The current issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism focuses on the future of writing and reading, offering up a spate of interesting writers examining various threads of that theme. Of particular note is The American Prospect associate editor Ezra Klein’s look at the Kindle, Amazon’s new digital book reader. Books may be in decline, he surmises, but people are still reading all the time – we’re glued to our computer screens. So surely the Kindle is onto something?

So I consulted my conscience, which is as much gadget-head as bookworm, and quickly came to a decision: I would simultaneously support reading and the introduction of expensive new electronic devices by buying a Kindle and proudly toting it around town for a month. That would give me time to determine whether this really was the future of reading, or whether the nation remained threatened by grave and unnamed consequences.

But after both admiring and criticizing the Kindle, Klein comes to the conclusion that if the reading revolution will be digitized, it needs to move beyond the typical conventions of the print medium.

At the end of the day, the true advances won’t come in the Kindle, but in the content.

[…]

This may, ultimately, prove to be Amazon’s truly crucial role—not driving the future of reading so much as the future of writing. E-reading technology will push forward even without Amazon’s involvement. The Kindle will soon face stiff competition from a bevy of able competitors. […] But if the Kindle’s successor or competitors are to succeed, it will be because Amazon used its status as the world’s largest online bookseller to force authors to think seriously about creating content that works better than the book, that goes where the book cannot, that’s interactive and cooperative and open in ways that printed text will never be.

Ah, the bedtime story. The little ones in their pajamas, all tucked into bed, getting ready to listen to yet another telling of a kidlit classic like Goodnight Moon… on their iPods?

Donna Vickroy, a columnist for Chicago-area newspaper Southtown Star, takes issue with AudibleKids.com, a new offshoot of audiobooks site Audible.com, which offers kids’ books for download.

There’s a popular children’s book that bears the title, “Let’s Talk About Being Lazy.”

How convenient that it may very soon be available in audiobook form.

Look, I agree that followers of attachment parenting can take that 24/7 lovey-dovey stuff too far.

And I believe that audiobooks are a refined arm of the technology craze.

But to expect parents to welcome the automation of their bedtime story reading duties is just plain cold.

[…]

And yes, something must be done to combat the reluctant reader phenomenon.

But when Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb says, “I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook,” you have to wonder whether virtual parents - today’s version of barbarians - aren’t knocking at the gate.

“One Book, One Vancouver” has picked Karen X. Tulchinsky’s 2003 novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky (Raincoast Books) as this year’s selection in the city-wide book club.

More info here, at the One Book, One Vancouver website.

Click here to read Q&Q’s review of The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky.

Over at The Tyee, Shannon Rupp has posted a lengthy response to a recent New York Times piece about bibliophiles judging potential mates by their reading material.

Using a booklist to divine a man’s character seems no worse than rating his shoes – which many women swear is infallible – and it may be better. A meeting of minds as a prelude to a meeting of . . . well, it just seems more authentic. Or so I thought, until I saw male reaction to the Times piece and discussed it with a few of my well-read men friends who began reminiscing about how knowing what was between the covers got them between the covers.

From there, Rupp shares a number of her men friends’ cheesy book-related pick up lines, and also exposes the all-too-common practice of “bookwinking” – pretending to have read and/or liked a book in order to get laid.

In perusing online comments it became clear that bookwinking is common. For every woman who dismisses a man for not knowing Pushkin, there are 10 men who have been literary poseurs. While it’s generally agreed by those of all sexes that a fondness for The Da Vinci Code, Ayn Rand, Dianetics, The Secret, and anything by Ann Coulter or Eckhart Tolle will get you booted out of bed by most thinking singletons, women note that there are a few books that serve as a kind of code-speak that a man’s taste in fiction is just that.

For example, beware any guy who claims Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being on his reading list. He’s trawling for casual sex.

Another warning sign is an alleged fondness for Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Apparently, it’s the title-of-choice among men posing as sensitive guys.

The 2006 Survey of Household Spending in Canada says that, despite an overall increase in consumption, “spending on reading materials decreased 5% to $260 per household.”

It seems that no one can stop the grim march of these stories about the death of reading. But there’s a silver lining: Canadians are now spending more on reading materials than on games of chance. Way to go, spending-on-reading!

One province is still reading, though. Thanks to the booming resource economy in the West, Alberta households are spending more than anyone else on entertainment. Mostly of the sporting and televisual variety, but spending on reading materials is up a healthy 8%. Seems like a good time to start marketing some books to Albertans.

All around the world, it seems, people need to step up their reading habits:

To cultivate a love of reading among Russian city dwellers, a Reading Moscow Train painted with portraits of characters and excerpts from classical literature will start running in May. Train carriages will also carry booklets featuring the latest books and magazines.

