[Updated later with a photograph of the Nook setup at the B&N on Fifth Avenue near 42nd Street.]
So yesterday I wandered into the Barnes & Noble at Union Square, and I beheld for the first time the retailing set up in the brick-and-mortar stores for the Nook, their super-sleek ereader. I should have snapped a picture with my phone, but I am lazier than the dead and simply wandered around with my mouth open going, "Nnnh... Nnnh? Nnnh!" and so on.
What I find interesting is that they've given the Nook an enormous amount of real estate in the store, basically tearing out four (five?) wall units of shelving and getting rid of two or three big tables—real estate which has, in the past, been given over to the display of physical books. This is no mere nook. Instead, we have a barren, future-aesthetic wall with the "Nook" legend, with the Nooks in plastic bubble containers on a shelf behind a counter, and a sullen-faced teenager between the counter and the Nooks, granting access. (This is probably only a requirement in New York City, where strange people might wander in, cry, "Nnnh!", grab a Nook, and make a break for freedom.)This is both alarming (goodbye physical retailing of books) and awesome (hello mass-market acceptance; you cannot miss this display). And really shows how very aggressively B&N is being about taking over this market from Amazon. Hell, they're even going to market other maker's devices—because B&N understands that content is key, and devices are just a means.Have any of you seen the new retail set-ups? How does it strike you?
Not all that long ago, I was in a swell position that allowed me to put back into print great novels that had fallen by the wayside. These weren't strange books that nobody knew, but major novels—among them Newbery Honor-winners by Eleanor Estes and others; some truly fabulous fantasies by Meredith Ann Pierce, Jane Yolen, and other greats; and various other books that should never have gone out of print in the first place.It happens more often than we'd like, books going out of print. Part of the natural lifespan of a title. At first it seems a sad thing, and it makes you wonder whether this is all worthwhile, this publishing business. But then a beloved classic is restored to print, and finds a vibrant life with a whole new generation of readers, and you realize that that, too, is a part of the lifespan of a book. I Capture the Castle? Was out of print until J.K. Rowling talked about her love for it. And now it is a new favorite of many and was made into a so-so movie.One of the books I was dying to reissue was The Mad Scientists' Club (that's the cover of the Scholastic paperback edition I owned as a kid there on the left), but Purple House Press beat me to it. They specialize in superbly produced reissues of strange classic books such as the vaguely disturbing-yet-hilarious Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat.There are other books that I miss and wish were still out there on shelves (such as the subject of a soon-to-come "Books We Love" entry, The Furious Flycycle by Jan Wahl), and soon it will be easy enough to have access to them digitally. The list is probably endless, but which titles do you wish were still around, so that you could pick them up and pass them on to someone, saying, "You are going to love this book!"
Let's be honest: you can only do so much on your own. Yes, yes, writing, as Ms. Jessamyn West wonderfully pointed out, is a solitary occupation. We know this. But we also know that networking can help abate just how lonely the writers have to feel. And conferences. And going outside to breathe fresh air every once in a while.The other way of feeling a little less solitary can come from sharing your work with those you trust. I'm not talking writing workshops here—although they can, in certain circumstances, be useful—I'm more thinking a great writing group or trusted friend. Yes, writing groups also have their pitfalls, but finding a really terrific group that will be honest, constructive, and sometimes downright brutal about the shortcomings of your work can be really terrific.Sure, eventually it might be ideal if you can be paired with an agent, or better yet an editor, who you trust to provide this type of difficult feedback that will ultimately make your work stronger. Before you get to this point, though, it could be really beneficial to have others to weigh in about your writing.So I ask you, oh trusted readers: what have you found has and has not worked when it comes to sharing your work with others? When it comes to writing for children, do you ever involve actual kids and listen to their reactions? Or is it better to move onward alone? Let us know!
