Readerville Weblog

Readerville 2000-2009, Thanks for the Memories

2009-06-06T04:10:58-08:00

by Karen Templer |

Every year when June rolls around, I try to find some way to mark the anniversary of the official launch of Readerville. I’m sorry to announce that this year, instead, I’m suspending operations. That is, with one notable exception: Note:books lives on, under a new name and new management.

It’s been an exceptional nine years. In June of 2000, the web was a very different place than it is today. Online resources for readers were comparatively few but pretty terrific, and Readerville was proud to be among them. Back then, if you told someone you talked to people on the Internet, they still looked at you funny, and most in the book industry couldn’t really grasp the idea of readers handselling books to each other in forums such as ours. These days, I’m thrilled at the vast assortment of tools for people to connect online—from blogs to Facebook and Twitter, to the many social book cataloging sites, and beyond. Readers have resources nobody could have imagined nine years ago, and it’s a joy to see books being talked about in every corner of the Internet. I like to think Readerville helped set the stage for that in some small way.

To the people who’ve made up the Readerville community over the years, I want to say that I am eternally grateful for your enthusiasm, your humor, your knowledge, your generous recommendations, and your friendship. I had no idea when I launched Readerville that it would mean so much to so many people, including me. It’s been an honor.

To all of the authors who’ve participated in Readerville Events over the years, thank you for lending so much to the experience this has been. Thanks especially to Elizabeth Strout for (unknowingly) being a magnificent and generous last guest.

And to my regular contributors—co-bloggers Gayla Bassham and Lisa Peet, 8-year partner in Most Coveted Covers (among countless other things) DG Strong, the inestimable new-release hound Kat Warren, and events coordinator Leah Kenworthy—as well as Ben, Daniel, Pat, Katherine, Marge, Howard, Karla, Doug, Randall, Mignon, Michael, Richard, Bob—most of all Bob!—and supporters and contributors too numerous to name, there are no words to express my gratitude.

The many successes of Readerville are all attributable to you.

So now what? I’ll continue to post about my reading at the new Noting:books and I hope you will too—I still want (need!) to know what you’re all reading. Aside from that, I’ll be blogging at Collapse and Delight, and I’ll still be on Twitter as @karentempler. Gayla’s blog is Beautiful Screaming Lady; she’s on Twitter as @Sophronisba and on Facebook. Lisa’s blog is Mappa Mundi, and she’s on Twitter as @lisapeet1. DG’s blogs are Six DGs of Observation and The Psychopedia, and he’s just joined Twitter. Kat will be continuing the wonderful @new_books feed at Twitter, entirely under her own direction and discretion. And Leah can be found at Twitter and at Facebook. Please do look us up. I’m counting on this being not so much goodbye as see you around.

So that’s it then. Thank you for coming. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
—kt

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Look Up

2009-06-05T20:34:26-08:00

by Lisa Peet |

Anyone who’s spent time in Readerville’s Judging A Book thread knows that for the past few years one of the most common book cover tropes has been shoes—big and little shoes, shoes next to feet, you name it. Shoes have become a standard Readerville snowclone, especially when talking about book design—for a while there orange was the new shoes, and antique labels, and hand-drawn type.

Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me, back in 2005, was an early adapter. The first galley I got my hands on at this year’s BEA was also his—Await Your Reply, out in September from Ballantine. Looking at that expanse of clouds on the cover got me thinking, and then comparing galleys with fellow Book Expo visitors. So it’s settled: This year, sky is the new shoes.

In the next six months alone we have Iain Banks’ Transition, Kate Braestrup’s Marriage, and Other Acts of Charity, Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, Amanda C. Gable’s The Confederate General Rides North, Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family, Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, Naseem Rakha’s The Crying Tree, and Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic. All of them feature low horizons or no horizons, with skies blue or gray, cloudy or clear. Some have birds, some have folks.

But the message maintains: Look up, not down! Publishing, the country, the entire world is unsure and in flux; things are changing, and not always as we wish they would. There is the temptation to stop in our tracks and look stubbornly down to see if in fact the earth isn’t shifting under our feet. But we as readers know that books are microcosms of the world, whether in sympathy or as fantasy or fact, and their covers have advice to offer us all, right there out in front. Enough with the shoe-gazing, enough self-absorption. It’s time to move past the personal to the universal, to expand our horizons outward, to see what these times want from us. Nearly 100 years ago E.M. Forster advised us to Only Connect, and it’s time, again, to remember.

