The book world is just starting to shake itself awake after the holidays, so here are a couple of photos from events that happened before the break.

Avast! Canada’s Dada bard has a Santa hat: Coach House published a revised edition of Christian Bök’s “univocular” work Eunoia, and celebrated the re-launch at Toronto’s Supermarket on Dec. 15 with readings from Andrew Pyper, Ken Babstock, Darren Wershler, Priscilla Uppal, and Bök himself, pictured here wearing the finest in Maple Leafs headgear. (Photo by Rick/Simon, courtesy of Coach House Books)

We assume they’re laughing on the inside: JAZZ FM host and occasional comic Ralph Benmergui interviewed Yuk Yuk’s head honcho Mark Breslin at a This is Not a Reading Series event at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto on Dec. 9 to launch The Yuk Yuk’s Guide To Canadian Stand-up (HarperCollins Canada). Above: Breslin (left) takes Benmergui step-by-step through the comedy “rule of three.” (Photo by Chris Reed, courtesy of HarperCollins Canada)

Edna O’Brien, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Paul Theroux are among the writers who will be making their short fiction available exclusively to Kindle users thanks to a new deal between online retailer Amazon.com and the general interest magazine The Atlantic. The first two of these stories, O’Brien’s “Shovel Kings” and Christopher Buckley’s “Cynara,” are available today. From the press release:

As outlets publishing fiction rapidly dwindle, The Atlantic asserts its historic commitment to the form by introducing two new short stories each month via Amazon’s Kindle – becoming the first magazine to deliver fiction exclusively to Kindle readers…. These works will also be available for purchase and reading with the Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for PC apps, as well as planned Kindle platform expansions for Mac and Blackberry.

At the risk of sounding snarky, this Quillblogger would like to point out the irony in the first clause of that opening sentence, given the magazine’s decision in 2005 to cease publishing short fiction on a monthly basis and to group fiction into a kind of annual gulag in their summer issue.

Moreover, The New York Times points out that authors who have their work published as part of this agreement will have access to a rather exclusive audience:

For authors who sign with The Atlantic for the Kindle deal, their contracted work is limited to that one format, since those who don’t own a Kindle – or an iPhone, on which readers can install a Kindle app – won’t be able to read it.

Participating authors, who have been paid what the NYT refers to as “a four-figure fee,” may at some future time reprint their stories in collections or other periodicals, but they are prohibited from allowing them to appear on competing e-readers.

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.

Your glass half-full news for the day: Results from the second annual survey conducted by the Pepsi Optimism Project (yes, the acronym is POP) conclude that Americans are more optimistic about their personal relationships, health, finances, and overall well-being than they were in 2008, and the leading “optimism booster” is books. Although POP’s official press release focuses on the role of live events such as concerts, theatre performances, and speeches, GalleyCat points out that the full results show that 88% of respondents cited books as a key contributor to their optimism, putting it first in a “top optimism boosters” list. From GalleyCat:

Unfortunately, that’s not broken down by categories, so it’s not quite clear whether fiction or non-fiction lifts people’s spirits, so you should probably read a little of both, just to be on the safe side.

Even more surprising is the inclusion of poetry readings in the list of top “optimism boosters,” an option chosen by 56% of respondents, putting poetry ahead of advertising, news, and blogs. Although it’s not clear whether these results refer to writing blogs or reading them, you’re likely still better off picking up a novel than scanning through your RSS feeds, but we here at Quillblog wouldn’t blame you if you made an exception.

From Your Local Guardian:

Hardworking fathers can still read their children a bedtime story in their absence, thanks to a new invention by a Kingston father-of-two.

Chris Coombs, 44, has come up with a personalised audio book that fathers can record through the internet and email to their offspring at home.

He came up with the idea in 2001, after being called away from Kingston to visit his father, who had fallen ill in Canada.

His daughter Mia, now seven, had been born the day after the September 11 attacks in America and Mr Coombs was about to board a plane.

He said: “I wanted to reassure my four-year-old daughter that I had to leave the country for a few weeks but everything was fine.

“As an audio mixer and dubbing editor I recorded myself reading a story and then added sound effects and prompts.”

He discussed the idea with four other friends who often missed out on bedtimes stories and fivedads.com was born.

Putting aside the absurd idea of e-mailing bedtime stories to kids, it’s nice to see utterly gratuitous references to 9/11 making a small comeback.

