Bring On The Books For Everybody How Literary Culture Becomes Popular Culture by Jim Collins

Bring On The Books For Everybody How Literary Culture Becomes Popular Culture by Jim Collins.

Jim Collins is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. This book is published by Duke University Press in 2010. Jim Collins is writing for a popular audience. The word choice is quite interesting and wonderful. He uses terms like lit-lit, bibliotherapy, adaptation film, and superstore. There is melding of the academic with the popular. Jim Collins easily moves between subjects like Ladies Home Journal and modernist literature. The juxtapositions are striking.



The writing is at times funny, ironic, and witty. The author is describing how literature is transformed into a popular medium and taken out of the academy. He describes adaptation films (films adapted from literary works,), the New York Times Book Review, Oprah's Book Club, and chick lit.



Jim Collins explains how literature is treated as both a form of self cultivation and self actualization. Many people read the classics to be better people. We get a of an Oprah Winfrey episode of television where Oprah encourages people to read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, the classic Russian novel. It is at times appalling, fascinating, and poignant.

I espcially liked his sections on books to film. Two of the books which he spends quite a bit of time on are The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and The Hours by Michael Cunningham both of which were turned into excellent films.



Jim Collins is describing the packaging of books into a complete line of products; books, films, furniture, and other products. Books become a brand unto themselves. This is an article that explains the phenomenon with the book, Eat Pray Love. http://www.mercurynews.com/fashion-style-headlines/ci_15797294?nclick_check=1



Classic literature becomes swept up in the process as well. Shakespeare becomes books like Shakespeare In Love and Jane Austen becomes The Jane Austen Book Club. This marketing is exploited by companies like Target, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other super shopping sites. Henry James and other writers become commodities.



I am not completely comfortable with this. I find some of it goes too far. For example, books like The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger are clear attempts at romantic consumerism; a mix of buying the right stuff, sex, and relationships.  Sex and the City for literature.



This is a very interesting book. It is quite topical for librarians, booksellers, and people interested in books. It even mentions Nancy Perl and her segment on books on National Public Radio. The book is well indexed and has an extensive bibliography. I highly recommend reading this book.

Booklife Strategies And Survival Tips For the 21st Century Writer by Jeff Vandermeer

Booklife Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer by Jeff Vandermeer

Booklife is about the process of becoming a better writer. It is not as focused on how to write, although there is an essay called How To Write A Novel In Two Months. The author suggests
you should have a blog, be part of social media, and participate in online activities.

The language is very clear and concise. We learn about what an agent does, the process of how a book goes from a submitted manuscript to a published book, how book public relations and marketing are done, and many other skills a writer needs to understand to succeed.

The book is not just about the public aspects of writing. It is also how about how to manage your time as a writer, keep healthy and focused, and have good relations with other writing professionals like librarians, booksellers, editors, and agents.

I enjoyed reading the book. For those interested in learning what a writer does, or who are seeking a better understanding of how social media and new media changes a writing career this book would be a useful tool.

In order to get the full benefit of the book, I think it is necessary to take a little time to look at the blog as well, Booklife Now, http://www.booklifenow.com . Jeff Vandermeer includes many useful tools which are not in the book in the associated blog including a blogroll and numerous additional essays on writing.

The main complaint I have about the book is that there is no index in the book. This made it hard to backtrack to find certain subjects. The layout of the book was excellent. It had wide paragraph breaks, bolded headings, and many bullet pointed suggestion lists.

Jeff Vandermeer invited a variety of guest writers for the appendices. The two essays which I liked were Marketing Versus Publicity by Colleen Lindsay and Additional Notes on New Media by Matt Stagg.

This is well worth reading. Jeff Vandermere has a blog at http://www.jeffvandermeer.com . He has written many fantasy novels including Finch and edited a variety of anthologies including Steampunk which he co-edited with his wife, Ann Vandermeer.

Good Morning, Prince of Stories, Hard Times For Book Trade

Artwork by E. Burne-Jones, April 1888, for the first book edition of William Morris' A Dream of John Ball, illustrating medieval equalitarian slogan.