To foster a culture of reading in Ghana, one media consultant is urging the government to make reading a compulsory subject in school and wants every district to have a library and community book club. Accra newspaper Public Agenda reports that the consultant considers a lack of reading culture in Ghana to be a stumbling block for the country’s future.

And a recent study in the U.S. concluded that America’s literacy is in decline and that this will have “severe consequences for American society.” The report by the National Endowment for the Arts suggests people who read on a regular basis have better health, are politically engaged, and earn more money.

Remember the good old days when you walked to school uphill, both ways, and even read books for free?

Hoping to lower school dropout rates, the mayor of a small town in Spain has suggested paying students one euro for each hour they spend reading.

The town’s council will vote on the idea in March. The jury is still out on whether this will foster a love of reading or love of money.

Noted sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin weighs in on what she calls the “alleged decline of reading” in a feature essay in the February issue of Harper’s. The article begins with a predictable litany of lamentable reading stats, but then takes the debate in a whole new direction, squaring the blame for reading’s decline on publishers, not readers.

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

The essay, available only to subscribers, is equally sharp, witty, and angry throughout, though Le Guin’s conclusion that we’d all be better off if “corporate” publishers dumped their literary imprints does seem a little rash. Still, her rhetoric is fine, rabble-rousing stuff.

A fitting coda to the media’s handwringing this year over all things literary is Caleb Crain’s piece in The New Yorker, ominously titled “Twilight of the Books,” which looks at how declining literacy is affecting not just the publishing industry – it’s changing the very structure of the human mind, most likely for the worse.

The article begins by corralling a long list of facts that describes the slow decline of literacy in the U.S. Here are a couple of zingers, excerpted from the text:

In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002.

The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005.

According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient – capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials” – declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.

Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation – even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.

And on and on. Crain then offers a lengthy primer on the neurological basis of literacy skills and concludes that reading, as opposed to watching TV, provides a better “cognitive workout.” The bad news, of course, is that in the “antagonism between words and moving images” the latter is winning hands down.

Given the decline of books, it’s not surprising that the Guardian is reporting on the death of book criticism. John Crace’s article profiles English academic Ronan McDonald, whose new book (titled The Death of the Critic) contains some very old-school ideas. (The central argument boils down to this: “It’s tough being a serious critic in these relativist times.”) The author even invokes the ghost of F.R. Leavis, the admittedly “rebarbative and prescriptive”critic of a bygone era.

Ironically, the very existence of Crain’s lengthy piece and McDonald’s lively polemic point to the health of both literacy and criticism. Here’s  hoping that coverage of both topics becomes a little less morbid in the new year.

Many of you faithful industry watchers have probably already heard tell of the short documentary that Indigo CEO Heather Reisman commissioned earlier this year about the “crisis” in school libraries. It’s called Writing on the Wall, and while it spends a fair amount of time showing us how truly, appallingly neglected most Canadian school libraries are these days, it spends an equal amount of time trumpeting Reisman’s attempts to address the problem with her “Love of Reading” campaign. Over the past year or so, Reisman has been screening the film for publishers and politicians and anyone else who might want to support her cause, but as far as we’re aware it’s never been screened to the broad public.

Now, however, you can see it for yourself here, on Indigo’s website.

It’s fairly lengthy – more than 10 minutes long, by our estimate – but it’s worth a look, if only to see the maudlin denouement. After a straightforward – if predictably cheesy – first half, which simply documents the poor condition of most library collections and the lack of funding for teacher-librarians, the second half is like a reality TV game show. Reisman and her board pore over hundreds of school applications – they get most excited for the submissions with macaroni art and sparkles – and then we cut back and forth between two different schools that both desperately want and need one of the 10 $150,000 Indigo grants. The filmmakers actually put cameras in the two respective principals’ offices when the notifying phone calls come in, so not only do we watch and listen as Reisman informs one school of its win (accompanied by the expected tears of joy and laughter), but we also watch as one of Reisman’s monotone employees informs the other school that they have not been selected. In this latter case, the principal is alone in a gray, claustrophobic-looking office, and she nods sadly as she is told to try again next year. Ugh.

German journalist and author Gunter Wallraff has been trying to get permission to read from Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel The Satanic Verses in a mosque in Cologne, but has so far been denied permission.

From DW-World:

The request posed a dilemma for the Turkish-Islamic union DITIB, an Ankara-funded religious foundation: If the group members denied Wallraff’s request, they would be seen as not being liberal, but granting permission would anger a large number of their members.

DITIB officials said they had discussed the proposed reading with Wallraff until two weeks ago, but negotiations failed after he refused to compromise.