The
publishing world has been aflutter over the quick rise of the e-reader. With Apple announcing its forthcoming tablet, Amazon through three versions of the Kindle already, and Barnes and Noble dropping their Nook like it's hot, there's plenty of change, competition, and innovation. But when will they get it just right?When the Kindle first came out, I had no intention of buying one. "I'm old fashioned!" I yelled from my rocking chair. "I need to feel the book in my hand!" *Ting* went the spittoon.When I landed a job that required a few hours of reading, mostly from Word documents, a day, the Kindle suddenly made more sense. I sucked it up, laid down the $350 or whatever it was at the time, and was mostly happy. Sure, I was getting tons more reading done on the subway. Sure, I was breezing through submissions. There was a small part of me that wished I could take notes and edit, but who was I to gripe?Well, I griped when Amazon lowered the price a month after I bought my Kindle. Now more people are griping as newer technology looks to make the Kindle a thing of the past, as Michael pointed out in a post from earlier this month. Now we have the Nook, which has some nice features, like a touchscreen, color navigation, and the ability to lend books to friends, which, honestly, is pretty huge. But they've also dropped the ball by not being able to view and open Word documents, meaning I'd never use one (to date, I've purchased one book for my Kindle).So help me out here...whether you love 'em, hate 'em, or chase after them with torches and pitchforks, what would you like to see in your ideal e-reader?
(The post below is another recycled bit from my now living-dead blog, As the World Stearns. Part of our ongoing series on books we adore.)
I unabashedly adore this novel, Edward Eager's second and best book. I love it despite its pretty glaring flaws (some stereotyping of Arabs as "shifty"; a shamelessly episodic structure with some dead spots in the middle), because its quality more than makes up for such minor quibbles. It is relentlessly fun, written with the kind of wit and economy that only the very best writing has, and—at core—it is a story with real emotion, a carefully constructed tale about four kids coming to terms with loss.The central conceit of Half Magic is a simple one: Four children find a magical coin that, when wished upon, immediately grants half of the child's wish. Want a desert island? You end up with a desert. Want a talking cat? Boom! Your cat can now speak only an English-like gibberish. (And is even more annoyed than usual at the indignity of it all, if such a thing is possible.) Each wish the kids make gets them deeper and deeper into pleasant trouble, until they figure out a way to double their wishes and undo the entire mess.
The prose is a deft joy. Eager tells us all we need to know about the children and not a thing more (Chris and I discussed this in our second podcast), and what's amazing is how well we feel we know the kids without getting deluged with information:
Jane was the oldest and Mark was the only boy, and between them they ran everything.Katharine was the middle girl, of docile disposition and a comfort to her mother. She knew she was a comfort, and docile, because she'd heard her mother say so. And the others knew she was, too, by now, because ever since that day Katherine would keep boasting about what a comfort she was, and how docile, until Jane declared she would utter a piercing shriek and fall over dead if she heard another word about it. This will give you some idea of what Jane and Katharine were like.Martha was the youngest, and very difficult.
The four children are at loose ends for the summer because of their father's untimely death several years ago. Their mother is struggling to make ends meet, so she is gone at work all the time, and the kids can't afford to go to the country or camping or any such thing for the summer. "A woman named Miss Bick came in every day to care for the children, but she couldn't seem to care for them very much, nor they for her." They are half a family without their dad, and they need something to make them whole again.So the coin is a welcome diversion. They visit the Sahara, the time of King Arthur, experiment with invisibility, and more, until the coin—having granted a wish to each—is all used up and empty and it seems their adventures are over. More to the point, their mother has met a new man, a nebbishy sort who she nonetheless loves, and who she intends to marry. A typical happy ending, a marriage; but still, the children miss their father. Nice as this new guy may be, he's no replacement.And then Eager takes the coin metaphor a step further and gets at the emotional heart of the book. He does it quickly and with grace, and few readers even notice what he's done:
The last wish was Jane's alone, and she never really knew she made it.That night, as she was getting undressed, she found the charm in her pocket, and sat on the bed looking at it for a long time, and pondering the mystery of how it had come into their hands, and why.And from that she went on thinking about their mother's being married, and the changes it would bring into their lives.She was quite contented about everything. But because she was the only one of the four children who remembered their father, she would have been more contented still if she could have felt sure that he knew about what was going to happen, and approved of it....Her last waking thought was that she wished her father were with her now, so she'd know how he felt about things.She wasn't worrying about the charm, or working out the right fractions, as she wished it. But because there was still this one small corner in Jane that wasn't completely happy, the charm relented, and thawed out of its icy used-upness, and granted the wish, according to its well-known fashion. Immediately, her father was half there.He was there like a thought in her mind, assuring her that everything was all right, and exactly as he would want it, and that he was happy in their happiness.
