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August 28, 2006

EVER HAVE ONE OF THOSE DAYS?

We're having one.

So we're going to leave you with these two interesting bits, and get on with beating our foreheads until they bleed:

The San Francisco Chronicle offers its Fall Fiction Roundup, taking a look at the heavy hitters coming your way.

October brings the Oakland Raiders to Candlestick. It's the Battle of the Bay. Bragging rights from San Jose to Redding. And, quite possibly, early jockeying for a high draft pick. It's also the same month that "The Road" arrives, McCarthy's tale of a postapocalyptic America (that may or may not resemble the parking lot after the Niners-Raiders game), along with Michael Lewis' new book, a study of the left tackle position (that may or may not resemble the play of the offensive lines during the Niners-Raider game). There will be new novels by Charles Frazier, Richard Powers, Kate Atkinson, William Boyd, Richard Ford and Heidi Julavits. And it's also the month Hollywood cashes in on nonfiction best-sellers. There's the aforementioned Eastwood movie, "Flags of Our Fathers," as well as a movie of Augusten Burrough's memoir, "Running With Scissors," but also Richard Linklater's take on Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation."

November is full of intriguing possibilities. There are such gambles as Ridley Scott's adaptation of Peter Mayle's novel "A Good Year" (starring Russell Crowe, no less), and there's "The Hoax," starring Richard Gere as Clifford Irving, who wrote a book about an art forger but turned out to be something of a fake himself. Equally interesting, there are memoirs from Steve Wozniak and Pervez Musharraf, and biographies of Walt Disney and Jane Goodall by Neal Gabler and Dale Peterson, respectively.

All of which is terrific news for Americans but is likely to keep 2,000 Canadians busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger ...

Fifteen years ago, the acquisition editors at a prominent Canadian publishing house were regularly told by their sales and marketing colleagues that there were no more than 3,000 serious book buyers in the entire country.

The adjective “serious” was never precisely defined, but it was understood to describe those readers who could be counted on to go to a bookstore at least once a week and buy one or two titles on each occasion, mixing purchases of fiction with those of non-fiction. Since then — a time some publishing types like to call the B.C. Era (as in “Before Chapters/Indigo”) — that estimate has dropped, I'm told, to between 1,600 and 2,000, the result, one imagines, of the competing distractions-attractions of the Internet and the rise of digital media.

Or you can just go contribute to the record-breaking comments glut that is continuing in Friday's post.

Posted at 11:06 AM in Litlinks |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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