Category: News & Curiosities

Book title trends: The [Adjective/s] [Life/Time Period] of [Full Name]

A worthy successor to the [Profession/Status/etc.]’s [Female Relation] trend? Just spotted from Librarything‘s* “Popular this month” list:

  • The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
  • The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, Stephanie Meyer
  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

Pretty good sampling of genres there, too – one literary/historical fiction, one… whatever you want to call Stephanie Meyer, one nonfiction. Any others I’m missing? I feel like I must be, if three out of a list of just ten bestsellers are hits for the trend.

* Mindlessly soothing hobby of the month, while I avoid my numerous laboriously overwritten and therefore still unposted reviews – tweaking and entering dozens of books into my Librarything. Anyone else out there have an account and like to be library-buddies?

– E

Not a re-read, but close enough

Re-reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman in its entirety is one of those things that I’ve wanted to do for a while, but that looks increasingly unlikely to happen soon as the summer winds to a close. (nooooo….)

Luckily, Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus) provides an alternative, in his Sandman Meditations over at heady comic-book blog Gestalt Mash. In each installment, Cheney provides commentary on one issue as he reads through the series for the first time; two installments are out so far. (A similar read-through essay series is also being offered for George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, with the added twist of commentary being provided by one new and one re-reader.) Graphic novels are not his expertise, but his background in film studies is obvious, as he pays close attention to details of shape, composition, color, and the flow of panels.

These won’t do much for anyone who hasn’t already read the series, or isn’t in the process of doing so, but they’re a fascinating, if largely technical way to revisit it.

– E

Go to:

Neil Gaiman: bio and works reviewed
Sandman, 10 (and maybe 5) years later

Miéville and Moore in the New York Times

Sending me into fangirl ecstasies, the New York Times featured two substantial pieces on speculative-fiction luminaries, this week and the last:

In “Making  Squid The Meat of the Story,” China Miéville talks about his preferences in cephalopods; his newest novel, Kraken (speaking of which, I covergasmed recently over the art for Subterranean Press’ limited edition); why he found Star Trek horrifying as a child; and more.

“At a certain stage some people end up not trusting their own imagination,” Mr. Miéville said. “You get this kind of baleful set of voices in your head that tell you, ‘That’s silly; you’re being silly.’

“But I think most people have more ideas in their heads than they think they do. It’s just that those of us in the fantastic fields — either we don’t listen to our own filters, or we have a much higher ridiculousness threshold.”

And in “Hero of Comic-Book World Gets Real,” Alan Moore discusses his current work-in-progress, “a lengthy spoken-word recording accompanied by an atmospheric musical soundtrack and a book of photographs” about Steve Moore, the comics writer and early mover and shaker within British comics. (Sorry if this is completely not-news within the realm of Moorephilia; I’m behind on news about pretty much everything imaginable.)

Also made my week to see continued confirmation that Moore will be continuing work on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one of my most-beloved series, despite his plans to otherwise leave behind the world of graphic novels.

– E

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/books/24mieville.html?hpw

Go to:
China Miéville

Nebulous destiny

And the 2010 Nebula winners have been announced!

I think I never got around to posting about the nominations here, but there was, of course, a lot of overlap with the 2010 Hugo nominees, and the winners included some familiar faces. Kij Johnson’s “Spar” won for Best Short Story, and Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making won the Andre Norton Award for best young adult novel, which marks the first time that a self-published novel has won a major literary award.

Woo hoo!

Also, I really really want to read Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl…

– E

What’s weighing on your shelf?

