• CS Lewis vs teh internets
• Book sales up in April!
• A Bible study group for the choir: a book club for liberals
• Anne of Green Gables house (with functioning S&M dungeon, including Gilbert’s original ball gag, still occupying the parlour space behind the bookshelf of Victorian porn) is now a heritage site
• Denis Johnson to appear in Playboy… I know. I know.

• Part time ‘Ninja Barbara Gowdy wins the Trillium Award for Helpless
• Sean Connery unveils long-awaited memoir of his extensive experience being attractive, then unattractive, then attractive again before becoming downright unbearable to think about
• Madonna’s brother to write memoir about his sister, tentatively titled: “Bullet Bras, Ropey Arms, and Other People’s Children: A Life Spent Manipulating the Media Into Covering Mediocre Art”
• National essay writing competition now accepting video entries
• Reader of the Year (from Maud)
• Frugality according to McCarthy’s The Road
• Poetry videos on Ted Hughes (timely moment: Hughes says the position of laureate wasn’t outmoded when he took it, and wouldn’t be until the crown was no longer the symbol of the spiritual unity of the British tribe), Anne Sexton, “continuous poems about hats is a bit limited” (I guess “pote-ry” is at least good for a laugh…), Ted Kooser poetry reading, poetry panel with Pinsky, Plimpton, and Howard

Poet and playwright, dead at 81.

A Guardian blogger weighs in on the decline of the book review. Good riddance, says he. Reading is personal, says Alastair Harper. Like gravy, I’d add. See, with gravy, you get all the scrapings at the bottom of whatever pan you’re cooking in and you mix it together into a sort of starch/blood/flesh sauce to dribble back onto the meat you or your butcher had previously drained of said blood. You can’t take gravy from one meal and export it to another. It just won’t taste right. Each meal needs to have its own gravy made from its own flesh/blood scrapings. Reading’s kind of the same thing, but the difference is, if you spill reading on your host’s Victorian table linens, you needn’t surriptitiously sneak a tea cup over it and then try to switch seats halfway through dinner to cause confusion over who to blame. … …. ….um… … …. Okay, guys, very funny… Who put the Oxycodone in my coffee?

Any true defender of the arts would have spat on the floor in disgust at the philistine expansion of the business and sport pages, marauding into the sacred space reserved for the veneration of literature. The truth was I don’t really care that much.

It’s not them, it’s me. The book itself is the focus of my interest – the ambling or swift-paced development of a story over the number of pages the author has decided it will take. Reviews of book don’t interest me, in the same way that simply reading the plot of a novel on Wikipedia doesn’t, and Pierre Bayard’s advice on bluffing literature doesn’t either. The affaire de coeur is invariably short, the book abandoned once it’s been consumed, but when I’m amongst its pages I’m loyal and true. I love the experience of the individual book, not canons, or the world of literature as an artificial whole. Part of that experience is finding out if a book works for me or not. So I just can’t make myself interested in the canapé taster approach of reviews of books.

You’ll note that we (Canadians) are the only ones referring to Rawi Hage as “Canadian”… I genuinely don’t know, but would be interested to hear how Mr. Hage defines his nationality, if he does. This might be an interesting place to collect opinions on this. What makes someone Canadian? Residency? Time punched on the clock? Intent? Grant receipt? Publisher? A stint in Nova Scotia early in the last century? Seems like we’re ready to call anyone passing through a Canadian. Does that add value to our national identity in the world or devalue it? Any takers?

Novelist, and reluctant poet, Jonathan Bennett has won the KM Hunter Award for his upcoming novel, Entitlement, which I am very excited to read. Bennett’s short story collection Verandah People just blew me away. His writing is muscular without sacrificing sensitivity and nuance. It’s also mildly poetic, yet keeps a firm grip on event and plot. Since we’re talking about the best of Canadian fiction, he’s an author I’ve long thought unfairly overlooked, at least in the sense of kudos. (Disclosure: I am friends with Bennett and have seen him, on more than one New Year’s Eve, run down a hall with his pants flying like a flag over his shoulder. This has not affected my ability to judge his literary merit. In fact, given this information, my endorsement should be read as well-earned and hard-won.)

Alex Good has gone and done something rather rash in the latest issue of CNQ (which is just about the best Canadian books publication out there). He’s written an essay analyzing the legacy of the Giller Prize, Canada’s glitziest award for fiction, and I think it’s safe to say he’s come to a few negative conclusions.

