Click here for a wonderful comic from Patricia Storms. Hilarious.

I’ve managed to catch up on some reading today:

Michael Dirda answered reader questions about bookstores at the Washington Post (my store gets mentioned several times!).

Dan Wickett, who must never sleep, interviewed Ron Rash, author of Saint at the River and also winner of the O. Henry award for his short story “Speckled Trout”.
Dan also interviewed independent bookseller Corey Mesler, who owns and operates Burke’s Books in Memphis.
And he also ran a panel with more bloggers.

Robert Birnbaum interviewed Tom Bissell, author of the just released collection of stories God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories and Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia.

So the NYT has been paying attention apparently. Sort of. Sara Boxer’s ‘Critics Notebook’ column talks about blogs reviewing reviews. She doesn’t mention all the other things we do. But that’s okay. Bookdwarf is happy she got mentioned at all (yes, I ran out and got a copy of the paper). We are discussed in some great company: Beatrix, Conversational Reading, Golden Rule Jones, The Reading Experience, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Return of the Reluctant, and Our Girl in Chicago.

Okay, I am secretly jumping up and down with excitement.

I am afraid that I have to be brief here. I am moving in 3 days and have to get all my work done before then. But it’s almost like the Globe knew I wasn’t going to be able to do the usual long roundup.
Continue reading →

I can’t help myself. Spotted in this weeks’s Publisher’s Weekly: Doubleday’s winningest title, The Da Vinci Code, marking two years on PW‘s charts, has gone back for an 82nd printing, making for record-breaking 10 million copies. Worldwide, Da Vinci has 29 million copies in print, in 44 languages, and the audio versions have sold more than 500,000 copies, making it the bestselling audio in Random House’s history. By the way, these figures do not include The Da Vinci Code: Special Illustrated Edition, published last October, now nearing the one-million mark. If you stacked every copu of Da Vinci printed, it would be 220 miles tall, notes Doubleday. THat’s high enough to get in the path of an orbiting shuttle and 50 miles short of hitting the international space station. Perhaps it’ll reach that after the release of The Da Vinci Code movie from Columbia Pictures, planned for 2006, starring Tom Hanks.

Maybe Dan Brown can use some of those 10 million copies to build himself a fort. That way he can hide in it and work on his next novel and not be bothered by the public. Plus, with all those dust jackets, he’ll never need another form of ID.

I know she has a penchant for using the word ‘limn’, but she’s used it in her last 2 reviews, for Saturday and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
And have you noticed the plethora of reviews of Saturday? I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose. But check here for a list of links to reviews.

I liked this article about the new Editor in Chief of the Oxford American Dictionary. Except for the part when the author of the article seems to find her so bizarre for wearing “a casual outfit accented by bright, pink-framed glasses and a pair of beat-up black-and-white Converse sneakers”. She also sits on an exercise ball instead of a chair and serves beverages in neon blue glasses. So the woman has taste. Does she deserve this? “Might Ms. McKean be an escapee from a local version of Cirque du Soleil? A young woman in the throes of suspended adolescence?” It’s rich coming from someone named Strawberry. But I imagine she’s joking.

I first heard about Virginia’s Festival of the Book from Mr. Bookdwarf’s wonderful parents, who live and work in Charlottesville, Va. I have visited the city several times now and really love it. They have some of the best used book stores I’ve come across. I did not know how huge the festival was until I checked out their website here. Man, what a list of authors! Ron at Beatrice has posted several dispatches from an author attending the FOTB. The entries are spread out over a few days, but worth reading. I’ll see if I can scare up some other such links. Or let me know if you come across any.

Alex Beam has an article on Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit in today’s Globe. I don’t know about you, but I find it annoying that they just don’t print the word.

I wish this was available online, but unfortunately there is no link to this interview with Jonathan Safran Foer. I came across it in Ingram’s Advance magazine, which consists mostly of ads and lists of new books coming the next month, but they usually include an article or two. They have a 3 page interview by Amy Cox Williams with JSF that reveals some really interesting stuff. Here’s some of the more salient bits.

ACW: When I interviewed you for your first book, you mentioned that your next book was set in a museum. Is that the second book you were just referring to—or is it Extremely Loud?
JSF: It’s all been the same book believe it or not; it just changed. There’s an analogy that I sometimes use, and I think it’s a good one…I was a philosophy major [ed.–oh god] and in philosophy there’s this famous problem of a boat that leaves a port and over the course of its travel every single plank in the boat is replaced, so that when it gets to the new port, let’s say it’s leaving from London and going to New York, when it gets to New York not a single piece of wood taht was in the original boat is in the boat that got to New York, so would you say that it’s the same boat or not? I mean you kind of have to say it is the same boat because what else could the passengers have come across on? On the other hand, what’s a boat if not everythking taht makes it up? SO it was the same thing with the novel. Every single word was replaced, and what’s going to be published in April has nothing in common, explicitly, with what I was working on two and a half, three years ago, but I know that I never threw one out and started another; it was happening through this process of replacing things. [ed.—a simple no would have sufficed here]

ACW: Just as in your first book there was a bit of yourself in that character. Do Oskar’s traits, his anxieties or interesting quirks, come from yourself?
JSF: Yeah. We’re actually amazingly similar [ed.–there’s shocking information]. When I was a kid I was very precocious and very weird, I guess. I used to have all these outfits I insisted on wearing, like bow ties and glitter vests [ed.—WTF?!], and I would wear rings on all my fingers. As I’ve gotten older, I guess the things that make me an individual are expressed much less explicitly. Like I think if you were to sit down with me now your first thought would not be, “This is a really interesting person.” I’ve had people who’ve read my book and then met me say, “Wow, you’re not really funny like your book is funny.” I think writing has been a way to express those things I am no longer comfortable or even capable of expressing in life. In a way, there’s also an analogy to the character, the renter who doesn’t speak but writes everything on paper, a lot gets pushed through that way.

God, I wish I could make this stuff up. There’s tons more, but I am having an off typing day. I will try to post more bits of the interview later today.