“He lacks understanding for the feelings and needs of members of our Muslim community,” said a spokesman, without specifying what DITIB had proposed to Wallraff.

Any sentence with the words “Muslim” and “Rushdie” in it tends to raise temperatures on all sides of an issue, and to be fair, it’s unlikely that one would easily get permission to read, say, The Da Vinci Code in a cathedral. Maybe, like so many of us, the DITIB officials just don’t care for literary readings?

Either way, Wallraff has vowed to keep trying.

(hat tip: The Literary Saloon)

Remember Glenn Danzig, the perpetually shirtless goth rocker from the Misfits? Remember how your semi-goth girlfriends in high school had pictures of him in their lockers and insisted that he was not only hunky, but deep, too? Well, it seems they were right and you were wrong.

Just take a look at this old video that has popped up on YouTube, in which Danzig sits down in front of his bookshelf and talks up some of his favorite titles, most of which involve werewolves, nazis, or other apparitions of evil. And though the guy’s enthusiasms are morbid, it’s clear he’s just a big ol’ softy at heart. Look at the smile that lights up his face at the end. So cute!

Thanks to The New York Times‘ Papercuts blog for drawing the video to our attention.

Every year, the rare and used books website Bookfinder.com releases a bestseller list of out-of-print books, and this year’s list has now been unveiled. Some of the highlights are Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, Jessica Simpson’s now forebodingly titled I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding, David Manners’ The Great Tool Emporium, which describes itself as “a pictorial extravaganza of the tools of yesterday and today,” and photographer Larry Clark’s too-icky-to-ever-be-printed-again Teenage Lust.

You can see the full list – which has been broken down into several categories – here.

After U.S. National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman had finished freaking out over declining levels of American readership, bookselling blogger The Written Nerd looked at the stats from a more reassuring angle:

The [U.S. National Endowment for the Arts] survey states that 56% of Americans read any book in 2002 (that’s ANY book, not just “literary works,” which the survey focuses on).

The Associated Press/Ipsos survey says that 73% of Americans read any book last year (i.e. in 2006).

Therefore, if these two respected organizations are to be believed…

AMERICANS READ MORE LAST YEAR THAN THEY READ FIVE YEARS AGO.

Ah, numbers. So many different ways to interpret them. Good thing words aren’t like that!

Anyway, Freeman’s article raised the spectre of how to attract more people to reading:

Now that cigarettes are becoming less and less palatable in an actor’s hand, put a book there. If the NEA wants people to read, strong-arm a copy of William Carlos Williams’ The Doctor Stories onto Grey’s Anatomy. Companies which spend millions of advertising dollars articulating their brand could say a lot more for less by using books. Why doesn’t The Gap stock copies of On the Road?

The Black Entertainment Television network, as pointed out by GalleyCat, is helping out with that angle – sort of. BET’s new animation department has produced a music video that it says celebrates literacy and black pride.

Its cartoon rapper bounces on a piano, riffing on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and in his first line bellows, “Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book!” He goes on in a similar manner to encourage listeners to brush their teeth, care for their children, drink water instead of booze, and wear deodorant. Sound advice, to be sure, but it’s all accompanied by a plethora of profanities and stereotypical rap-video images.

A Los Angeles Times article covers the mixed reactions to the clip – some see it as a funny satire of the hip-hop industry; others find its rampant use of negative African-American stereotypes offensive.

The article also describes the parts of the video that most startled Quillblog:

In one scene, a gangster uses a book as a cartridge in an automatic weapon, while another shows a woman shaking her rear with “BOOK” printed on her low-riding pants.

Nothing says “reading is fun” like guns and booty-shaking, right?

(Thanks to GalleyCat for the link.)

According to The Guardian, a new poll has revealed that Britons want to be writers more than they want to be anything else.

A YouGov poll has found that almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organiser on the list of most coveted jobs.

The Guardian speculates that this surge in literary interest is due mostly to J.K. Rowling, who is generally perceived to have made gobs and gobs of money by simply scribbling away in cafes over cups of tea. Judging by the fairytale content of the rest of the preferred professions list – which essentially amounts to playing sports, flying, and throwing parties – it seems that Britons are actually just saying that they don’t want to work for a living at all. Which is understandable enough.

However, according to our calculations, if all the wannabes follow their dreams, Britain will soon have 6 million authors storming the doors of the nation’s publishing houses. Good luck to ‘em, we say.

Meanwhile, The Guardian has also posted the results of yet another poll, this one from the U.S., which found that a quarter of Americans read no books whatsoever last year. And of those who did, the average tally was four books, with the Bible and romance novels named as the top picks. So we’re guessing that “writer” would not beat out pop idol, motivational speaker, and heiress as the preferred professions in the U.S., but hey – different country, different dreams.