… four of the five books shortlisted had substantial historical components, with the one exception, Late Nights on Air, set in the mid-1970s (a time within living memory, though “we can see the sepia tones already starting to colour the northern landscape”). The acknowledgments in all five doubled as bibliographies. Research was experiencing its own real return. The old adage that books are written out of other books has never been so clearly demonstrated, albeit the books in question were not inspiring works of fiction but rather stuff like Tapestry of War, Beneath These Red Cliffs: An Ethnohistory of the Utah Paiutes, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870 – 1914, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921 – 1924, and Ras Mala, Hindoo Annals of the Province of Goozerat in Western India. I’m not making any of this up.

Other Giller trends also returned stronger than ever in 2007. The Old Guard duly made the list in the presence of Michael Ondaatje and M. G. Vassanji (both previous Giller winners). The winning book was published by McClelland & Stewart (who had two nominees), giving M&S and Doubleday 11 out of the last 15 prizes. Three of the five nominated authors live in Toronto, with Elizabeth Hay and Daniel Poliquin hailing from Ottawa. Donald Winkler, Poliquin’s translator, lives in Montreal.

There is no need of a conspiracy to arrive at results like these. The Gillers have, in a mere fourteen years, become an institution so incestuous and sclerotic they have their own systemic biases. Of course none of this would matter if the best works of Canadian fiction were being recognized. But they are not. And so one may well question whether the prize is serving any valid purpose at all – indeed, whether it is perhaps now doing more harm than good.

Say what you mean, man! Quit beating around the bush! All this innuendo with no substance is maddening!!

• Farley Mowat to publish “last book”
• Author begins hunger strike, and not inadvertantly after seeing latest royalty statement
• What are American children reading?
• HC says online giveaways actually work (I wonder how Degen is getting along? Can you report, John?)

Rawi Hage is the first Canadian since Alistair MacLeod to win the prestigious prize. All congratulations to him. Read some prize buildup and what the judges had to say.

In this remarkable novel, however, luck is a central element. The title refers to the game of chance – to the death-defying game of Russian Roulette played by DeNiro in the film The Deer Hunter. Hage’s characters find themselves in a very different yet equally extreme situation – caught in the civil war raging in Beirut in the 1980’s. Hage’s writing allows the reader a shocking intimacy with the personal impact of such conflicts. Through the fate of his anti-heroes, George and Bassam, he shows how war can envelope lives – how one doesn’t have a choice in such situations. Concepts of guilt and innocence are left to flounder in the hail of bombs and the struggle for survival. Life itself becomes a game with no real winners, only scarred survivors whose estrangement is deeper than any bullet wound, and whose future seems darker than their blacked out city.

De Niro’s Game is also a compassionate novel of friendship and betrayal, of love and loss. The war-torn city of Beirut plays host to the bravura of the young men- a city full of marauding militia, cleverly compared with the mad dogs that also haunt its precincts – a city that gradually drags its inhabitants into the blood-red sands of extreme situations and heart-breaking betrayal.

The three top female contenders for the position of UK poet laureate have ruled themselves out of the running in part because they feel the position is outmoded and useless and in part because it’s just another imposition on the time and energy of hard working women. Not mentioned here is the requirement that lady laureates wear those stupid hats with feathers and pastel suit/dresses with huge black buttons the royal women always seem to have on. I suspect that’s a big, if unspoken, part of the consideration.

And Cope is not alone in her distaste for the high-profile post, which will become available when Motion’s 10 years in the seat come to a close next year.

Award-winning poets Fleur Adcock and Ruth Padel, who have both been tipped for the role, agree that writing for the Queen was probably more trouble than it was worth. Adcock said that quite apart from the extra work it involves, the role continues to command a very meagre salary.

“It’s terribly hard work for very little pay,” she said. “The poet laureate is fine as an institution, as long as I don’t have to do it.”

The fee for taking on the grand title is still just £5,000 a year, although the ancient tradition of a “butt of sack per annum” has been reinstated by Motion. But even 630 bottles of Spanish sherry – no matter how fine – is not enough of an incentive to abandon literary integrity and solitude, said Adcock, whose work has earned her an OBE and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.

Imagine going to visit Papa’s house in Cuba and having the cop there tell you you can have any one of Hemingway’s books in the library for $200. That would be like visiting Marlon Brando’s island and having the security offer to sell you a soiled cheeseburger wrapper. InconCEIVable!

A fluff piece edges toward relevance by telling us that even authors who actually sell books are coming to terms with how much work they’ll have to do (and money they’ll have to spend) themselves. I tells ya, someone’s going to break a nail here if this hard labour keeps up.

“It can definitely get creative,” said Emily Giffin, author of four novels, including the current bestseller “Love the One You’re With” (St. Martins, $24.95). Giffin, who was in Boston last week on a book tour, missed her reading at a local Barnes & Noble because of a canceled flight. But no worries – that wasn’t her only Hub event. She had plenty of time to make it to her book party at J. Crew, where shoppers could buy “Love,” get discounts on clothes and sip cocktails.

