I’ve never really had a favorite YouTube channel before (except maybe if the Planet Unicorn folks had their own channel), but I have one now. Thank you Merriam-Webster Online for your Ask the Editor series. I particularly enjoy “Octopus.”
Any other super nerdy series (YouTube or otherwise) I should be checking out?
Well, the USA may have bowed out to Ghana back in June, but thanks to Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird, we are the victors in this contest. Let’s take a moment to pause for chants of “USA! USA!” and maybe a round or two of “We are the Champions.”
OK, so now that that’s done, here’s the results:
1) USA: Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: 36.59%
2) England: George Orwell’s 1984: 26.83%
3 – tie) Chile: Isabel Allende’s THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS: 9.76% and Spain: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s THE SHADOW OF THE WIND: 9.76%
4) Netherlands: Anne Frank’s DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL: 7.32%
5) Argentina: Jorge Luis Borges’s LABYRINTHS: 4.88%
6 – tie) South Korea: Hwang Sok-yong’s THE GUEST: 2.44% and Paraguay: Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, THE SUPREME: 2.44%
So, our winner is…Anonymous. Email me at labramo@dystel.com to claim your prize, which you’ll recall is a copy of one of the fine books in the contest.
And while I did promise to read the winner and report back, I’ve actually read both #1 and #2 on this list. I love them both (and still fear being in close quarters with rats as a result of the latter), so I certainly support their victory. But since the goal was to get me reading more foreign lit, I’ll skip on down to the tie for #3. I have long meant to read both, so they’re both moving up to the “to read soon” pile. Tell me which to start with below!
Thanks to everyone who participated, and I hope we all at least got some good book recommendations out of it!
You know about our contest, right? If not, read here and here.
So first, let me start by apologizing for the technical difficulties. The polling site I used to generate the polls seems to have gone down and the polls won’t load now. Anyone who tried to load that blog post (or even our home page) in the last couple days before we noticed would probably have found it very slow going. Sorry for that!
It also proves a slight problem because I’m not 100% sure about all the books now and of course hadn’t written them down. I think I’ve gotten this right, but please let me know below if I haven’t.
I did write down the countries that won the last round before the site went belly up, fortunately. In the interest of not dragging this out, let’s skip ahead to the final match, shall we! New poll pitting the last 8 against one another, below. (I’m using a different polling site and sacrificing a USB drive to the technology gods for good measure.)
Let’s get ourselves a winner, shall we? Polls open till Thursday 8/5, and the winner will be handed glory the next day.
As I’m slowly readjusting to my return home from vacation, I’m still reflecting on the best moments of last week. Chief among them seeing old friends; strolling down streets I walked down every day for more than a year; eating honeycomb ice cream (why don’t we have that here??); and watching QI (see previous parenthetical). I sort of prefer vacation to be more like living an ideal life for a week than doing fancy touristy things, and an ideal life would include more honeycomb and Stephen Fry.
One of the best moments was actually work-related: finding a book with my name in the acknowledgments on the shelves of the bookshop I used to work in. The last job I had before Jane brought me on here as her assistant was at a fantastic book store in Galway called Dubray Books. So naturally, one of my first stops when I arrived in town was to see my old coworkers and browse through the shelves. I think I may actually have scoured every shelf in the store that had a remote possibility of containing a DGLM title—spotting a few here and there, a couple editions I sold the rights for, some others where I sold translations but not international English editions, still others I had nothing to do with at all but felt proud to see nonetheless. Because of the speed with which publishing moves, especially international publishing, and the fact that not every title is going to find its way into Ireland’s relatively small market, I wasn’t sure that anything in which I was acknowledged would be there. And then I found it, Richelle Mead’s Spirit Bound. I’m not her agent, of course, but I’ve sold rights for her internationally, and she graciously thanked me for doing that. (Thanks, Richelle!) So I got to stroll around the store, book in hand, showing off my name to friends and former coworkers. It meant a great deal—a marker of how far I’ve come professionally in the 5 ½ years since I was stocking those shelves—and a comfort when I was feeling pangs of regret for having left a city I love so much. My desire to work in publishing is, after all, the primary reason I always knew I’d come home to NY after grad school.
This isn’t the only time I’ve seen a book I had a hand in out in the wild, and years into this job, I still seek them out. The first thing I did after work on pub day for the first of my books to hit the shelves was to go to the B&N where I spent 3 1/2 years of my working life and see the fruits of my labor. Every time I find myself in a bookstore with family members, I make them endure this little ritual. Just a few weeks ago, for the very first time, I saw one of my own books being read by a random person sitting across from me on the subway, and I think I may have just sat there beaming till I got off the train. These moments are why I’m in this business: getting to help books get into the hands of readers. I could never write one, and I can’t singlehandedly buy them all, but I can help keep this publishing ecosystem going in my own small way.