Jason B. Jones at Bookslut has kindly decided to share with us one of his most prized possession: an out-of-print audio recording of Alec Guiness reading T.S. Eliot poems.

What’s hilarious about the recording is listening to the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi reading The Waste Land. (When I started playing the tape at home, my 4-year-old cocked his head and asked, “What’s Ben Kenobi saying?”) […] But what’s really splendid about the recording is hearing Eliot’s poems read by someone who knows how to act.

Jones includes an mp3 snippet from Guiness’ Waste Land reading, and a further snippet of Eliot himself reading from the same poem.

(Also, just for kicks, he includes a link to an old, nonsensical Wikipedia entry for The Waste Land, which appears to have since been altered.)

This week’s shot comes courtesy of a friend of Q&Q, and depicts her daughter concentrating furiously on finishing the new Potter.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

The most recent edition of The Times Literary Supplement contains a review of a book/essay entitled (in French) “How to discuss books one hasn’t read.” Written by French literature professor and practising psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard, the book tackles what must surely be a common problem: having to fake one’s way through conversations or writing about great lit one hasn’t read. Don’t feel guilty, Bayard says – you aren’t alone, and society shouldn’t be pressuring you like that anyway.

During a discussion of “literary embarrassment,” Bayard himself confesses to referencing Joyce repeatedly in his teaching, though he hasn’t read Ulysses, and he isn’t alone in his chutzpah, the review says:

Bayard focuses on a scene in Lodge’s novel Changing Places, in which the English academic Philip Swallow initiates his students and fellow academics into a “game of Humiliation,” according to whose rules players have to give the names of great works they have not read: the head of the English department who hasn’t read Paradise Regained is bested by the American academic, Howard Ringbaum, who, in a moment of professional recklessness, confesses to not having read Hamlet. Ringbaum’s mistake, according to Bayard, was to have made this unambiguous confession, for Hamlet is part of what Bayard terms our “virtual” library – works we cannot help but be familiar with. There was simply no need for Ringbaum to be so rash.

As discussed in the review, Bayard focuses on the question of reviewing without reading the works in question:

The most enjoyable chapter is on Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues … in which the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who has come to Paris to find literary fame and fortune, receives a brisk lesson in the cynical conventions of Parisian literary journalism.… Rubempré, who is full of foolish notions about “la sainte critique,” learns from his more worldly friends that … to read a volume for review would be considered humiliating – it’s a task best left to one’s mistress: the reviewer’s job is to express general opinions about the author in question, opinions that comply with the wishes of one’s editor. Bayard would see this approach to literary journalism as “transgressive”: all opinions, no matter how ill-founded, are valid, and the book has ceased to have importance, “has ceased to exist.” Balzac’s chancers are free to construct their own virtual libraries.

The practice of reviewing a book without having read it inevitably brings Oscar Wilde into the discussion: Wilde (the patron saint of non-readers) recommended six minutes as the proper time to spend reading a book for review, and advocated reviewing as a good way of talking about oneself.

Quillblog should state, for the record, that Q&Q’s reviewers never try this at home.

Sometimes, if you want to sell books, you’ve got to go where the people are: that is, bars, community centres, planes, trains, the Internet, and now, thanks to an emerging trend, people’s offices. According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Starbucks have been hosting book events for their employees. In the case of Google, the company sweetens the pot by buying a ton of books to hand out free.

“There are so many distractions out there,” said Yelena Gitlin, publicity manager for Bloomsbury Books, who started bringing authors to Microsoft and Starbucks in 2003. “It’s hard to get people into bookstores these days, so book publishers and sellers have to come to readers — and they are often at work.”

Indeed, companies like Google are offering so many perks or “enriched lifestyle” options, as they are called — fitness classes, massage services, dry cleaning, financial advice, ski trips, round-the-clock meals and now lunch hours with famous authors — that the novice might not realize that health, well being and community were previously sought outside work.

At Yahoo, there’s even an employee by the name of Judy Moore whose title is “party princess.” Among Moore’s duties is to oversee high-profile book events.

The corporate author event originated at Microsoft Research in Seattle in the late ’90s, when science and technology authors were invited to address employees of the company’s think tank division. The program became so popular that in 2000 Linda Stone, Microsoft’s “Virtual Worlds” director, expanded it to include all kinds of authors and all of Microsoft, with the help of Kim Ricketts, Seattle’s University Bookstore event organizer. Two years later, SmartMoney magazine picked Microsoft’s author events as the employee “perk of the month,” and according to Ricketts, a new business model for bookselling was born.

“We sold and do sell a lot of books at companies,” Ricketts said. “It immediately became clear to me that this is a more efficient way to sell books.”