Which is to say, he's a ghost of sorts, called back to soothe his daughter's worries. In the morning Jane has forgotten all about the visit but not its effects: She is happy without quite knowing why, and the family can move forward. And then the plot kicks into gear again: More hijinks ensue when the charm is picked up by a new child. It is the briefest of emotional moments in a book filled with hilarious business, but one that addresses what really lies at the heart of the novel, and does it with such economy that most readers skate right over it in their eagerness to get back to the fun.Eager was a writer for television, and he wrote his novels for his only son. Like many of his time, Eager smoked like it was his profession and true love (think Mad Men), and he died of cancer at the criminally young age of 53. His son died young, too; his wife, Jane, outlasted the two of them several decades more. But the final heir to the Eager estate—all of his correspondence, manuscripts, and royalties—is Harvard University, his alma mater.In reissuing the book for its fiftieth anniversary some years back, I tracked down and read through all of his correspondence from the early years, and discovered that the seven books of magic we have in print are not his entire body of work. There is a first novel, Red Head, which was never reprinted; and his follow-up manuscript to Half Magic, called Faith, Hope, and Carrotty, which his editor, Margaret McElderry, rejected, and which he never took elsewhere. (It wasn't much like Half Magic, and she thought he should continue in that vein.) Each of his magical novels is half of a pair (Half Magic and Magic By the Lake; Knight's Castle and The Time Garden; The Well-Wishers and Magic or Not?), and there are rumors of an uncompleted eighth tale of magic, a companion to the superb Seven-Day Magic. All of these things and more must be secreted away in his papers at Harvard. Maybe some day an enterprising publisher will dig them up and put them into print—perhaps only digitally, so that the books exist even while they have no physical dimension. That would be exactly the sort of magical ending that Eager would have approved of.
I have been an absent Crow recently—my apologies. For those of you who don’t know, I am not only a literary agent, but also a very lax blogger, a compulsive baker of cookies, and the mother of a tiny and precocious little girl named Alice, who is just over 400 days old.On Saturday afternoon, my gracious mother braved the drizzle and traffic and drove to my apartment to spend a few hours chasing my daughter from room to room. She did this not only because she relishes being a grandmother but also because she felt it was her duty to grant me the most fantastic gift one mother can give to another: Sleep.Stay with me here—this post will eventually be about books. I promise!Once I got my mother and daughter settled in together, I stumbled into my bedroom, buried myself in the various comforters and sheets and blankets of my bed, and succumbed to a gorgeous, deep, dark, drool-on-the-pillow afternoon nap.When I finally came to, I lay there for a few moments, trying to regain my wits. The baby monitor in my room was turned on low, and through the tinny speaker, I heard the familiar rustle of pages, followed by the melodic sound of my mother’s voice as she began reading Alice a story. I haven’t heard my mother’s “reading voice” since I was a little girl, and until that moment, I suppose I never even realized that my mother had a “reading voice.” It sounds different from her normal every day voice-- lilting, deeper, more confident.I think that everyone has an inner narrator; that is, when you sit down to read (or write) a story, there is a voice you hear in your head, narrating for you. And on Saturday afternoon, with the rain beating against the windows and the cheerful coos of my daughter bursting like happy static through the baby monitor, I realized that the voice of my inner narrator, whistling back to me through the corridors of time, carrying with it very promise of every wonderful book I have ever read—and will ever read—is the voice of my mother.Just to make certain I wasn’t absolutely crazy (hearing voices, having mommy-issues, and all that), I queried others about their inner narrators and was relieved to find that most everyone has one. Some people hear their mothers or fathers, some the voices of their schoolteachers, grandparents, or favorite authors. One person even told me that she doesn’t know who her inner narrator is exactly, but she knows beyond a doubt that it’s not her own voice.To this day, it is my mother’s reading voice that drives the bright kernel of hopefulness I feel upon setting out to write new short story, or to read the first pages of a new novel or manuscript. And I suppose that every time little Alice crawls into my lap with her pile of books and I read to her, pressing my lips to the top of her sweet, sweet head, I do so with the vague optimistic hope that, in some remote future, it will be my voice she hears, my voice that guides her long after I am gone, into each new narrative adventure, into the world of wonder and opportunity that lies behind the title page of every new book.What about you? Whose voice do you hear when you read or write?
Thanks to everyone who voted in the first ever Upstart Crow Poll(s) of Mass Importance. In case you missed it, last week, in anticipation of the Where the Wild Things Are film, I polled readers here on the blog and on Twitter to decide which films ranked as the best and worst adaptations of books, both for children and for adults.The polls yielded lots of surprises. For example, two films, Jumanji and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, earned votes for both the best and worst adaptations of kid's books. The first Narnia film also incurred the wrath of bestselling author Michael Grant, who complained that if Santa Claus were to show up with weapons, he should have just given the children some better firepower, claiming they, "Wouldn’t have even needed the magic Jesus lion if Santa had just turned the kids onto a tank." A valid point, Michael.