The world is changing. Look up, up and out.

Books By Committee

2009-06-05T11:24:32-08:00

by Lisa Peet |

One of the big events at this year’s BEA was Perseus Books’ Book: The Sequel. In the month running up to Book Expo, contributors from around the world were invited via email to submit first sentences of imaginary sequels to famous books (their sample: “You see—I was right,” from Das Kapital Redux). Over the course of 48 hours during the BEA weekend, the good folks at Perseus worked around the clock to compile, edit, lay out, and produce the book, which was unveiled at a much-heralded press conference at the Perseus booth on Saturday, May 30. The final product itself is slight by nature, more of a novelty or gift item, and there are a lot of zombie jokes. Still, it’s a recognizable book, put together on short notice as a totally collaborative effort, available on a number of platforms, including a trade paperback published under the PublicAffairs imprint for $15.00 (with royalties going to the National Book Foundation). And if you start with a bathroom book, you can always aim higher.

Taking a page from NPR’s book (minus the tote bags), Kickstarter—an online funding platform for artists—recently sponsored New York Makes a Book. It offered the first 100 participants who were willing to pledge $30 a page in a book of the same name and a copy of the finished product. No particular theme was stressed, and the editorial policy seemed to be mostly contingent on the PayPal transaction. The end result looks to be a bit less ambitious than Perseus’, available in print only and eventually distributed out of a box at a yet-to-be-named bar, which I’m sure will be in Brooklyn. But it also promises to be more cutting-edge in terms of content, taken from a smaller, hipper pool ("Please be a local. We want to see you at the bar! Mostly because we don’t want to ship these books").

The idea of the collaborative, quick-turnover book is interesting, and I’d like to see more efforts like these. But they’re two very sincere and interesting ends of a spectrum, with lots of room in between for other possibilities.

Marilynne Robinson on Calvin

2009-06-05T09:46:58-08:00

by Gayla Bassham |

I think I’ve finally been convinced to read Gilead. In the Guardian blog, Andrew Brown quotes from an interview with her in which she discusses John Calvin:

“One of the things that has really struck me, reading Calvin,” she said then, “is what a strong sense he has that the aesthetic is the signature of the divine. If someone in some sense lives a life that we can perceive as beautiful in its own way, that is something that suggests grace, even if by a strict moral standard ... they might seem to fail.”

This is not the Calvinism I grew up with. There’s also this bit:

I wanted very much, when I wrote the character of Jack, [to create] a character whom it would be very painful for people to be able to dismiss, with the assumption being that if one could not dismiss him, there would be no reason to believe that God would want to dismiss him, either.

China Mieville on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2009-06-04T23:44:47-08:00

by Gayla Bassham |

I am not posting this interview with China Mieville because I think he’s one of the most inventive speculative fiction writers working today. Nor am I posting it to give myself another excuse to link to the wonderful Perdido Street Station. No, I’m posting the interview because Mieville agrees with me about the abomination that is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie without Joss Whedon:

I’ve heard that you were a Buffy fan, and I wanted to ask you how you felt about the announcement that they would be remaking the original Buffy movie.

Good lord! I hadn’t heard about this.

It’s not related to the TV show and Joss Whedon [the creator of Buffy] is not involved.

He isn’t involved? What I suppose I would say is my alarm bells are ringing. Never underestimate the sheer crassness of Hollywood. It’ll probably suck. But you know, how about we don’t go to see it?

The Reading in Public Project

2009-06-04T16:47:47-08:00

by Karen Templer |

My friend Mignon Khargie tipped me off to something clever she and some others are cooking up in San Luis Obispo: The Reading in Public Project. They’re declaring a day and building a Book Bench, and people can sign up for 30-minute slots on the bench:

Our intent is to celebrate the written word by reading in a designated public spot, however you like: Quietly or out loud, traditionally or as performance. Bring your books, newspapers, magazines, Kindles, laptops, favorite sites, Tweets, braille: We welcome it all. We’re looking for readers, troubadours, signers, mimes, poets, authors, storytellers—people of all ages and walks of life who want to share their love of reading.

I’d love to sit on the Book Bench, but alas, I’ll have to hope the highlights make it to YouTube.

