RB: You know you can’t read everything, right? Or I can’t. So there are big holes in my—literacy?

CO: No. Field of dreams. [chuckles]

It’s not surprising that Tom Wolfe won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the Literary Review. Look at some samples they provided:
“Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns.”
Uhm, yeah. Now if only they can pry that damn white suit off him.

Normally I roll my eyes at the reviews of Michiko Kakutani. She seems to take great pleasure in not enjoying books. Obviously she is entitled to her opinon, but now her opinion seems ‘worth’ more in certain circles. Anyway, I am happy that she trashes the new Michael Crichton today. This is a book that deserves the Kakutani treatment. Granted I have not read the book, but it sounds like nothing more than an barely disguised rant against environmentalists. It’s nice to see a trashy novel get a trashy treatment.

Grrrr. I was seriously disheartened when I heard that they were going to make films of the His Dark Material series by Philip Pullman. And now I just want to sabotage it somehow.

Our Pal the Rake, with his splendid looking redone page, shows us that the Gourmet article that DFW wrote on the Maine Lobster Festival is available online at long last. No, the folks at Gourmet did not see fit to provide it. It’s the dearhearts at Lobster Liberation. Here’s the article (it’s a PDF).

So the wonderful Dan Wickett asked me to participate in his Interview with the Bloggers series. And now the results are in finally. Also interviewed are Ed, Michael of the Lit Saloon, MJ Rose, Nathalie Chica aka GalleyCat, Lizzie aka The Old Hag, Mad Max Perkins, Kassia Krozser aka Booksquare, Sam Jones of Golden Rule Jones, and the two women behind the Cupcake series. Don’t we sound like some demented gang?

It’s list time. I’ve been toying with the notion of doing my own Top 10 Books That I’ve Read in 2004 (inspired by Conversational Reading’s great list), but who knows if I will get to it. I still have not figured out the comments problem either (has anyone else had this problem?). But the NYT has chosen their 10 favorite books. Nothing surprising or shocking in their list:
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, The Master by Colm Toibin, The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, Runaway: Stories by Alice Munro, Snow by Orhan Pamuk, War Trash by Ha Jin, Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan, Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer, and Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt.

It’s exciting to see what everyone looks like finally. BrooklynVegan attended the ‘What the Blog’ event on Friday and took pictures. Exciting!

Dennis Loy Johnson of MobyLives is hosting a talk show called ‘What the Blog? Literary Blogger Summit at the Housing Works Used Book Cafe tomorrow night at 7 in Soho. On the show will be our friends Maud Newton, Ron Hogan of Beatrice, Jessa Crispin of Bookslut, George Murray of Bookninja, and Laila Lalami of Moorish Girl.
I am assuming they couldn’t get through to me for some reason, which is why I am not on there. Right.

GalleyCat has an interesting post on the disappearance of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize winning The Line of Beauty from the bestseller lists. It’s funny to me because here at my store, it is still selling very strongly. Granted, we have it as one of our select books for the holidays and is 20% off, but our market seems different from the one I read about in the papers. Cambridge is weird—most people are liberal and well-educated. Ann Coulter just doesn’t sell well here. But Alan Hollinghurst does. As does Cloud Atlas and other books that people say don’t sell anymore. My point is that I tend to look at the book world in a skewed fashion. We don’t sell some stuff here because there it’s just not the right market. We don’t sell that many mass markets—no Danielle Steele or Nora Roberts. We don’t carry the Left Behind stuff. We do sell almost 20 copies a month of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the U.S.: 1492-Present. Our bestseller list looks nothing like the NYT bestseller list. Anyway, I think it is great that my store puts emphasis on quality and the community. It makes for a great store and a great place to work.

And as for Vernon God Little’s poor sales, maybe that’s because the book is crap.