Book Blogger Convention Swag Giveaway

Tomorrow, I'm headed to the Book Blogger Convention at the Javits Center here in New York. Several interesting panels, some authors and publicists, and a bunch of people who know their way around a blog.

I know a lot of book bloggers out there would like to go and can't make it. Well, I can't do anything about that, but I can give you a little piece of the action: the swag.

Here's what I am going to do: I'm going to send my share of swag to one book blogger out there. And the list of sponsors looks pretty tasty.

No tricks, no required follows or retweets or anything (though if you did, more people will hear about it. Though I guess that's bad if you want to win).

Here's how you enter:

Send an email to readingape AT gmail DOT com with a link to your book blog. If you win, I'll ask for your mailing address. That's it!

Two restrictions:
1. You have to have a book blog that's been updated in the past two months.
2. This one's a little more painful: US only. I'm going to be mailing this on my own dime, and the package is likely to have a fair number of books. And I am not made out of money. While I do have some affiliate cash banked from referrals here at The Ape, they probably will just barely cover the domestic postage.

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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

Yawning at the Apocalypse: Thoughts from the BEA 2011 Showfloor

This time last year, I had been blogging for about six weeks before I went to BEA. The experience was eye-opening; I knew little about the world of publishing and publicity. It was exciting to get copies of books that I didn't yet know existed and wouldn't be available to the public for several months. There were also authors I admired signing around every corner.

A year later, I am more interested than excited. I pay much more attention to publishing news, so nothing at BEA was really a surprise. Also, my reading list is longer now that it has ever been, so there's quite a bit less room for serendipity or experimentation. So I turned up at BEA more for the spectacle than for the surprise.

Here's a few things I saw:

1. I think the rise of self-publishing reduced the number of oddball publishers and authors at BEA. For the entry fee, they can do quite a bit more online and ensorcel unsuspecting readers directly.

2. Imprints from the Middle East had some seriously huge and beautiful booths. Though, much like a mall in Dubai, they were huge, beautiful, and empty.

3. It's all well and good to know that China has some human rights issues, but it's another thing to flip through an English language Chinese magazine and see absolutely no critique or observation of anything wrong with any aspect of Chinese life.

4. There was one guy sitting the lounge outside the registration area with a weird hat advertising his book PROVING GOD. He sat there alone and made no move to pitch anyone his book or move about at all. I guess they don't make evangelicals like they used to.

5. It's one thing to know that romance moves the most units; it's another thing to see the Harlequin autograph lines. And it's another thing to try to cross those lines to saner ground.

6. Florence Henderson does not blink. Not in a metaphorical sticks-to-her-guns way, but in a Madame Tussaud's way.

7. The coolest thing I saw was Xerox's on-demand publishing set-up. This thing is basically the size of a washer and dryer and can spit out a pretty attractive paperback in a few minutes. I'm currently wondering if they will accept my left kidney as payment.

8.  In case there was an doubt, I am an elitist pig.

9. It's really too bad that the walk from Penn Station to the Javits Center is one of the 9 ugliest walks in Manhattan. The other eight are from behind dumpsters in the Lower East Side back to your apartment.

10. I thought e-galleys would be a big thing this year. I was wrong. You know what is a big thing? Publishers scared shitless of e-publishing.

11. Best way to spend your publicity dollars at BEA: complex carbohydrates. Cookies, whoopie pies, pastries, bagels, whatever. For 100 bucks worth of Oreos, you can have every librarian in New England visit your booth. Of course, then you have every librarian in New England at your booth. Kidding, librarians, kidding. We all love you. Now. Back in grade school you creeped us out.

12. The L. Ron Hubbard landing craft was a bit smaller this year, though it was more informative. Did you know you can get Dianetics in over 37 Earth languages?

13. I really want to care about self-published novels. I saw nothing that moved the needle for me though. (Keep it clean, Ape. Keep it clean).

14. Blogging about literature is exponentially more interesting that the publishing business. And more relevant too.

15. YA literature.....the enthusiasm for the genre blows me away. I wish literary fiction had as much juice going for it. Lines of people 100 deep waiting for autographs from people I had never heard of. Considerably shorter lines for Karl Marlantes autographs. Sigh.

16. Tote bag hoarding was in full effect. Saw one surly homonculus with about 12 bags completely empty freebies on his shoulder. Disconcerting.

17. A truckload of digital publishing businesses who all provide weirdly vague services. Can't help but think this is a kind of carpetbagging before the war is over.

