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Last week we were happy to announce that First Book joined forces with Goodreads, one of the largest online communities of readers, to bring more books to more children this summer.
This summer the Goodreads community will be reading ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, by Jennifer Egan, to kick off their new Goodreads Book Club. For every 10 members of the Goodreads community who add this title to their shelves on the site, Goodreads will donate 1 book to kids in need through First Book.
We are happy to announce that the participant count is now at 32,613, closing in on 33,000. We would love to get to the 40,000 mark so that we can donate 4,000 books to kids in need. If you are looking for a quick and easy way to help First Book get books to kids, this is it! Goodreads members simply have to add the book to any shelf. (For folks who are new to Goodreads, registration is easy, quick, and completely free.)
Join the the book club and help us get books to kids!
By: Maryann Yin,
on 7/8/2011
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Galley Cat (Mediabistro)
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Goodreads has partnered with First Book, a charity group whose mission is to make sure children who reside in low-income communities are able to have access to books. Together, these two organizations will be fighting illiteracy using the Goodreads Book Club.
Every time 10,000 Goodreads members add A Visit From the Goon Squad to their shelves, the organization promises to donate 1,000 books. So far, 25,000 members have added the book. If another 5,000 members follow, then Goodreads will provide 3,000 books.
Here’s more from the site’s blog post: “Our initial goal is to donate 5,000 books—which means we need 50,000 people to add A Visit From The Goon Squad by August 2, when the Book Club concludes with a live video chat with author Jennifer Egan. If more than 50,000 people add the book before the end date, we will honor our pledge and donate up to 10,000 books!”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
By: Brian Minter,
on 7/5/2011
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We’re excited to announce that First Book has joined forces with Goodreads, one of the largest online communities of readers, to bring more books to more children this summer.
This summer the Goodreads community will be reading ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, by Jennifer Egan, to kick off their new Goodreads Book Club. (It’s an incredible book; it was recently awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and the National Book Critics Circle Award).
For every 10,000 members of the Goodreads community who add this title to their shelves on the site, Goodreads will donate 1,000 books to kids in need through First Book. That may sound like a lot of people, but it turns out there are a whole bunch of people on Goodreads. 25,000 people have already added this title, so we’re up to 2,000 donated books right out of the gate. Woot!
But we’d love to get that number much, much higher, so if you’re on Goodreads, please read (and add) ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, and see what all the richly-deserved fuss is about. And if you’re not on Goodreads, go sign up! It’s free and it’s a huge, interesting community of people who love books. Plus there are quite a few First Book staffers on there already, and we’d love to talk about our favorite books with you.
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By:
Aaron Starmer,
on 6/14/2011
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The Indubitable Dweeb
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I’m willing to bet that Harold Bloom is wagging his meaty arthritic fist right now, decrying the declining influence of classical educations and the literary canon. Ah, yes, the classical education. Gone are the days when a crested Exeter boy was considered cultured if he knew his Greeks, could recite some Donne, and laughed at the right moments in As You Like It. I’m not going to say times were simpler then but…actually, yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to say. Times were simpler then.
People weren’t dumber and life wasn’t easier, but literary and cultural knowledge was more limited, because there were obviously limited choices. The average student these days is bombarded with countless opinions on how to feed a healthy brain, and as cultural content flows into the world at an exponential rate, it’s hard to know whether 20 hours are better spent reading Infinite Jest, watching Season 3 of The Wire, memorizing “The Wasteland” or listening to scratchy bootlegs of Robert Johnson.
This argument has surely been made before, and surely better, but as a writer I think it needs to be continuously addressed. Because for all the opportunities writers are afforded today, we are facing increasingly fragmented audiences. There are still perpetually curious folks out there, trying their best to sample everything from the buffet. My wife is one of them and her skills as a prolific devourer of books and media always astounds me. But the majority of people simply taste the king crab legs and decide, “well heck, king crabs are pretty darn good and thanks to those Deadly Catch fellas, we’re swimming in ‘em, so I might as well eat these long-legged SOBS until I go gentle into that good night.”
