Bookmarks: a small town book tour, inappropriate books for kids, and Walt Whitman selling jeans

Bookish links from across the Web:

• Test your celebrity poet knowledge over at Details and guess which verses have been written by Michael Jackson, Mr. Spock, Jewel, or William Butler Yeats
• Battle of the sexes, poetry edition: Do women write “female” poetry? 
• Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue tour skips San Francisco and Los Angeles and makes stops in Noblesville, Indiana, and Rochester, New York 
• Don’t tell Scholastic: a new blog dedicated to inappropriate books for kids
• Recordings of Walt Whitman reading “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “America” are being used in Levi’s Jeans new ad campaign. Controversial use of a dead poet’s work or clever marketing strategy? Slate Magazine discusses
• Kazuo Ishiguro “auditions” characters to narrate his novels. Colum McCann will print out chapters of his incomplete book, staple them together, and take them to Central Park, pretending to be reading someone else’s work. The Wall Street Journal interviews 11 top authors about their writing habits

Bergen bows out first in Tournament of Books

For the second year in a row, the American website The Morning News has assembled a group of book reviewers and commentators to whittle a list of 16 notable books from 2005 down to one final winner, by pitting the books against each other two at a time. The bad news is that David Bergen’s The Time in Between, the sole Canadian contender, was eliminated in the very first entry in the tournament, losing to Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love. (The worse news is that the critique in question was self-indulgent and pointless, but hey, things can only get better from there.)

Anyway, so far Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go have also advanced to the next round along with Krauss. (Foer and Krauss are spouses, incidentally and coincidentally.) Go Ish!

On an unrelated Morning News note, the site also has an interview with Canadian author Alberto Manguel, who, and you may not know this, knew Jorge Luis Borges.

Related links:
Click here for the Tournament of Books site
Click here for the first installment, in which Bergen is eliminated
Click here for the Alberto Manguel interview

What an award means (if anything)

How reliable are literary awards as an index of quality? Not very, suggests one Toronto blogger, who argues that Kazuo Ishiguro was robbed in the recent Man Booker race (his Never Let Me Go lost out to John Banville’s The Sea. The same blogger is currently “slogging through” another Booker winner, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. “All in all,” writes the blogger, “I find that the recommendations from friends, booksellers (just tell them other stuff you like — they can do more than ring up your purchase, you know), and reliable reviewers [are] far more likely to satisfy.”

Related links:
Click here for the BlogTO entry on literary awards

Booker shortlist announced

In a year that saw landmark books written by the big names of British fiction — Rushdie, Barnes, Coetzee, McEwan, and Ali and Zadie Smith to name a few — the big question preceding this year’s Man Booker shortlist announcement was as much “who will be left out?” as “who will be kept in?”

Among the ranks of longlisted books that didn’t make it are Nobel Prize-winner and two-time Booker-winner J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and books by two other past Booker Prize recipients, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.

There are few surprises among the shortlisted books. Each of them was written by an established novelist, with the possible exception of Sebastian Barry, better known as a playwright than as a long form fiction writer.

This year’s Booker shortlist includes John Banville’s The Sea (Picador); Julian Barnes’ Arthur & George (Jonathan Cape); Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (Faber & Faber); Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Faber & Faber); Ali Smith’s The Accidental (Hamish Hamilton); and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton). The bookmakers at William Hill favour the thrice-shortlisted Julian Barnes with 5/4 odds.

The winner will receive £50,000 with a guaranteed increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, will receive £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their own book. The winner will be announced on October 10 in a televised ceremony.

Related links:
Click here for the official Man Booker website
Click here for commentary by Louise Jury of The Independent
Click here for commentary by John Ezard of The Guardian