It sounds like a sweet gig for the authors – after all, nothing else says “captive audience” like a group of clean-shirted cubicle dwellers. The flesh-and-blood aspect is probably key, though – we’re thinking that the offices of Google and Microsoft are at least a couple of venues where Margaret Atwood’s LongPen would seem less like a novelty and more like business as usual.

The often entertaining and frequently bizarre David Sedaris has a reflective piece in the latest New Yorker. He writes about the phase in his life when he was obsessed with quasi-antiques and lived in a house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, run by a woman who shared his passion.

I hadn’t even crossed the threshold when I agreed to take the room. What sold me was the look of the place. Some might have found it shabby – “a dump,” my father would eventually call it – but, unless you ate them, a few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone. The same could be said for the groaning front porch and the occasional missing shingle. It was easy to imagine that the house, set as it was, on the lip of a student parking lot, had dropped from the sky, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, but with a second story. Then there was the inside, which was even better. The front door opened into a living room, or, as Rosemary called it, “the parlor.” The word was old-fashioned, but fitting. Velvet curtains framed the windows. The walls were papered in a faint, floral pattern, and doilies were everywhere, laid flat on tabletops and sagging like cobwebs from the backs of overstuffed chairs. My eyes moved from one thing to another, and, like my mother with her dining-room set, Rosemary took note of where they landed. “I see you like my davenport,” she said, and, “You don’t find lamps like that anymore. It’s a genuine Stephanie.”

This Quillblogger doesn’t even know what a Stephanie is.

The issue also features an essay by Nobelist Orhan Pamuk, who meditates on the advent of hot dogs in Turkey. (For hot-dog lovers out there, street meat is a popular topic in Toronto right now, too.)

National Book Critics Circle member Rayyan Al-Shawaf, a Beirut-based writer and freelance reviewer, has posted an extensive survey of the Lebanese book scene on the NBCC blog. Al-Shawaf discusses the lengthy traditions of tolerance and diversity in the country and its capital, which he says are known as “the Arab world’s publishing hub for quality books of all kinds,” and the names of a few Canadian writers crop up.

Books by Lebanon-born novelist Rawi Hage (De Niro’s Game) and Iraqi-raised man of letters Naim Kattan (Farewell, Babylon), both of whom are now based in Montreal, are cited as examples of, respectively, thriving contemporary Lebanese writing and Jewish literature that is widely published and available in Beirut.

The often-controversial Irshad Manji also earns a mention:

A lively debate on the role and relevance of Islam in modern societies has long been underway in the Arab literary world; the same can be said of more detailed issues concerning Islamic law. Fascinatingly, however, Beirut is a place where one can also find works by Western writers of Muslim origin who have decided to plunge into the debate. These include a number of polemical books familiar to Western readers.

Occasionally, these books are translated into Arabic, as with Irshad Manji’s The Trouble with Islam Today, which appeared under the more circumspect title Muslimoun wa Ahrar (loosely translated as “Muslims and Freethinkers”), courtesy of Cologne-based publishing house Al-Kamel Verlag; as an added cautionary measure, no translator is credited. More common is for the work to be sold in English – thereby lessening the potential for controversy.

Authors: do you sometimes worry about employing excessively salty language? Do you fret about offending readers with your otherwise innocent descriptors? Don’t you wish there was a way of determining once and for all the words that amuse and the words that affront?

Well now there is! The friendly people at Random House Reference have devised a revolutionary – and handy! – chart for just such a purpose, called the O.Q., or the Offensiveness Quotient. As they state on their website:

When we label sensitive terms for Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, there are a lot of factors to consider. The way we decide has to do with how offensive a word is (the degree to which a word offends the person it is used to describe) and how disparaging a word is (the degree to which the person who uses the word intends for it to be hurtful).

To decide how to label a word, we go through a process that is something like the chart we give below. We call it the O.Q., or “offensiveness quotient” – modeled after the more familiar I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient). […] Basically, the O.Q. is the average of a term’s rank on the scales of Disparagement and Offensiveness.

Thanks to the O.Q. chart, we here at Q&Q now know that while it is not particularly desirable to refer to someone of the feminine persuasion as “the little woman,” it is still preferable to referring to her as “baby.” Similarly, calling someone of European descent a “honky” is worse than calling them “whitey,” but not nearly as bad as calling them “cracker.” We’re not exactly sure how “spaz” can be considered more slanderous than “harelip,” but then, who are we to question such a finely honed system?

