Weekly links: Jezebel poses questions for your book club; Exupery revelations; ‘Shades of Grey’ trilogy breaks 10 mill in sales & more

Posted on 25 May 2012 by Trisha, Managing Editor
book club graphic from Jezebel

Jezebel's apt illustration for the piece

Running short of discussion topics at your book club meetings? Julieanne Smolinski, whose Fifty Shades of Grey takedown tickled my funnybone a few weeks back, has 15 hilarious ideas over at Jezebel. A few highlights:

4. This book has sold several million copies and has been translated into 26 languages. A lot of us are kind of resentful about this. Do you think you could have written this book or something? Do you think writing a book is easy?

10. What foods or beverages did you spill on the book during the course of reading it? Anything good?

You’ll definitely want to email the link to your fellow book club members (although I have to say, if your club has not already debated the attractiveness of Jonathan Franzen and/or confronted the author photo turtleneck question, we should probably take away your wine permit).

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Last Wednesday, a Paris auction house sold two newly discovered pages from Antoine St. Exupery’s beloved classic, Le Petit Prince. The pages were omitted from the final version, and show the prince visiting Earth. As the NY Daily News’ Page Views reports,

Here he sees a man on the road and says to himself, “I am going to find out what they think about life on this planet. That may be an ambassador of the human spirit…” The Little Prince approaches, but the man is preoccupied. He has been stumped for three days by a crossword puzzle and is looking for “a six-letter word that starts with G that means ‘gargling’.”

Scholars say the word was “guerre” (the French for “war”) and hypothesize that the passage was removed to prevent the book from becoming too overtly pacifist. The final auction price was a staggering $495,000.

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Should we expect a Shades of Grey baby boom next year? The popular—and, in some libraries and bookstores, controversial—erotic trilogy has sold more than 10,000,000 (yes, that’s 10 MILLION) copies worldwide in all formats. What’s even more shocking: the sales show no signs of slacking, with bookstore chains selling tens of thousands per week and some libraries reporting thousands of holds from patrons. Have you succumbed yet?

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Novelist Jennifer Egan—the last winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction—is telling a story through Twitter.  The first installment of “Black Box” was released on the New Yorker’s Twitter feed (@NYerFiction) between 8 and 9 p.m. EDT last night, and will continue at the same time for the next 10 nights until all 8,500 words have been published (the whole story will be collated as it is posted here).  Very, very cool. [Via]

What links have you discovered this week?

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Kathi Kamen Goldmark

Posted on 24 May 2012 by Lynn

This afternoon, we received the sad news that our effervescent Author Enablers columnist, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, died today in San Francisco. With her husband, Sam Barry, Kathi dispensed witty advice for writers in a monthly column for BookPage and in a book, Write That Book Already!, published in 2010 by Adams Media. She was also a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, the all-author rock band.

Bubbly, full of life and always brimming with ideas, Kathi was a delight to work with. All of us at BookPage mourn her loss and send sincere condolences to Sam, the other members of her family and her many friends across the country.

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Recipe of the week: Kitchen Sink Chopped Salad

Posted on 24 May 2012 by Cat, Editorial Assistant

Cooking columnist Sybil Pratt has spent a lot of time looking at “Mom” cookbooks, or as she calls them, “solving-the-everyday-need-to-feed-the-family” cookbooks. Our Cookbook of the Month, The Mom 100 Cookbook, is one of the best.

Its 100 recipes tackle all the major hurdles of planning a family dinner, from picky eaters to vegetarians, from making dishes ahead of time to letting kids help with the cooking.

Kitchen Sink Chopped Salad

Years ago, when my kids were very young, an oversize, green, gently serrated plastic knife appeared in our kitchen, probably having migrated there from an old Play-Doh set or some kiddie kitchen kit that was given to them. Anyway, it became Charlie’s knife. “Where’s my knife?” he’d demand, with a certain amount of Gordon Ramsay-ish inflection. It is a great knife, sharp enough to actually cut things like cheese and tomatoes, not sharp enough to cut things like Charlie. It has been used by Charlie to make many a salad in our house. If you can find a knife like this it’s a great thing to have on hand, especially if your child feels a sense of ownership about it, which leads naturally to participation in the kitchen. Curiouschef.com has kid-friendly knives, for your young chef garde manger (French for “the cold food sous chef guy”).

