Friday Forum: Why Do We Care About Authors?

Note: I've been so pleased with Disqus and invigorated by the comments here at The Ape over the last few days that I'm trying out a new feature, Friday Forum. The idea is to pluck a story from the week in book news and think about it deeply and then discuss it. Let's see if it works. Cheers, TRA
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Yesterday we had someone blithely dismissing book blogging, today we have someone (or someones, rather) proscribing rules for it; never a dull moment in this little corner of the internet (though at least I don't care about YA. You guys have to keep them at bay with whips and overturned chairs).

Over at Three Guys One Book, Dennis Haritou, offers Ten Cardinal Rules for Book Blogging, which  ranges from the high-minded (the only reading that's worth any respect is close-reading) to the idiosyncratic ("Never write about your friends...it's revolting").

Rule-making for blogging seems like a bit of a fool's errand; your time would be just as well spent arranging sand on the beach just so. Still, there is a central concern to the 3G1B list that is worth thinking about: the relation of the author to the reviewer, reader, and blogger.

The first rule suggests that the reader/reviewer ignore the fact that there is a writer at all:

 You love the book, not the writer. You don’t care about the writer. They could be a talking gazelle. You don’t care. You’re in for trouble if you like the writer. No good can come from this.

Then, in the last rule, a seemingly contradictory imperative:

Read only the writers who will talk to you. There is no greater thrill than reading a novel, being amazed, and knowing you can ask the writer about it.

I'm not really sure how to reconcile this. We're not supposed to care about the writer and yet we are thrilled to talk to writers, to have access to them, to connect our appreciation for a work to the being who created it.

I think that affection for a writer after reading a great book relates to something else I've thought about, An Offshoot of the Buzz. Basically, reading something that moves, entertains, or inspires you is difficult to keep contained. You want to share it, process it, and revel in it. And yet, the book object (or increasingly text file) is inert. It cannot share in your exuberance, respond to your questions, or otherwise affirm your excitement. So we want to go to the source.

The problem then becomes---well now what. What does having some knowledge or even relationship with an author do to your existing love for a book? Does it intensify it? Attenuate it? Does your excitement get transferred from the book to the author?

My own experience has been that the best place to expend this enthusiasm is with other readers, not with the author in the various forms available to the common reader and blogger (interview, essay, reading, etc). For one, I can count on one hand the number of authors who, in person, are half as interesting as the book I just read (most are not quite as interesting as a can of Pringles. Though I do really like Pringles).

A fellow reader can share your experience in a way an author can't; the author is too tied to it, too invested in the work personally. Also, when discussing a book with a fellow reader, you are less likely to be subject to the author's presence. Even the best interviews are not conversations about a book in the same way that a very good discussion between peers can be.

Do you like to know more about authors? Why or why not? Do you think people should be paying more or less attention to the authors themselves?

Eight Questions about the State and Future of Book Blogging

In the run-up the Book Blogger Convention on Friday, I've been writing a series of posts about various aspects of book blogging. This is the last in that series, and a list of the earlier entries can be found in the first few sentences of this previous post. Thanks for reading. 
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In 1925, W.E.B Du Bois, worried that African American art had strayed from the goal of social justice, sent a questionnaire to influential authors and publishers. In it, he asked them a series of questions about what they thought African American arts and letters should be about.

He must have been quite disappointed. Rather than affirm his own belief that African American art should be propaganda for African American equality, most of the respondents argued for the freedom of the artist to follow whatever path their “genius” desired.

But then Du Bois did a fairly remarkable thing; he published the responses in his magazine, Crisis. All of them. To my knowledge he never wrote about them, he quietly printed them over the course of a year and let his essay “The Criteria of Negro Art,” speak for him.

I’ve always admired Du Bois for this; he asked hard questions and didn’t duck the answers, perhaps realizing that the conversation was just as important as the subject.

It’s in this spirit that I’d invite you to respond to a series of questions about book blogging; these questions are meant to kindle conversation as much as they are to arrive at anything like answers.

If you’d like to respond in the comments, please do so. If you’d like to respond on your own blog, please let me know and I’ll link it up here. If you would like to run your responses as a guest post here at The Reading Ape, I would be thrilled to run it, just let me know at readingape AT gmail DOT com.

Here are the questions:

1. What does book blogging do best?
2. If you write a book blog, why do you?
3. What do you think the future of book blogging is?
4. What do your favorite book bloggers do?
5. If you could tell all book bloggers one thing, what would it be?
6. If you could change one thing about book blogging, what would it be?
7. How do you think book blogging fits into the reading landscape?
8. What about your own book blogging would you like to do better/differently?