There were nervous smiles and possibly some fluttery stomachs in and around the Enwave Theatre for last night’s “Men of Letters” reading, the first event of the first-ever BOOKED festival. The featured authors were Ray Robertson, Steven Henighan, David Gilmour, and Barry Callaghan. Despite a couple of small glitches – there were no Robertson titles available at the booksellers’ table; Callaghan had to borrow water from an audience member – the event went off fairly smoothly. The theatre was around half-full, with between 75 and 100 people attending (including editors and publicists from each of the authors’ respective publishing houses). Q&Q columnist James Grainger hosted. Selling books at the event were reps from Another Story and Bakka-Phoenix.

Hear ye, hear ye, Oprah’s Book Club has spoken: your new favourite book is going to be Middlesex, the sprawling 2002 book by Jeffrey Eugenides that is (only at base) about a hermaphrodite who chooses to switch genders. Oprah is also billing it as being about family secrets, identities, and self-discovery – her favourites!

The Book Club website promises downloadable goodies such as an “exclusive bookmark,” questions for the author, and, oh yeah, some of the book’s content. Plus you – yes, you – can win a contest to be the first to e-mail Eugenides.

The U.K. bookstore chain Waterstone’s has just released the results of a poll they put together for their 25th anniversary, in which they asked readers to vote for their favorite novels of the past 25 years. To practically nobody’s surprise, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the top pick.

Also not surprising is the fact that Canadian Yann Martel made the cut with his enormously popular Life of Pi. What is a bit surprising, though, is that Margaret Atwood’s highly un-recent 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale made it onto the list, too – and that it ranked as high as #11. Who says readers have short term memories?

The full list, as it appears in London’s Daily Telegraph, can be seen here, along with a short article analyzing the list and discussing how it reflects British tastes.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates delivered a lengthy speech about the future of media and advertising last Tuesday at a conference in Seattle, and he spent a fair portion of it talking specifically about the future of print. Seattle-based technology blogger Todd Bishop has posted several excerpts from Gates’ speech, including this one:

Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. […] Somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.

Not that Gates would be biased toward technology or anything. A more convincing examination of the future of e-reading can be found on the Guardian’s website, where author and technophobe Andrew Marr writes about his month-long experience using the iRex Iliad, which has been touted as one of the first truly usable e-readers on the market.

(Thanks to Quillblog reader Jennifer Lambert for pointing out the Gates link.)

David Kipen, a former book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, has joined the battle to save newspaper book review sections from cutbacks and possible extinction with an essay on Salon.com. Kipen argues that the decline of reviews and reviewers is a symptom of a larger problem. “Book reviews and the people who write them are,” he says:

what biologists like to call an “indicator species.” An indicator species is the newt or worm in an ecosystem that nobody much notices until it starts to disappear. And even then, who really misses another polliwog — until six months later when, suddenly, even the buzzards are dead?

Like it or not, the indicator species for American daily journalism is the book review. Newspapers were cutting book coverage before the current flurry, among other places in Detroit, San Jose and Boston. Without exception, losing their book pages failed to stanch either reader loss or red ink. Were these papers already in trouble before they started cutting book coverage? Of course, but what did their publishers expect by further alienating people who like to read — the one constituency no newspaper can survive without? Put another way, how can institutions that cover electoral politics be so deaf to every campaign’s first commandment, namely, “Shore up your base”?

Kipen goes on to say that a National Endowment for the Arts study called “Reading at Risk” reported that “only about 47 percent of Americans can say they read a book for pleasure the previous year. That marked a decade-over-decade swan dive from 1992, and a power dive from the decade before.” Facing numbers like these, Kipen says, more has to be done to restore reading to a place of prominence in American culture. Kipen directs the NEA’s Big Read initiative and recommends other one-city, one-book campaigns (similar to CBC’s Canada Reads and regional reading initiatives that run in Canada).

Kipen also offers a theory about why the Resistance has been slow to take up arms. “There’s a furtive, beleaguered, unacknowledged glamour in feeling like the last bastion of civilization, the saving remnant beset on all sides by the forces of ignorance and greed. Who lives for baseball more than a Cubs fan? Everybody loves a lost cause — sometimes so much that we forget to fight for it.”

Design Observer has an interesting essay by Alice Twemlow of the School of Visual Arts in New York contemplating the sheer abundance of books now being produced.

According to the Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid, writing in So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, the human race publishes a book every 30 seconds. If current trends continue, by 2052 the number of people writing and publishing a book in a given year will exceed the number of people who will read one.

For those who wish to write and publish books, this opening may be off-putting or even day-ruining, but take heart: Both Zaid and Twemlow move past this to consider the beauty of books. Twemlow visits the Artists Space gallery in New York, where 5,300 books and magazines from 360 independent publishing houses are on display. Even  surveying that wealth of books devoted only to the subject of contemporary art, Twemlow is still able to suggest reasons why people still want to produce, read, and own books.  Whew!