This is a kitchen sink salad. As in, Step 1: Open vegetable bins and peer inside. Step 2: Save any slightly depressing looking vegetables for soup (see Vegetable Bin Stone Soup on page 79) and pull out the rest for this big-bowl salad. The veggies listed are merely suggestions. You might also try slices of pear or apple. Moreover, this immediately becomes a main dish (though possibly non-vegetarian) salad if you add chopped cooked chicken, steak, tuna fish, shrimp, tofu, hard-boiled eggs . . . let your leftovers be your guide.

Continue reading →

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Say ‘I Do’ to wedding-themed novels

Posted on 24 May 2012 by Eliza, Associate Editor

Last month we told you about Kiss the Bride, a charming wedding-themed anthology. With a long weekend ahead, you may be looking for even more romantic reads—even better if they feature a magical start to a marriage.

Read on for our suggestions for eight wedding-themed novels:

Lori Wilde’s There Goes the Bride and Once Smitten, Twice Shy are combined in a single volume called Kiss the Bride. The stories are linked by a lucky antique Irish wedding veil.

Genre: Contemporary Romance ǀ On sale: June 1 ǀ Publisher: Forever ǀ Price: $7.99

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One Hot Cowboy Wedding by Carolyn Brown is about a hot cowboy and his best lady friend who get married for purely business purposes. Everything is going according to plan, until they realize they might actually have romantic feelings for each other.

Genre: Contemporary Western Romance ǀ On sale: April 3 ǀ Publisher: Sourcebooks ǀ Price: $7.99

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Rules of Engagement by Stephanie Laurens, Kasey Michaels and Delilah Marvelle is about three ladies (a country girl, a member of the ton and a duchess) on their journey down the aisle.

Genre: Historical Romance ǀ On sale: April 17 ǀ Publisher: HQN ǀ Price: $7.99

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The Reluctant Matchmaker by Shobhan Bantwal is the unforgettable story of a a 31-year-old Indian-American woman who is drawn into becoming her boss’s “marriage consultant”—even though she has a crush on him herself.

Genre: Contemporary Women’s Fiction ǀ On sale: June 26 ǀ Publisher: Kensington ǀ Price: $15

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Real-life “Vows” columnist for the New York Times Devan Sipher has written a roman à clef called The Wedding Beat. It’s about a reporter who falls for a wedding guest at the event he’s covering. He spends the rest of the story tracking her down—and is eventually hired to cover her wedding. But is it too late?

Genre: Contemporary Romance ǀ On sale: April 3 ǀ Publisher: NAL ǀ Price: $14

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Joan Johnston’s Texas Bride is a historical romance set in the Wild West, where rancher Jake Creed gets a mail-order bride in the form of feisty Miranda Wentworth . . . but never expects to actually fall in love.

Genre: Historical Western Romance ǀ On sale: March 27 ǀ Publisher: Dell ǀ Price: $7.99

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In Rachel Hauck’s The Wedding Dress, bridal boutique owner Charlotte traces the history of a gorgeous vintage wedding dress, learning something about true love as she discovers the stories of its previous owners.

Genre: Inspirational Romance ǀ On sale: April 3 ǀ Publisher: Thomas Nelson ǀ Price: $15.99

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Boston Globe “Love Letters” columnist Meredith Goldstein has written a funny (and sometimes sad) story called The Singles—about a group of five single guests at a college friend’s wedding.

Genre: Women’s Fiction ǀ On sale: April 24 ǀ Publisher: Plume ǀ Price: $15

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Readers: Which book will you read first? Do you have a favorite wedding-themed novel? Happy reading!

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What we’re reading Wednesday: ‘The Age of Miracles’

Posted on 23 May 2012 by Eliza, Associate Editor

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
Random House • $26 • ISBN 9780812992977
on sale June 26, 2012

Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles is one of our most buzzed-about debuts of 2012 and one of our 20 summer standouts. Walker is also one of our 10 women to watch in 2012. You might be sensing a pattern here: The BookPage editorial staff really, really likes this novel.

The story is about Julia, a sixth-grader who lives in suburban California. She’s preoccupied with fitting in at school, buying her first bra, talking to her crush—and something that has global consequences. Julia wakes up one morning, and the earth has started to rotate at a slower pace. At first, it’s just a few minutes added on to every day, but before long, days and nights are twice as long as they used to be. Crops can’t grow and gravity is messed up. People are getting sick from sunburns, and electricity isn’t consistent. World leaders insist on keeping to a 24-hour schedule, but some “real timers” try to stay awake during sunlight and sleep when it’s dark, keeping up with circadian rhythms.

