t believe that person’s writing a book” department, Dustin Diamond, a.k.a. Samuel “Screech” Powers, has just signed up to write a behind the scenes tell-all about his years on Saved by the Bell. According to New York‘s website, the book will detail “sexual escapades among cast members, drug use, and hardcore partying.”
I want my SBTB gossip, and if you saw Diamond on Celebrity Fit Club, you know he is not the sweet nerd most of us grew up with and is probably ready to reveal more than any of us wanted to know about Kelly and Zack’s offscreen peccadilloes. To paraphrase Jessie Spano in that immortal episode about the caffeine pills, “I’m so excited, I’m so excited, I’m so . . . so . . . scared!”
You may have noticed that a number of new initials are now appearing beneath post titles. I am absolutely ecstatic to introduce the strongest, largest, fastest group of contributors ever to grace the browser of The Olive Reader. In addition to the normal fare provided by CK and MS, we now present the mellifluous finger-tappings of EB, JC, CS, BH, and MC. To humanize those letters, I’ve finally updated the photos on our About page, so go get an eye full, expect new and regularly appearing features, and make sure to come back soon!
LOVED this article in the Telegraph about great unread books. At the Ways with Words Festival, which the newspaper sponsors, they asked writers what classic books they are ashamed to not have read. There’s a video of several very proper-sounding British authors confessing their deepest shames; one guy even wrote an entire thesis on Wuthering Heights without ever having read it!
If you ask my boyfriend, my greatest flaw is never having read Art Spiegelman’s Maus, but I’m not sure what I’d say. Maybe Lolita? Commenters on the article are chiming in with their answers; the most shameful wins a prize. I’m just shocked (shocked!) at how many people have admitted they’ve never read any Shakespeare. Greatness aside, how did they manage to make it out of high school without it being forced upon them?
Knowing all that goes into the final design of a book cover (pleasing the author and agent, not to mention everyone here at Harper Perennial, can be an exhausting job for our amazing cover designers), this has become one of my favorite sites. It’s run by a graphic design firm, and every couple of days a new book cover is featured. Commenters (most of whom seem to be designers themselves) can then weigh in. I don’t claim to have any great design sensibility, so it’s always interesting to see where my opinions intersect with those of trained professionals. A cover can sell or sink a book, and this site has some insight into why.
They’ve covered some great Harper Perennial covers, of course: The Seven Days of Peter Crumb, The Gulag Archipelago, and The Dead Beat (a book about the somewhat wild world of obituary writing that I read recently and loved; any fan of Stiff or Spook would too), as well as many more.
Consumerist.com has posted a list of “7 ways your public library can help you during a bad economy“. Sure, things like free kids activities and cheap movie rentals make sense, but with temps in New York lingering in the 90s, and my window A/C unit working like a traffic cop on street cleaning day, I’d like to add an 8th suggestion: go for the free air conditioning.
In case you missed your Daily Variety today, The Dark Knight set a new weekend box office record, bringing in $155.3 million. I contributed $10 to that pot, and I’m not at all sorry I did. Our esteemed author and legendary graphic novelist Warren Ellis is a man who thinks outside the box when it comes to superheros and their methods of criminal reform. Check out his unique (errrr, sadistic?) crime fighting plan for Gotham City here, and if you’re eager to see what his depraved mind can do when unleashed in novel form, check out the paperback of Crooked Little Vein on sale July 22.
Before our main man Neil Strauss became a star in his own right, he helped some guys known as Mötley Crüe put pen to paper and write their no-hold-barred memoir, The Dirt. The result was a shocking account of back stage hijinks that would make Madonna’s bikini waxer blush. Now a few years later, the boys of Mötley Crüe have released a new album, Saints of Los Angeles, that’s inspired by their hair-raising memoir. We couldn’t let this moment pass uncelebrated, so we’re giving away a Crüe Fest Mick Mars Fender guitar, some books, and some CDs on our website. Read the book, listen to the new tracks, enter the sweepstakes, but don’t come crying to us that your life seems like a tremendous bore after seeing what real rock stars get into when they’re looking for trouble.
Ross Raisin (he’s the guy on the right in this photo; the other guy is Willy Vlautin, and the two of them are signing books at last week’s event at Word in this photo) was just longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers, which carries with it a $115,000 award. Way to go Ross! Go here to listen to him talk about his debut novel, Out Backward.
Argh! One of the downsides of publishing is that we’re always working far, far ahead. Right now I’m working on the copy for our summer 2009 catalog (yes, that would be a full year from now) and getting super excited about an upcoming author. Reading just the first page of one of her short stories completely took my breath away; the writing was so beautiful, so wise, so honest. Googling her turned up this piece about her wedding in the New York Times that also moved me. Remember this name: Lydia Peelle. She’s won an O.Henry, two Pushcart Prizes, and been featured in Best New American Voices (twice), and come summer 2009 she’s going to be big.
We hear that Meri Weiss’s debut novel is now published, Closer to Fine. Our friend, Roger Rosenblatt says “[she] writes beautifully of love and death in a family, which, in her careful hands, becomes everyone’s family.”
On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Brad Meltzer gave a rousing recommendation of Replay by Ken Grimwood. This title is a bit deep on our backlist (now, of course, reprinted) and the author, sadly, died in 2003, but there’s something fitting about new life being gifted to a novel about gifting new life. Read more at Omnivoracious.
SEED Magazine, one of our favorite science publications (and it’s so much more than that), is calling for entries to their SEED 2008 Science Writing Contest. For rules and other information follow the links!
Bookmark
In case you missed your Daily Variety today, The Dark Knight set a new weekend box office record, bringing in $155.3 million. I contributed $10 to that pot, and I’m not at all sorry I did. Our esteemed author and legendary graphic novelist Warren Ellis is a man who thinks outside the box when it comes to superheros and their methods of criminal reform. Check out his unique (errrr, sadistic?) crime fighting plan for Gotham City 
Before our main man 
Ross Raisin (he’s the guy on the right in this photo; the other guy is Willy Vlautin, and the two of them are signing books at last week’s event at Word in this photo) was just longlisted for the 