George Orwell, in his essay “Confessions of Book Reviewer,” wrote that “until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.” He saw this mostly despairingly, with the professional reviewer wasting precious time and words on unworthy books and ultimately “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.”

Joe Queenan, however, views the ever-growing pile of crappy books as something to be celebrated. In an essay in The New York Times, Queenan contends that bad books should be seen for what they are: the life of the party in an often solemn and overly serious field.

Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They read only good books, they see only good movies, they listen only to good music, they discuss politics only with good people, and they’re not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn’t. It makes them mean and overly judgmental and miserly, as if taking 15 minutes to flip through The Da Vinci Code is a crime so monstrous, an offense in such flagrant violation of the sacred laws of intellectual time-management, that they will be cast out into the darkness by the Keepers of the Cultural Flame. In these people’s view, any time spent reading a bad book can never be recovered. They also act as if the rest of humanity is watching their time sheets.

Such prissy attitudes are neurotic and self-defeating. Bad books are an essential part of life, as entertaining and indispensable as bad clothing (ironic polyester shirts), bad music (John Tesh at Red Rocks, Phil Collins anywhere), bad trends (metrosexuality, not using toilet paper for a year in order to “help” the environment) and bad politicians (take your pick). I started reading extremely bad books as a boy, when my beloved but slightly unhinged Uncle Jerry lent me the classic Reds-under-the-beds screed “None Dare Call It Treason,” and have been reading them ever since.

Of course, even Orwell admitted as much, in another essay entitled, appropriately enough, “Good Bad Books”:

All of these are definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh AT than WITH, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can say is that, while civilization remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power.

Bookninja has linked to an article (posted by Yahoo! News) about teachers in Maryland using Disney comics to inspire a love of reading, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re decidedly skeptical about the whole idea.

Garsh, Mickey. Isn’t Disney so civic-minded and not clawing desperately at its few remaining untapped markets?

Bookninja goes on to imply that reading Disney comics will rot the young minds of schoolkids. Though we at Quillblog love the ’ninja people, today we must respectfully disagree with them. As any serious comics fan knows, Disney has always set an inordinately high bar with their comics for kids, most notably with their classic (and still running) Gladstone line. The original Carl Barks-penned Uncle Scrooge comics – with their globe-trotting Gunga Din-style adventure plots – are especially high-water marks, on a level with Herges’s Tintin series and Jeff Smith’s Bone. This Quillblogger recalls many a happy Sunday afternoon spent reading Uncle Scrooge, which probably taught me more about the pleasures of narrative than many of the middling YA novels my teachers tried to force down my throat.

This week’s Friday photo comes courtesy of Gene Wilburn, who took this shot of Robert J. Sawyer reading a chapter from his new novel, Rollback, on his handheld computer at the book’s launch at Bakka Phoenix bookstore in Toronto on April 14.

Go to Q&Q’s Flickr pool for more from the Sawyer launch.

The May issue of Q&Q, in stores now, contains a cover profile of Sawyer. Read a review of Rollback here.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

Harry Potter may be approaching his grand finale but he may still have something to learn from an older master of magic. According to The Guardian:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has, for the past 16 weeks, looked to be the invincible champion of the bestseller lists, despite being more than three months away from publication. But the wizardy whippersnapper hadn’t reckoned on the return of an even more popular author: JRR Tolkien has come back from beyond the grave to seize the throne of Amazon’s book charts. The Children of Húrin, based on uncompleted manuscripts by Tolkien, has been worked into a book by the author’s youngest son, Christopher: a labour of love that has taken him 30 years.

J.K. Rowling and Tolkien both have enormous appeal as authors, but judging from Salon.com’s review, this last book of Tolkien’s is much darker and more tragic than The Lord of the Rings, not to mention a denser read:

Initially, “The Children of Húrin” has that ye-olde-homework feeling of Tolkien at his most laborious. Here is the third sentence of Chapter I: “His daughter Glóredhel wedded Haldir son of Halmir, lord of the men of Brethil; and at the same feast his son Galdor the Tall wedded Hareth, the daughter of Halmir.” (Furthermore, none of the people in that sentence ever reappear.) I still had to refer to Christopher Tolkien’s thorough and helpful maps, indexes and appendixes every few pages to keep the geographical and genealogical nomenclature straight — and I went back to “The Silmarillion” a couple of times to figure out the historical context — but I minded that less and less as the hours grew longer and Túrin’s fell struggle against innermost and outermost evil grew ever more dire.

It may have knocked Harry Potter out of the top spot on Amazon, but it would be interesting to know if the same readers are buying both books. Quillblog speculates that some Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fans may graduate into an interest in the new Tolkien volume, but maybe only the best students of wizardry who don’t mind studying like Hermione.