…and hard on the heels of authorial astrology, comes bookshelf psychoanalysis! The New Yorker’s book blog feature “The Subconscious Shelf” taps into that singular pleasure of scoping out other people’s bookshelves: readers submit photos of their libraries, and the blog’s contributors offer up lighthearted analyses of their tastes, concerns, aesthetics, and whatever else they can glean from their bibliophilic snapshots.

e.g. (on a photo featuring precariously free-standing towers of books) “The point is that while your system is aesthetically pleasing and features all the “right” authors—Updike, Agee, Chekhov, Keats, Capote, Orwell, and Roth, with a little Wells Tower thrown in—it does so at the expense of practicality and, furthermore, safety.” (har)

or, on the twin shelves of an engaged couple:

“Michael, you’ve got Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Marquise of O,” Kafka’s Complete Stories, a couple James Baldwins, and lots and lots of philosophy. This, coupled with Jessica’s above claim that you wanted to take the shortest route through your pre-marital counseling, leads me to believe you value rationality highly. Jessica’s books are perhaps a tad lighter in spirit, but still quite serious and thoughtfully selected—your collections complement each other.”

Once I get back home to my primary bookshelves, I’d be way tempted to be self-indulgent and submit a shot or two…

– E

Astrological Angela Carter

Expect to see a lot of random posts about Angela Carter these days, because as part of my academic-year-end cool-down I’ve been indulging in a lot of re-reads of The Bloody Chamber, accompanied by munching of whatever academic essays I’ve been able to find for free through Jstor. wheee. (If you are not, like me, a babbling Carter fangirl, feel free to move along – when I get enthusiastic about things, I get very enthusiastic.)

So this has been one of my absolute favorite finds: the blogger at The Cantos of Mutabilitie has written, in great detail, an astrological analysis of Carter. I can’t pretend to understand any of the technical (?) aspects of it, but it’s both highly entertaining, and a wonderful tribute to Carter’s style and career. Some of my favorite bits:

“There’s a huge stellium (or planet cluster) in Taurus – Mercury, Saturn, Sun, Moon and Uranus all huddling together, with Jupiter just over in Aries – and then we find Neptune and Pluto swung out to one side. Accordingly, this is an extremely ‘earthy’ chart: the other elements are all relatively weak. This intense concentration on earth evokes the baroque celebration of the mundane in Carter’s writing, her heady ability to work mud and blood into her otherwise very mannered and super-sophisticated prose.”

…

“One senses that Carter’s taurean Mercury liked to hoard words like trinkets, cherishing dialect words and obsolete terms for the tackle and trim of various trades. … There’s almost a hunger to possess – a Taurus keyword – language, rubbing words as though they were pieces of smooth bottle-glass on the tideline, grubby and history-filled.”

…

and this particularly amusing part about Carter on Lovecraft:

“I find interesting that in a piece of criticism she derided H. P. Lovecraft for his horror writing, for two reasons. First, for his naivety; she saw that Lovecraft thought of evil as visible horror, and no one with a strong Pluto could fall for that one. Secondly, she wrinkled her nose at his sheer gloopiness, his childishly putrid slimes. She was a hard-edged writer; in contrast to Lovecraft, her kind of horror is the lurid glamour of the knife in the hand of the insane surgeon, always with the frisson of style – not deliquescence and gunk.”

(worth noting that the blogger is himself decidedly unfond of Lovecraft – he explains why at length in an equally ornate and amusing post here.)

– E

Wonder, bleakness, and beyond

PSA – just in case it wasn’t already sort of obvious, Bad Book Cover Fridays are on hiatus while I plumb new depths of procrastination finish my theses (holycrap).

In the meantime, please enjoy the ever-encyclopedic David Forbes’ mind-blowing essay,  “Sovereign Bleak” (via Coilhouse) on sci-fi landmarks and the philosophical trends that shaped them.

– E

Guess that children’s book!

One of my roommates and I work part-time for a children’s library, and one of the activities this past fall was teaching kids how to interpret stained-glass windows – so in between midterm cramming, we ended up painting eight huge faux-stained-glass windows of popular children’s (and a couple YA) books for the kids to guess. Anyone else like to have a go?

1.

cotsenstainedglass-006

2.

cotsenstainedglass-009

Continue reading Guess that children’s book!