Reading Copy

Belgian authors don’t get an awful lot of press on the world stage. Paul Verhaeghen is changing that. A few hours ago, he won The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel Omega Minor. He also translated the book.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize celebrates an exceptional work of fiction by a living author which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the UK.

Omega Minor is Verhaeghen’s second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. The author is a cognitive psychologist, and focuses on memory and the basic aspects of ageing.

The purse is £10,000 but the author isn’t taking accepting the cash himself.

Popularity: 7% [?]

We have a new feature on AbeBooks to mark the 75th anniversary of the Nazi book burnings on 10 May 1933. We’re not celebrating this anniversary, we’re simply remembering that it happened and examining its impact. Aside from revealing some of the books and authors who were banned and burnt by the Nazis, we have interviewed three experts on book burning.

Matt Fishburn is a rare bookseller in Sydney, Australia - he’s also the author of a soon-to-be published book called Book Burning. Rebecca Knuth is a professor at the University of Hawaii and the author of two books on book burning. The third interviewee is Shaun Bythell, who runs The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland’s Book Town. I got to know Shaun a couple of years ago when he conducted a book burning to promote Wigtown’s festival - it worked as he walked into several major UK papers. Shaun has a completely different perspective on book burning - he’s a dealer and looks at books rather differently because they become inventory and have a monetary value.

Have you ever tried to burn a book? I’ve tried to burn an old telephone directory and it didn’t burn easily. You’d think it would go up in flames very quickly but oxygen can’t fuel the fire unless you start ripping out chunks of pages. It’s a beautiful irony that books, paper-based objects, are tough to burn.

You can watch Shaun’s Wigtown book burning on YouTube. They clearly put a lot of work and thought into the event.

A few books about book burning…..
Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History, Lucien X. Polastron
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, Rebecca Knuth
Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, Rebecca Knuth
They Burned The Books, Stephen Vincent Benet

Popularity: 10% [?]

Several things catch my eye this morning….

The AP reports how a children’s book about a two-dad penguin family is still making conservatives very angry in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee etc. Not even worth a sarcastic comment….

Nasty body-builder picture book showcased by The Independent. Yuck - check out the slide show for one particuarly horrid shot.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The Times has a feature on Paddington Bear, who is 50 years old. The Paddington Bear TV series played a small role in my childhood. The five-minute shows would be on just before the six o’clock news on BBC1 just as the children’s TV programs were wrapping up for the evening. The voice of Michael Hordern comes back to me very clearly.

Of course, Paddington did sell out - check out his attempt to flog Marmite, the most disgusting substance known to man.

Popularity: 15% [?]

In The Independent…..writers who cannot write and Salman Rushdie (who can write) admits the fatwa made him into a nicer person (and helped him get to know some really nice bodyguards.)

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Writers and poets from the Hay on Wye literary festival could be going to prison reports the BBC.

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The Catholic Explorer has an interview with Anne Rice - author of Interview With the Vampire

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There was a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the activities one can undertake when stranded on a plane trip without any books.

We’d barely cleared Italian airspace, though, before the screen in front of me - and every other one on the plane - froze, flickered and then displayed something that looked an awful lot like Microsoft’s dreaded Blue Screen of Death. Every video channel went dead; every audio channel went silent. For the next half hour the crew tried to reboot the entertainment system half a dozen times, and finally gave up.

Entertainment-wise, we were on our own.

It is an interesting quandary, and readers from Shelf Awareness have been writing in with their own solutions…

Jane O’Connor, editor at Penguin Books for Young Readers, offers yet another literary time killer:

Write the alphabet down one column. Pick a phrase from newspaper, book, airplane mag, whatever. Then pair the first 26 letters of the phrase with the alphabet letter. For example, if the phrase was “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy . . .” your letter pairs would be: AT, BH, CE, DQ, EU, and so on. Then try to come with a famous name for each pair: Arthur Treacher (of Fish and Chips), Bob Herbert (of the New York Times) and so on. Fun to play competitively. Set a time limit. You get one point for a name that another contestant has, two points if you’re the only one with the name.

It sounds like a fun game, and sounds a lot like one I play with friends on road trips. You start with an authors name, “Charles Dickens” and the next player in line has to say an authors name starting with the final letter of the previous author “Sylvia Plath”… then “Harold Pinter” and so on. The rule is you can’t repeat an author twice, and usually we play high stakes - If you can’t come up with an author, or if you repeat, you have to buy the next round of coffees (if we are driving, if we are at the pub its a different game all together)

It may sound easy but there’s a skill in the game, such as trying to work in authors with the last name FOX, because there are only so many blokes named Xavier…

Popularity: 20% [?]

Geri Halliwell says her Ugenia Lavender children’s books are “a rebirth of girl power.” Lord - give me strength.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Jonathan Franzen says the New York Times’ lead fiction reviewer is the stupidest person in the Big Apple. Excellent - I love a good fight.

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While attempting to research a biography on Louis XIV’s mistress Veronica Buckley stumbled upon the lost diaries of the former king of France. The problem was the diary was not written 282 years ago, but in 1998.

What Buckley quotes is in fact the work of François Bluche. In 1998 this French academic decided to imagine what the king’s journals might have been like, by piecing together information gleaned from myriad historical documents. The result was a book, Le Journal secret de Louis XIV, which Buckley got hold of and used as a primary source.

I think this brings the fraudulent or recalled memoir/biography count to four? or is it five? this year…

More in The Guardian

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Douglas Todd, a religion and spirituality reporter for the Vancouver Sun, was supposed to interview touted atheist Richard Dawkins (author of the God Delusion). However Dawkins refused to do the interview. Eventually an interview was arranged with a different reporter.

You would think that someone like Dawkins would be just itching to get into it with a religion reporter…

Popularity: 18% [?]

There is a nice interview with Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid about their most recent book, Beyond The Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China which combines the best elements of life cooking and traveling though China.

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James Frey is back, and this time he is admitting it’s a novel

Popularity: 13% [?]

LA Times Festival of the Book occurred this past weekend in LA. The AbeBooks staffers who were at the fair will probably talk about it in tomorrows blog posts but today, to tide you over, here are the winners of the LA Times Book Awards:

Fiction: Andrew O’Hagan - Be Near Me
Current Interest: Elizabeth D. Samet - Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Science & Technology: Douglas Hofstadter - I Am A Strange Loop
Young Adult Fiction: Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain
Poetry: Stanley Plumly - Old Heart: Poems
Mystery/Thriller: Karin Fossum - The Indian Bride
History: Tim Weiner - Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Biography: Simon Sebag Montefiore - Young Stalin

Popularity: 14% [?]