Books that grab you

"Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker, which manages to combine a 90-year-old super spy, a clockwork repairman and a cunning plan to destroy every living thing in the universe, has won him the Kitschies Red Tentacle award for the most intelligent, progressive and entertaining speculative novel of the year.

     Set up by the books site Pornokitsch, the Kitschies go annually to books that 'elevate the tone' of genre fiction. The Red Tentacle prize for best novel – which comes with a large, tentacular trophy, £1,000 and a bottle of Kraken rum – has been won in the past by books including Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls, Lauren Beukes's Zoo City and China Miéville's The City and the City.
     Harkaway's second novel, Angelmaker, in which gangster's son turned clockwork repairman Joe Spork tries to put a stop to monks who are plotting the universe's destruction, beat titles by Adam Roberts, Frances Hardinge, Jesse Bullington and Julie Zeh to win this year's award."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
Read more…

Get all the books mentioned in this post here...

"[…] when you lose your furniture, household items, you can replace them. But with his books, it was really as if he lost the woman he loved most in his life..." — Rasha Barghouti

From: Al Jazeera English

"As war came to Jerusalem in May 1948, Palestinian Omar Saleh Barghouti fled his home, leaving behind hundreds of his books, including years worth of his diaries. He would never see them again.
      Unknown to him, as the battle over the creation of the Jewish state raged, teams of Israeli librarians and soldiers were collecting tens of thousands of books from Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa and elsewhere -- including 256 from Barghouti's home in the Katamon neighbourhood.
     For Israel, the effort was a way to preserve books which would eventually be returned to their owners. But for the Palestinians, it was theft.
     Omar's granddaughter Rasha Barghouti remembers his stories about his books.
     "He was a lawyer who had an office on Jaffa Street," she told AFP. "He used to write a lot — his diaries, the history of Palestine, of Palestinian families, the Jordanian regime, the tribal law."
     After two years in exile in Egypt, Barghouti moved to the West Bank city of Ramallah, reaching out to Jewish friends in what was now Israel to try and get his books back."
— Agence France-Presse, (via globalpost)
Read more…

From Surfing to Serfdom

"In Who Owns the Future? [Jaron Lanier] tellingly questions the trajectory of economic value in the information age, and argues that there has been a fundamental misstep in how capitalism has gone digital. For Lanier, late capitalism is not so much exhausted as humiliating: in an automated world, information is more important to the economy than manual labour, and yet we are expected to surrender information generated by or about ourselves – a valuable resource – for free. […]
     In his view, disproportionate economic power now accumulates around companies who 'own the fastest computers with the most access to everyone's information.' We donate extremely lucrative information – our interests, demographic predilections, buying habits, cyber-movements – in exchange for 'free' admission into social media networks. (Digitisation has also allowed banks to repackage the 'information' of a mortgage debt and sell it on as increasingly complex financial products, while excluding the indebted home-owner from a percentage of the profits.)
     Lanier argues that the early internet years have fetishised open access and knowledge-sharing in a way that has distracted people from demanding fairness and job security in an economy predicated on data flow."
— Laurence Scott, The Guardian
Read more…

Books Be Gone (Page Two)

From: Zoomed In

"Amazon is advising users of the Kindle iOS app not to download the latest update due to a bug that can delete users' existing libraries and settings from their device.
     Amazon issued an update for its Kindle app on Tuesday, but it didn't take long for some users to report it was actually deleting their content. The good news is libraries are retrievable, thanks to back up in the Cloud, but the update deregisters users and makes them start the upload process all over again.
     'The update deleted all books from my iPad, and I had to register again, creating a second name for the same iPad,' wrote one review on the app's page in the Apple App Store [iTunes link]. 'It's like starting all over again. Now I have to upload [download?] over 130 books from the cloud.'"
— Samantha Murphy, Mashable
Read more...

Read a related post here...

Bubble

From: Blue Pueblo

"Last August, a book titled Leapfrogging hit The Wall Street Journal's list of best-selling business titles upon its debut. The following week, sales of the book, written by first-time author Soren Kaplan, plunged 99% and it fell off the list. […]

     It isn't uncommon for a business book to land on best-seller lists only to quickly drop off. But even a brief appearance adds permanent luster to an author's reputation, greasing the skids for speaking and consulting engagements.
     Mr. Kaplan says the best-seller status of Leapfrogging has 'become part of my position as a speaker and consultant.'
     But the short moment of glory doesn't always occur by luck alone. In the cases mentioned above, the authors hired a marketing firm that purchased books ahead of publication date, creating a spike in sales that landed titles on the lists. The marketing firm, San Diego-based ResultSource, charges thousands of dollars for its services in addition to the cost of the books, according to authors interviewed.
     As ResultSource's website points out, hitting best-seller lists can mean fame, and potentially lucrative consulting assignments."
— Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal
Read more…

See a related article here…

Illuminated

Source image from: oilpaintingsframes.com

"It’s curious how much of literature we are conditioned to consider unliterary. Few would contest the canonization of Bleak House, Vanity Fair, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but these classics have something in common we may be prone to disregard: each was published with profuse illustrations, and in each case the author relied on the artwork not only to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the book but to add meaningfully to the story. […]

     I suspect that most fiction writers would instinctively agree that interacting with visual representations of a book in draft can help give shape to evanescent impressions or inspire new ideas. (In the most famous instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald 'wrote in' the image of T. J. Eckleburg’s haunting optometry billboard after seeing Francis Cugat’s dust-jacket design for The Great Gatsby) […]

Then there is the future of digital readers, which erode that largely theoretical firewall writers have installed to keep their work from the corrupting influence of film. E-readers allow you to read text, look at pictures, and watch videos on the same device; already, 'transmedia' books such as 2012’s The Silent History have appeared that combine all three elements into the reading experience. (E-readers will also relieve the strain of printing costs, one of the factors that have led publishing houses to discourage illustrations.)"
— Sam Sacks, The New Yorker
Read more…

Early Atwood

From: Leaside High School Year Book (sosyalokur)

"[…] she told us that her first step in becoming a writer was buying a publication called Writers’ Markets, which said that the money was in true romance stories. She told us: 'I thought, I‘ll do that during the day and write my deathless masterpieces at night.' There was a certain formula to these stories, she said. 'There would be a choice between two men – one would have a motorcycle and one would work in a shoe store. The woman would get involved with the unreliable one . . . . There were various ways of ending the story. The best way was patching things up with the shoe store guy . . . . But there would always be a scene on the sofa: "and then they were one." I couldn’t bring myself to do that. That wasn’t going to happen.'

     Her next idea was journalism school. Her parents, 'biting their tongues', 'dredged up' a journalist second cousin, who told her that, as a woman, she would end up doing 'nothing but obituaries and the ladies’ fashion pages.' She decided to go to university and write in the summer holidays. At the time she graduated, teachers were in great demand, so she taught grammar to engineers at the University of British Columbia. 'At 8.30 in the morning. They were asleep. I was also asleep.'

Becoming a professional writer in Canada wasn’t easy for anyone. Atwood told us that in the 1950s and 1960s there were only about five literary magazines. In 1960, only five novels by Canadians were published in Canada. In bookshops, Canadian poetry and fiction would appear in the 'Canadiana' section. Many aspiring writers left for England or the US."
— Catherine Morris, The Times Literary Supplement Blog
Read more…

Buy all of Margaret Atwood's books here...