This is a tender and beautiful coming-of-age story with a chilling sci-fi twist—except “the slowing” feels hauntingly plausible. Aimee Bender calls the novel “at once a love letter to the world as we know it and an elegy,” and I completely agree. Here’s an excerpt that describes some of the consequences of “the slowing.”

Five thousand years of art and superstition would suggest that it’s the darkness that haunts us most, that the night is when the human mind is most apt to be disturbed. But dozens of experiments conducted in the aftermath of the slowing revealed that it was not the darkness that tampered most with our moods. It was the light.

As the days stretched further, we faced a new phenomenon: Certain clock days began and ended before the sun ever rose—or else began and ended before the sun ever set.

Scientists had long been aware of the negative effects of prolonged daylight on human brain chemistry. Rates of suicide, for example, had always been highest above the Arctic Circle, where self-inflicted gunshot wounds surged every summer, the continuous daylight driving some people mad.

As our days neared forty-eight hours, those of us living in the lower latitudes began to suffer similarly from the relentlessness of light.

Studies soon documented an increase in impulsiveness during the long daylight periods. It had something to do with serotonin; we were all a little crazed. Online gambling increased steadily throughout every stretch of daylight, and there is some evidence that major stock trades were made more often on light days than on dark ones. Rates of murder and other violent crimes also spiked while the sun was in our hemisphere—we discovered very quickly the dangers of the white nights.

We took more risks. Desires were less checked. Temptation was harder to resist. Some of us made decisions we might not otherwise have made.

Are you excited about reading The Age of Miracles? (You better be!) What are you reading today?

 

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Two books, one stockphoto

Posted on 22 May 2012 by Trisha, Managing Editor

While looking through the August releases, I came across this unlikely pair of novels, united by a stockphoto: Margaret Dilloway’s The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns (Putnam) and Yvette Edwards’ A Cupboard Full of Coats (Amistad).

The images have different light treatments, crops and type additions, but this is definitely the same yellow rose and peeling blue barn. I’ve seen similar covers before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the exact same image used on two jackets that are being released in the same month. Which book do you think used the image better?

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Trailer Tuesday: ‘The Uninvited Guests’ by Sadie Jones

Posted on 22 May 2012 by Cat, Editorial Assistant

Sadie Jones, author of the award-winning The Outcasts, heads into new, weird territory with her third novel, The Uninvited Guests.

The story takes place over a single day in the crumbling Sterne estate, somewhere in the pre-WWI English countryside. A train derailment disrupts the day’s party, and what follows is “a kind of prickly menace and biting wit . . . [that] builds to a horrible crescendo in a scene with echoes of the war to come.”

Check out our Q&A with Jones, where she chats about The Uninvited Guests and its pre-war English setting:

I simply needed a time we perceive as beautiful and romantic and yet trembles on the brink of the unknown. Western civilization was at a peak, both culturally and scientifically; to me that generation sits like white icing on the dark slag heap of the century before it, looking blindly toward the new century, the mass suicide of the Great War.

The book trailer for The Uninvited Guests features an excerpt from the novel:

Is Sadie Jones’ newest on your list?

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7 questions with . . . David Downing

Posted on 21 May 2012 by Cat, Editorial Assistant

There’s plenty of talk of summer reading lists as the days grow warmer and longer, but this time, I’m suggesting you add a whole series to your stack. Start with David Downing‘s Zoo Station and make your way through the adventures of Anglo-American journalist/author/spy John Russell, then grab Downing’s newest, Lehrter Station.

This series is best enjoyed from the beginning, and historical suspense fans will agree with Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney, who insists “Downing’s deft weaving of fiction and real-life WWII history is second to none.”

We chatted with Downing about the fifth installment in the story of John Russell, and I loved his answer to this question: “If you could travel back in time to any decade, where would you go and what would you do while you were there?”  Read his answer.

Will Lehrter Station make your summer reading list?

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Monday contest: Books for inspiration

Posted on 21 May 2012 by Eliza, Associate Editor

This week’s Monday Contest celebrates books to make you better—better at breaking (or making) habits; better at being healthy; better at being happy in the face of uncertainty.

