Category Archives: reading

August 06, 2010   DG&B   contest, fun, international literature, Lauren, reading  
3

Contest: World champion!

by Lauren

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!

August 06, 2010   DG&B   favorites, fun, Rachel, reading  
4

Literary fashionistas

by Rachel

I’m no fashionista, yet I find it fascinating reading descriptions of characters and their garb in books. I remember reading Charlie and The Chocolate Factory as a kid and being blown away by Roald Dahl’s descriptions, and then watching the movie—wow! So, this article by Judy Berman piqued my interest and made me think about some of the best-dressed book figures out there. I’m going to be cliché here and vote for Ian Fleming’s James Bond as my best-dressed literary hero. I also agree with a lot of the names on Berman’s list—Dorian Gray, Scarlett O’Hara, Emma Bovary—what great examples of fashion-conscious characters.

I’d love to hear who you think is one of the best-dressed literary figures out there! Or perhaps the worst (if I recall anything from my college reading, Dorothea Brooke from George Eliot’s Middlemarch wasn’t such a sharp dresser).

August 02, 2010   DG&B   feedback, fun, Jim, reading  
21

Bookaholic?

by Jim

It’s finally August which means a few things: I’m counting down to vacation (five days!), New York smells like hot garbage, and publishing is in its slowest season. I’ve set a goal of clearing my Kindle before I head out of town on Saturday. It’s an ambitious goal, but so far seems doable (check with me on Thursday).

So what does that mean? One week of entirely non-work reading. It’s the week I have in mind all year long when I hit the registers of a bookstore laden down with things I know I don’t have time to read. Book shopping is my crack. It always makes me feel good. Until I go to put the books on shelves and realize how much I have that I still haven’t read from the last time I went shopping. And the time before. And the time before that. And 2006-9.

Come Friday, I expect this to happen: I go through my bookshelves picking out my vacation reading. I end up with maybe 12 novels. As I start to whittle down, I realize that none of these are what I really want to read on vacation. I reshelve everything and start over. This time I come up with 15 novels. I narrow to five, and I’m completely sure of them. They go into my suitcase. Saturday morning: I pull all five out, throw them on the coffee table, and randomly grab the first four things I see. I get to the airport and drop $75 in the bookstore.

Does anyone else have this problem? We’re all readers here, so I feel like I can’t be alone in this. But, I mean…I work in publishing. I get free books! And I STILL can’t avoid the pull of bookstores.

So fess up: does anyone else have the Barnes and Noble and the Borders frequent shopper card…even though they prefer shopping in independent bookstores? Has anyone else bought three copies of the same book because they just kept thinking it looked awesome? Or shown up late to dinners, shows, movies because they were lost in the stacks of beautiful books waiting to be read?

And, okay, let’s say I do end up shopping again for my vacation reads. Anyone fall completely head over heels for a book lately and just HAVE to recommend it?

July 30, 2010   DG&B   contest, fun, international literature, Lauren, reading  
1

Contest: Into the finals

by Lauren

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.

July 30, 2010   DG&B   fun, opinion, Rachel, reading  
4

Fantasy and self-help and shanking

by Rachel

With Lindsay Lohan tucked away in jail, and a renewed interest in life behind bars, I think it’s time to come clean about my fascination with prison (and prisoners). From long drives while living in California to see a teeny glimpse of San Quentin, to thinking Prison Break was one of the greatest TV shows ever made, to spending days watching those Lockup documentaries while visiting family over the holidays—I’m kind of obsessed with what goes on in the pen.

So, I was rather intrigued to read Kenneth Hartman’s article on Huffington Post . Drawing from his 30 continuous years in a California slammer, Hartman gives his readers an exclusive rundown on prison reading—what genre would you expect to be the most popular? The answer might surprise you. What also might surprise you is that Hartman no longer has time to read books; he’s become an avid magazine reader due to the “oddly busy nature” of his life. Fair enough.

Something also rather interesting was this article in The Guardian that pointed out an alternative to prison terms; being sentenced to read! This saves the government money as well as steers people in a different (/better) direction.

What books do you think would be effective for rehabilitation programs like these?

July 29, 2010   DG&B   endings, fun, Jessica, opinion, reading  
13

All’s well that ends well

by Jessica

Last weekend I saw Inception, a film that I mostly enjoyed; I could have done without the alpine fortress/firefights on skis, the relentless soundtrack, and the director’s obvious desire to offset tricky ideas with cool special effects (Thinking got you down? Watch this!) but unlike many audience members, I did like the ending. It was, I thought, a niftily ambiguous conclusion, and it called to mind a polite but on-going discussion I’m having with a writer I know, whose novel features an ending that I find indeterminate but unsatisfying. How a book ends matters to me—if the resolution feels forced, artificial, or worse yet, phoned in, I feel cheated, and perfectly entitled to hurl the offending volume across the room.

