Reading group classics - will these authors really be remembered 100 years from now?

Postwar novels dominate as 15 are chosen from 100 modern-era books

John Ezard
Saturday August 27, 2005
The Guardian

If 500 of this country's most fervent readers have got it right, the past 25 years have been a golden age for classic fiction, the past 15 years have been even better and the past five years have verged on the platinum.

Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) is more enduring than Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) is more penetrating than Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994) is of higher merit than Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong (1993) is greater than Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.

This perspective will be news to most critics, academics and publishers, although publishers will be grateful for the boost for their newer titles. But it is the firm view of 48 book reading groups across Britain.

The verdict, discussed in today's Review supplement, is the fruit of seven months spent by the groups debating which titles published during the 20th century or so far this century will be considered classics in 100 years time.

One group member summed up their dilemma in deciding what makes a classic by asking: "Can we enjoy it or does it have to be worthy?"

These groups, in their role as discriminating readers, were asked by the publisher Vintage to come up with a list of their top 15 modern novels. Vintage, part of Random House, did so to celebrate its 15 years of publishing literary paperbacks.

The readers chose only two novels - the first world war classic All Quiet on the Western Front and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World - from the years before the second world war, which are usually considered the golden age of literary modernism.

Then their choice jumped to the 1960s, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Nine of their favourite titles were published in or after 1980, three come from the 90s and four from the first three years of this century

The four latest books include two acknowledgedly substantial novels, Atonement and Mark Haddon's Whitbread prize winner, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. But no one in the UK books scene has previously ventured to suggest that the 21st century is producing enduring masterpieces at a rate faster than one every year.

Yesterday, however, the choice came as no surprise to Guy Pringle, publisher of Newbooks magazine, which is in touch with readers and readers' groups.

"The groups involved have not taken this lightly," he said. "But my guess is that the groups are keener on more recent fiction than in going back over the classics. The level of reaction has confirmed to me that people might say they like reading the classics, but they don't do so as often as they say.

"Classic titles have always been the hardest to shift when we have special offers for readers' groups. Even an easy and amusing classic like Three Men in a Boat was slow to move. But I know from what I've read in discussion groups that discussion about this choice has been very wide-ranging and thoughtful."

Tom Palmer, the reading partners coordinator for the government Reading Agency, set up the Vintage project with the 48 groups.

"Some groups read classics only, but the majority go for modern fiction. It's stuff like Captain Corelli's Mandolin that a lot of them read - good-quality middlebrow material."

Mr Palmer estimates that Britain has at least 10,000 reading groups. "I know of 400 in the East Midlands alone," he said.

Vintage gave each group free copies of 100 of its titles to choose from. This 100 had no books by Evelyn Waugh, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, William Golding or other writers usually considered classic, but otherwise included a fair spread.

Vintage's public director, Rachel Cugnoni, said of the project: "It's not a list created by academics or literary critics, but by ordinary readers. This is what makes the list authentic.

"To pin down exactly what defines a classic is hard to do and certainly open to debate, but ultimately what all recognised classics must have is the affirmation of large numbers of readers. These are the classics of the future."

Mary Rossall, a member of a reading group from Cumbria, said, "Even group members who were on holiday still took part - emailing their thoughts on their latest reads.

"In every single meeting we've had, we've ended up talking about how to define a classic. Is it literary merit? Is it a story that stays with you long afterwards? Is it a book that gives voice to people or events which would otherwise be silenced or forgotten?

"Can we enjoy it or does it have to be worthy?"

Writers themselves have difficulty defining what a classic amounts to. For Tim Lott, the book must "say something not merely of the time, but for all time".

Ruth Rendell has defined a classic as something that must be completely original: "Nothing like it has ever been done before. A classic may not be easy to read, but demands care and concentration and will seldom have much immediate appeal to those whose past reading has been thin on the ground or confined to the lightest of fiction. Even to them, when they persevere, it may turn out to be a favourite book, the most rewarding they have ever read."

Top 15 best reads

The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood, first published in 1985

Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernières, 1994

The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco, 1980

Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks, 1993

The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles, 1969

Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden, 1997

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Mark Haddon, 2003

Catch-22
Joseph Heller, 1961

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, 1932

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee, 1960

Atonement
Ian McEwan, 2001

The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger, 2003

Star of the Sea
Joseph O'Connor, 2003

All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque, 1929

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,1962



Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Reading group classics - will these authors really be remembered 100 years from now?

Macavity Award Nominations 2005
(for works published in 2004)
The Macavity Awards are nominated and voted on by members of Mystery Readers International. Winners will be announced at Bouchercon on September 2, 2005.