All in the name of sales.

Giffin, 36, isn’t a stranger to this. She appeared in a Bloomingdale’s advertisement in 2004 to promote her novel. She also made a guest appearance on “As the World Turns” last year – playing herself as a guest on a fictional talk show to – you guessed it – promote her book.

“I never could have anticipated the amount of time an author can spend on the promotion of a book,” she said. “You really can find yourself spending a lot of time on the business side and not writing. The key is to find the right balance. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a problem I’m very grateful to have.”

The British government found their free book give away last year so successful that they’re doing it again. Free books for all rugrats! Yay yay, UK!!

The government was particularly concerned to help the project dissuade children from giving up reading for pleasure, with Year 7 pupils hitherto particularly likely to lose the habit. According to Booktrust’s evaluation research into last year’s exercise, the results look very encouraging.

Booktrust’s project manager Hannah Rutland said yesterday, “Last year’s programme was hugely successful with 98% of all secondary schools in England participating. 55% of Year 7 children who completed our online survey thought that Booked Up would encourage them to read more than before and of those children who said they never read, 68% claimed to have read at least some of their book and 66% found their book enjoyable to some degree. ”

This year, Year 7 pupils will be offered their choice from a list of 12 carefully selected titles, and the reception-aged children will each receive two books: Harry and the Dinosaurs go to School by Ian Whybrow, illustrated by Adrian Reynolds. The packs will also contain a guidance booklet for parents and carers to encourage sharing books with children, and for the first time, a poetry book: The Puffin Book of Fantastic First Poems.

A few thoughts on the Kindle/e-book revolution and the future of reading.

The discussion of the future of the book in the digital age continues to preoccupy the literary classes. Two extreme positions tend to dominate: Either the digitization of everything will lead to a golden age of reading and knowledge, or it will result in a crass bazaar of entertainment products that devastates the precious copyright that artists require to earn an income.

(Nice to see the Globe and Mail finally took down the paywall. Did you know the NYT is also free online? And has been for quite some time.)

• First novel award shortlist includes ‘Ninja fav Gil Adamson (yay!)
• Walrus editor resigns
• Stop right there! Don’t waste your time browsing and thinking about what to read! The LAT has thought long and hard for you and presented their findings in a convenient list form
• Campbell and Sturgeon sci fi awards shortlists
• Memoir checklist for aspiring solipsists (thanks, J)
• Rushdie playing the field

Some big name popular writers are balking at the book-a-year pace set by the business to create and maintain momentum and stretch their publicity dollars. While some *cough*PattersonClancy*cough* hire teams to meet the deadlines, some are finally putting their expensively-shoed feet down and saying, enough is enough.

In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.

Many top-selling writers, such as John Grisham and Mary Higgins Clark, have turned out at least one book annually for years. Now some writers are beginning to grumble about the pressure, and some are refusing to comply.

Not that writers are being explicitly harassed, but costly advance marketing plans are increasingly tied into the expectation that the most profitable authors will have a new book out at roughly the same time each year. In today’s intensely competitive marketplace, readers will turn to another author if a writer fails to come through at the usual time, which could cost a publisher big bucks.

Many writers below the top tier are also being urged to pick up the pace. In some cases, publishers have made a book-per-year promise an explicit condition of taking on a new author.

• Britannica catches Wiki-fever, monocles worldwide simultaneously pop from eye sockets
• Austen-related crap continues to sell for ridiculous amounts
• Brazillian novel written by German
• Finally, the invention no one was waiting for: a digital pen (remember, Frankenhand isn’t a robotic pen so much as a robotic hand)
• Rowling’s Harvard speech, lauded by some, derided by others

A musician riffs on his relationship with literature.

I was taken with music at a very young age. Not like a prodigy picking out Debussy at the piano, but dumbstruck, at age 7, by the power of disembodied voices fighting static over the radio. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong and Dusty Springfield were actors all, and I heard every song as a movie. By the time I was 13, I was completely obsessed with songs, and heavily invested in Bob Dylan’s constructed mythology. He’d been posing from the beginning, of course, and while I was never seduced into hearing his Rimbaud-meets-Cassius-Clay narration as personal biography, I somehow understood that it not only suited his songs but seemed to propel them.

Around this time, my older brother Dave slipped me a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And when he did, the electrical circuit was finally closed. The light came on.

It’s nice to see small presses successfully, by some measure, engaged in translation. At least abroad. Our literary system here seems to be actively engaged in keeping Canada out of the business of engaging with the world.