Responses:

Ken at The Ken
Ellen at Fat Books, Thin Women
Mummazappa at The Book Nerd Club
Reader's Quest
What Red Read
She Treads Softly
Ben at Dead End Follies
Nicole at Bibliographing
Jillian at A Room of One's Own
Every Book and Cranny
Falcata Times

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

A Loner's Guide to Book Expo America

I have been to BEA a grand total of one times and so am highly qualified to give advice. This isn’t “wear comfortable shoes” advice, though you should do that. (Actually, you should wear comfortable shoes all the time. Except when you are trying to chase me down—then by all means wear some torturous Carrie Bradshaw pair).

1. The book that is being given away left and right is going to be the book you are going to be sick of hearing about in six months. So read that right away before hype fatigue becomes a problem. 

2. If you try to crash the librarian’s special reception/lounge, you will be met with stronger language than “quiet, please.” Unless you are a librarian, in which case it is all high-fives and ass-slaps. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to librarians; you should. You should definitely look for them at the bars and buy them tequila sunrises. You really haven’t gazed into the dark void of book nerddom until some glassy-eyed children’s librarian delivers an homily on her love of Ramona Quimby, Age 8.  

3. Do not drop your business card into every “WIN AN IPAD” giveaway. The only thing you will win is an unstemmable tide of email spam.  

4. Drinking game idea: go to a trend panel and do a shot every time someone uses reason or evidence. By the end, you’ll still be as sober as a Japanese nuclear engineer. 

5. Check out the remainder pavilion but don’t dawdle. The dudes who lurk there are a little sketchy. Like drives-a-windowless-minivan-and-knows-his-way-around-a-roll-of-ducttape sketchy. 

6. If you find yourself waiting and hour for an autographed copy of some C-list celebrity’s ghostwritten memoir, then it’s time to reconsider your station in life and your prospects for future happiness. Also, wave to me.

7. Do not tell a clutch of self-pubbed novelists that you write reviews. Save yourself the time by getting on the 6 train to the Bronx Zoo, cutting your femoral artery, and jumping into the piranha tank.  

8. No one likes a free totebag whore. No one that is, except people looking for people to mock on Twitter.

9. To maximize your quality-value ratio, don’t eat at any restaurants between 30th Street and 72nd Street. Unless it is a vaguely “pan-Asian” restaurant. Those places are only slightly below average, but pretty damn cheap.

10. Go to The Strand, but not with a shopping list. Pretend you are in the last scene of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and pick out just one thing--“Choose wisely.” 

11. Don’t bother with a map of the Javits Center. Just let the random placement of escalators flow over you.

12. The press area’s refreshment spread might make a Benedictine monk’s fridge look downright decadent, but there are chairs and Ethernet ports. Also, it seems to be scantily policed, so you don’t even have to have a lightly-trafficked literary blog to get in. 

That's all I have for you. Stay tuned for woefully ill-informed and poorly-researched live-coverage from BEA next week!
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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Review Policy --- DRAFT

Dear readers and fellow book bloggers,

The Ape has been putting off crafting a review policy, but a recent mini-spike in inquiries has at last forced our hand. Below is our attempt at a reasonable policy, and we'd be enormously appreciative of any feedback you might have the time to offer. Have we left something out? Said something, in Orwell's words, "avoidably barbaric?" Let us know in the comments, on Twitter, or by email.
                                                       ---Thanks in advance, TRA
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The Ape is open to receiving review copies from publishers, agents, and authors.  However, we only make time for literary fiction and literary history, so unless your book could reasonably be shelved in either category, we’re probably not a good fit for you.

Also, we make no promises about giving the book a review, let alone a positive one.  We’re committed to giving any accepted book a fair chance, but our reading time is too dear to us to promise more.  Unfortunately, we’re not currently equipped to accept e-books or other digital formats.

We’re also not interested, for the time being, in blog tours, author interviews, guest posts, or giveaways, but this state of affairs is subject to change.

If, after all this, you’d like to discuss submitting your book or would like to know more about our readership, please do email us at readingape (at) gmail.com.

Cheers,

The Reading Ape

A Little Stock Taking

We're taking a look at our blogging efforts here at the Ape, trying to see what we've done, what we haven't done, what we do well, and what we don't. As part of that process, here are some hits and misses from our recent activity (the idea for this came from ProBlogger's 7 Links Exercise).