There were a few bumps in the road, too. On the adult side, I decided to limit the choices to films that had been released in the last 20 years to, in my mind, make things a little easier. Probably a bad decision, since I received votes for Apocalypse Now (1979), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and The Princess Bride, which came out 22 years ago (I know, I know ... inconceivable!).In the end, though, we had to have winners and losers. So without further adieu, I present to you the Best and Worst Adaptations of Films as Chosen by You, The Readers!
It seemed like such a simple formula, really: take the book that turned readers out of seemingly everyone, mix in one of our generation's most beloved actors in Tom Hanks, attach an Academy Award winning director in Ron Howard and, just to make Chris Richman happy, add in Audrey Tautou (whose performance in Amelie makes me want to jump into the screen and date her each time I watch it), and you're going to have a successful film, right? Um, wrong. Even though the film grossed over $200 million domestically, many found the greatest mystery to be why the movie stunk so much. Maybe it was because the book itself was already so cinematic that the film was almost pointless? We'll never know.
Despite a strong showing from fans of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption, and a near-upset by Bridget Jones's Diary, Peter Jackson's adaptation of the classic fantasy series won out in the end. This is a tough one to argue with: if we're basing the success of this film on Academy Awards and box office numbers alone, it goes down as one of the most successful film franchises in history. More telling to me, however, is how a series that was typically regarded as one of the cornerstones of nerdiness was able to transcend the dark basements of pimply-faced people everywhere to become a shared experience for the masses. This selection is especially touching to me, a boy who played Dungeons and Dragons as a half-elven ranger named Legosis (culled from Legolas and Aragorn, as well as other nerdy pursuits). Take that, cheerleaders!
Poor Ron Howard. Not only did his boyish appeal from Happy Days not last long enough to propel him toward success as an adult actor, but now he also has the dubious distinction of directing both selections for worst adaptations of books. Maybe Ron should avoid libraries altogether, huh? Or maybe it's a Dr. Suess thing, since the Mike Myers atrocity that was The Cat in the Hat came in second in the voting. Whatever the case, it seems that every who down in who-ville liked this film a lot, but the readers, who living just north of who-ville, did NOT!
The best children's book adaptation was the most hotly contested. Holes, Black Stallion, Anne of Green Gables, and several Harry Potter films received multiple votes, but none of them could topple this adorable little piggy. What set this film apart? Was it the hopefulness of the story? The wonderful supporting cast? How the pig had FREAKING ADORABLE HAIR? Likely, it was a combination of things that led you all to proclaim, "That'll do, pig."Thanks to everyone who read and voted!
(In case you're visiting only to vote, please remember that we're looking only for films that have been released in the past 20 years. Thanks!)On Wednesday
, I polled readers on the best and worst film adaptations of children's books and found some surprises, some no-brainers, and some upsets. The results will be posted on Monday.Sure, we focus mainly on children's books here on the blog, but that does not mean we at Upstart Crow ignore adult titles completely (just ask the wonderful Danielle Chiotti, who is our resident specialist in adult titles). Given our love of all things literary, we'd be remiss not to discuss the best and worst film adaptations of adult novels.Because the adaptations of novels go back to the very beginnings of cinema with classics like All Quiet on the Western Front, The Grapes of Wrath, and Gone with the Wind, I've decided to limit choices for best and worst adult film adaptations to movies made in the last 20 years because, if the children's choices are an indication, the nominations will be all over the place. And besides, The Godfather would have been tough to beat for the best, amIright?So please follow the same format as before in voting for your most/least favorites. List your selections like so: "Best: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original) Worst: Twilight" Please limit your choices to best and worth to only one in this format to make it easier for tallying purposes. If you'd like to list runners-up or comments afterward, feel free.The results from comments and from my concurrent poll on Twitter (follow hashtag #books2film) will be posted next Monday. Let the votes begin!