Good news for translated fiction and small presses doesn’t arrive that often. So this is a very bright patch for a rarely spotlit field, with three awards for literary translations into English going to independent publishers in recent days.

In this country, Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of The Maias by the Portuguese novelist Eca de Queiroz was awarded this year’s Oxford Weidenfeld prize at a ceremony on Friday evening. Novelist Helen Dunmore, who joined the judging panel alongside three Oxford translators and academics, told the audience at the St Anne’s College ceremony that The Maias was “a brilliant drama of a family’s decline and downfall” rendered in a translation that is “supple, transparent and wonderfully paced”.

Is education the key? How do you promote that amid the chaos, esp when much of your material is missing or confiscated?

When Eskander talks about his library, he makes it sound a combination of a national healing process, a social crucible for establishing a more egalitarian society and a centre of free inquiry that Iraqi intellectuals have been denied for decades.

But what does cultural education even mean? “We want to change people’s orientation through our books. Otherwise there is no alternative but mosques. I would always say invest in secular education, because religious extremism is a cultural phenomenon – it is not wholly an armed phenomenon. We need to prove to people that there is an alternative.”

Profiled at the NYT where they, as seems to be de rigeur these days, question the truth of his essays. Though it sounds as if people are starting to dig the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of literature: a bit of fiction in their non-fiction.

“I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using a nonfiction label,” Alex Heard wrote in a long article in The New Republic called “This American Lie.” (Mr. Sedaris has often appeared on the public radio program “This American Life.”) In preparation for his article Mr. Heard revisited some Sedaris essays, investigating the places and interviewing the characters. Some details did not match up, and Mr. Heard suggests in the article that Mr. Sedaris “issue Oprah Moment apologies to a few people” he has written about, including members of a nudist colony and his mother.

Mr. Sedaris has always said that he exaggerates for effect, particularly in dialogue; an author’s note in the new book describes the stories as “realish.” He also maintains that in the sort of essays he writes, reality is a subjective, slippery concept, particularly as no two people have the same recollection of the same event. “Memoir is the last place you’d expect to find the truth,” he said as he nibbled at his sandwich.

He also said that some details in his essays are obviously fictionalized. “Naked,” for instance, has a story “where my mother hits a cat with her car, and the cat dies, and the cat comes back to life and says, ‘You killed me,’ ” he said. Speaking of Mr. Heard, he added, “That’s what he was fact-checking, that book.”

Weighing in on The New Republic article many critics said at the time that a little embellishment in humor was hardly the crime of the century.

I’ve only read some, but regardless of the truth, he is a genuinely laugh-out-loud funny story teller.

The Australian laments the lack of Oz stats info comparable to that which shows novels as big business in America.

UNLIKE AUSTRALIA, where there seems to be little hard fact available about the book industry (the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ latest research was about five years ago), there always seems to be information popping up about US books and readers. To coincide with BookExpo America, the trade fair that finished last weekend, figures revealing the state of the industry were released.

It seems book production last year increased only slightly on the previous year to 276,649 titles, according to Bowker, the research outfit. But what had people all atwitter was the jump in “on-demand” and short-run titles to 134,773, which gave a total of 411,422 titles in 2007.

Novels are clearly back in vogue, though, with 50,071 published in the US, up 17% from 2006. That is double the number published as recently as six years ago. And if you’re worried about what sort of novels these were, rest assured there were literary ones in there. There was a 19% increase in “literature” titles to 9796, which is on top of a 31% increase the previous year.

I wish I could quit yoooOOOOOOOooooouuuuu!

No shit, Sherlock

Emma number 1?

In real life, Gay Magnolias inspirations nearly lost it all

Paris Review archives: time well wasted

Sci Fi writer profiled at the Guardian.

“Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas, rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition,” he says. “I’m not entirely at ease with that self-description.” But with a background in biomedical and computer science rather than literature, his fiction always returns to science. “I just can’t help myself,” he explains. “I have a compulsive urge to use that background to build baroque laboratory mazes for my protagonists to explore, rather than being content to examine them in their native habitat.”

But isn’t the written word a decidedly old-fashioned media to explore such cutting edge ideas? Why not screenplays, or video games? What makes the novel so compelling? Aside from having been a compulsive reader from early childhood, Stross has two words – creative control. “Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.”

Literary tattoos. So much potential for disaster. Luckily for me, I’ve had, since I was a teenager, a ten-year rule. If I conceive of a tattoo I want, the clock starts ticking. If I still want it ten years later, I get it. It’s a great system that’s saved my proverbial bacon quite a few times. Just think of the Yin/Yang-Leonard Cohen-celtic knotting-skull and crossbones  graveyard my arms would have become. A pictoral record of hubris as a lifestyle choice.

