How to use this Page

On Monday, February 13, 2012, Seth Godin published a piece entitled “The End of Paper Changes Everything“ for The Domino Project. The premise of the piece was that “[n]ot just a few things, but everything about the book and the book business is transformed by the end of paper.” In fact, Godin boldly declared “the book itself is changed.” He’s absolutely right.

My definition of a book has always revolved around its tangible form. To me, a book is made up of a cover, title, paper, weight. But that’s not going to be the case for much longer. The birth of the e-book forces us to answer Godin’s contentious question: “What makes something a book?”

If we take away a book’s physicality, then what we’re left with is its foundation. The parts that make up a book’s substance. A book will now be defined by its characters, plot, themes, setting, message. Perhaps, a book will become what it was always meant to be: A story.

However, this leads us to yet another conundrum: If a book isn’t bound by the restrictions of its physical form, does that mean its storytelling potential is limitless. You tell me.

by Lauren

It’s been a busy week around these parts, with Sarah Palin’s book hitting the shelves; publishers ignoring potential breakout hits in a neverending search for obvious frontlist; and debate on Harlequin’s branching out into self-publishing territory. We answered questions on fiction credentials and platform building; admitted to guilty pleasure reading; explained publishing; practically wrote your letter to Santa for you; analyzed the reading habits of youth; asked for short story suggestions; and Chasya told you why she’s here in the first place.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog posted a covers contest so challenging that even previous winners Jim and I couldn’t get ‘em all. (Seriously, people, what are #2 and #4? They haven’t posted the answers yet, and it’s driving me a bit nuts.) They also interviewed a seriously awesome 4-year-old on his love of books and monsters. Everyone talked about the eminently deserving Colum McCann’s win of the National Book Award. Eric at Pimp My Novel pointed out that we’re writing a lot of books about people’s daughters lately. Michael Cairns at PersonaNonData analyzed e-book pricing. The author behind Belle de Jour, blog-turned-book-turned-TV-show about a prostitute in London, turned out to be a research scientist. And Nathan Bransford made a pretty compelling argument for the eventual supremacy of e-books because people gravitate toward efficiency (on the one hand, I dream about one day having a home library with rolling ladders to reach the higher shelves; on the other, I’m kind of an efficiency nerd).

And now I’m off to figure out how to efficiently fit a library large enough to require rolling ladders in a New York City apartment.

by Jim

Oh, jeez. The New York Times has released their list of 100 Notable Books of 2009.  As is always the case when this comes out, I feel a touch overwhelmed. It’s exciting to know that there are always more great books out there to be read, but at times it gets a bit daunting that you can never even hope to catch up. Or is that just me?

I already have Let the Great World Spin and The Year of the Flood set aside for my holiday break reading. And I want to read Half-Broke Horses and Wolf Hall. And Follow Me sounds fascinating. Ack!

Anyone else excited or frustrated by year end lists? See any titles that for sure should be skipped?

Does it count as daily blogging if today looks a lot like yesterday? Been running around in circles since the morning and find myself, once again, using my first chance to sit down to reach out to you all, with the get-to-the-event-clock ticking down. This one is at my local neighborhood bookstore, Greenlight Bookstore, where [...]

Joseph Dorazio, a poet and friend, alerted me to a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight" (Robert Lee Holz, Science Journal, June 19, 2009). There's an emerging science of epiphany, apparently. There's proof that daydreaming matters.

"Sudden insights," Holz tells us, "are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically."

Eureka moments, Holz reports, are accompanied by "a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain's right hemisphere, which is involved in handling associations and assembling elements of a problem." Moreover, in EEG-assisted research scientists have seen that "that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate."

