March Madness of Books

From the Morning News--the dorkiest, most creative re-branding of a Sweet Sixteen bracket we know of.

Make it Count Twice

This is old news, but on two indistinguishable editions of Condoleeza Rice's memoirs were on display at the bookstore today:

Like most of us, Condi only had one childhood, but why limit yourself to selling only one childhood memoir when you can make more money selling two? The brick and mortar bookseller left it at that; Amazon clarifies that the 352-page Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family is meant for adult audiences while the "distilled" 336-page Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me, which retails for nearly $10 less, is for "young adults, 7th grade reading level and higher."

Books on the Shelf Still Worth Something

Kids who grow up with 500+ books in the house go to school 3.2 years longer than kids who don't, even after adjusting for dad's occupation and income. That's nearly a bachelor's degree, right there, or a master's if a bachelor's is the standard.

The Espresso Book Machine

A souped-up copy machine to print books (trade paperbacks) on demand. Fun to watch it work.

Steven Spear on Constant Innovation

Blog for Steven Spear's Chasing the Rabbit. McGraw-Hill needs to run a PDSA cycle on that website's formatting, btw.

There Is Nothing New Under the Sun

Other People's Money--And How the Bankers Use It, published in 1914. Via.

How could we miss this?

Fatwa on Rushdie now 20 years old.

Entry post-dated for dramatic effect.

Banned Books Week

Was this week. Read a banned book.

Meta-Media

Wired blog about the process of writing a story about Charlie Kaufmann.

Jhumpa Lahiri Watch

Interview in Bostonia, the BU Alumni mag.

Antique Science Books at Auction

Slide show of the hot stuff from NYTimes.

On Drinking.

An alcoholic, as we understand the term, is a person who drinks more than their doctor.

Kingsley Amis has some less medical thoughts on the benefits of alcohol, pointing out that wherever there is spoken language, there is drink.

The Enchantress of Florence

Salman Rushdie is the greatest writer of our time. This statement was easier to defend after his masterpiece, Midnight’s Children, was made a Booker among Bookers, and before the steaming pile of shit, Shalimar the Clown, made the rounds (at least the title sounded good, even if reading the thing felt like getting a wedgie), but it is true, all the same, whether you like him or not. And let’s be clear: he is the world’s most unlikable man. Four women have divorced him, the ayatollah wants him dead, and no one who has ever invited him to a dinner party has asked him back. But none of that has anything to do with writing, because you don’t read a book out of awe and respect for the author’s life-long marriage. You read to read, and Rushdie writes to write.

This time, Rushdie’s mix of magical and real involves a mind meld between the Mughals of Hindoostan and the Machiavellis and Medicis of medieval Italy. Yes, this puts the work in the category of historical fiction, and it includes a bibliography that reveals, I suspect, his new alliance with Emory, where more than a few English grad students are clamoring for an opportunity to map the line between Rushdie’s magic and the real. But ignore that. There’s a story to tell.

A young man lost in the world, with great talents and charms, not all of them legal, seeks to tell the fairy tale of his origins to the Mughal Emperor. He is descended, it would seem, from an offshoot of the line of Amerigo Vespucci untouched by the famous cousin’s wanderlust, for whom Niccolo Machiavelli, a failed Florentine politician, was a matchmaker when their friend, Arcalia, or Argalia, a great warrior who carried enchanted weapons and in whose retinue four Swedish giants traveled, died defending his true love, an enchantingly beautiful woman from the Mughal Court.

Of course, a no-account wanderer cannot walk into the Mughal Emperor’s palace and announce himself, so there is a story to be told just to bring the man to The Man. Like Satanic Verses, which includes a brothel in the image of the prophet’s harem, this man’s journey, supposedly enchanted by his mother, needs a whore’s blessing to safely enter the throne room. His prostitute protectress is something else herself:

She was so thin that her name among the other whores was Skeleton, and those clients who could afford it often hired her together with her antithesis, the obese whore called Mattress, in order to enjoy the two extremes of what the female form had to offer, first the unyielding dominance of bone and then the flesh that engulfed. The Skeleton ate like a wolf, greedily and fast, and the more she ate the fatter Mattress became, until it was suspected that the two whores had made a pact with the Devil, and in Hell it would be Skeleton who was grotesquely overweight for all eternity while Mattress rattled bonily around with the nipples on her flat chest looking like little wooden plugs.