Years back when I was giving my first graduate paper in the USA my proud mother gave me some cash to get a suit. I blew it on a tattoo taken from an illustration in William Blake’s Europe and a pair of combat trousers: I laboured under the delusion that I was a bit of an intellectual rebel. What an eejit! Yet still, I always thought, my tattoo’s literariness does give it a certain cachet.

Wrong. At least if the plethora of sites devoted to literary tattoos is anything to go by. You’ve got everything from Dumbledore’s mug and Tolkien’s Elvish adorning midriffs to passages from A Tale of Two Cites and Slaughterhouse 5 inscribed on inner and upper arms. My lit tat ain’t anything to write home about. Everyone is suffering for their art nowadays.

All that I do have tattooed on me currently is text. I’m about to get my first “image”, but it’s actually a somewhat glyphic band that tells a story, so… And yes, it’s a knot. But I’ve wanted it for 10 years now.

HarperCollins is suing John Gotti’s daughter Victoria, seen here dressed as the illegitimate lovechild of an anatomically unlikely threesome between Cher, Michael Jackson, and that freak lady who has had surgery to make herself look like a cat, for the return of royalties after she failed to produce a book under contract. At stake, $70G and the thumbs of anyone who tries to collect. Also at stake, my dreamscape, which may now be haunted by my own post.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in New York, HarperCollins alleges that Victoria Gotti has failed to return a $70,000 (£35,000) advance for a memoir originally due in November 2005. Gotti told the publisher last September that she was breaking the contract, but HarperCollins claims it has not had its money returned.

The crazy-assed incident that happened last year around the TSPBF continues to get ink, this time in The National Post of all places, where a piece loosely recounting the events of the incident, perhaps in hopes of driving a few rubber neckers out, has been run in anticipation of the fair tomorrow–an event I would be boycotting if I were in Toronto. In fact, I may fly to Toronto just to walk by and not go in. I can’t remember a year I’ve been in TO and missed it. What a sad state of affairs. It was an ugly fall and winter, and I can only hope that the straggling few people left supporting the fair and its threat-happy organizers can somehow rebuild it despite the destruction of its reputation. I am reluctant to even post anything, given how everyone’s scared of getting letters from lawyers, and because there’s something to be said for just letting the whole thing die, but I can’t sit by and say nothing as a cultural philanthropist like Stuart Ross gets walked on like this.

You might as well chop my hands off at the wrists while you’re at it. It might be the only way you can be assured of getting the books out of my house without me clawing your eyes out.

Every disorganized person needs a scapegoat, and on Week 4 of my crusade to clear our hopelessly overstuffed attic, I chose my husband, Bob.

Having already sorted through holiday decorations, I turned to books, smug in the belief that Bob was responsible for the boxes up there filled with volumes going back to college. I love books, but I don’t insist on a lifelong relationship with every one of them.

See, this is where you and fundamentally part ways, lady. I’m a loyal, steadfast life partner of my books, while you’re a cheap hussy with a fear of commitment. Yes, my office looks like its the nest of a 6′2″, 230 lbs mouse, but that’s neither here nor there.

A Christian student group, ironically named Youth 4 Revolution, in the US has succeeded in having the public library remove The Joy of Sex from public access. The Joy of Sex is the Chilton’s repair manual of the sex ed world: providing indispensible mechanical information while remaining utterly boring. The level of brainwashing, repression, and self-hatred someone has to be suffering from in order to be offended by others viewing these vanilla books is staggering. Maybe the group should consider a slight name change to something more apropos: Students 4 Self-Revulsion.

For the love of Jaysus on a Popsicle Stick. How many times can this article be written before the universe awakens and unleashes a furious gamma ray burst near the head of the latest journalist responsible? In defence of this piece, I think it’s meant as a non-arts page summary for the general (read: uninterested) public. So if you feel you haven’t considered all the issues at hand in why we should or shouldn’t have a prize for women, please, read on. Otherwise, I hope you’re on the phone with either God or Bruce Banner right now, arranging the aforementioned gamma ray burst.

So what is the justification forall-women prizes?

The novelist Kate Mosse, who co-founded the prize, said: “The prize was set up to celebrate international fiction written by women and to get fabulous books by women to male and female readers and it continues to be really successful in doing that.” Part of its raison d’être was to encourage women’s writing at a time when it seemed to be largely ignored by the larger prizes. However, five of the last six Whitbread/ Costas and the latest Man Booker prize were won by women.

