Best of lists take a beating – but what about critical honesty?

On Salon.com, Laura Miller talks about the controversy over PW’s best ten books of 2009 being 100% male:

What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

Empathy, wit, and rage towards Mr. Million Sales

To finish off Dan Brown Week – doesn’t have quite the ring of Shark Week does it? – here’s a roundup of some Lost Symbol brouhaha for your reading (dis?)pleasure.

CBC pop culture columnist Sarah Liss reads The Lost Symbol in a single twelve-hour sitting:

Sometimes, Dan Brown, loosely adapting Anthropology 101 texts for fiction just doesn’t work. Also, why do I get the sense you’ve never been tattooed – or met a gender-variant person? Also: “transgendering” is not a verb.

The National Post blog gives us a quote-fest of big names talking about Dan Brown’s success, including this one from Salman Rushdie:

“Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code, a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.”

Guardian blogger Jean Hannah Edelstein confesses that she doesn’t hate Dan Brown – she feels empathy:

I would thus be willing to wager all of the income I have ever made from writing fiction (nothing, but the sentiment is there) that sometimes, even as he wallows in his piles of money, Dan Brown wonders why he’ll never be able to write exactly as well as he wishes he could; why while being one of the world’s most financially successful writers, literary acclaim eludes him; why no one ever says, “actually, there’s a sentence on page 344 when Langdon says something rather profound and eloquent”. Sometimes, despite our best intentions, we just cannot help the way that we write, and sometimes, it is just a bit crap.

Might our communal antipathy towards Brown in fact be a displacement of the energy that fuels the oft-unspoken but pervasive anxiety that the even attainment of longed-for commercial success is no guarantee that we are actually any good at writing? And yet would we keep writing at all if we didn’t still have a shred of hope, deep down, that it might be possible that we might be brilliant? We are all Dan Brown. Except for the staggering wealth.

Ruth Padel resigns, but the “gender war” rages on

Book blogs all across the interwebs are abuzz with news of Ruth Padel’s resignation from the post of Oxford professor of poetry only nine days after she was elected. Her resignation came yesterday after claims that she was the anonymous source that tipped off journalists about allegations that her rival, Derek Walcott, had sexually harassed students.

An article from the Guardian quotes Padel’s statement last night, upon her resignation:

I genuinely believe that I did nothing intentional that led to Derek Walcott’s withdrawal from the election. I wish he had not pulled out. I did not engage in a smear campaign against him, but, as a result of student concern, I naively – and with hindsight unwisely – passed on to two journalists, whom I believed to be covering the whole election responsibly, information that was already in the public domain.

The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog comments on the supposed gender war that many academics and writers believe is driving this drama:

The accusations from both camps (and, yes, that would be Men v. Women) have been pointed. A male Oxford professor called for Padel’s resignation by saying, “We now have proof” of a smear campaign against Walcott “led by a gender-based faction determined to have a woman in the post.” The poet Clive James defended Walcott thus: “What male teacher is going to escape a sexual harassment case? All you’ve got to do is stand there, and you’re sexually harassing them.” After Padel resigned, the novelist Jeannette Winterson opined that “Oxford is a sexist little dump.” The poet Jackie Kay didn’t mince words: “The old boys have closed in on her. It would not have happened to a man, and I am very sad.”

Man Booker also-ran Sebastian Barry “entitled to be disappointed” … says Booker juror

Horse-trading, you say? Compromise? The acceptable third choice? This would appear to be what adjudicating a major literary prize comes down to. Little more than a month after the Guardian published its exposé covering 40 years of Booker deliberations, Michael Portillo, the chair of this year’s five-member jury, explains on the Man Booker website that the eventual winner, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, was not a unanimous choice to take the prize.

Two other books appeared closer to certain jurors’ hearts, according to Portillo. Steve Toltz’s comic novel A Fraction of the Whole apparently split the jury along gender lines, with the men being moved to tears by one passage that was read aloud to them, while the women remained stoic. Portillo himself calls Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture “the most beautiful book” on the list, and calls it “a glorious piece of writing with not a word misplaced.” Why, then, did Barry not win? Portillo claims that there were concerns about the book’s plot.

The final decision saw the jury presenting a united front, but Portillo still seems to feel that Barry got the shaft:

The judges made it through without “blood on the floor” (to the media’s disappointment) but we were not unanimous, except in the sense that everyone accepted the choice once made. I am entirely happy with our decision, but Barry is entitled to be disappointed.

In the end, Portillo says that “Adiga won out too because his angle seemed so fresh.” Not everyone agrees with this assessment, however. Writing in the Telegraph, Sameer Rahim says the book “reads like the first draft of a Bollywood screenplay (no romance or songs sadly),” and blogger Nilanjana Roy takes issue with the freshness of Adiga’s novel, saying that “as anyone in India who reads widely enough knows, he’s not ‘the first to go where no other Indian author has gone before’ as reviews in the west have proclaimed.”

From TV show to book, part 357

Fans of the BBC TV nature show Planet Earth will be pleased to learn that Scholastic in the U.S. has announced a tie-in series of kids’ books. As CNN.com reports:

Scholastic’s publishing program will launch in September 2008 with a full-color, 48-page Planet Earth Scrapbook and a Planet Earth Reader featuring incredible full-color photography in an easy to read format. The program will continue with three January 2009 publications (a second reader, a board book and scrapbook), followed in April 2009 by a full-color 98-page Guide to the Planet timed to coincide with Earth Day.

Scholastic’s publishing program will include a variety of formats, including paperbacks, board books, phonics books, novelty, readers, and scrapbooks to reach a combination of readers from pre-schoolers, to the middle grades, to young adults — encouraging families to share in the wonderment of our planet. Each book will be a visual celebration of our planet, raising awareness and engendering a sense of appreciation. High-quality 30% post-consumer waste recycled paper will be used for all Planet Earth titles.

The piece also notes that Scholastic has American and Canadian (English- and French-language) rights to the tie-in books.

Bookmarks – Paddington the Bear in jail, comic books in Kandahar, bibles in China, and more

Some book-related links:

• Paddington the Bear arrested on immigration charges on 50th anniversary (CBC.ca)
• Comic books handed out in Kandahar to teach kids about human rights (The Canadian Press)
• Speaking of human rights, China to hand out bibles – 50,ooo,ooo of them! – in make-nice gesture (Times of India)
• Making new books out of old (The Register-Guard)
• Bookselling and the gender divide (Mister Aeden Goes To Dubai)
• Who really wrote “‘Twas the Night Before Chrismas”? (Associated Press)

The Canadian short story: digging into the stats

Over at The Danforth Review, Michael Bryson has written a long survey on “Short Fiction in Canada, 2004/05.” The overall theme here seems to be the contrast between “realistic” fiction and more “avant-garde” forms, and Bryson lines up plenty of quotations from commentators and authors in support of one or the other. Taking the ReLit Awards short-story-collection longlist as a sample, Bryson unearths some hard numbers: “Of the 30 titles … 17 appear to be generally ‘realistic’ and seven appear to be generally ‘experimental,’ with six seeming to me to be too close to call.” Further number-crunching ensues, bringing in issues of geography and gender.

Related links:
Click here for the Danforth Review feature