18. Couldn't swing a dead cat without seeing something using an Ipad. I mean, my dead cat kept hitting those bastards.

19. Didn't realize it until I was out on the showfloor, but I am about ten times as interested in the Book Blogger Convention than anything the publishing business is hawking. Not a great sign for them.
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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

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

Book Blogging and The Publishing Complex

This the next and penultimate post in my recent series on book blogging. The comments on the previous entries (on reviewing and subjectivity [1, 2, 3], the problem of pleasure, blogging and literary terminology [1,2], thinking about your reviewing audience, the phenomenon of buzz, and the seven things readers want from publishing) have been wonderful. I highly recommend checking them out.
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At the moment, I am reading and enjoying Michael Palmer's new novel, The Watery Part of the World. As much I like the book (it is fine novel, indeed), the most interesting thing about it is that I shouldn't be reading it. Or rather, I shouldn't have heard of it; the only reason I am reading it is because the publisher sent a review copy. I didn't ask for it, hell I didn't even know it existed, but it showed up, so I read the blurb and the first dozen pages and kept going. The publicity machine of publishing dangled the smallest worm, and I bit like a spawning salmon.

Though I've received review copies before, this is the first time where I didn't ask for something and ended up spending time with it. And honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I don't know if you've noticed it, but book blogs are slowly becoming a significant part of book publishing. Book tours, author interviews, sponsored giveaways, advertising, event promotion---the boundless enthusiasm book bloggers have for reading has been noticed by the publishing complex and they are trying to figure out how to use it to sell books. This, of course, is there job and a healthy publishing industry I think is good for readers, but I wonder if it is good for book blogs.

I started reading book blogs about seven or eight years ago, and I've noticed that the blogs that became widely read found their writers being plucked out of blogging into mainstream publishing (Mark Sarvas, Maud Newton, Ron Hogan, to name a few). Many of these blogs are now either gone, incorporated into publishing houses, or shadows of their former selves. Many of the currently popular blogs and bloggers have significant, growing ties to publishers, bookstores, and writers.

See, the thing I love the most about book blogs is the naked, unadulterated readerly passion. Call it being a geek, a dork, a fanboy or fangirl, whatever. The love of reading that spurs someone to write a blog about whatever they happen to be reading just because they need an outlet for their excitement is infectious, inspirational, and affirming.

Maybe it's a paranoid concern, but I can't help but wonder if book blogs will change, will lose some of their valuable amateurism, as they become increasingly linked to the business of books. I see this happen in the academy (and it is one of the reasons I started The Reading Ape); the more someone's livelihood and professional prospects are tied to something, the harder it is to follow your bliss.

What do you make of the strengthening ties between publishing and book blogging?

Literary Techniques and Book Blogging: A Response

Many thanks for those of you who responded to my post about reading and literary terminology. The breadth and complexity of those comments made my regular mode of responding in the comment section itself seem inadequate (and makes me anxious to install some kind of more sophisticated commenting system. A project for after BEA).

Anyway, let me highlight a few points and respond.

1. It seems that, for the most part, those not actively studying literature or teaching it have lost the majority of whatever literary vocabulary they once had. I'm not at all surprised by this and I'm sure for most of us there is some area(s) of our education that is rusty beyond use. (At one point, I was a philosophy major, but my mastery of thinkers and particular schools of thought are now long gone).

2. Also perhaps unsurprising, those that think about/use literary terminology as they read and write think it's important to do so.

3. This third observation is the most interesting to me as it gets to the center of why I asked this question: many commenters expressed a concern that the infiltration of literary vocabulary into reading and reviewing would come at the expense of enjoyment. Jackie's story about SCUBA diving best represents this position--that copious, detailed knowledge about a subject interferes with a more organic experience of that subject.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to write about literature in a way that the academy does not allow--somehow more personal, passionate, informal, and perhaps even funny. I have consciously refrained from using much academic jargon here, both because I can do that elsewhere and because I've felt that the instant I deploy "metonymy" or "negative capability" the tenor of my writing and thinking changes dramatically. The pleasure/rigor binary, though, doesn't seem necessary or desirable to me at this point.

Tolmsted and Greg both posited that some compromise might be possible, to use the tools of scholarship but do so in a different spirit. This seems to me an exciting possibility that squarely matches both my expertise and desire--to use the skills I have but to do so in a more readable, entertaining way: to not mistake or link inextricably the tools and the tone (Tolmsted, I think this might answer your question about why I am asking these questions).

Perhaps this will fail, but if so at least it will be a failure of imagination.