You know, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time deriding The Writers Union of Canada as a place more suited to the exchange of recipes and gardening tips than advocacy on behalf of writers, but I have to say that in the last year under Susan Swan the organization not only got back some teeth, but also a serious set of brass balls to go with (it’s no good having teeth if you can’t work up the courage to bite). It actually started behaving like a union (in so much as it can), lobbying on behalf of its members, instead of a organizational placeholder or mutual back-patting society. I even joined late last year! I’d like to congratulate Swan on her tenure there and encourage the incoming chair and board to build on her momentum.

Abebooks has a neat little piece on the kind of crap and ephemera (more expensive word for crap) found in used books. A old pal and I performed a “guerrilla” poetry stunt about 12 years ago where we slipped little poems into books in used and new bookstores, hoping people would get an unexpected poetry jolt when they opened their PD James or whatever. It was a neat idea at the time, given our general hubris, but now that I’ve read this, I think money would have been more effective at brightening a day.

Be careful what you use as a bookmark. Thousands of dollars, a Christmas card signed by Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a marriage certificate from 1879, a baby’s tooth, a diamond ring and a handwritten poem by Irish writer Katharine Tynan Hickson are just some of the stranger objects discovered inside books by AbeBooks.com booksellers.

I recently opened a secondhand book and an airline boarding pass from Liberia in west Africa to Fort Worth, Texas, fell to the floor. Was there a story behind this little slip of paper? Was someone fleeing from a country ravaged by two civil wars since 1989? I will never know, but used and rare booksellers discover countless objects – some mundane, some bizarre, some deeply personal – inside books as they sort and catalog books for resale.

The novel about books is apparently a subgenre of… um… what? Oh, I guess it’s a subgenre of the kind of novel I’m probably never going to read.

There’s something vaguely unhealthy about this obsession with old books – you can practically smell the must and mould rising from the pages – but if you’re a book nerd like me, it’s also charming and oddly exciting, and Rosemary is an appealing heroine.

I’m not sure if a general declining interest in books is making us readers celebrate the artefact with renewed love and nostalgia but the bookish book is doing very nicely. It might be the influence of recent bestselling novels such as Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, with its romantic view of libraries as the hiding places of secret treasures. Books are also dangerous: we’ve had novels where they’ve conjured up Dracula, or Satan himself.

• Week of long knives–HarperCollins exec resigns, and since these things come in threes… who’s next?
• James Bond book smashes sales records
• Kids authors throw down the gauntlet on age recommendations

• Brits sweep Orange Prize (hard luck to Huston and O’Neill, the Canadians on the list)
• Very talented poets, chosen from list of youngish rakes, win Griffin Poetry Prizes (Ashbery is a god of poetry, and Blaser is too, though I am sad for McFadden, who I thought deserved it)
• Germany’s literary  Frankfurt Peace Prize goes to a visual artist

Random culture for you. I love artists who conceive of huge ideas and then actually follow through with them. This guy drew a self portrait so big it took up most of the planet to complete.

John Grisham writes an editorial on some recent discoveries.

Guess what? There is this really neat literary device I just learned about, and it’s called “foreshadowing.” It’s this thing where, in the beginning of the story, you put in all these little “hints” about stuff that’s going to happen later on. I can’t wait to try it out!

I think the best part about foreshadowing is that it doesn’t come right out and tell everyone what’s going to happen. Instead, it does this thing called “planting a seed” in the reader’s mind, so that the ending will still be a surprise but also seem logical. At least that’s what it said on WritersZone.com, which is a really good site with lots of fun tips on writing.

Foreshadowing is awesome.

You can foreshadow anything. One thing you can foreshadow is a high-powered attorney billing the hours, making the money, and rushing relentlessly up the corporate ladder of a giant D.C. law firm, and then in an instant, it all comes undone. I am definitely going to try foreshadowing that.

A tiny service piece on the upcoming pre-Griffin award readings by the Toronto Star publishing reporter turns poetic itself when Wagner starts riffing on why we go to hear poets read. (Thanks, K)

We go to readings by our favourite prose stylists to share the company of the authors, possibly to witness a beloved novelist’s capacity for sparkling conversation as he or she parries publicly with an onstage interviewer.

By contrast, we go to poetry readings for the same reason we go concerts, to hear the poet’s own interpretation of the work – to hear where they think the emphasis in a line or stanza should properly rise and fall.

We go to hear the poets sing.

It seems like writing about your library is in fashion now. This guy talks about the library that consumed him. Mine is in danger of literally consuming me. And I mean, like, maw-opening, saliva-slathered-teeth-biting consumption.