1. Our second post (supposed to be the first post, but our first posted has already been recently recycled):

Our Kind of Guy: a re-post of a story from the New Yorker about an inveterate book collector. We don't do as much re-posted+commentary as we thought we might, but maybe we should reconsider that.

2. A post we enjoyed writing: 

The Top Twenty Literary Characters of the Last Twenty Years: This was a hoot. Not sure if the list is a good one or not, but it got us to think about what we've read and what has stuck with us (and why).

3. A post that had a great discussion:

The amount and quality of interaction we've had around our Reading and the Gender Gap series has been a pleasant surprise. This segment, Reading and the Gender Gap Redux, focused on book blogging and, perhaps not surprisingly, spurred some interesting thinking.

4. A post on someone else's blog you wish you'd written:

A couple of weeks ago, there was interweb conversation about the phrase "having time to read." We weighed in as did many others, but Nymeth's thoughts over at Things Mean A Lot seemed to strike the right chord/ Here's an excerpt.  

Obviously I WANT people to read – I’m very passionate about literature, and I want more people to experience the many, many splendid things books have to offer. I want to share this thing that I love so much, but I worry that the prescriptive approaches I sometimes see, particularly in educational contexts, will backfire.

The post was personal, passionate, and carefully considered. We strive for all three.  

5. Your most helpful post:

This is a bit difficult to judge, but from re-posting and re-tagging, the Swiss Army 10 feature seems to have had some follow-through. The goal was to offer general purpose recommendations that are both serious and entertaining.  We've been meaning to get back to this with a variation, tentatively titled 10 Readable Classics. Sound interesting?

6. A post with a title you are proud of:

We're not terrible good at titling, either for SEO or for entertainment value, but we kind of liked The Special Disappointment of a Failed Conceit. It summarized our review of Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, while not so gently mocking it. We thought it clever....ish.

7. A post you wish more people had read:

It was an early post, so it's perhaps not surprising that it didn't get as many eyeballs as some others, but Hoping for an End to Fate was the first post we wrote that we felt like said something in a style we're aiming for: considered, serious, readable, and a wee bit humorous. It also was commentary on a literary idea, born out of a reading experience---a kind of writing somewhere between review and criticism.

You Don't Have a Favorite Author, Redux

Every week, Jenn over at Crazy for Books hosts the Book Blogger Hop--a chance to explore some new book blogs. This week, she asked that participants talk about a favorite author, but we always bristle at that question, like, we think, many readers do. However, in the spirit of good sportsmanship, we don't want to shirk the task, so will instead offer a previous post on the subject (in fact, the very first post here at The Ape).

You Don't Have a Favorite Author

As a proud and pugnacious fanboy of literary fiction, the Ape is often asked THE question question that all of his fellow bibliophiles both love and dread: "Who is your favorite author?"

This seemingly innocuous, even kind-hearted question causes a peculiar paralysis, one born of self-consciousness and existential dread. Because here's a little secret---no one has a favorite author. That's right, you heard it here first; we're all lying when we tell someone that John Steinbeck or Barbara Kingsolver or Toni Morrison or Tolstoy or Austen is our favorite author.

Don't resist; you know this to be true. Can you really say that you always crave Dostoyevsky on the beach? Or Dickens on a long plane ride? Or Margaret Atwood on the subway? Or Hemingway on rainy Sundays or Joyce on a bright September morn? You see what we're getting at here. 

One of The Reading Ape's founding principles is that our tastes are as changeable as the weather and twice as unpredictable. So, we need a stable of go-to authors to attend to our carousel of whim, our revolving door of obsession. So stay tuned as we offer bizarrely specific recommendations for the myriad of reading occasions that comprise our literary lives.

Welcome to the Ape (and some of our favorite posts)

It’s Friday so once again many of you might be visiting The Ape for the first time via the Book Blog Hop, hosted weekly by Jenn at Crazy for Books. A couple other folks have mentioned us recently, including a very kind recommendation from the guys at 3:17am, so some of you might have found us from those places. In any case, welcome and have a look around.

Might we recommend a few posts that we think capture what we’re trying to do? Here’s a brief sampling of life here at The Ape:

• On likable characters
• The Top Twenty Literary Characters of the last twenty years
• On Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy
• Reading and the Gender Gap
• A Review of The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

If you like what you see, you can subscribe through our RSS feed on the left sidebar, or perhaps follow us through Google, same sidebar, just a little further down. You can also contact us at readingape (at) gmail.com.