I'm feeling reflective this morning (or as reflective as I ever get, anyway), so I'm going to don my Nostradamus-like robes and prognosticate on the future of publishing. There is something in the air—is it just autumn previewing winter? or is it something more portentous?There is an interesting (some might say alarming) story in this morning's New York Times about libraries building downloadable digital collections, with several publishers coughing into their fists and muttering, "Unsustainable!" Simon and Schuster has introduced the wet fizzle they call the "vook." Former Harper CEO Jane Friedman has launched an ambitious plan to digitize the backlist of many successful authors. And soon there will be a bevy of e-reader options—from Barnes & Noble a two-screen doozy, and a cut-rate Kindle-esque reader called the iRiver Story, and many more ways to read books that make the Kindle look like slate and chalk. Soon you'll have your choice—electronic ink? backlit screen? giant screen? tiny screen?What does this mean for books? What does it mean for publishing? Publishers—and most authors—are clearly agitated by the idea that books may become the next medium to be pirated and passed around, like movies and MP3s. We all saw what happened to the record industry: artists survived, but big labels have not—or not in the same fashion. Nowadays recordings are seen almost as advertisements for the musician's tours and merchandise. The money has migrated. Will the same thing happen to traditional publishing? And if it does, as seems likely, where will the money come from? How will publishers or authors (in newspeak) "monetize" their craft and content?Michael Grant, who periodically pops up in the comments section of this blog to toss an F-bomb or two, believes that books will definitely all be digital soon. He points to his frighteningly smart son, who read the whole of a 750-page manuscript on an iPhone. Kids these days, he suggests, aren't allied to traditional media. His terrifyingly brilliant son, in fact, has created something he calls Frebook (the link is to a Quicktime animation sequence; it takes a bit of time to load), which embeds backstory and advertising within a text, and creates hypertext-like windows that pop-up when the cursor is rolled over highlighted words.Well, that's one way money might be generated. But I think it ignores how book sales are generated in the first place: By word of mouth.Another way to monetize digital books is to embrace free media and give the downloads away. That's what Cory Doctorow did with his bestseller (in print) Little Brother. He made it available in so many downloadable forms that it made the issue of pirating moot. Instead, it did something else: It spread the word. Doctorow quoted publisher Tim O'Reilly that "My problem isn't piracy; it's obscurity," and then went on to make a cogent point: "Of all the people who have failed to buy my books today, the majority do so because they've never heard of me, not because someone gave them a free, electronic copy." Giving away Little Brother didn't hurt book sales at all. If anything, it may have buoyed them.Certainly that's how it works these days in music. Anecdotal example: A friend gave me a copy of the Frank Turner album "Love, Ire & Song." I loved it so much that I've since bought three physical copies—for other people. And I downloaded his collection "The First Three Years" from iTunes. And I bought a physical copy of his new album. I love the guy's music, and so I support his work. I believe readerships might function the same way.Readers—like fans of music—are incredibly loyal beasts. Loyal to formats (else there wouldn't be such passionate defenders of print media), loyal to authors, loyal to the books they love. Readers aren't created wallet-first, but hooked by their love of a story. The other day, I bought a massive trade paperback of James Clavell's Shogun, a book I adored and read and reread as a teen. (I was so passionate about it and feudal Japan that my friends, in the way of savage un-PC teens everywhere, called me "Mr. Nip.") This is the third copy I've owned over the years. I didn't want it digitally. If I love something, I want it around in concrete form.I know that I will always buy books by the authors I love. Even if, say, I didn't buy the book that first exposed me to their work. Maybe I got that book from a library (Ray Bradbury), or maybe a friend loaned it to me (Robert Heinlein), or maybe I read it on an e-reader first.What do you all think? Where is publishing going? Where are books going? Is it really that worrisome for authors? Or only for publishers?
Anticipation is
high among publishing folks for Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Jonze and have enjoyed his work dating back to his music video days. What's getting me even more excited for the film are the early reports of it being incredibly dark and strange.There will be contrasting opinions about the film adaptation of WTWTA, and I simply can't wait. Some will say, "It's too scary for kids!" Others, "Where's all the good stuff I remember?" Folks like me, "Holy crap that was crazy awesome!"The film got me thinking about adaptations in general. With the recent success of the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Coraline films, we're seeing more film studios that want to capitalize on children's books as films because they see them as events the whole family will attend together. In one way, that's good: Percy Jackson, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Alice in Wonderland will all be gracing on the big screen before too long. In another, it's bad: I'd hate to see the film version of I Love You Forever or The Giving Tree.So it's time to play movie critic! What are the best and worst film adaptations of children's books? Please leave your picks (one of each, please!) in the comments like so: "Best: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Worst: Harry Potter and the Secrets of the Chamber."On Friday, we'll switch things over to adult titles who got the film treatment and then on Monday I'll post the results both from the blog replies and replies on Twitter.