Over the years I’ve gotten used to the inevitable questions about my accumulation of books. No, I haven’t read all of them, nor do I intend to — in some cases that’s not the point. No, I’m not a lawyer (a question usually asked by couriers, back in the days of couriers). I do have a few hundred books that I reread or consult fairly regularly, and I have a lot of books pertaining to whatever current or future projects I have on the fire, and I have many, many books speculatively pointing toward some project that is still barely a gleam in my eye. I have a lot of books that I need for reference, especially now that I live 40 minutes away from the nearest really solid library. I have some books that exist in the same capacity as the more recondite tools in the chest of a good carpenter — you may not need it more than once in 20 years, but it’s awfully nice to have it there when you do. Primarily, though, books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind — my brain isn’t big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help.

Actually, I have about five distinct libraries in my house (and storage) that have been poured into one by limited real estate: my ever growing poetry library, a general fiction/non-fiction library, Lady Ninja’s feminist/gender studies library, the boy’s children’s book library (which is no long insignificant in terms of storage space), and the piles of homeless, bug-eyed books sent to Bookninja, the ones that look like starving orphans in a food line, stacked on all available horizontal surfaces with press releases jutting from between jackets like plague-swollen tongues. “Pleeease, sir” they all say in moans or raspy voices. Gagh! I can’t feed you all!! Stop looking at me!! STOP LOOKING AT ME!!!

Well, I can’t think of a time when I’ve had more hope for American politics than today. It’s almost a fuzzy feeling that goes someway toward undoing the ulcer damage I suffered when I was 12 at the hands of that old bobble-headed, finger-on-the-button Regan.  Anyway, the NYT asks lit types what books they’d recommend to presidential candidates.

STEVEN PINKER

All three candidates should read all three of these books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris’s “Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up.” A lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today, it will help you tell your Sunnis from your Shiites, remember which Congo is which (it’s so hard to keep them straight!) and remind you whether the Waziris are on our side or not.

Obama has dibs on Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Some have criticized the uncompromising tone of this atheist best seller, but it’s mild stuff compared with the acid you guys have been flinging around. The book will put you in touch with the fastest-growing religious minority in this country, help you understand why our European allies consider us so backward and encourage you to keep your distance from kooks who call themselves spiritual leaders.

Clinton should read, and then quickly pass along, “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts,” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. A half-century of research in psychology has shown that we all overtrust our memory, judgment and rectitude. Nothing could be more important in a president than an awareness of this universal flaw.

A Guardian blogger comments on the choices here.

It’s a slowish news day and it’s nearly summer here finally, so I am giving you a list:

• James Frey on Q… “Hey, fuck you, clown”
• Bad Hemingway poems in back of book up for auction
• Borders cutting staff
• Science book prize
• Armitage writes short story for Paul Weller album
• One of the last NY private libraries gets moved and renamed

• Austen’s hair up for auction, Bookninja pleased to see trade in literary body parts still healthy
• Shortlist for crime book Daggers in UK
• Authors protest Can Studies regs
• Slushpile points to this bit on journal magazines entitled: Dear Editor: Shove It
• NYer’s summer fiction issue contains previously unpublished, and presumably unburnt, Nabokov

Faber bigwig Stephen Page itemizes the benefits of the Faber POD program for out of print classics.

Traditionally, to reprint a book economically meant printing at least 2,000 or 3,000 copies – occasionally fewer, but not easily. Many good books have gone out of print as their audience has dwindled.

Excellent books, however small their audience, deserve an ongoing life. Much that is published is not excellent, nor does it need to be to turn the wheel of the books industry. However, at the heart of Faber’s new imprint, Faber Finds, is the thrilling thought that the digital revolution holds the key to the resuscitation of many high-quality titles by good writers as printed books, not digital files.

This (not wholly original) idea came when, about a year ago, I took some time away to think about Faber and the digital revolution. I read books and articles, visited many websites and talked to people. The news seemed good. New technology was ushering in an age of abundance where niche audiences around the world would be able to cluster around the obscure.

Remember those kids who broke into the Frost house and defaced it? They have to take courses in his poetry. Yeah, that oughtta work. I give it one week before we find the well-meaning Parini mummified in spit balls and duct taped to the ceiling. Twain’s house is going through it’s own share of problems. While we’re looking for sympathy for writers’ houses, mine needs new windows. Anyone want to punish some kids by making them help? I’m all for forced, surly labour. Especially if I don’t have to pay for it.

Wendy Cope, a (former?) contender for the position of poet laureate, makes her intentions perfectly clear. But Wendy, the post is an honour, not a role. It’s like having your jersey retired in hockey. They starch the fucker and hoist it up into the rafters for the future to marvel at. Look, this jersey represents someone who was really good at the game but now does donut and snow tire commercials. The only difference is that in the poetry world we hoist the jersey up with the player still in it.