I think that there are small moments throughout the process for each of us here that really make us proud to get to work with our fantastic clients and help them make their dreams come true. This morning there were 185 emails in my inbox not counting the queries, spam, and things I was copied on or forwarded as an FYI. 185 things to respond to and take care of and think through and take action on, during a week in which my colleagues and many of the people I work with didn’t get in touch because they knew I was away. Plus the 10 or so contracts in my mail pile, the voicemails, the things that I have to follow up on now that I’m back. At the end of the day, we do all that because we get to be a part of something that’s pretty magical. The odds are so stacked against any book that there’s something really special about having the privilege of seeing them on the shelf and knowing that we helped to get them there.
So thanks, authors, for letting us be a part of that!
P.S. I bought Moab Is My Washpot at that very bookstore. Can’t wait to read it!
Happy summer, everybody! For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we’d hate to leave you guys hanging. It’s no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when. So we thought we’d bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year. If you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!
Numbers don’t mean a whole lot to me. I was always much better at the arts/humanities portion of my education than the math/science one. That’s not to say I don’t find math absolutely fascinating—I actually do, I swear!—I just don’t get it the way I do literature and language.
Without a ton of context, statistics don’t tend to make an impact on my brain. But there are some numbers that even the biggest numerophobe in publishing really ought to know. Here are some you might find interesting:
Some numbers are critical to understanding how publishing works, and others are just an interesting way of looking at what seems like a completely abstract world. What statistics do the rest of you find fascinating? Which sets of numbers comfort or terrify you? What numbers do you wonder about?
You know about our contest, right? If not, read here.
I think we could all learn a little something about the courage of our convictions from the world’s most awesome psychic, Paul the Octopus, so let us all embrace that spirit and go forth and declare winners! I lack the technical know-how to set up something awesome and bracket-like for you here, but polls are open until Monday the 26th, so root for your favorites below, and let’s see who makes it to the quarterfinals!
[Sorry, technical difficulties!! See the next round post!]
Thanks, everyone, for the nominees! A bunch of these have been on my to-read list for ages.
*Selected from a list of Korean novels on Library Thing!
**Technically, this isn’t from Slovakia, but it was the closest suggestion I got, since it was published in Czechoslovakia before the split.
***Vicki pointed out that while Allende is Chilean, this was published in Spain. I’m sure she’s right, but I’ll include it here because we did get another Spain entry and no other Chile ones!
Folks, if you’ve spoken to me in the last month, you’ll know that I have a serious case of World Cup fever. As a child, I was a devoted soccer player and a fairly good goalie, if I say so myself. While I’m something of a fair-weather soccer fan now, every four years I get really, really into it again. I’ve spent the last few weeks on a rollercoaster of excitement (Impressive goals! Beautiful men with even more beautiful accents! Delightful tonsorial choices!) and disappointment (my top three choice teams going out in a blaze of something other than glory). While I gear up to see my (fourth) favorite in the final, inexplicably not doomed by my supporting them, I’m also starting to feel withdrawal.
Now I’m the one who sells foreign rights around here, but I’m not particularly widely read on books in translation. In the spirit of improving that and keeping the World Cup buzz part of my life a bit longer, let’s have some fun here:
Below is a list of the “teams” in the tournament. I’m going to start this off at the round of 16, even if that means excluding Italy (sob). Here’s where you come in: in the comments below, give a shout out to your favorite book from a country listed. The first book named from each is getting selected for the national team! Next week, before I head out on vacation, I’ll set you up with the head-to-head battles. Then while I’m away, you guys can vote for your favorite book in each match. We’ll take this on through to it’s logical conclusion: the World Champion, which I’ll promise to read and report back on—and I’ll send the person who nominated said book a copy of something from the list they’d like to check out.
Fine print: books must have been translated into English, because I don’t know any other language well enough to read in it. (Way back when, my trusty French-English dictionary and I trudged through a few, but let’s just say that neither of us enjoyed it.) Let’s see if we can’t get books in for the US and England that were published in those countries but not originally in English. And if we can’t come up with something for a country that doesn’t export a whole lot to the US, the best argument for including a book for that country gets called up, much like those athletes who play for the team grandma was from instead of the one they’ve lived in their entire lives.
Don’t have any favorites for countries that haven’t already been taken? Get in the game by suggesting a new name for this contest, because mine is terrible.
I must admit that I’d be the first person here to IM my colleagues with “Reeeeeally?” followed by the latest celeb memoir listing from Pub Marketplace. In general, the trend irks me, not because it’s taking the room of other, better books, but because I simply don’t understand why there’s a market for any random has-beens to get paid to talk about their mostly mundane lives. Comedians and other performers known for their ability to string words together are fine with me, and occasionally someone’s life is spectacularly weird, but once upon a time sitcom actresses with the same story as every other memoir on the shelf just boggle my mind. And yet people care. They care in droves. It’s a market I simply cannot comprehend.
Until now, that is. I’m beginning to suspect my confusion is a product of age. Celeb memoirs have, until recently, by and large been written by people who barely register as famous to me and many of my contemporaries. (Which is probably for the best, since you should live at least a reasonable share of a life before writing about it.) Before Valerie Bertinelli became a bestselling author, I knew only that she’d been on a sitcom that happened not to be in my steady childhood diet of crappy TV and that she’d been a spokesperson for a weight loss company. Naturally, I couldn’t have been bothered to read her memoir on the grounds that she’s famous. And those people who were truly famous to me who happened to have book deals—Tori Spelling, for example—didn’t come along so often that the odds were in favor of my actually caring they existed.