Philip Roth and The Man Booker Judging

As has been widely discussed, last week Philip Roth won the Man Booker International Prize (which might as well be called, "For Those Who Haven't Won Nobels." This choice would have been widely accepted, even perhaps expected, if one of the judges had not resigned her position over the selection.


Carmen Callil decided to air her grievances publicly and spectacularly, with initial disparagement and now more considered remarks.


This is the stuff of good literary water-coolering ("It feels as if he is sitting on your face") and a fair glimpse of the politicking and subjectivity of such awards. To be honest, I tend not to find the back-room dealing of the judges interesting, though I do care about who wins these awards since they tend to provide the most publicity literature receives over the course of the year.


What strikes me know, though, is how little Callil's objection to Roth is about Roth himself: of her 828 words, less than a hundred of them are about Roth specifically. The rest are about the scope of the award and her displeasure about the process. I was anxious to see why Callil objected to Roth strongly, but instead all she said was this:

There are great moments in Roth's work. He is clever, harsh, comic, but his reach is narrow. Not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas. Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor's clothes. 

Hard to admire him, hard to see him on the long list, hard to award him this international prize.

If I understand this correctly, Callil's concern is the narrowness of Roth's writerly interest, mainly that that interest is principally "himself" and that self holds little interest to Callil. 

Analyzing Callil's argument is difficult here because she states a preference and doesn't use much in the way of evidence. Still, there are a couple of interesting points here. 

First, the number of metaphors she uses to describe her dissatisfaction is fascinating: "reach," "narrow," "canvas," "digs," "oceanic," and "swish of emperor's clothes." There is a certain cognitive dissonance here (how does one dig into an ocean), but at its core, Callil's complaint is about scope. In her estimation, Roth's artistic vision is limited and that to which it is limited is of little interest to her. 

That Callil finds the fact that Roth's greatest subject is Roth tiresome is of course her prerogative, but I wonder if she isn't missing the point of Roth's self-examination, and in doing so misses reason he is the most decorated and widely read living writer of American literary fiction. Roth's signature achievement is not spectacular understanding, but a consistent, experimental, literary investigation of the 20th century's central artistic theme: the problem of the self. 


Roth's consternation over the self leads him to a staggering display of artistic virtuosity, encompassing nearly the whole array of mid-to-late 20th Century generic forms. Incendiary debut? Goodbye, Columbus. Shocking coming-of-age novel? Portnoy's Complaint. Confessional literature? The Zuckerman Trilogy. Speculative fiction? The Plot Against America. Magical Realism? The Ghost Writer. Postmodernism? Operation Shylock. Satire? The Great American Novel. Domestic drama? American Pastoral. Carnivalesque? Sabbath's Theater. And the list could go on. 


Roth's "limited" vision is the vision of kaleidoscope--fragmented, combinatorial, various, and beautiful. Callil's privileging of subject ignores the bounty of Roth's formal mastery. To dismiss him for only writing about himself would be like dismissing Monet for only painting plants. 
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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

Do You Think About Literary Techniques as You Read and Review?

I made a claim in my first post about book blogging and the "I"-centered review that I'd like a little feedback on:  "the spread of "I"-centered reviewing covers for a relative lack of vocabulary and strategies for reviewing books."


What I want to know, well, I guess...am I right?


I recently saw this list of 40 basic literary terms mentioned quite a bit, and the number and velocity of links, tweets, and reblogs suggested that people want more vocabulary for this stuff than maybe they have at their disposal.


Maybe this question is more generative--do you think about the techniques and vocabulary when you are reading or reviewing literature? 


I know many of you have studied literature--how much of that education and training remains in your head? And what percentage of that could you use?


Would you like to use more formal terminology and modes of analysis? Why or why not?


I'm really quite interested in this and appreciate whatever feedback you can give. 

The "I"s Have It, Once More With Feeling, Follow-Up

Most welcomely, Jillian of A Room of One's Own responded to my last post on book blogging and subjectivity. Unfortunately, a blog-related snag created a little ill-will. For some reason, Blogger decided to list a comment she made on that post as spam. She, perhaps understandably, thought she was perhaps being prevented from commenting. Long-story, short: I've unspammed the comment, which you can read here, and commented on her latest post about the whole matter, which you can read in the comment thread to that post. (I've also responded to the blocked comment here. If you've made it this far, bully for you).

The "I"s Have It, Once More With Feeling

This topic has generated more feedback than anything else I've written on this blog, and I find myself unable to let one of the comments in particular pass without more substantial comment. (First post, second post)

Jillian of A Room of One's Own took exception to my desire for book bloggers to use more evidence and do more analysis in book reviews. I don't agree with her, but not for the reasons she thinks we don't agree. This misunderstanding is worth thinking about.

