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.

Ian McEwan, Khaled Hosseini, and J.K. Rowling were all honoured at the Galaxy British Book Awards last night, but much of the subsequent media coverage has focused on a brief moment after the awards, when Rowling came perilously close to a boob reveal.

From The Daily Mirror’s pun-tastic take on events:

She may be a wizard with words – but Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling keeps getting herself in a right old muggle with her frocks.

At the Galaxy British Book Awards on Wednesday night she almost revealed everything in her Chamber of Secrets as her figure-hugging purple satin gown suddenly started Slytherin down.

Luckily her press aide Mark Hutchinson gave new meaning to the phrase PR handout – by quickly grabbing the top of the dress to spare her blushes.

J.K., who picked up the Outstanding Achievement Award at London’s Grosvenor House, suffered more overexposure on a U.S. tour last year when her dress slipped to reveal her white bra.

Not to dedicate too much more time to this, but be sure to scroll down in the Mirror piece for the three-picture slide-show of the dramatic rescue as it unfolded.

Who says booksellers are the last guardians of good taste in an ever-more tawdry world?

From AbeBooks:

Welcome to the Hooker Prize – in honor of Elliot Spitzer and his fall from grace in a New York minute, AbeBooks.com has compiled a list of 10 recommended non-fiction reads about hookers, madams, high-class callgirls and prostitutes. Prostitution, of course, is the oldest profession in the world and has fascinated readers for centuries. Since the 1970s, there has been a wealth of memoirs from ‘ladies of the night’ so here’s the literary lowdown on the callgirl culture.

Yes, The Happy Hooker by Xavier Hollander is #1.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a new book from author, Globe and Mail columnist, and self-appointed fashion pundit Russell Smith. Diana, published by Biblioasis Press, is an erotic novella in diary form.

Actually, this new book is an old one – it was originally published by the now-defunct Gutter Press five years ago. In an interview with Eye Weekly, Smith lays out the twin urges – sex and money – that lay behind his initial interest in writing porn.

“I started it as an exercise,” Smith recalls. “I found that in all my fiction I was not writing the sex scenes. I was doing the stereotypical pan to a window when a couple fell onto a bed. Why was I avoiding it? Part of it was that sex is difficult to write. There’s such a lack of a vocabulary and in the vocabulary that exists, you have a choice between the clinical and the euphemistic. So I felt I had to practice to get better.” With a full manuscript (made wholly from solicited scenarios contributed by his female friends) Smith also became enamoured of pulling off a literary hoax by hiding behind a distaff pseudonym — a time-honoured tradition in the world of blue books.

Beyond the fun of a hoax, Smith also points out that the pseudonym, Diana Savage, was to be his way of skirting the realities of demographics. “Women are the market you want for any work of fiction. They are pretty much the only readers of fiction left, and particularly of erotic fiction, of which they, statistically, are the only readers.” Diana was initially accepted by Black Lace, the UK publisher of erotica quickies, but Black Lace confronted Smith’s agent at the last minute and demanded proof that Diana Savage was a woman. Not wanting to turn his hoax hobby into professional fraud, Smith put aside his dreams of a second, lucrative career as Diana Savage, chronicler of infernal passions.

The article also mentions the critical pasting that the original edition of the book – and its author – got from Noah Richler, who was then the book columnist for the National Post. Smith lays this all out in detail in the book’s introduction:

I remember seeing Noah Richler … [at the 2003 launch party], and warmly shaking his hand and asking him if he would like a beer. He seemed friendly enough. I left him to go and chat up a tall and very pretty woman who turned out to have a Polish accent. She later said that I seemed obnoxious and full of myself. I must have been in a good mood.

Fast-forward to the next day, when the book receives its drubbing in the Post.

Richler was disgusted by this book. I think he was disgusted by pornography generally, by the idea of pornography. Basically, he was embarrassed.

I was, let’s say, surprised. Had I not seen Noah at the launch party? Had he not enjoyed the free beer and the attendant tall Polish girls? I seemed to recall him listening to the reading at least. And, wait a minute – when did he have time to write the article?

None of which is particularly erotic – unless the petty politics of Toronto launch parties are your thing.

Lest he kill the mood entirely, Smith does end the intro on a note more befitting the overall aim of the book:

It’s that simple, dear reader: this book is pornography. Its purpose is to titillate. It exists solely to arouse you. It is telling you to position yourself at a window where you can be seen, unbutton your jeans and slip a hand inside the waistband. Now await further instructions.

Unless you happen to be reading the book on the subway or on a plane, of course.

Lest anyone think Smith has given himself completely over to the realm of stroke-lit, we should point out that the book’s full title is Diana: A Diary in the Second Person.

Everyone knows that narrative POV is just so hot.

(But really: jeans? How déclassé.)