Marilynne Robinson’s Unanimous Orange

2009-06-04T04:21:34-08:00

by Karen Templer |

Perhaps the surprise was that there was no surprise. This year’s Orange prize for the best novel written by a woman was last night won by a writer regarded by some as one of the greatest of living novelists: Marilynne Robinson. Fi Glover, the broadcaster who chaired this year’s judging panel, admitted the decision had been straightforward and unanimous.

Seems like there have been so many stories of conflict on judging panels lately that it always feels like the “winner” was some sort of grudge-filled compromise and the real best book lost out. I’m never surprised at any award going to Robinson, but it’s wonderful to hear it was undisputed.

Jay McInerney: Great American Writer?

2009-06-03T09:19:58-08:00

by Gayla Bassham |

At Slate, Steven Metcalf attempts to answer the question Is Jay McInerney a great writer? I’m not going to lie, I’m skeptical. Here’s Metcalf on McInerney’s self-promotion:

McInerney has been a tireless campaigner on his own behalf. The handsome gaze fixes, the mouth opens, and out trots F.R. Leavis, disguised as Eeyore. “I suppose an unsympathetic critic,” he once told an interviewer, “might say that my ostensible critique of the manners of my age is overwhelmed by participation in that culture.” (No need to suppose.) “We live in shitty, depraved and complacent times,” he wrote in Esquire in 1989 in an infamous piece defending himself against his critics. He understands the stakes are not small. If McInerney is simply part of the zeitgeist, then he is a party to a collective loss of social memory that is inimical to the literary canon into which he eagerly seeks admittance. (At the table of posterity, it’s better to be seated next to Fitzgerald than Brett Easton Ellis.) To deserve the company of his heroic predecessors, he believes he must position himself as a cold-eyed chronicler—and not merely a symptom—of these shitty times.

If you’re not satisfied with Metcalf’s judgment--or McInerney’s--you can check out the writings for yourself, including his best-known novel Bright Lights, Big City and a collection of short stories, How It Ends.

If You Swipe His Story, He Will Come

2009-06-02T20:21:24-08:00

by Lisa Peet |

A few weeks ago I posted here about a young, mysterious upstart named John David California who had written an unauthorized sequel to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Now, apparently, the reclusive 90-year-old author has come out of the woodwork to file a lawsuit blocking the book’s publication. Salinger is claiming copyright infringement and suing for “unspecified damages.” California, in turn,

called the legal action “a little bit insane” and said that while Salinger had control over the names of his characters, he did not over his style or perspective.

“To me, this is a story about an old man. It’s a love story, a story about an author and his character,” said the man, adding that John David California was his pen name.

Salinger has been heard from only a handful of times in the past thirty years, and those disproportionately represented by legal action as well. I suppose if one were looking for a way to deliberately lure him out into the open, that wouldn’t be a bad one. Why does this image keep coming to mind?

The Book Groups of Summer

2009-06-02T17:08:08-08:00

by Karen Templer |

You may have heard The Morning News is putting together a summer read of Infinite Jest—now with its own website, infinitesummer.org—and details are beginning to emerge. See also @infinitesummer on Twitter (and hashtag #infsum) and Facebook.

Also, in addition to the aforementioned Picador book group on Twitter, an ad-hoc group has emerged, called simply the Twitter Book Club. The second pick is Mr. Pip, and the discussion will take place June 15th, beginning at 6pm PDT, hashtag #tbc.

Of course, also not to be missed—right this very minute we’re talking to Elizabeth Strout about Olive Kitteridge.

BEA09 Blogger Redux

2009-06-02T02:50:14-08:00

by Lisa Peet |

Well OK, I was a bit too busy being self-serving and schmoozy at BEA to be an effective Roving Girl Reporter, but there were enough dedicated litbloggers around to ensure good coverage from all angles.

The postmortems were generally upbeat, with much of the skepticism reserved for the unwieldy format of BEA itself. Nearly everyone had something to say about forward motion at a more grassroots level. For a variety of takes to counter the New York Times’ mopiness try Ed Champion, Stephen Elliott, LitKicks, Booksquare, Russ Marshalek’s great four-day liveblogging at Baby Got Books, and—this is the whole point—a host of others. If you’re on Twitter, try searching #BEA09. And if you wish you were on Twitter, check out Jacket Copy’s writeup of the BEA tweetup.