She writes:

Some book bloggers are only journaling (me.)
I would far rather hear what someone personally thinks of a book (I), than what they've analyzed about it according to somebody ele's idea of proper reader response (one should/we believe/etc). In fact, I recoil at a dry 'review' of a book (analysis, supporting evidence, blah, blah, blah) rather than an embrace of the work as a dance beween I and the author.

 A few things to note here.

1. Some book bloggers are only journaling.

I know many people use blogs as reading journals, but my question is this: why make it public? I can only assume that the desire to journal online includes the desire to have people read what you write. My point is that if you readers, hell even one reader, who will read what you write about books, you have an opportunity to do more than journal. Pick your verb for what that is, but I am thinking along the lines of "enrich," "educate," "entertain," "inspire," "complicate," "contribute," and so on. If you are giving your opinions of books, you may well get a readership, but what is it that you are offering that readership? And how can you offer them more?

2. I would far rather hear what someone personally thinks of a book (I), than what they've analyzed about it according to somebody ele's idea of proper reader response.


Unless you are writing history or doing mere description/summary, there is no way to avoid writing what you "personally" think. I am not arguing, nor shall I ever, that there is a way to objective book reviewing. In fact, I am actually arguing for a much more transparent, contemplative subjectivity, a subjectivity that not only expresses your reaction, but gets into details about the source and nature of those reactions. One last thing here: since I write somewhat formally and from an academic background, many readers assume that I think only "dry" and "proper" writing about literature is acceptable. This could not be further from the truth: I want writing about literature to come in all flavors. A diverse, invigorated, on-going literary conversation is good for literature, and it's good for me. No matter the style though, writing about literature can be in service of making us all better readers. 


3. I recoil at a dry 'review' of a book (analysis, supporting evidence, blah, blah, blah) rather than an embrace of the work as a dance beween I and the author.


So do I. That's why I started a book blog and don't just write academic essays. The fact that this is positioned as an either/or choice for writing about literature gets to the heart of my thinking. I think that there is a wide, inhabitable space between impressionistic reviewing (describing the "dance") and scholarly writing. That analysis and evidence are cast out with academic/high criticism hurts book blogging. Analysis doesn't have to be boring, nor does using evidence. In fact, I think it can be amazingly illuminative, both for the reader and for the reviewer. Why do you hate the main character? Why do you think the plot is unlikely? What does that say about the book and what does it say about you? Why do you think that is? This is not the stuff of graduate seminars (though sometimes I wish it were)--this is the stuff of living an examined life. 
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I'm going to put a coda on this discussion with a bit of one my earlier posts. In it, I disagree with Sarah Mancuso's reading of the end of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. I include it here as an example of what I hope to do more often here, not as an exemplar for how other people should review. A few words about it after.



Mancuso on Freedom:

"...Freedom focuses on two fully human adults who, despite their history of betrayals, return to each other. When Patty and Walter drive away from the lake house, they complete the book’s convincing depiction of a mature marriage—one that survives serious conflicts and requires serious mercies. It isn’t nostalgia for Walter’s affair that broke my heart; it’s Patty’s forgiveness, and Walter’s forgiveness of her own betrayal, and the reminder that such forgiveness is possible..."

Mancuso reads Freedom's end with considerably more hope than I do. In her assessment of these novels, Mancuso provides compelling textual evidence, but here at the end she abandons direct quotation of the text. To my mind, one paragraph describes the nature of Walter and Patty's reconnection, and it is the reader's interpretation of that paragraph that will determine how positive their reconciliation is. I'll quote at length:

"Her eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold empty space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside of him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind" (p. 559).

I find it difficult to call this moment forgiveness. Forgiveness implies a kind of ethical transaction in which wrongs against a moral system are pardoned. Here, the moral system is completely obliterated by "the void." This absence of ethics makes any transgression meaningless, any emotional benevolence null. Their relationship here is cast as a strategic alliance against nothingness--not a turn to each other as subjects of meaning and value.
But that’s me.  
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There are a few things I am pleased with here. First, I used a relevant quotation and looked at the passage in detail---no scholarly apparatus required. Second, my reader can follow my logic because they can look at the text in front of them. Third, I didn't even know I felt this way until I wrote about it. And this is where I will end: writing with analysis and evidence actually tells you more about what you think than you even know. You already know how you feel about something, what you don't know is why. Writing can be the most intense personal exploration there is, a place of deep subjectivity and discovery.


In short, write about books in a way only you can write about them. Do it generously, passionately, and deeply.  

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.