I speak of course of anyone who’s picked up some Stieg Larsson and decided that kinky and moody thrillers are the be-all-and-end-all, or anyone who’s buried themselves in paranormal romance and decided not to dig out until all the centaurs have found a hooflove, or…well, you get it. Genre has been around for a long time, but it’s more comforting than ever these days. Since there’s no such thing as a classical education anymore–since what’s deemed canonical is so daunting–you might as well become a specialist, an expert, a slavishly devoted fan.
I don’t really have a problem with this sort of fandom because I participate in it to a certain degree and, if I’m lucky enough to find my writing lumped into a zeitgeisty genre, I stand to make a few bucks and find a few readers from it. Yet it can be discouraging to a writer whose work doesn’t necessarily fall into a popular genre and sees his/her books added as #347 on peoples’ Goodreads “to-read” shelves and wonders, “when they heck are they gonna get to me? They still have all the Shopaholics, Tolkien and Dutch Transcendentalists to get through!”
Publishers know this better than anyone and that’s why they turn down some great writing in favor of some not-as-great writing. It’s a business, as you are constantly reminded, and market share ain’t necessarily achieved just because you can string together a better description of butterflies than Nabakov. If they can’t find a place to fit you into the “market,” then you’re left out in the cold.
One genre currently freezing its tuchus off is the comic novel f
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Beth Kephart ,
on 5/23/2011
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I'm well into my second month of cohabiting with the iPad2, and I'm frankly still getting used to the creature. Still learning how to navigate and sync. Still trying to discover how to make it work for me.
Some reporting, then, from the field.
I have found the iBooks (I bought
Bossypants and a guidebook to Croatia) to offer a more alluring read than the Kindle books, thanks to the preview capability, the extras, the ease of navigation, and the more generous simulation of actual-book reading. And yet, I have leaned more heavily toward Kindle books because the titles I have wanted—
In Zanesville, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Please Look After Mom, When We Danced on Water—have been either more readily or more cost-effectively Kindle available. During these past six weeks I have continued to go into bookstores and to buy books proper, continued to hold proper paper-and-spine books such as
Cleopatra, Caleb's Crossing, Sweet Dreams, and
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius on my lap. I don't think I will ever willingly give up on my old
book-buying habit.I have also made use of the PDF Reader to read both my own adult novel-in-progress (I wanted to approximate the feel of the read before the book was sent out to editors for review) and
Dana Spiotta's magnificent Stone Arabia. I'm clearly not a skilled PDF Reader user. I am not thrilled with, and could never look past, the floating nature of those pages, the inability to truly mark the text, the sense that I was reading a mere facsimile. I'm buying Spiotta's book when it comes out in July because I want to own it, have it on my shelves, pick it up with ease, flip to a favorite page. And certainly I am hoping that my own adult novel will move past the PDF Reader stage.
On the other hand, I have loved—loved—reading
The New York Times on the iPad2. I still retrieve the weekend edition from the end of my driveway, still settle in with the paper version of the magazine. But I find the overall newspaper to be easier to handle on the iPad2—more alluring, more easily reviewed, more packed with the bright lights of videos and links. I don't annoy my husband with the crinkle and snap of the paper while he sits on the other end of the couch watching his monster river fish and World War II shows, and I am more connected to the news than I was, and that, alone, is worth the price of this machine.
The New Yorker still arrives via the old mangled mailbox each Tuesday. I'm not quite sure that I want to go digital with that particular publication just yet.
Since I am soon bound for London and Berlin, I've also bought some travel apps and played with these. I'll be honest: I'm still going out to buy a travel guide or two. Call me old-fashioned. I like to dog ear my instructions to foreign places. The Berlin app, for the record, was far superior to the L
Novelists are tasked with leaving readers with the grave and glorious illusion that they have been given access to a world, ushered in. This exists, the novelist says. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. Let me show you.
Jennifer Egan’s many-prized A Visit From The Goon Squad does not merely render a world. It wends readers through the hallows and hollows of vast geographies, personalities, and zones. Goon Squad is a composite of abutments and abrasions—a savvy, smart, sometimes bitter, often funny suite of thirteen tales about ingeniously interrelated slackers and singers, druggies and parents, inglorious PR mavericks and thieves, people who were young and people who grew old. Time is Egan’s primary character, her first concern. How we hope. How we remember. And how, most devastatingly, we age.