Children’s book publishers in the U.S. are grappling with a new act of Congress, introduced earlier this year, imposing strict safety standards on board books and other products destined for kids. Earlier this month, the Consumer Product Safety Commission – the body overseeing the new guidelines – clarified that “ordinary” ink-and-paper books printed after 1985 would be exempt from the stringent regulations, but publishers of “novelty and book-plus formats” will be required to submit to Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act-approved testing. From Publishers Weekly:

After a stay of enforcement, publishers have until February 10, 2010, to get their CPSIA-mandated third-party testing procedures in place. However, publishers and retailers have had to comply with the law’s safety requirements since February 10 of this year, which has led the large retail chains to demand testing for all children’s products, some as early as last November.

The impulse – to reduce the risk of choking hazards and some toxins, such as lead – is a good one, but predictably the publishing community is up-in-arms over what they perceive to be bureaucratic red tape. (In a recent blog post, one commentator felt compelled to clarify that “devouring” a book is just a metaphor.)

The mental and spiritual development of the young ’uns seems to be much on the minds of literary types these days.

Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket (apparently to his lasting chagrin: the author’s new story is titled “Why Does Lemony Snicket Keep Following Me?”), is working on a symphony that will teach children about orchestral instruments. The piece, commissioned by the San Fransisco Symphony, is called “The Composer Is Dead” (a book-and-CD version is due out in March). In an interview published in the Sacramento Bee, Snick… er, Handler explains that he was originally approached by composer Nathaniel Stookey to contribute narration to Peter and the Wolf, but considered that story “boring.”

Handler describes the plot of “The Composer” this way:

The composer is dead and his death is suspicious, and the authorities come in and question all the members of the orchestra so you learn about all the different instruments.

Yup. That sounds riveting.

In other kid-related news, The New York Times Magazine asks whether children reap the same benefits reading off a computer screen as they do reading actual books:

In a hundred ways, we pretend that screen experiences are books — PowerBooks, notebooks, e-books — but even a child knows the difference. Reading books is an operation with paper. Playing games on the Web is something else entirely. I need to admit this to myself, too. I try to believe that reading online is reading-plus, with the text searchable, hyperlinked and accompanied by video, audio, photography and graphics. But maybe it’s just not reading at all. Just as screens aren’t books.

Family Literacy Day isn’t officially until next Tuesday, but to help draw attention to the cause, the literacy organization ABC CANADA is boldly attempting to set a new Guinness World Record. Beginning at 2 p.m. today and running for the next 24 hours, people from across the country have been reading aloud from Robert Munsch’s Munschworks 2 (published by Annick Press) with the aim of toppling the current record for “Most Children Reading with an Adult, Multiple Locations.” From the release:

To date, over 900 events, with an estimated 158,000 participants at locations across the country, have been registered online in the attempt to break the current U.S. record of 78,791 adults and children reading together.

Calgary Herald columnist Naomi Lakritz (whom you might remember from Quillblog past) weighs in on that story about Canadians being unable to name their own authors. Her drive-by attack on Carol Shields doesn’t exactly raise the literary-criticism bar, but much of what she has to say generally is fair enough:

That’s another thing about the aura around CanLit – you’re not really supposed to admit that you don’t like some of the authors’ works.

[...]

[I]f people aren’t even reading these authors, then no debate as to their merits is possible, and the illusion – or rather, the requirement – that everyone should swoon over a book simply because its author is Canadian, continues unchecked.

It’s unclear where exactly the problem or remedy is supposed to lie here – if “people aren’t even reading these authors,” then how much unwarranted swooning is really going on? – but it’s hard to argue with the general sentiment that debate is good.

And at one point in reading Lakritz’s column, Quillblog couldn’t help chipping in a spontaneous “amen”:

Adrian Stein, of Books in Canada magazine, calls the results of the poll “dreadful but not surprising.”

He claims that it’s hard “for any country to maintain a literary culture when the vehicles that support this expression are disappearing, one by one,” and says Canadian Heritage itself doesn’t grasp the importance of book reviews.

That sounds like a thinly disguised plea for more money to shore up the magazine….

Notes from far and wide:

• Penguin’s campaign of standardized, retro covers was a hit with book buyers Down Under.
• Two brave and hardy souls have set out to read every book in the New Canadian Library.
• Hey, Westwood agent Hilary McMahon had her home featured on one of those decorating TV shows!
• Russell Smith marvels at the enduring popularity of reading, and then suggests it’s because movies like The Dark Knight are so terrible. Not sure that theory holds up under scrutiny, but nonetheless, he’s right about The Dark Knight.
• That phony Holocaust memoir might get released after all – as a novel.