Good Morning

This morning, I finished reading Prince of Stories, The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman on the subway to work. I very much enjoyed many parts of this book. The writing is interesting. There are unique pictures including a complete comic book story called Blood Monster written by Neil Gaiman, artist: Marlene O'Connor, Lettering: M. Kelleher.

The section on movies talked about Beowulf and Mirrormask neither of which I have seen. It made me like the idea of them so much that I reserved them to view. I was previously reluctant to do this because I had mixed opinions on the movie Stardust. My understanding is that the next movie that Neil Gaiman will be scripting is Neverwhere after Coraline.

There is a very long complex interview at the end of the book. Gaiman talks about his early obsession with reading all kinds of fantasy books. He could recite Lewis Carroll's entire Alice In Wonderland when he was six years old. I have a deep appreciation for Alice. He also had a fondness for C.S. Lewis's Narnia books as well as everything written by Michael Moorcock.

It reminds me of a truism that I have experienced, the more you read, the more likely it becomes that you write because to understand reading properly it becomes necessary to write. Also, I love his statement about dreams fueling his writing of sandman, and I especially like this little quote from the interview, " I like [Charles] Bukowski more than I suspect I should."

The last thing I can say about this book is that it is very well designed. Everything falls into place nicely, the interviews, the pictures, the stories, the art work, the original articles, absolutely everything seems to fit just right.

Hard Times For Book Trade

Hard times may be coming for the book trade. This is across the board, libraries, publishers, and bookstores. Books are not an essential item in many peoples mind during an economic downturn. I don't think most people live on books and chicken, or intellectual stimulation.

From Bookselling This Week:
http://news.bookweb.org/6457.html

From Library Journal:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6619406.html

New York Magazine:
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/52761/

New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/business/04publish.html?_r=2

Add in the general malaise in the economy and we are facing some hard times ahead. Peoples reading habits have also changed. This will further cause problems because of the problems with the newspaper industry. Publishing looks to go through a very turbulent period. Online publishing may grow, I am not so sure about traditional books right now.

Maybe, the big companies will throw off the most unsatisfied and create little companies that are lean and mean. We are living in interesting times...

Publishers are already calling the event Black Wednesday for Wednesday, December 4, 2008 when it was officially announced.

Romance Books

It has been a rather interesting day like all lovely days.

Romance Books

My director asked me to place a large order of romance paperbacks. Apparently, our racks were emptying. So, I went to http://www.romantictimes.com and picked out a variety of romance paperbacks. I actually don't mind trashy romance paperbacks.

I sometimes read Elizabeth Lowell, and I reviewed Linnea Sinclair's The Downhome Zombie Blues which is kind of like Star Trek except for with sex. Elizabeth Lowell wrote as the science fiction author, Ann Maxwell, and was nominated for a Hugo award for her science fiction romance, Name of A Shadow.

There are a number of authors who are popular at our library in the romance section, Donna Hill and Gwynn Forster are two best selling black romance authors. I also like Jeaniene Frost's Night Huntress series which is quite interesting, it is a vampire romance story. There are of course all the campy contemporary authors like Amanda Quick, Candace Camp, and Linda Lael Miller.

In addition to spending time at Romantic Times, I also visited the Eharlequin site http://www.eharlequin.com . Eharlequin bought out BET Black Entertainments line of romance novels, so they now have an extensive set of African American romance books, including the Kimaru series. The other romance publishers I looked at were Avon Romance, Tor/Forge has a science fiction romance section, and Bantam/Dell. Dorchester Publishing which does the Hard Case Crime series of hardboiled mystery noire paperbacks also has a romance line which looks very campy. http://www.dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/NewRelease.cfm?L1=2&L2=0

I am about halfway through my order of mass market romance paperbacks. I'll probably finish it tomorrow.

I was busier than usual today, again. We had a meeting to discuss the agencies that served the disadvantaged and we divided up the telephone list to call different agencies for an open forum discussion.

Other than that, I spent some time as usual on the reference desk, did some weeding, and cleaned up my desk a bit more. It was a quite full day.