It took me many days to read this book, but I’m not sure why. I would read a few chapters, set the book aside, return—not the smartest approach to a book in which it is necessary to place and remember a stream of characters who are minor, then major, then receding, then right back at you again. You have to work at this book, in other words—not because Egan is trying to be difficult, but because Egan is so very smart, and so frequently sly. She’s postmodern, if I understand the term. A risk taker, a jokester, a woman who (now so famously) can tell a very touching, humane story through the device of power point slides. Oddly, I was perhaps most moved by the tale delivered through those infamous slides.
Egan can also write a hell of a sentence, and in fact she has written an abundance of them here. I close this post with an example, a description of an undone rocker who we’ve also known, in pages elsewhere, as a singing tour de force.
Look at what Egan can do:
Nowadays he was huge—from medications, he claimed, both post-cancer and antidepressant—but a glance into his trash can nearly always revealed an empty gallon box of Dreyer’s Rocky Road ice cream. His red hair had devolved into a stringy gray ponytail. An unsuccessful hip replacement had left him with the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck. Still, he was awake, dressed—even shaven. The blinds of his loft were up and a tinge of shower humidity hung in the air, pleasantly cut by the smell of brewing coffee.
The iPad2 was my husband's gift to me—marketed weeks upon weeks in advance. "I don't need that," I kept saying. "It feels indulgent." But we run a communications business here, we need to know what is up, what can be done, what hasn't been done yet, and besides, he had to talk me into a Blackberry, too, and you don't now find me going out too often without that. Also besides, I've been saying for a long, miserable time that I need to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in a quiet place, a room or two away, reading and writing.
And so, the iPad2, which arrived a week ago, and which I have put to minimal, but interested use. I am a
New York Times subscriber, for example, and so, by downloading the
New York Times app, I can now sit with this glass tablet on my lap in the dark making no disturbing rustling noises while I read the reviews of such great books as Francisco Goldman's
Say Her Name. I find it easier to read this way—my arms don't hurt, my eyes don't squint, and I can turn off the lamp beside my husband while he watches shows about fish, food, and war (sometimes he's lucky and all three things appear on one show at once). I'm reading my hometown paper this way as well, and when my subscription to the paper version of
The New Yorker runs out, I may go iPad with that as well, though I don't know. I'm rather fond of my stacks of
New Yorker stories, torn fresh from the bindings.
Vanity Fair? Maybe.
I also, as readers of this blog know, downloaded Tina Fey's
Bossypants and iPad2'ed it—the perfect book for this medium. As much as I loved
Bossypants, I don't plan to ever teach it, do not need my scribbled marginalia as a guide to my first readerly reactions. I know that some sort of marginalia can be achieved via the iPad2, don't get me wrong. I'm just not interested in going there at this moment and rather suspect I'll never be. There's an art to making notes in books, and I like pen to paper. I also like, however, the extras the expanded iBook version of
Bossypants afforded—more photos, an audio chapter, pretty cool flipping and bookmarking technology. I've just downloaded Jennifer Egan's
A Visit from the Goon Squad as well as a guide to Croatia for my next iPad2 readings. I want to take Egan to Ithaca over Easter weekend and Croatia to Croatia, some time in June. I think of these books as traveling companions.
Finally, I've downloaded the PDF app that will allow me to iPad2-read my own manuscripts-in-progress. I've got two books I'm working on—a novel, nearly complete, and a memoir. I've worked to give myself enormous distance on the novel and reading it again on a new technology, following a final set of revisions, will, I think (I hope), allow me to see this book as a stranger might. That, at least, is what I'm going for.
My friend Karen, always so far ahead in matters of technology, does many things with her iPad that I don't know how to do—watch Netflix movies while exercising, say, or grading student papers. She's the real expert on this (as she is on most things). I'll become a smarter iPad2 user in time, I hope. But for now, to answer your questions:
I really like my iPad2.