But this changes everything. Sam Seaborn AND Punky Brewster publishing memoirs in the same year! This is the greatest celebrity memoir news of all time. I was genuinely disappointed when Rob Lowe canceled his first book deal. 13-year-old Lauren was a devoted fan of many an 80s movie, but St. Elmo’s Fire was by far at the top of the list. Not to mention that The West Wing is the best TV show of all time, and anyone who thinks otherwise is mistaken. Punky Brewster was my childhood hero (and Halloween costume at least twice). For probably the first time, the authors of celebrity memoirs actually star in my DVD collection.
I’m still not sure I’m going to read their memoirs, I must admit. I suspect I know the more interesting parts of both their back stories, and much as I get the impression both are at least reasonably intelligent, I’m not really that eager to hear their lives in their own words. (If Rob Lowe’s book features a photo insert, I’ll at least browse it at the bookstore, however, because he’s awfully pretty, even in St. Elmo’s Fire, where he looks kind of ridiculous.)
Whose celeb memoir would I actually read? Well, I got Colin Ferguson’s as a gift for Christmas, and it’s on my to-read pile, because that man is a genius. I plan, eventually, to get around to Kathy Griffin’s. And I’ve been meaning to pick up Stephen Fry’s. Aaron Sorkin’s, which must come to pass eventually, definitely. But it’s harder for those who are famous for something other than their ability to express their thoughts. Maybe if Johnny Depp wrote one, because he seems like an interesting and intelligent guy.
What about you guys? Read any celebrity memoirs that are genuinely more interesting than a cursory glance at the author’s Wikipedia page? (Seriously, click that–he should write a second memoir, covering the later, wackier years.) And who hasn’t written one who really should?
Trolling the internet for a blog topic, I stumbled across this Gawker piece by Richard Lawson on why one shouldn’t hate Simon Rich just because nepotism probably accounts at least somewhat for his success (and recent book-to-film deal). I’ll admit that I had missed this deal announcement, but I probably would’ve at least scoffed had I first seen it out of this context.
Lawson sums up my (and perhaps the average person’s) gut reaction to such things thusly:
But still, in a country where so many doors are closed to so many people, that a twentysomething born into a life of ease can just saunter in and get exactly what he wants on the first try seems to fly in the face of our noble belief in the meritocracy.*
But he also goes on to say that sometimes, we really ought to just suck it up and put all that aside. As he points out, why bother to wish that other people struggle because we do? Is it a belief in merit or just envy? Sometimes geniuinely talented people get an easy in, not because it’s the only way they can succeed, but because it’s not sensible to reject the easy in on principle.
The piece is well argued, and I think a good reminder not to fall into the trap of begrudging someone success. In publishing, I think it’s especially easy to get caught up in looking for someone to blame. There’s celebrity memoirs; a publishing system full of gatekeepers; bottom line thinking; all the people taking the supposedly (but actually not at all) “easy” way out by writing something trendy or very commercial; and yes, too, the well connected. But even if the system is imperfect and quality isn’t always the deciding factor, where does bitterness get you?
It’s natural to be annoyed, but don’t let that drive you. Sometimes we can all use the reminder to breathe deep and worry not about everybody else, but instead about how to achieve our goals independent of whether anyone else achieves theirs.
*I learned from the comments to that Gawker post that the term “meritocracy” was coined (satirically) by Toby Young‘s father, which seems delightfully a propos.
Reading Miriam’s post the other day, I was totally delighted by all the great/bad books. I’m not sure I can make a top five list, because I’m incredibly contrary and like to overthink lists before I commit to them, but Moby Dick, Jane Eyre, and the collected works of Charles Dickens (sorry, Jim!) and John Steinbeck (sorry, Rachel!) would at least be in my top 25.
The thing that struck me most, though, was several of you mentioned reading these books multiple times. I particularly loved that Kerry went back to a book she hated the first time, which I can’t even imagine. I just can’t do it, myself. With very few exceptions (the odd children’s book I don’t remember well; Gatsby once to try to understand a reference to it that still makes no sense), the only books I re-read are manuscripts I’m editing. Even when I love the books, I find re-reading has none of the enjoyment for me that reading for the first time does. I find it near impossible to focus, knowing what’s coming next. (It’s probably for the best that I never became a copyeditor, for that and other reasons.)
The idea doesn’t bother me: On the one hand, there are so many books to read, it seems a waste to read one of them multiple times. On the other hand, you’re never going to read them all anyway, so what’s the harm? I just can’t actually do it in practice.
Anyone else? Re-readers, tell me, why? Do you easily read every word, have no objection to skimming, or struggle with the impulse? And is there a certain kind of book you find re-readable when others aren’t? A thriller doesn’t sound like much fun the second time. Enlighten me below!
August 13, 2010 
DG&B 