The imperial city, in those days, was swarming with “poets and artists, those preening egoists who claimed for themselves the power of language and image to conjure beautiful somethings from empty nothings, and yet neither poet nor painter, musician nor sculptor had come close to what the emperor, the Perfect Man, had achieved,” for you see, he had willed the woman of his dreams to life and she now walked the halls of his palace as his favorite queen. And so it was not altogether surprising that this emperor, an artist among artists, was rapt by the wayfaring stranger’s tale. Of course, the outsider who becomes an insider incites jealousy and even treason, described here in pre-school rhymes, among the courtiers and courtesans, and ultimately, for political reasons, of course, the emperor cannot believe the stranger’s tale.

No, we didn’t just give away the ending—there is more—but yes, the entire plot could be summed up in just a few grafs. In fact, the plot itself isn’t exactly a page turner. The real show is the language, the story telling, and that is what keeps you coming back. If we call it literary porn, you will understand that this is not an insult.

Funniest Book Review Ever

On The Bush Boom, Alice writes:

Finally! A book that proves the existence of an alternate universe. Obviously, a rip in the space/time continuum between this universe and the other universe where Bush is presiding over a 'boom economy opened up and this book fell through. Can there be ANY other explanation?

Wow. Just wow. via Big Picture.

Best Dustjacket Ever

Jordan Crane's four-layer creation for Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends. via BoingBoing.

Egalitarianism in the Early Days of the Web

was an artifact of the lack of organization on the Internet in the late 90s and early 00s. And it tricked webheads into thinking that the Internet was some kind of egalitarian utopia. Now that organization has come to the web, so has The Man. From the dustjacket of Access Denied:

The Web provides everybody with access to information. That makes those in power nervous. Transparency is the best defense against further narrowing of information access and the starting point for rolling back existing barriers. Access Denied provides the definitive analysis of government justifications for denying their own people access to some information and also documents global Internet filtering practices on a country-by-country basis. This is timely and important.

--Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

Jhumpa Lahiri: Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri is one hot writer. Her new collection of short stories--her stories have been consistently better than that novel was--went on sale last week.

PS: Brookline Booksmith: We missed her talk at The Coolidge because you did such a poor job advertising it and then, when we stop by your place this weekend, you have piles of her book but not one signed copy? We can think of two things you could do to turn around your failing little store right there.

Mudbound

LibraryThing is a place where you can catalog your books (a preview of ours lives in the right-hand margin), compare your library to other readers' libraries, display them on a virtual shelf, and generally take your bookishness to a new dimension. Recently, they have come into a small supply of advance copies from a handful of publishers to share with members, and so we snagged a copy of Hillary Jordan's debut, Mudbound.

Jordan's novel does evoke To Kill A Mockingbird in its themes of racism and intolerance, both of which are portrayed with an uncomfortable honesty; there isn't a single white character who doesn't speak differently about blacks when there are no blacks around to hear. The sexism is similarly evident; would-be farmer Henry feels as if he owns his wife, Laura, while he has a healthier (and more impassioned) give-and-take relationship with his land than he does with her.

The story, which centers on the collision of Laura, a nice city girl forced by a number of circumstances to start a family on a mud-bound farm, with a black sharecropping family, is narrated in first person, but from every character's perspective in turn. Think Bram Stoker's Dracula, told in a series of journal excerpts. Jordan makes an attempt to capture the individual narrators' dialects with varying success; the effect was unfortunately distracting, especially early on, although the artistic appeal of this approach is obvious. The plot itself starts thin but builds to an intense and gruesome climax. With a tougher editor, Hillary Jordan will grow into a force to be reckoned with.

Synergy

Paradigm shift. Web 2.0. Buzzword, buzzword, buzzword. MBAs generally annoy us, but they do make money, and money isn't annoying when you have it. Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA, essentially an annotated reading list of management and business books, caught our eye if just to see a little of how MBA types think the game should be played. It reminded us that skimming all the way through technical writing is usually yields more than reading it linearly, so even if we only take that one idea away from it, it's already done something for us today. From Cool Tools.

Free books!

www.ebooktakeaway.com. That is all.