The three books are funny, interesting and inspiring. They’d make perfect gifts for graduates, or great reads for anyone who needs a little pep talk:

A.J. Jacobs is the best-selling author of The Year of Living Biblically and The Know-It-All. In his latest book, Drop Dead Healthy, he goes on a quest for “bodily perfection.” His hilarious journey will make you crack up and maybe even change the way you live. Read a funny hand-written Q&A with Jacobs here.

Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit pulls back the curtain on some of our most mystifying behaviors—and reveals how we can change them. Read more in a Q&A with the author.

10½ Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said by Charles Wheelan contains some of the best, most straight-forward commencement advice I’ve ever heard. The book is taken from Wheelan’s 2011 speech at Dartmouth College and is filled with humor and genuinely helpful suggestions.

Want these books? Here’s how you can enter to win . . .

TO ENTER: Comment on this post with the title of a book that has helped you improve your life.

CONTEST DETAILS: One winner will be chosen by random.org from among entries received by 5 pm CST on Friday, May 25. The winner will receive the three books listed above. Prize must be shipped to a North American address, and Rhode Island residents are not eligible. (Full contest rules here.) Good luck!

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Fall fiction: Ken Follett

Posted on 18 May 2012 by Eliza, Associate Editor

Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants was one of the biggest books of 2010—in fact, our readers voted it as #5 on their Best Books of 2010 list. Book one in a hugely ambitious trilogy of historical novels about the 20th century, it takes readers through World War I, the Russian Revolution and the struggle for women’s suffrage. It’ll also keep you busy for a while, clocking in at 985 pages.

Now we’re just four months away from the publication of Winter of the World, book two in The Century Trilogy. It comes out on September 18 and is 960 pages.

Winter of the World is about the same five families (American, German, Russian, English and Welsh) we met in Fall of Giants. Here’s more from the publisher (Dutton):

[The five families] enter a time of enormous social, political, and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of the Third Reich, through the Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of World War II, up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs.

Were you hooked by the start of The Century Trilogy? Are you eager for Winter of the World?

By the way, if you were discouraged from reading Fall of Giants by the high price (the hardcover is $36 and the paperback is $25) or long hold lists at the library, you’ll be happy to hear that a mass market paperback edition hits bookstores on September 4. It will retail for $9.99.

Check out the rest of our Fall fiction posts, or browse all posts about 2012 releases.

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A real town benefits from ‘Calico Joe’

Posted on 17 May 2012 by Eliza, Associate Editor

Calico Joe, John Grisham’s novel about a rookie baseball player whose career is cut short, is currently enjoying its fourth week on the New York Times bestseller list. I also predict it will soon get another boost for Father’s Day. As Martin Brady writes in his BookPage review of the novel:

“Beneath all the baseball lore and Grisham’s obvious affection for the game, Calico Joe offers a sad but real tale about fathers and sons and the difficulties family members can experience when attempting to re-establish severed bonds.”

I recently gave a copy of the book to my mom, and she responded with a bit of local news. I am from Little Rock, and the main character in Grisham’s novel is from Calico Rock, Arkansas—a small town that’s home to about 1,000 people. It’s practically up the street from where my dad grew up.

My mom sent me a quote from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, from columnist Linda Caillouet:

“[Calico Joe is] really helping to put our little historic town—which is almost totally dependent on tourism to keep old historic Main Street alive—on the map,” Matthews says of the book. [Matthews is a business owner in Calico Rock.]

In March, the town’s museum (created with the help of a generous donation from Grisham) saw an increase in visitors and April promises to be even better, says Matthews, whose rustic lodge overlooks the White River.

Apparently Grisham’s ancestors were early pioneers of the small town. Who knew?

I love books where I can claim a personal connection to the setting, like The Homecoming of Samuel Lake or The Lions of Little Rock. What book did you enjoy that is set in your home state? Will Calico Joe inspire you to make a pilgrimage to Calico Rock?

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Recipe of the week: Olive Oil Cake with Tangerine Marmalade

Posted on 17 May 2012 by Cat, Editorial Assistant

The Newlywed Cookbook by Sarah Copeland is the perfect mix of elegant design and down-to-earth usefulness, making it a great gift idea for new couples. Cooking columnist Sybil Pratt says it’s “a lovely way to encourage culinary togetherness.”

Pretty and yummy!

