I needed to get out of the incessant Taipei rain for a while, so I checked out the streaming audio of several American public radio stations. One was running Fresh Air. Terry Gross is my favorite interviewer. She has a great, nuanced radio voice, which doesn’t seem to go with her photograph at all. She was interviewing Al Gore, who was supporting his new book and documentary. The segment is already in the archive, so tune in for a preview of Al’s environmental message.

Recommended with reservations.

Reviewing White Ghost Girls, Judy Fong Bates writes:

“What can you give me?” is the opening line of Alice Greenway’s debut novel, White Ghost Girls . For Kate, the adolescent narrator of the story, this is a question with no satisfactory answer, one that resonates with urgency and vulnerability as she recounts the painful summer of 1967 when her world spun out of control.

Kate and her older sister, Frankie, are Americans, living with their parents in Hong Kong, a safe place for the family yet close enough for regular visits from their father, who works as a war photographer in Vietnam. Their beautiful but distant mother has chosen to follow her husband to Hong Kong, fearing that if she remained in the United States, he might find a mistress or become addicted to war itself.

Read the rest of the review at The Washington Post.

Of the one hundred books that made the list for 2005, I have read only four. Ten more I plan to read. It is always interesting to see how one’s take on the literary landscape differs from those of one’s contemporaries.

Read the list at The New York Times.

On Gatsby’s Girl Ron Charles writes:

Exhuming a character buried in a famous novel sounds like a late-night violation of sacred ground, but if someone talented does the digging, who can resist the temptation to see what’s there?

Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.

I, like most bibliophiles, have a backlog of reading material. In something of a fever dream, I added a batch of Asian works that have recently been translated to the queue. Once I finish my current stack (with only Eastern Standard Tribe, Everyman, and The Sea remaining), I plan to push through it in marathon fashion. The first book in the queue is Kafka on the Shore by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It was featured in The New York Times‘ “The 10 Best Books of 2005.”

Resources:

• Buy Kafka on the Shore (Paperback) at Amazon.com
• Read about Haruki Murakami at The Complete Review
• Read about Haruki Murakami at Random House
• Read an interview with Haruki Murakami at BookBrowse
• Read “The 10 Best Books of 2005″ at The New York Times

Random House, the publishing company owned by Bertelsmann, the German media giant, announced on Tuesday that it would increase the proportion of recycled paper it buys for its books to at least 30 percent by 2010, from 3 percent now.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

I enjoyed Al Gore’s earlier book on environmental issues and railed against the mudslinging that unfairly tarnished it slightly (type ‘”al gore” unabomber’ into Google to see what I mean). I plan to pick up his latest, which by all accounts is a clear presentation of the scientific evidence for global warming, when I return to the States.

Resources:

• Buy An Inconvenient Truth (Paperback) at Amazon.com
• Read about Al Gore at The Washington Post

Safe Internet access proved to be slightly more precious than I anticipated. It is late afternoon in Singapore on 23 May as I post this. A few readers have been confused by the dates and times at the bottom of posts. I write entries in a small notebook using a pen. The date and time at the bottom of a post indicate when I wrote the entry in my notebook; when I posted the entry might be entirely different. The entry below was written in Bangkok on 18 May.

I read a bit over half of Never Let Me Go on the plane from New York to Hong Kong. I am enjoying the novel but feel that the storytelling is a bit awkward in places. Ishiguro seems to have fallen into a pattern, with what amounts to a minor cliffhanger capping each chapter.

The latest issue of n + 1 carries a bold essay by Elif Batuman.

“New American fiction” is, to my mind, immediately and unhappily equivalent to new American short fiction. And yet I think the American short story is a dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukacs once wrote of the chivalric romance, “by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic.”

The contemporary American novel actually fares just as poorly in the essay, and, while my assessment of the literary landscape is slightly more optimistic in its own grim way, I enjoy reading something with bite. The establishment needs a shot fired across its bow now and again.