[Russell Smith launches Diana tonight at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel as part of This Is Not A Reading Series.]

Canadian talent fared well in this year’s Oscar nominations, announced this morning. And in case you needed an excuse to catch the February 24 ceremony – if it happens – there’s a publishing tie-in, too.

Besides the best actress nod for Halifax’s Ellen Page for Juno, which is dominating Canadian headlines, Toronto director/actor/activist Sarah Polley is up for best adapted screenplay for her directorial debut Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Julie Christie also got a best actress nomination for her role in the film.

The news dovetails with a mini-debate on GalleyCat about how Polley’s film has accomplished the seemingly unthinkable by sexing up Alice Munro for a mass audience. Yesterday, a mildly scandalized reader complained about the new Vintage paperback edition for The View From Castle Rock (pictured above), first published in 2004.

“I saw the cover for the paperback of Alice Munro’s latest collection, The View from Castle Rock, in an ad in the NY Times Book Review,” a GalleyCat reader emails, “and Vintage has given the book a Sessalee Hensley makeover.” … [I]t’s not too hard to see what he’s talking about, although my reference point upon first glance wasn’t so much Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, as it was all those chick lit covers with women’s legs and no faces. (Not to mention the hot pink lettering; nice touch, that!) “While I understand the effort to sell more copies, it seems like a desperate approach for such a great writer,” our source continues, addressing the “chick lit” question directly: “Is that Vintage’s marketing strategy? I guess, if it gets Munro into more people’s hands it’s a good thing, but for me there’s a real disconnect in tone between the cover and the contents.”

Today, another reader rebuts by asking if Munro’s (or Munro’s publisher’s) concession to the marketplace is really such a big deal. After all, in CanLit, as in Canadian film, opportunities to sell out are few and far between.

From MI6.com (which, we assume, is your one-stop shop for all things James Bond):

James Bond legends Sean Connery and Roger Moore will go head to head with rival books this autumn, after Weidenfeld cajoled Connery into telling his story, and Michael O’Mara won the battle for Moore’s memoirs.

Our question is, where’s the book from George Lazenby?

From EarthTimes.org:

A German children’s book can be published in the United States after a publisher there dropped its demand for the genitals on a picture of a statue in it be air-brushed out, it was revealed Thursday. The German illustrator of the book had angrily complained of censorship and withdrew it from the US market last summer after being told that shoppers might object to the nudity.

[…]

The offending male organ is a tiny squiggle in the picture: the male statue itself is only 7.5 millimetres high on the page.

[Emphasis added]

All we can say is, whoever got upset about this in the first place is a bit of a tool.

What do George Orwell, Dorothy Parker, and John Irving all have in common? A penchant for tattoos, according to an article posted on the website of Abebooks, the Victoria-based online book retailer.

The piece opens with a mildly scandalized lede –

Authors just don’t spring to mind as the most likely people to have tattoos. But authors are showing their tattoos in publicity shots, they are arriving at award ceremonies with tattoos clearly visible, and they are loud and proud about the words and images that adorn their bodies.

– and goes on to reference a long list of tattoo-themed titles and trivia. Several tattooed Canadian authors are also mentioned, including Alissa York and vegan cookbook author Sarah Kramer (pictured above), who co-owns a tattoo shop in Victoria.

A surprising detail that emerges is the fact that John Irving, who’s novel Until I Find You features a tattoo artist as its protagonist, sports a maple-leaf design on his shoulder, reportedly as a tribute to his Canadian wife. (No word if Irving’s tattoo is accompanied by the slogan I Am Canadian.)

Seemingly more discerning is the aforementioned Kramer, who describes one of her several tattoos as follows:

I, for example, have the word “unforgiven” with a dagger through it. Its genesis started with the lyrics of a Go-Go’s song about unforgiving someone. For me, this tattoo gives me strength and reminds me that the choice I made to unforgive a certain person and remove them from my life was the right choice.

Q&Q’s Deals page is on a holiday break, but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention this deal, from The Globe and Mail’s “The Biz” column:

Rebecca Eckler has signed a deal for two novels with Key Porter Books. The first, Private School Confidential, is due in 2009. Eckler and Erica Ehm are also collaborating on a children’s book, Mischievous Moms, for Key Porter.

Is it just us, or do both Private School Confidential and Mischievous Moms sound like titles of books kept at the back of the store, just beyond the beaded curtain and the “Adults Only” sign?

From The Canadian Press:

Ribald and X-rated, a new exhibit at France’s national library is banned to anyone under 16.

The exhibit that opened this week offers a peek at France’s long-secret library of libido, where, starting in the 1830s, librarians hid books and other documents from the national collection that they deemed dangerous for public morality. They called it L’Enfer, or Hell, and kept it under lock and key.