Today A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan has won the 2011 Tournament of Books at The Morning News–a round robin competition that pits books against books every March.
A team of literary judges decided each round of the competition, and all the judges voted on the final two books: Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom and Egan’s novel. Egan earned nine votes; Franzen earned eight.
Andrew Womack concluded the contest with this vote: “How fortunate to find two books in the championship so comparable—both spanning decades (or beyond) and heavily centered on music. For me, this decision comes down to pacing, and Franzen is the Pink Floyd to Egan’s Sex Pistols; by the end of Freedom I couldn’t take another meandering guitar solo, while I was dazzled by how much Goon Squad packed into such a compact space.”
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Today A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan has won the 2011 Tournament of Books at The Morning News–a round robin competition that pits books against books every March.
A team of literary judges decided each round of the competition, and all the judges voted on the final two books: Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom and Egan’s novel. Egan earned nine votes; Franzen earned eight.
Andrew Womack concluded the contest with this vote: “How fortunate to find two books in the championship so comparable—both spanning decades (or beyond) and heavily centered on music. For me, this decision comes down to pacing, and Franzen is the Pink Floyd to Egan’s Sex Pistols; by the end of Freedom I couldn’t take another meandering guitar solo, while I was dazzled by how much Goon Squad packed into such a compact space.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
(Knopf, June 9, 2010)
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Reading this book was a little like starting a conversation out of general politeness, and discovering that you're talking to someone you passionately want for a best friend.
Jennifer Egan -- full disclosure -- is a friend and customer of Greenlight Bookstore. I'd hosted her before for events at other stores, and chatted with her and her kids at Greenlight, but to my own detriment I had never actually read any of her fiction. (Even though, as often seems to happen, it seems in retrospect like obviously the sort of thing I would like: the smart but not overtly political feminism of Look At Me, the Gothic nested stories of The Keep, etc. -- good storytelling in the service of big ideas, or vice versa, without sacrificing the one for the other.) It seemed like now would be the time to pick her up, though, since we're hosting her launch party for the book on Wednesday. So I opened the intriguingly titled A Visit From the Goon Squad earlier this spring.
And found a new addition to my personal author pantheon.
As I wrote for our recent staff picks email, A Visit From the Goon Squad is ostensibly (and quite effectively) about the world of rock music, and the intersections of the realms of commerce and creativity (and the dysfunctional folks who inhabit both). But it's really about life on Earth, in all its heartbreaking and maddening and rich and loveable complexity. It's about the mistakes of each generation, about being young and growing up, about adventure and domesticity, about interconnectivity and isolation, and (especially) about the brutality and kindnesses of time.
And it doesn't hurt that it is structured in my favorite form: the novel as interlinked stories (cf. my pantheon authors David Mitchell, Charles Baxter, Joan Silber, and others). Some of those were published in the New Yorker -- trust me that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, though each story has its own poignant and complete miniature arc. One of them perfectly evokes being a young and foolish professional woman in New York City (ahem). One is written flawlessly from the perspective of a very young gay man, one about a record exec, several about the intersections of teenagers who have grown up too fast and adults who are not very grown-up at all. One is composed of a series of PowerPoint slides and is alarmingly literate and moving. San Francisco, Italy, and Arizona make appearances, as do the 1970s, the 1990s, and a near-future that is the most believable I think I've ever read (wait till you learn what a "pointer" is). The meaning of the title is illusive, but when it hit me it hit hard, and shaped my understanding of the project of the novel in the way the best titles can do.
And did I mention the damn thing is funny, too? Apparently Jennifer Egan is one of those rare authors who can quite literally do anything.
I have already seen Jennifer post-Goon Squad reading, and gotten out of the way my mumbled fangirl admiration. Luckily she seems as delighted at how it came out as her readers will, and is in fact the sort of kind and smart and idealistic and charming author that
Or, instead of bumbling back to the wintery Durmstrang-y reads, maybe everyone should just take the summer off and read nothing BUT comic novels for adults! That’d be kind of cool.
Agreed Tiff – Recommendations!?!