Well, now, I like this, and Joseph knew that I would. I like it because in my memoir, Seeing Past Z, I made a long argument for the value of daydreaming—for giving kids room to imagine. I like it because I spent much of yesterday blanketed into a couch, trying to see the next scene in the novel I am writing. My thoughts were uncontainable. I could not keep them tethered. They wound in and out of the sound of rain, through conversations I'd been having, through images of my past, through the old newspaper stories I've lately been reading. Anyone trying to measure my thought's progress would have given up and left me for useless (I was about to do the same, just ask Reiko, who rescued me with a mid-daydreaming email) when, all of a sudden, I had a breakthrough on the novel I am writing. I felt the bright burst of gamma waves.

The novel inched forward.

This coming week, on Tuesday, one of my very favorite authors, Colum McCann, is releasing his fifth novel, Let the Great World Spin. Few authors trust their imagination, their process, as thoroughly as the entirely lovable, provocatively talented McCann, and I urge you to visit his website so that you might learn about this book that soon the literarily privileged will be reading. There's a video of McCann talking process on his site (and on Amazon.com). He's the real thing—aching and wanting like the rest of us, but somehow always pushing through. He's a writer worth listening to.

Every now and then (wait: that would be more than every now and then) I get myself into literary trouble. This holiday weekend I did it again. In the early hours of each day I was at work on this wild mash of an adult novel—a scene involving, among other things, a mind in the midst of repair. In the afternoons I was reviewing the final edits for the YA novel set in Juarez, The Heart is Not a Size. At one point I was answering questions about Nothing but Ghosts, and always, always, I was fighting for the time to read Colum McCann novel, Let the Great World Spin.

I was, in other words, all kaleidoscoped with voice and place and desperate to get traction.

I don't typically seek out such collisions, but when they happen, I try to learn from them. I study the first-person present voice, for example, for fault lines (when does it fail? what happens when it gets pushed too far? what happens when a story is a was and not an is?). I weigh interior monologues against dialogue chains against the power of the omniscient narrator, and decide: what yields, what confines, what exacerbates? I ask myself how I might have approached a scene in the McCann book (McCann's book begins with the famed 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Towers, a story also richly told in a documentary I recently watched, "Man on a Wire"), and then I try to imagine what McCann might have done had he chosen to weave insanity inside his book, or a south-of-the-border squatter's village, or a garden. What would McCann do with a garden?

As writers we are never finished; we never know enough. We write each book as if it is our first and also our last, and when we are brave, we go back and look over our own shoulders and ask, What might we have done right there to make this a better book?

We are always desperate to write the better book.

I first became aware of the power of that one word ruin when reading the poetry of Gerald Stern. It seems the very opposite of beauty, and yet how close the two words are often found on a page—how near and next of kin are beauty and ruin. Yesterday, reading Colum McCann on the train, there was that word again, often. When Michael Ondaatje speaks the word it is all shush and reverence.

"When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future," Christopher Woodward wrote in In Ruins.

Is that how it is for you, or is it just this thing that happens to the incurably love-riddled melancholy?

The National Book Award Finalists were announced and there are some surprises in the fiction category. Lydia Millet and Junot Diaz were a part of the judges panel and some big names were absent from the nominations. Richard Russo, Lorrie Moore, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers and Jonathan Lethem were absent from the list. Paul Theroux’s son Marcel was nominated as well as Colum McCann. They even nominated a book from a college press: American Salvage  by Bonnie Jo Cambell.

Fiction:

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

In Other Rooms, Other Wonder by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

Far North by Marcel Theroux

Let the Great World Spin and Lark and Termite got the best reviews this year, but it will probably be McCann’s year. Far North is an apocalyptic story in a which a woman sheriff patrols a desolate hardened landscape. American Salvage are short stories about tough working class people and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s stories are about modern day Pakistan.

Nonfiction:

Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook by David M. Carroll

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species by Sean B. Carroll

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin

The Poison King: The Life and legend of Mithridates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles

Poetry:

Versed by Rae Armantrout

Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach

Speak Low by Carl Phillips

Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop

Young People’s Literature:

Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose

Snitches by David Small

Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor

Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia