Oliver Marre, a blogger for The Telegraph is on a mission to unseat Dan Brown and The Lost Symbol from the top of the book charts.
The surprise fall of Simon Cowell as pop chart king spurs him on toward victory…
Archive for 2009
Borders UK shuts up shop
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009I may mock Texas but things are bad in the UK too. Forty five Borders bookshops are closing for good probably about now as I write this post. What a mess and I pity those employees who are going to have a thoroughly miserable jobless Christmas.
El Paso is America’s least literate city
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009The bad news just keeps coming for Texas. First, Laredo is left without a bookshop and now El Paso finishes bottom of a survey revealing America’s most literate cities. Seattle is the winner (it seems to always finish top of these lists) and El Paso was joined at the foot of the table by another city in the Lone Star State, Corpus Christi.
Texas – what is going on? Pull yourself together.
The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
I love the Coen Brothers. My favourites are probably Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. But my VERY favourite is without a doubt The Big Lebowski. These are the movies I buy, knowing that yes, I really will watch them again and again. And I’m not alone. There’s an almost-reverence among fans of the Coen Brothers, and The Big Lebowski in particular. Which is why the existence of the book The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers doesn’t surprise me.
Author Cathleen Falsanti, also a Coen fan, began noticing recurrent and complementary themes of morality, honor and right and wrong underlying the more overt storylines of the films, which are often anything but moral in appearance, ranging from ridiculous and ludicrous to shockingly violent. She became interested and perhaps a little obsessed, and the book was born. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m curious to – it would be a great gift item for movie buffs or theology students with a sense of humour.
Stephen King’s Top 10 Books of 2009
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009How can it be a year already since I posted Stephen King’s Top 10 Books of 2008?!
The year has zoomed by and it is time for his Top 10 Books of 2009 . (Note: The books weren’t all published during the past year. These are his choices from the books he’s read.) Since we seem to be hurtling through time anyhow, without further ado, here are Stephen King’s Top 10 Books of 2009 as published on EW.com.
10. Rough Country by John Sandford 
King says: Sandford’s mystery-suspense novels are rich explorations of what it is to be a plain old American guy. This tale is rich, satisfying, and frequently hilarious.
Book description: John Sanford’s second adventure of Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers. Virgil’s always been known for having a somewhat active, er, social life, but he’s probably not going to be getting too many opportunities for that during his new case. While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, he gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only, a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery, commune with nature, and while it didn’t start out to be a place mostly for those with Sapphic inclinations, that’s pretty much what it is today.
Which makes things all the more complicated for Virgil, because as he begins investigating, he finds a web of connections between the people at the resort, the victim, and some local women, notably a talented country singer. The more he digs, the more he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions, encompassing a multitude of motivations: jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger, fear. Then he finds that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated one, the year before. And that there’s about to be a third, definitely related one, any time now. And as for the fourth . . . well, Virgil better hope he can catch the killer before that happens. Because it could be his own.
9. Ravens by George Dawes Green 
King says: Bad boys Shaw McBride and Romeo Zderko decide to cut themselves in on a big lottery win by taking the Boatwright family hostage. When Green isn’t making you laugh, he’s making you bite your nails down to the bleeding point.
Book description: The Boatwrights just won 318 million dollars in the GeorgiaState lottery. It’s going to be the worst day of their lives.
When Shaw McBride and Romeo Zderko pull up at a convenience store off I-95 in Georgia, their only thought is to fix a leaky tire and be on their way again to Florida-away from their dull Ohio tech-support jobs. But this happens to be the store from which a 318,000,000 million dollar Jackpot ticket has just been sold — and when a pretty clerk accidentally reveals to Shaw the identity of the winning family, he hatches a ferociously audacious scheme: He and Romeo will squeeze the family for half their prize.
That night, he visits the Boatwright home and takes the family hostage, while Romeo patrols the streets nearby, prepared to murder the Boatwrights’ loved ones at any sign of resistance. At first, the family offers none. But Shaw’s plot depends on maintaining constant fear-merciless, unfaltering terror-and soon, under the pressure, everyone’s sanity begins to unravel . . .
At once frightening, comic, and suspenseful, Ravens is a wholly original and utterly compelling novel from one of our most talented writers.
King says: If you’re not hip to rambling adventurer Jack Reacher, you’ve missed a mother lode of escapist entertainment. In the wonderfully tense opening, Reacher spots a late-night subway-rider who looks like a suicide bomber. The thrills build from there. Child’s writing is lean and wiry.
Book description: New York City. Two in the morning. A subway car heading uptown. Jack Reacher, plus five other passengers. Four are okay. The fifth isn’t.
In the next few tense seconds Reacher will make a choice–and trigger an electrifying chain of events in this gritty, gripping masterwork of suspense by #1 New York Times bestseller Lee Child.
Susan Mark was the fifth passenger. She had a lonely heart, an estranged son, and a big secret. Reacher, working with a woman cop and a host of shadowy feds, wants to know just how big a hole Susan Mark was in, how many lives had already been twisted before hers, and what danger is looming around him now.
Because a race has begun through the streets of Manhattan in a maze crowded with violent, skilled soldiers on all sides of a shadow war. Susan Mark’s plain little life was critical to dozens of others in Washington, California, Afghanistan . . . from a former Delta Force operator now running for the U.S. Senate, to a beautiful young woman with a fantastic story to tell–and to a host of others who have just one thing in common: They’re all lying to Reacher. A little. A lot. Or maybe just enough to get him killed.
In a novel that slams through one hairpin surprise after another, Lee Child unleashes a thriller that spans three decades and gnaws at the heart of America . . . and for Jack Reacher, a man who trusts no one and likes it that way, it’s a mystery with only one answer–the kind that comes when you finally get face-to-face and look your worst enemy in the eye.
King says: The last years of Charles Dickens, as narrated by his increasingly unstable colleague Wilkie Collins. This is a beautifully realized historical novel, but it’s also a modern tale that chronicles the descent of a great mind into dope-fueled madness.
Book description: On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens–at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world–hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.
Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying?
Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens’s life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens’s friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), Drood explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author’s last years and may provide the key to Dickens’s final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.
6. Shatter by Michael Robotham 
King says: Plenty of people saw the naked woman jump to her death, but professor Joe O’Loughlin discovers the lady was afraid of heights. Someone out there has become an architect of suicide, and soon he’s got his sights set on O’Loughlin¹s family. The most suspenseful book I read all year.
Book description: In Michael Robotham’s latest thriller, psychologist Joe O’Loughlin—the appealing hero of Suspect—tries to prevent a suicide and finds himself locked in a deadly duel with a very clever killer.
Joe O’Loughlin is on familiar territory—standing on a bridge high above a flooded gorge, trying to stop a distraught woman from jumping. She is naked, wearing only high-heel shoes, sobbing into a cell phone. Suddenly, she turns to him and whispers, “You don’t understand,” and lets go. Joe is shattered by the suicide and haunted by his failure to save the woman, until her teenage daughter finds him and reveals that her mother would never have committed suicide—not like that. She was terrified of heights. Compelled to investigate, Joe is soon obsessed with discovering who was on the other end of the phone. What could have driven her to commit such a desperate act? Whose voice? What evil?
Having devoted his career to repairing damaged minds, Joe must now confront an adversary who tears them apart: a man who searches for the cracks in a person’s psyche and claws his fingers inside, destroying what makes them whole.
With pitch-perfect dialogue, believable characters, and intriguingly unpredictable plot twists, Shatter is guaranteed to keep even the most avid thriller readers riveted long into the night.
King says: This surreal novel can’t be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory. Suffice it to say it concerns what may be the most horrifying real-life mass-murder spree of all time: as many as 400 women killed in the vicinity of Juarez, Mexico. Given this as a backdrop, the late Bolano paints a mural of a poverty-stricken society that appears to be eating itself alive. And who cares? Nobody, it seems.
Book description: Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman–these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.
4. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie 
King says: 1,001 children are born in India at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947; this epic social comedy follows one of them through a lifetime of adventures worthy of Dickens.
Book description: Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.
This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.
3. Hollywood Moon by Joseph Wambaugh 
King says: Only Dream City could produce cops as cool as Flotsam and Jetsam (surfer cops), Nate Weiss (the aspiring-actor cop), and Dana Vaughn (the cynical, fortysomething mom-cop). The best of Wambaugh’s Hollywood Station novels.
Book description: There’s a saying at Hollywood station that the full moon brings out the beast–rather than the best–in the precinct’s citizens. One moonlit night, LAPD veteran Dana Vaughn and “Hollywood” Nate Weiss, a struggling-actor-turned cop, get a call about a young man who’s been attacking women. Meanwhile, two surfer cops known as Flotsam and Jetsam keep bumping into an odd, suspicious duo–a smooth-talking player in dreads and a crazy-eyed, tattooed biker. No one suspects that all three dubious characters might be involved in something bigger, more high-tech, and much more illegal. After a dizzying series of twists, turns, and chases, the cops will find they’ve stumbled upon a complex web of crime where even the criminals can’t be sure who’s conning whom.
2. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
King says: Thank God I read the novel before seeing the movie, which is a pale imitation in spite of great acting. Set in 1955, Road focuses on a suburban couple living what looks like the American postwar dream. But Frank Wheeler’s fantasy life as an intellectual rebel is just a hollow pose, and when April makes the mistake of believing he’s serious about busting out of the rut they’ve dug for themselves, tragedy ensues. Skip the DVD; read the book.
Book description: In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank’s job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.
With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
1. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
King says: This is a terrifying, engrossing ghost story set in the English countryside not long after World War II, but it’s so much more. Although told in straightforward prose, this is a deeply textured and thoughtful piece of work. Several sleepless nights are guaranteed.
Book description: In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners – mother, son and daughter – are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own.
But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
Laredo – the town without a bookstore
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009I’ve been thinking about Laredo in Texas for a few days now and wondering how on Earth a city of 250,000 can be left without a bookshop. The story emerged last week. Barnes & Noble is to close Laredo’s last remaining one, a (profitable) B. Daltons. They might get a large format Barnes & Noble in 18 months. In Victoria in British Columbia, where AbeBooks is headquartered, you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a bookstore – Chapters, Munros, Bolen Books, Russell Books, Rennaissance, Grafton and many others – and this city is roughly the same size as Laredo.
I remember touring around a small Gulf Island called Gabriola between here and mainland Canada a couple of years ago and discovering what looked like a gas station for boats on the edge of a dock. What intrigued me was the life-size cardboard cut-out of Harry Potter standing by the front door. I wandered in and realised this gas station was also a small bookstore, packed with secondhand and new books. I think there were one or two dwellings within a kilometre of this place and yet there was the bookshop serving the boating community.
I know the booklovers in Laredo are going to have to resort to buying on the internet but what a sorry state of affairs for a decent-sized city. We’d much rather see a town with a thriving book community than one without. Let’s hope somebody sees an opportunity in this situation and opens up a bookshop.
Literary New Year’s Resolutions
Monday, December 21st, 2009A Huffington Post entry today found Celeste Ng talking about her New Year’s resolutions, specifically in regard to her reading habits. I like that idea. She and I sound like similar readers, so mine might be similar, but I’ll give it a go. And for those who remember (I can’t find the blog entry – blast!), I decided last January that 2009 would be the year in which I read as many books and watched as many films as possible. With the year drawing to a close, I’m annoyed because my accurate recording as become very lazy over the past 2 months or so, so even with thinking back and recreating, the list will likely be shorter than it should. But all in all, pretty good. More on that later.
So, for posterity, here are my Literary New Year’s Resolutions for 2010:
1) Read some nonfiction. Doesn’t matter what kind or even how much, but I will read at least one work of nonfiction in 2010.
2) No new books! I spend too much money on new books too frequently, and of anyone I know I have the most access to/knowledge about used ones, so that’s silly.
3) This is uber-nerdy, but I used to do it, and I liked it – Keep a pad/pen next to the bed, and when I come across a word I don’t know, write it down. Once a month, look them all up.
4) Speaking of which, read books that might contain words I don’t know. I tend to shy away from books I feel might be too challenging, and I’d like to shed that fear and dive in. So I will read three books that intimidate me this year.
5) Iris Murdoch, David Foster Wallace. I will read both these authors this year.
That’s it for me. I do pretty well with books overall, anyway. What about you? Anyone out there have any good book intentions for 2010?
Following in the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes
Monday, December 21st, 2009How would you like to take a walk around London, tracing the fictitious history of the great detective Sherlock Holmes?
Sorry, I’m not offering a free trip to the UK or to the big city itself, but if you’re lucky enough to be in London, I’ll give you a tip on where to find a fantastic free self-guided tour. Or, if like me you’re far, far away (or even just far away), you won’t be left out – there’s a fantastic slideshow tour for armchair travelers.
The Guardian and SoundMap are celebrating the opening of the new Sherlock Holmes movie with a special downloadable audio walk.
First, you may wish to download the map as a reference. If you’re able to physically do the London walk, you can download the full tour and transfer it over to an MP3 player.
If you’re doing the armchair tour as I will be, I recommend brewing a pot of tea, loading a plate with scones or Jammie Dodgers (Peek Freans Fruit Creme will do) and sitting back and watching the slideshow tour. You could even end off the event by making something from Dining with Sherlock Holmes: A Baker Street Cookbook.
Ahh to be in London in December! :)
Most Collectible Books of the Decade
Monday, December 21st, 2009AbeBooks has compiled a list of the most collectible books published between 2000 and 2009. These hyper-modern books became collectible in a hurry.
1 The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
The original edition – there are only seven handmade copies. Our sister company, Amazon, purchased the only one available for £1,950,000 in a charity auction in 2007. Bound in brown Moroccan leather, the books are embellished with silver ornaments and mounted moonstones. AbeBooks sold a signed collector’s edition (limited to 100 copies) for $6,000.
2 Peter Beard Art Edition by Peter Beard
Published by Taschen in 2006, the Art Edition of this famous photographer’s work was limited to 2250 signed and numbered copies. The most expensive copy sold by AbeBooks went for $10,808. One of the most lavish books ever printed.
3 Any post-2000 Harry Potter book signed by J.K. Rowling.
In 2000, J.K. Rowling changed from an up-and-coming author into a worldwide literary superstar. As her fame grew, her book tours became shorter. Today, any book signed by Rowling has instant value. A signed first edition of Order of the Phoenix sold for $7,657 on AbeBooks in 2007.
4 Any of Dean Koontz’s Odd Series if signed & lettered
Koontz published Odd Thomas in 2003 and has added three more to this series. Charnel House has produced a limited edition of each novel (signed and lettered) and these are highly desirable. AbeBooks sold a copy of Forever Odd, signed and lettered, for $4,550.
5 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
This novel was in its 104th printing when AbeBooks sold a signed first edition for $4,260 in May 2006 as the movie version was being released – it was the highest price ever paid for a copy of this bestselling thriller. Signed copies are treasured as Brown’s touring days are over.
6 No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Published in 2005, this is a novel about a drug deal in the desert and it was quickly turned into an excellent movie. Signed first editions sell for around $800 to $1,000. A numbered deluxe edition, limited to 75 copies, sold for $4,500 on AbeBooks.
7 Antarctica by Pat & Rosemarie Keough
An incredible photography book published in 2007, this huge book weighs 27 pounds and was limited to 950 leather-bound copies. It was part of an effort to raise money to prevent the extinction of the albatross. The most expensive copy sold by AbeBooks went for $4,000.
8 Devil May Care (Bentley edition) by Sebastian Faulks
Writing as Ian Fleming, Faulks breathed new life into the James Bond franchise in 2008. Doubleday produced these leather-bound beauties complete with a scale model of a Bentley on the cover. Only 300 copies were printed worldwide. AbeBooks has sold a boxed limited edition (not the Bentley) copy, one of only 500, for $870.
9 Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Published in 2001, the Canadian Alfred A Knopf editions are ones that matter. This novel won the 2002 Man Booker Prize and achieved a remarkable combination of global popularity and critical acclaim. Most expensive copy sold by AbeBooks went for $3,720.
10 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Who needs reviews and critical acclaim when word of mouth can deliver bestseller status? Published in 2003 with a small initial print run, first editions are treasured by fans of Hosseini’s writing. The most expensive copy sold by AbeBooks was snapped up for $2,750.
Click here to see the full top 35 most collectible books of the decade (2000-2009).
Literay salons back in fashion
Monday, December 21st, 2009“I’m just nipping out down the literary salon,” is something said by authors like Louis de Bernières, Geoff Dyer and Jake Arnott, according to The Observer. Of course, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the other Inklings in Oxford preferred to attend the literary pub – the Eagle and Child, which always used to serve a nice pint of bitter.
Book theft
Monday, December 21st, 2009Book stealing never goes out of fashion and, of course, Christians are the worst of the lot, according to this article.
Best Words of the Past Decade
Thursday, December 17th, 2009I love this post on The Guardian’s Book Blog – it’s a collection of “neoglisms” (new words) from the past 10 years. Here’s a selection of my favourites from the list but it is worth a visit to The Guardian to see the full list.
- witches’ knickers (Ireland) shopping bags caught in trees, flapping in the wind
- glomp (US campus) to jump and hug someone from behind
- trout pout (UK) the effects of collagen injections that produce prominent, comically oversized lips resembling those of a dead fish
- smirting (New York) flirting between people who are smoking cigarettes outside a no-smoking building.
- huburb (US) its own little city within another city
- elevens the creases between one’s eyebrows from squinting or frowning
- California licence plate (US) a tattoo on the lower back
- open the kimono (US) to expose or reveal secrets or proprietary information
- banana fold (North Carolina) fat below the buttocks
- Anna Kournikova when an Ace and King are held (allegedly so called because it looks a good hand but in fact rarely wins anything)
- menoporsche (UK) the phenomenon of middle-aged men attempting to recapture their lost youth by buying an expensive sports car
- fox hole (UK) the area beneath desk where telephone calls can take place peacefully
- twuncing (UK) when walkers drive two cars to the end point of their walk, and then ride together in one car to the starting point; after the walk they drive together to the starting point to collect the other vehicle
- catch a falling knife to buy a stock as its price is going down, in hopes that it will go back up, only to have it continue to fall
Having a Ball With Rare Children’s Books – Former NFL Star Auctions Collection
Thursday, December 17th, 2009It seems an odd combination but really why shouldn’t a professional football player collect books?
Pat McInally did that. In 1975, after signing a rookie contract with the Cincinnati Bengals, did he rush out to buy a snazzy car or upgrade his living accommodations? Nope – he bought a rare book collection because he wanted the edition of Winnie the Pooh it included.
A couple of years later, he took a day trip by plane from Cincinnati to the West Coast so that he could bid on two James Bond books, Casino Royale and Live and Let Die, inscribed by Ian Fleming.
Over the past 35 years, McInally has put together quite an impressive rare books collection. But in a move to “tidy up” his collection, he auctioned off 101 of the books.
The auction which included Beatrix Potter’s personal copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, a first edition The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, signed copies of Winnie the Pooh, and a deluxe Harry Potter set inscribed by J.K. Rowling.
“The hardest thing to sell is Beatrix Potter’s ‘Peter Rabbit,’” McInally said. “That was her personal copy that she had bound. No one even knew it existed until six years ago or so. If I hadn’t made the commitment to (auction house) Profiles in History to give them some unusual material, that’s the one I would have kept.”
The auction took place yesterday and you can see the list of the books McInally parted with and the prices each sold for, on the auction website.