Olive Oil Cake with Tangerine Marmalade

{tastes like the sun}

There is an elegance to an olive oil cake, especially one layered in shingles of shiny, candied citrus that make it an instant centerpiece. But what are good looks to a dessert without the flavor and texture to back it up? This cake wins in all categories. It borrows a little trick from savvy Italian nonnas, who have long known olive oil as their heart-healthy secret to a moist cake. Made with your best mild fruity finishing oil {one whose flavor you like all on its own}, this becomes a special occasion cake that’s far simpler to make than it looks.

While your cake cools, make your own luxurious homemade marmalade out of sweet citrus. We fell in love with fresh squeezed tangerine juice on our honeymoon to Mexico. I love tangerines for their beautiful balance of sweetness and tang and the way their tender skins soften with sugar and add a glistening finish to this tender cake. You can use whatever citrus you love, or a mix of all your favorites.

Continue reading →

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Fall Fiction: Time for another Mitch Albom novel

Posted on 16 May 2012 by Trisha, Managing Editor

Albom

Hyperion announced today that they’ll be publishing The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom on August 28. This is a “magical” new novel about Father Time that casts the fairy-tale figure in a new light: as the person who first attempted to track time. It’s the first novel in six years from Albom, who originally struck literary gold in 1997 with Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir about the death of his friend and mentor, teacher Morrie Schwartz.

“We are excited once again to share a new Mitch Albom book with his beloved fans and readers,” said Hyperion President and Publisher Ellen Archer. “Mitch taps into an issue we all struggle with these days—our time and what we make of it. His novel will spark a lot of conversation about how we live our lives now—and what we can’t afford to forget.”

Albom’s modern-day parables have moved millions and The Time Keeper isn’t likely to be an exception. Will you look out for it?

Related in BookPage: our past coverage of Mitch Albom’s books, including an interview about his last novel, Have a Little Faith.

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What we’re reading Wednesday: ‘Winter Journal’

Posted on 16 May 2012 by Cat, Editorial Assistant

Winter Journal by Paul Auster
Holt • $26 • ISBN 9780805095531
on sale August 21, 2012

Thirty years after his breakthrough debut, the memoir The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster returns to the medium in Winter Journal.

With the hindsight of Didion, the narrative elegance of Nabokov and the mesmerizing writing for which he himself is known, Auster (now 65) steps into what he calls “the winter of [his] life” by looking back on a lifetime. He shares his memories and the fleeting moments of his body—places it has been, things it has felt (both wonderful and terrible)—through threaded vignettes constructed of languorous sentences that feel much like memory itself. Each fragment careens toward death, a boat against the current.

Auster writes as “you,” a device which could feel like an assault were it not for the accomplished writer behind it. At times, the “you” seems removed, peering at his former self in a distant way, as when he recounts the hours immediately following his mother’s death: “No tears, no howls of anguish, no grief—just a vague sense of horror growing inside you.” At other times, the “you” seems to be surprised and thrilled all over again, such as when he discovers his own penis at age five: “. . . how fitting that you should have a miniature fireman’s helmet emblazoned on your person, on the very part of your body, moreover, that looks like and functions as a hose.” And always, the “you” is hypnosis to trick you, reader, into remembering a life that isn’t your own.

It’s a fast read, never waning to nostalgia, that will move you to chew the cud of your own mortality and (somehow) still find time to disappear into your own memories.

Enjoy the opening:

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

Your bare feet on the cold floor as you climb out of bed and walk to the window. You are six years old. Outside, snow is falling, and the branches of the trees in the backyard are turning white.

Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said. Time is running out, after all. Perhaps it is just as well to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenomenology of breathing.

Will you keep an eye out for Auster’s new memoir in August?

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Trailer Tuesday: ‘What Do You Want to Do Before You Die?’ by the Buried Life

Posted on 15 May 2012 by Cat, Editorial Assistant

For some college graduates, the real world just has to wait.

That’s the thought behind the Buried Life, a group of four grads who set out to achieve the ultimate bucket list: every single crazy thing they wanted to do. Their cross-country Winnebago tour became an MTV reality show and led to What Do You Want to Do Before You Die?. The book is a graphic collection of illustrated dreams of the Buried Life’s fans, plus heartfelt essays by the guys and more.

Meet the four boys who make up the Buried Life in the book trailer from Artisan books:

Is this a book you’d give to a graduate? Do you wish you’d received it when you graduated?

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