The 400-year-old institution of the poet laureate, a post held by Ben Jonson, William Wordsworth and John Betjeman, has been labelled “ridiculous” and “archaic” by Wendy Cope.

Cope, one of the country’s most widely read and best-loved poets, is seen as a frontrunner for the position after the expected retirement of Andrew Motion next year. If appointed, Cope would be the first woman laureate.

But that now seems unlikely. Answering a question at this year’s Guardian Hay festival, Cope told her audience that the laureateship is something we could do without.

In the wake of the Microsoft bailout, academic libraries pause to assess the future of digitizing their collections for the three Ps of library science: preservation, posterity, and profit. Can the world survive without two computer juggernauts duking it out over our scanned books? The answer? Not unless said companies conduct this battle via flamethrower-equipped robot.

Libraries increasingly see digitization as a preservation strategy. While Microsoft’s departure probably won’t cause significant upheaval, it will reinforce for universities the necessity of ensuring that they retain the rights to their scanned materials — or that their digitization projects will be around next semester, let alone forever. One way to do that is to continue pursuing internal, proprietary scanning projects which, for many libraries, existed for years before Google and Microsoft made it possible to vastly increase their scope and scale. Another is to work with nonprofit initiatives. But if there’s one thing libraries agree on, it’s that the competition between the two companies was healthy.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. V-S-Nai-PAUL! Woo woo! Having long ago applied for and received a licence to indiscriminately purse his lips and subtly shake his head in a disapproving manner, the great writer has now also apparently filled out form 75b-1.4a, Application in Pursuit of Permit to Issue Blanket Statements on the Worth of Every Generation But One’s Own.

The novelist V S Naipaul has damned the achievements of his literary contemporaries by declaring that there are “no more great writers”.

Naipaul, 75, who won the Booker in 1971 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, is said to have called this year’s Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival “unimportant and meaningless”.

He made his outspoken comments while at a launch of a new magazine at the Wallace Collection, in London. “Publishing has gone down in quality so much in recent years and the problem is that there is no literary life any more because there are quite simply no more great writers,” he said.

He added that he had also noticed the people who go to Hay were “incredibly ugly”. A spokeswoman from the festival said that Naipaul had not made an appearance at Hay in any official capacity.

On the pleasures and frustrations of giant books. I actually fall asleep sometimes in bed while holding a book in the air over me, and it usually drops deadweight onto my face, so I would add to this the danger of having a 800 pager fall and break your nose.

I’m not suggesting that gigantic books are useful only as an excuse for avoiding responsibility. No, those who read them also reap the psychic benefits of being admitted to an exclusive club, like Icelandic rodeo queens or American presidents whose administrations did not end in disaster. Those who have read the unabridged “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and “Remembrance of Things Past” and “Man Without Qualities” belong to a very special group because at any given time there are no more than a few hundred such people on the face of the earth, and none of them live in Tarrytown.

This is a far more exclusive group than those who have read “War and Peace” or the complete works of Jane Austen. Lots of high school kids have bluffed their way through Tolstoy, whose masterpiece is daunting but not insurmountable, and polishing off Austen is a snap because Austen is sassy and mean, and only one of her novels is more than 400 pages long. What’s more, you can always see the light at the end of the tunnel when you’re reading Austen and Tolstoy. You can never see the light at the end of the tunnel when you’re reading “The Man Without Qualities” because the author himself never saw it. Even though he spent his entire adult life working on the book, it remained unfinished at the time of his death.

It’s been a while since we’ve been able to chant “Fight! Fight!” in proper dumb-ass mob style. So it’s nice to see literary heavyweights Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul at it like a couple of kids in the schoolyard. And in poetry no less (curse the Guardian for stealing the best headline for this). It’s like Walcott got up in his grill and threw down some sick freestyle. Bread and circuses, all around! Huzzah!

Walcott’s new poem, The Mongoose, is a fast-paced, savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul’s work and personality that begins with the opening salvo: ‘I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.’ It was premiered at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica.

Telling the audience, ‘I think you’ll recognise Mr Naipaul … I’m going to be nasty’, Walcott launched into The Mongoose amid a hubbub of surprised gasps and nervous laughter from the crowd.

By way of some vicious rhyming couplets, the poem criticises Naipaul’s writing technique (’each stabbing phrase is poison’), specifically in his later novels Half a Life and Magic Seeds: ‘The plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly/The anti-hero is a prick named Willie.’

• Profile of new Random head
• Book sales stay flat in US
• It’s been 100 years since the courts allowed us to resell our books and loan them out
• Author drops case of money from airplane to promote new book (video) (this makes me so queasy)
• Bunch of authors pick best summer books