Read the rest of the essay at n + 1.

On Sunday, May 14 at 10:00 am and at 11:00 pm EDT

In “House of War” James Carroll chronicles the growth of U.S. military power from World War II to the present. The author asserts that the Pentagon is the most influential institution in American history and operates under little or no authority. After Mr. Carroll’s presentation, writer George Scialabba responds to the author’s remarks. This event was hosted by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, where Mr. Scialabba is an affiliate.

Resources:

• Buy House of War (Hardback) at Amazon.com
• Read about James Carroll at Houghton Mifflin
• Read an Interview with James Carroll at BuzzFlash
• Watch C-SPAN2’s Video Stream

Henry Alford tries his hand at pushing paper in “How to Sell Books by Really Trying”:

I found a few books that were seemingly useless (travel guides of 17 or more years’ vintage), a few that were intellectually forbidding (like “The Importance of Scrutiny,” a collection of essays from the British literary journal Scrutiny) and a few that I thought no one would want to be seen buying (”Impotence in the Male”). I found some books that I will describe as unsexy (”Michigan Folk Art,” “Pruning Simplified,” the first volume of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs, two volumes of Jeffrey Archer’s prison diaries). And I found two books whose mere existence baffled me (a collection of drawings that the filmmaker and writer Rebecca Miller did without looking at the page, and “Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich,” a 2005 academic title).

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

Not recommended.

In “The Lowering of Higher Education,” Christopher Phelps writes:

I was wondering what to make of this dispiriting but solitary data set when I read about the Education Department study released late last week that shows that the average literacy of college-educated Americans declined precipitously between 1992 and 2003. Just 25 percent of college graduates scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” in literacy.

Read the rest of the article at Inside Higher Ed.

While I feel that some of the new print on demand services are a boon for authors of niche nonfiction titles, I remain unconvinced that these services benefit authors of fiction. Too many obstacles, not the least of which is the stigma that still surrounds self-publishing, line the way.

More than 91,000 professionally bound books were published through Lulu in January alone, nearly three times the 35,500 books the site produced last August. Sales are running at about $1 million a month but growing at an extraordinary clip of 10 percent monthly, said founder Bob Young.

Fueling the growth are the many specialty topics such as vintage Rolex watches and horse manure (”The Little Book of Horse Poop” is one Lulu title). They may not produce enough sales to land a book deal at Random House but have little trouble finding readers online.

Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.

Highly recommended.

In “The Da Vinci Clones,” Brigitte Weeks writes:

What should we call a large group of conspiracy theorists? A British reviewer wryly suggests “a connivance.” There are certainly enough writers in pursuit of Mary Magdalene’s supposed French descendants to make up a large connivance. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has sold more than 40 million hardcover copies in 44 languages, and conspiracy mavens will be hard-put to imagine it is coincidence that two related novels are appearing in the same season that finally sees the paperback publication of The Da Vinci Code and the premiere of a movie version.

Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.

I have not had a chance to pick up Philip Roth’s new novel, but I have been keeping tabs on the reviews it has been receiving, which have been quite mixed. I generally enjoy Roth’s work, and at only 182 pages the book will be a welcome reprieve, so I do still plan to read Everyman.

The USA Today (not normally the first source I would choose but here representative) reviewer writes:

It’s far from Roth’s best work, but it contains flashes of the writing that earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for American Pastoral and wide praise in 2004 for his last novel, The Plot Against America.

and concludes with:

. . .Everyman is a disappointment.

Read the rest of the article at Yahoo! News.

Reading interviews with and essays by Cory Doctorow, Eric Flint, and Tim O’Reilly over the past week got me thinking about long tail issues in publishing. I was set to write an entry on the topic when I discovered that the Grumpy Old Bookman had beaten me to the punch.

. . .it occurs to me that the book trade as a whole, may, just conceivably, be under-estimating the extent and speed of changes which may shortly be upon us.

Read the rest of the article at Grumpy Old Bookman.