Cheers!
The Ape

Book Blogging and the Gender Gap, Redux

A couple of things related to a previous post about gender and  book-blogging caught our attention recently, so we thought we'd take a moment to consider what, if any, help they might be.

First, Ed Champion, in breaking down Michiko Kakutani's apparent distaste for fiction, provided a list of the most negative (mainstream) book reviewers working today. That discussion is interesting in itself, but what we noticed was the gender-spread, or rather, the relative lack of one; of the sixteen reviewers listed, ten are men.

Along the same lines, we came across  More Intelligent Life's 2008 list of best book reviewers. Of the ten reviewers mentioned, eight are men. It also seems worth noting that one of the female reviewers was Jessica Crispin of Bookslut, who works primarily online. (The other, not surprisingly, is Kakutani).

We noted these the gender paradigms of these lists but were having a hard time relating it to the dominance of women in book blogging circles until Girl from the Ghetto made a remark in a discussion the Ape started on the Book Blog Ning: "Niche bloggers aka male (and all other kinds) bloggers don't fit into the existing molds. I believe until someone breaks the book blogging mold, it is going to stay exactly the same."

Though her astute remark was about book blogging, it came to us that we might consider the make-up of book bloggers as being itself a reaction to the male-dominated mainstream book reviewing establishment. Here's what we wrote in respose: "I mean, can it be a coincidence that the most books most discussed online (YA/romance/chick lit/scifi/paranormal) are precisely the kinds of books that would have a damn near impossible time being included in the NY Times, The Washington Post, etc? This might help explain why so few men blog about books--male-oriented book discussion already HAS a venue."

Does it seem reasonable to think that as mainstream reviewing is more and more an online practice that the gender disparity among book bloggers will change? Or has the die for book blogging largely been cast?

Reading and the Gender Gap, Part II: Book Blogging

Last week, we posted some thoughts about the gender gap and reading. In the comments, a couple of readers mentioned an even wider such gap among book bloggers. The Ape had noticed this as well and decided to do a little barely-at-all scientific study to see what the numbers might be.

Methodology

Our data set was registered members of the Book Blog Ning, of which there are currently more than 6000. Clearly, this was too many to handle, so instead we used the handy little “Random” sort option to give us a nominally unbiased sample size.

We then set out to gather data from 100 active book bloggers; the two requirements for “active book blogger” were that the blog had to be primarily, though not exclusively, about books and had to have been updated in the past month. If a blogger's gender wasn't readily identifiable, we didn’t count it among the 100 and moved on (this happened only twice).

While gender was our primary interest, we did a secondary look for what the Ape calls “social-book blogging activity.” This includes book-related memes, reading challenges, and intra-blog badges and affiliations. This was clearly a more subjective evaluation, but so be it.

Results

Out of the 100 book blogs surveyed, 92 were run by women.

Of the 100 book blogs surveyed, 70 participated in social-book blogging activity. Of those 70, 66 were women.

Analysis

The gender gap among the wider reading public is even more pronounced in the book blogosphere, where women apparently outnumber men somewhere in the 10-1 range. The difference in social book –blogging activity is extreme, somewhere in the 15-1 range.

If one organizes these three book-related activities (reading, book-blogging, and social book-blogging) according to social interaction, we can see that the more “social” the reading-related activity, the more pronounced the gender spread will be. Based on anecdotal evidence, gender differences in book clubs and groups would probably yield similar results.

Half-formed thoughts

So here’s the question that emerges: might gender differences in reading habits be caused by the different ways men and women socialize around books? Or is it the other way around?

If there were a direct correlation between social reading activity and baseline reading habits, then we would expect something less than the 10-1 spread in the gender of book bloggers. This suggests that the social role of reading might be a source of the reading gap itself; reading is more of social activity for women and it would make sense that this encourages more women to read.

What Else We’d Like to Know

How do men and women gather information about books? We’ve heard that a significant amount of book buying occurs because of a personal recommendation, so it stands to reason that if women are more social about books, then they are more likely to get these recommendations and turn them into sales/reads.

What is the gender spread in non-blogging social reading habits? (Book clubs, Good Reads, Library Thing, Amazon Reviewing)

What, if any, are the differences between what male book bloggers and what female book bloggers do?

The Ape is always appreciative of comments, but in this particular we’d especially like to hear your thoughts (fellow book bloggers, we’re looking at you).