While mulling over endings, both ideal and infuriating, I noted that The Millions has a terrific article on this very subject. This is the wonderful thing about the internet, one need not go far to discover that the same ideas you’ve been kicking around in an inchoate, undisciplined sort of way have been thought-through, researched, and then recorded, in clear, lively prose. Or such was my experience with Literary Endings: Pretty Bows, Blunt Axes, and Modular Furniture.  In it the, author creates a taxonomy of possible endings, cites examples of these different approaches, and offers up some of her favorites. To my her list I’d add: Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People; Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca, Scott Turow’s clever twist in Presumed Innocent; Ian McEwan’s Atonement; Clea, the whole fourth installment of Lawrence Durell’s Alexandria Quartet, in which all manner of hazy details snap into sharp and shocking focus. My husband offered up Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Bleak, but kick-in-the-stomach effective.

Your favorite endings? Least favorite endings?

July 26, 2010   DG&B   fun, graphic novels, Jim, reading  
14

Jim reads comic books

by Jim

I remember first becoming aware of the concept that a comic book could also be a “real” book around the time that Maus hit Entertainment Weekly’s best of the year list about a million years ago. In the years since I started working at DGLM, graphic novels have gained more and more traction in sales and become increasingly respectable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about them for one incredibly obvious reason: I’ve started selling them. In the coming years, adaptations of a few of the novels I’ve sold will be hitting stores in graphic novel form. And as we move forward with these projects, I’m reading more and more books in the format and also becoming increasingly intrigued about how readers crossover from one format to the other. Take Laurell K. Hamilton: I’d guess that most of the folks buying her graphic novels were already fans looking forward to a different approach to the stories and characters they loved. But I have to imagine that there’s also a dedicated comic readership whose first exposure to Hamilton’s Anita Blake came through the adaptations.

While pondering this all, I also finally read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. If anyone else still hasn’t read it, you totally have to. It’s, well…amazing (truth in advertising!). and it relates here because it’s about two cousins who participate in the birth of the comics boom in the States in the 40s. It made me want to read more comic books and graphic novels. So I have.

I dug into Watchmen and was blown away by the richness of it all. Emboldened, I kept going. From memoirs of Iranian girlhood (Persepolis) to the biography of a mathematical philosopher (Logicomix) to tales of a dorky Canadian battling his girlfriends seven evil exes (Scott Pilgrim Saves the World), I’ve been incredibly impressed by the integration of art and language. It’s incredibly encouraging that so many artists and writers are committed to growing the format as its own art form.

Of course, the fact that it took me this long to really get behind the movement in full force probably speaks to a bit of snobbishness that I held onto until now.

I’d love to hear if any of our readers are graphic novel obsessives. And I’m completely open to suggestions for what to read next!

July 26, 2010   DG&B   e-books, future of publishing, Jane, opinion, optimism, reading  
9

I love it when I’m right

by Jane

Over the last several months – it could be as long as a year, actually – whenever I have met someone not in our industry who asks what I do and I tell them, I invariably get the question, “Is publishing going to survive.”  What they really mean is whether the business of book publishing will be able to survive the arrival of the digital book.

I have always maintained that the changes that reading books electronically will bring to the book publishing business can and will be very exciting.  In fact, I have been absolutely certain that as a result of these changes, reading overall would increase.

And then Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon announced that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.  This news is really historic.

There was other news though that was just as exciting. According to the American Publishing Association, hardcover book sales were up industry-wide 22% this year.  Indeed, reading has been increasing, and I believe as more and more electronic reading devices are sold – and sales of these are way up as their prices have dropped – people will read more in all formats.

So, rather than being concerned that book publishing is going down the tubes, outside observers of our business should jump on the bandwagon and spread the word. This is only the beginning of a wonderful new digital publishing age. 

Do you all agree?

July 16, 2010   DG&B   contest, fun, international literature, Lauren, reading  
3

Contest: Be your own psychic octopus

by Lauren

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!

July 15, 2010   DG&B   feedback, Jessica, marketing/publicity, opinion, reading  
15

What drives us to buy books?

by Jessica

Last week I discovered that many of you who responded to my post about blurbs don’t actually place much stock in them, so now I’m offering up another of publishing’s sacred cows to see whether (and how) it’s barbequed. I’m curious about the publicity or promotion that is most likely to convince you to buy a book. NYT Book Review, appearance on The Daily Show, Oprah segment, Salon, Slate? Although I ought not play favorites, the book publicity to which I most respond has to be the NPR interview, in particular, Fresh Air’s long form, in depth, almost-always-memorable conversation with an author. Somehow, even more than a lengthy review, this format—which is capacious enough to allow a writer not only to discuss her thesis, but explore her ideas in detail—succeeds in piquing my interest.

I listen when I can, and download the podcast for times that I can’t tune in. This past Tuesday’s interview was with psychiatrist and author Daniel Carlat, whose new book Unhinged, The Trouble with Psychiatry, has just been added to my to-read list. My fondness for NPR in general and Fresh Air in particular may border on the unhealthy, but mine is a functional addiction, and enables me to participate willingly in any number of otherwise tedious chores/activities: running on a treadmill, folding laundry, doing dishes, even, on occasion, cooking. My husband refers to NPR as “the drone” and teases me mercilessly regarding its dangerous propensity for inducing catatonia, but as far as books are concerned, and sometimes music, I find NPR tremendously convincing.

What sort of promotion/interview/feature captures your attention?

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