In 1849, library director Joseph Naudet described L’Enfer as “a hiding place … in which we lock up certain books that are very bad but which are sometimes very precious for book-lovers and have a great monetary value.”

The historic secrecy surrounding the collection only fanned curiosity about it. L’Enfer still exists today - complete with its own special classification category - though it is much easier for patrons to gain access to works from the collection.

In a related move, the National Library of Canada is considering allowing its patrons to view its long-hidden collection of lithographs showing people in various states of temperance and moderation.

Here’s a shocker: Bill O’Reilly said something incredibly stupid on his show yesterday, something that would be offensive if it weren’t so laughably moronic.

This time, it was about J.K. Rowling’s recent claim that she felt Dumbledore was gay – a claim that sent a chorus of shrugs through her legions of young readers.

Here’s what O’Reilly had to say about the whole kerfuffle, according to Think Progress:

Bill O’Reilly joined in the fray, asking if Dumbledore’s outing was part of the “gay agenda” of “indoctrination” of “children.” O’Reilly claimed that by dropping “the gay bomb,” Rowling is a “provocateur” who is “going to let all hell break loose.”

O’Reilly made clear he didn’t think Dumbledore’s sexual preference was a case of just one queer apple in an otherwise unspoiled basket. “Those wizards,” he said, “I’m very, very suspicious about what they’re doing in their spare time.”

For the morbidly curious, here’s what O’Reilly gets up to in his spare time. (Not for the faint of heart.)

Entertainment Weekly has some tragic news for all you Eagles fans out there: a completed memoir by one of the band’s former guitarists, Don Felder, has been scuttled at the last minute by publisher Hyperion. The book – entitled Heaven and Hell – was originally scheduled to hit bookstores in the U.S. and Canada on Oct. 1, but has now been permanently cancelled for “legal reasons.”

The precise nature of those ”issues” is unclear, but certainly, the advance copy of the book distributed to reviewers by Hyperion does not stint on depictions of ’70s-era debauchery. Indeed, from the very opening paragraph we find Felder, who joined the band in 1974 and actually co-wrote ”Hotel California,” reminiscing about hitting the stage for a show with ”white powder rings around my nostrils.” Later, he recalls witnessing ”the barrage of p—y” that was offered up to the band.

But c’mon, how could Felder’s book possibly be any more scandalous than a million other coke-and-p—y rock biographies? Going by the rest of the EW article, it sounds as if the problem was not with the tales of partying, but with Felder’s whinging about finances . (Apparently, Felder spends a lot of the book slamming his former bandmates for allegedly cheating him out of a large chunk of the band’s profits.) EW also points out that the band has a new studio album – their first in 28 years – due out on Oct. 30, and that “the band may not have relished having to discuss Felder’s book during interviews.”

The Tyee has a survey of some recent books on sexuality, and argues that after a recent explosion in raunch, the culture is pulling back a bit:

[I]f this year’s crop of “sexy” books is any guide, the backlash is now in full effect. Sure, Porn 2.0 is grabbing more viewers than ever. But with sex so commonplace, people, or at least publishers, are looking for what’s next.

This year’s sex-culture books feature virgins, men vacuuming and crafty sex toys. And, really, what’s less sexy than those?

Quillblog assumes you’ve heard about that Conrad Black fellow by now; it seems he’s somewhat guilty. But amid the deluge of media coverage, we missed a little morsel from Barbara Amiel that the New York media and gossip blog Gawker has kindly highlighted for everyone. Because we had to think about it, you must too.

The Times, which carried a fairly solid timeline/analysis piece this weekend, wonders if Lady Black’s imperious image may have hurt her husband with the jury and contains this absolutely horrifying passage:

“In her last column written before the verdict, Ms. Amiel wrote about her pending move out of her temporary Chicago home – a five-room suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. She noted that her husband was already well into a manuscript for a new book, having just published a biography of Richard M. Nixon, but that she had not used her spare time during the four-month trial productively.

‘Give him another four months – and fewer nights of love – and he’ll have two finished manuscripts,’ she noted.”

Please excuse this Quillblogger; she has to go scrub her brain with steel wool.

If Judd Apatow’s and Rebecca Eckler’s lawyers weren’t already going to spend a lot of time debating whether tales of drunken insemination constitute intellectual property (see here for context), a new up-knocking contender is about to enter the field.

In October, Avery, a imprint of Putnam in the U.S., will be publishing Louise Sloan’s Knock Yourself Up: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom. The book, which is being marketed with the tag-line “No Man? No Problem!,” is part memoir and part how-to guide, though that latter part will probably not feature frozen daquiris in quite the same measure as either Apatow’s film or Eckler’s book.

Entertainment Weekly is giving the world a sneak peek at Stephen Colbert’s new comic book series, entitled Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen. The five-issue series features art by Scott Chantler, of Northwest Passage fame, and follows the intergalactic adventures of Jansen, the hero of a sci-fi novel that Colbert’s Comedy Central host character claims to have written. The title is a nod to William Shatner’s TekWar series.

Jansen periodically pops up on The Colbert Report in animated shorts, spouting that distinctive Colbert-ian blind arrogance (“he’s obviously had hundreds of girlfriends” is a recurring Jansen descriptor), and now he’ll start taking over comic book stores as of July 11. Scarface: Scarred for Life’s John Layman, one of the writers of the series’ main storyline, said it was hard to nail down the character: at first “we wrote it as if it was Stephen Colbert in space, so he had a robot eagle sidekick and he was going after alien bears,” he said, but eventually they got it right, giving Jansen a robotic monkey sidekick – and a series-closing nude scene!

The EW article includes a short Jansen strip for an immediate fix. Colbert’s own book, I Am America and So Can You, will be published by Grand Central and distributed in Canada by H.B. Fenn and Company in October.

Author David Eddie, who wrote an advice column for the now-defunct Toro magazine, is doing something similar for The Globe and Mail’s new Life section. And in a recent installment, Eddie covers what must be a fairly common problem for publishing types. Or not.

As frequent readers of Quillblog can attest, reading is sexy. Now we can share the message through clothing and accessories.

The website buyolympia is selling T-shirts, buttons, bags, and bumper stickers with the slogan “reading is sexy,” accompanied by a picture of a girl peering over the edge of her oval glasses. Available in styles for him or her, the shirts come in various colours.

American author Jane Smiley defends her sexytimes-filled new novel, Ten Days in the Hills, in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times. She says she was inspired by The Decameron and “wanted to go where Boccaccio had led — not for pornographic intent (I was not aiming to arouse myself) but for artistic intent, for the pleasures of working with new material, the insights to be gained thereby, the formal experiment of it.” On a less lofty note, she also describes herself during the writing process as “sitting in my office, drinking Diet Coke, cogitating, chortling, plotting and enjoying myself in private.”

As Smiley notes in her piece, the graphic sex scenes startled even that old satyr John Updike, who wrote in his New Yorker review of the book, “The sexual descriptions set a new mark for explicitness in a work of non-pornographic intent.” The review, for the record, is an admiring one. (Wait until Updike gets a load of Alan Moore’s Lost Girls.)

There is some uproar over Spider-Man: Reign, a new comic book series about the iconic wallcrawler that is darker and more “grown-up” than previous versions (similar to the approach Frank Miller used for Batman in the much-loved The Dark Knight Returns series). The uproar isn’t over the series’ depiction of Peter Parker as a broken-down, unhappy old widower, but over one panel from the first issue that shows the webslinger’s alter-ego sitting in bed, genitalia exposed. (Picture at link below.)

Predictably, this has many book retailers in the U.S. in a stir. Publisher Marvel Comics says the panel is in there by mistake and that, in any case, it’s “just a shadow.” They have promised to print a new, bowdlerized edition.

We can just imagine the front page of The Daily Bugle: “Spider-wang a Menace to Morality!”

Related links:
Read about Peter Parker’s wardrobe malfunction here

A literary prize presented by none other than Courtney Love? Ah, it can only be the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. As AP writer Jill Lawless reports, this year’s honour was taken by debut author Iain Hollingshead for his novel Twenty Something. Writes Lawless:

Judges were moved by Hollingshead’s evocation of “a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.” His description of “bulging trousers” sealed the win, the judges said.

Hollingshead beat out some, er, stiff competition to take the prize, including Mark Haddon, David Mitchell, Thomas Pynchon, Irvine Welsh, and Will Self. Mitchell made the list for comparing breasts to danishes, while Haddon drew notice for this description of either sexual bliss or a cerebrovascular seizure: “Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs.”

In Quillblog’s opinion, though, runner-up Tim Willcocks (author of the medieval adventure novel The Religion) wuz robbed. How could anyone top this? “In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil’s Fire.”

Related links:
Click here for the AP story via The Globe and Mail

The American Library Association has released its “10 Most Challenged Books of 2005″ list, and though it’s comforting that such immoral tomes as Of Mice and Men and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have finally been deemed acceptable by all of America’s library-card holders, there are still a few vintage titles on the list that might raise a few eyebrows. To make the list, a book must have generated at least one written request in the past year that it be removed from the library system. Such requests inevitably arise from a concern with the book’s sexual content or use of bad language, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone with a basic cable TV subscription could still be calling for the removal of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (third on the list) or Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, which placed fourth. The most challenged book was Robert H. Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, and Sexual Health for its “homosexuality, nudity, sex education, religious viewpoint, abortion, and being unsuited to age group.”

Related links:
Read the list on the Library Journal site