Or, as Stephen Elliott says:

Sometimes I want to get old. I’m eager to put on a bathrobe and play bridge all day and live in a compound with all of my friends. Sometimes I’ll say to a woman, “I want to get old with you, right now.” And what I mean is I want to lie in bed with her and read a magazine, wake up and have breakfast. I want to skip all the other stuff and get post-passion. But that’s not how it works, it turns out. You have to be young first, all the way until the end.

So you see, literature, that beautiful self-destructive art is alive and well. And when novelists worry about the state of publishing, what they’re really worrying about is themselves, and the changing, collapsing world around them. It makes me think of Kerouac rushing off in a four-year manic bender, benzadrine dripping from his pores like soy sauce. And then years of alcoholic misery and decline. But he never lost his looks.

Will It Be Publishing Veterans Who Shake Up Publishing?

2009-06-01T16:32:14-08:00

by Karen Templer |

The most fascinating thing to me, in the past eight months or so as the ebook discussion has really escalated, is the response from traditional publishers. Stuck in their ruts, they argue that ebooks can’t cost less than print books because the cost of producing the book doesn’t change; they still have to pay an advance, edit it, design it, print it, warehouse it, ship it out, take it back, ship it back out as a remainder—and now there’s what they see as the added expense of generating the electronic edition. My eyes nearly pop right out of their sockets every time a publisher says “why should an author make less on an ebook?” As if it’s never occurred to them that perhaps the author’s cut of an ebook should be larger than that of the more-expensive-to-produce print book. But they’re right that as long as they’re still printing everything, those costs still exist. So while they try to figure out how to charge more for ebooks in order to offset their same old costs (often not recouped, as it is), and while they toss out ideas like offering an electronic edition to buyers of the print version for a couple bucks more (instead of, y’know, vice versa), I continue to wait for a new kind of publisher to emerge. One who understands that cutting the printing/warehousing/returns part of the equation out of the budget is very likely the answer. Publish ebooks and make print editions available either later, if such demand exists, or via print-on-demand technology.

Though I waited in vain to hear of something like this coming out of BEA, it has turned up this morning on the blog of HarperStudio: a promotional video made a few months ago by John Oakes and Colin Robinson, two publishing veterans who are launching a new company, to be called OR Books. As Oakes and Robinson—who, the video notes, have worked with some of the biggest writers out there—offer a concise overview of publishing and its current perils, various text snippets say things like “alternative publishing” and “no warehouse, no returns, no waste.” And though they talk about using the production savings to invest in promotion, which is terrific of course, the one thing they don’t address is what impact they expect their model to have on the price of their product.

The OR video also says they’ll be selling direct to the consumer, and it remains to be seen what exactly that means. Will they be cutting Amazon out of the equation? Selling only through their own website? Or are they perhaps first on board for the venture Google announced at BEA? After lots of test balloons and speculation, they’ve finally declared their intention to be a conduit between purveyors and buyers of ebooks. Though the specifics remain murky.

Open Letters Monthly: Colson Whitehead, Evelina, China Mieville, and Kazuo Ishiguro

2009-06-01T08:30:33-08:00

by Gayla Bassham |

It’s the first day of June, and that means a new Open Letters Monthly. This month, Sam Sacks is frustrated by Colson Whitehead’s coming-of-age novel Sag Harbor (I hear you, Sam); Tracey Kelly reexamines Fanny Burney’s early epistolary novel Evelina; Khalid Ponte praises China Mieville’s new book The City & the City; and Karen Vanuska likes Kazuo Ishiguro’s story collection Nocturnes way better than I did.

Rounding Up the Books of Summer

2009-06-01T00:49:41-08:00

by Karen Templer |

The summer reading lists are rolling in, and David Gutowski (aka Largehearted Boy) has created a Delicious directory thereof.

Jane Austen’s Secret Love

2009-05-31T09:29:36-08:00

by Gayla Bassham |

Another day, another Jane Austen book. Andrew Norman has written a new biography of Austen, breathlessly titled Jane Austen: An Unrequited Love. According to the Telegraph, Norman argues that Jane Austen and her beloved sister Cassandra--who, like Austen, never married--had a falling out over a clergyman named Samuel Blackall. I’m skeptical, if only because it’s hard to imagine an English clergyman at the center of a love triangle.