Author Mik Awake, writing in The New York Inquirer, asks a perennial question:

I have been wondering for many years now – and I imagine that I’m not alone: what is the purpose of the literary reading? Publishers say, How else can a novelist sell books without going on tour and doing readings? Critics say, In this beleaguered age of literature, where books are quickly going the way of the dodo, we must embrace any event that celebrates literacy. But does the literary reading really help promote a book? And does it really celebrate literature – or just a certain type?

Awake notes that comic writing – not surprisingly – almost always works better in a live format, which tends to narrow down the “literary” possibilities of a literary reading. He posits a few reasons why readings may be an unwinnable proposition, but he likely hits the nail on the head here:

Reading is decidedly anti-social behavior. The freedom to read whatever we want to read is a shining legacy of our democracy, but one’s response to a book need not be democratic. One’s response is a totalitarian regime within each individual reader, morphing over time, and fighting for dominion of the imagination. In our producer-consumer version of literature, where authorial voice is a commodity for which publishers pay six-figure advances, the literary reading overlooks the single most important commodity in any literary transaction: a reader’s voice. Most writers write to be heard in that imaginary voice that comes from within a reader’s head, a natural compliment to the writer’s own. Literary readings, and perhaps even audiobooks, misunderstand where a book derives its power. It is not from the printed words on the page – the words themselves – but from the silence that surrounds them as we repeat them in our heads.

That’s the message of a report from the Hamilton, Ontario arts research firm Hill Strategies, based on StatsCan data from 2005. As The Globe and Mail reports, 66% of Canadians reported having read at least one book in a 12-month period, narrowly edging out the 61% that reported going out to the movies at least once over the course of a year. (Not mentioned: percentage of those books that had the words “Da Vinci” or “Code” in the title.) Some might assume that “at least one” is in fact very close to “one” for many of those book-reading Canadians, but take heart: according to the Globe story, four in 10 Canadians claim to read at least one book per month, not just per year.

The Toronto Star reprints a story from the Washington Post about the Mogadishu Public Library, a one-room affair in the middle of Somalia’s perpetually war-torn capital. The library, which is privately funded by its 7,000-odd members, stocks mostly non-fiction titles of a practical bent, books like The Handbook of Metal Treatments and Testing and The Multinational Construction Industry, though there is the odd work of poetry and philosophy.

[Manager Hirsie Mohamed Hirui] said it was slightly easier to find novels during the dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre, who was overthrown in 1991, and he recalled a slight craze in the 1980s over two books in particular, Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared.

“Everyone wanted to learn a little English,” Hirui said.

Of course, just because you are in the middle of a city where random AK-47 fire is the norm doesn’t mean you’re immune to book hype:

Lately, some worn copies of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code have been circulating from house to house.

No word on whether copies of Oprah’s latest book pick, The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier, have appeared yet in the Somali capital.

When trying to expand a personal library or find a few books for the winter months, lists help narrow down the endless possibilities. But, as Lev Grossman points out in an article for TIME, there are inherent problems with creating “a best of” list. “Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball,” he writes. Grossman actually calls literary lists “an obscenity” but even he could not resist J. Peder Zane’s book, The Top 10.

Zane asked 125 prominent authors, from Douglas Coupland to Norman Mailer, for their personal top 10 lists of favourite books. Zane’s book includes the individual lists as well as the ultimate top 10, made up of the most frequently mentioned works from the authors’ lists combined. While The Top 10 will not help narrow down the choices for reading, Quillblog agrees with Grossman that the results are bound to be interesting.

Curious about the final count? Here’s the top, top 10 list:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

The continuing rumours of poetry’s demise are pretty much on the money, according to an article by James Adams in Monday’s Globe and Mail. The problem, according to Adams, is that while the stuff still gets written and published in relatively large amounts, very few of the books sell more than 100 copies — a number that corresponds roughly to the demographic known as “friends and family.” While big-money awards help, they can only do so much.

Poets, poetry publishers and readers like to believe that the G-G generates “a bit of media fanfare for [the] genre,” as Barbara Carey, a Toronto poet, wrote recently on CBC.ca. But mostly that fanfare resonates within a decidedly itty-bitty world. Even the six-year-old Griffin Poetry Prize, which each spring splits a whopping $100,000 between a Canadian poet and an international poet, has yet to discover a vast reservoir of unplumbed readerly demand. And the Griffin Prize, in the words of one Toronto publisher, “is definitely bigger than the G-Gs.”

A possible clue for why this may be can be found in the words of one of the GG-nominated poets, who is quoted in the article describing veteran poets as “artisans of the oblique trajectory.” Sad though it may be, oblique trajectories just don’t get people as excited as they used to.

Related links:
Read the article in The Globe and Mail.