Best Novel
The Killing of the Tinkers, by Ken Bruen (St. Martin's Minotaur)
Cold Case, by Robin Burcell (Avon)
Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay (Doubleday)
High Country Fall, by Margaret Maron (Mysterious Press)
California Girl, by T. Jefferson Parker (HarperCollins)
Playing with Fire, by Peter Robinson (William Morrow)

Best First Novel
Uncommon Grounds, by Sandra Balzo (Five Star)
Summer of the Big Bachi, by Naomi Hirahara (Delta)
Whiskey Sour, by J A Konrath (Hyperion)
Dating Dead Men, by Harley Jane Kozak (Doubleday)
Misdemeanor Man, by Dylan Schaffer (Bloomsbury)

Best Nonfiction
Famous American Crimes & Trials, by Frankie Y Bailey & Steven Chermak, (Praeger Publishers)
Just the Facts: True Tales of Cops & Criminals, by Jim Doherty (Deadly Serious Press)
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories, edited by Leslie S. Klinger (W.W.Norton)
Latin American Mystery Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, by Darrell B. Lockhart (Greenwood Press)
Forensics for Dummies, by D.P. Lyle, MD (Wiley Publishing)

Best Short Story
"Viscery" by Sandra Balzo (EQMM, December 2004)
"The Widow of Slane" by Terence Faherty (EQMM, March/April 2004)
"The Lady's Not for Dying" by Alana White (Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine, Winter 2004)

Meet Leana of Treasure Island, Florida - the winner of the July ITW Bookshelf of Books!

Leana won autographed copies of:

The Black Silent, signed by David Dun

Painkiller, signed by Will Staeger

Falling Down, signed by David Cole

Ghost Horse, signed by Patricia Rosemoor

The Halo Effect, signed by MJ Rose

Enjoy your books, Leana!

The latest recipient of the BookBitch BookSlap:
Roxana Robinson, who obviously hasn't read many books in any of the genres she trashes. Ignorance run amok, and published courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.

A simpler, acrimony-free definition of `women's fiction'

By Roxana Robinson.

Roxana Robinson's most recent books are the short-story collection "A Perfect Stranger" and the novel "Sweetwater."
Published August 21, 2005


It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is such a thing as "women's fiction," but here agreement seems to end. No one can define the term to anyone else's satisfaction, and attempts to do so often degenerate into an exchange of accusations and denials. It's curious, how highly charged this issue is.

So let's try an empirical approach. Let's look at the books that women read in the largest numbers, the books standing in serried ranks at the airport and the supermarket: the best sellers. Certain books declare themselves, with pastel covers and soft-edged, blurry graphics. They're all by women. The jacket copy reveals the protagonist to be a woman and the plot to involve love. These are romances. Surely, if anything is "women's fiction" it is these books.

Like most best-selling novels, romances are escapist fiction, non-realistic fables. They follow formulaic conventions of plot, character and resolution. They deliver a clear moral message and no surprises. The narrative, after ingenious twists, always delivers the reader to the place at which she knew she would arrive. These books are neither beautifully written nor intellectually challenging; they offer little complexity and tell us nothing new or profound. So why do women read them by the millions?

Best sellers function the way populist literature has always functioned. Like myths, fables, fairy tales and sagas, they provide instructive reinforcement for our society. They validate our beliefs. They reiterate the truths we live by, or would like to live by, or which we would like to believe we live by. The truths are these: Virtue will be rewarded, and good will triumph over evil. Judging by the sales, this is a message we want to receive again and again.

Romances concern the quest for love, and their goal is engagement. The narrative device is a metaphorical search for awareness, with the heroine as the initiate who must undergo a series of trials. To succeed, she will need certain attributes: perceptiveness, generosity, empathy and self-knowledge. The human objective of the quest is the beloved--this is the heroine's shadow-partner, her other half. He and she have a date with destiny, which comes as the final engagement.

The heroine may learn that her perfect (but dead) husband was the father of her (supposedly) best friend's (supposedly) sperm-bank baby. She will be deeply shaken, but when she learns to forgive her dead husband, and her friend (who dies, too, so they needn't really make up, plus the heroine gets to keep the baby), as well as herself (for pretending that her marriage was much better than it actually was--frankly, it was a terrible sham), then she can accept the really perfect partner who has turned up just down the beach and who is so loving and true and a far cry from that--at last it can be said--two-timing cad.

The setting of the romance is domestic, the focus narrow. The heroine's worldly task is attraction, so the mechanics of allure are crucial, and its tools--clothes, makeup, hair-dos and manner--will be exquisitely detailed. The philosophical scope is limited. If a social issue arises--hunger among the poor, for example--the heroine will take the side of virtue, and favor feeding. Conventional morality reigns, and though philandering may occur, the final engagement will be based on fidelity. Loyalty is given to an individual, not an abstraction. Emotion is paramount, and love the engine here. Love is the dominant presence: It animates the characters, produces the suspense, provides the central action and the satisfying conclusion.

The underlying premise of the romance is a primal need for emotional connection. The heroine's reward is abiding love, with the implied concomitant rewards and responsibilities: children, home, roots and so on. This functions as a powerfully instructive text, with obvious benefits for society: If women are committed to their husbands, families and households, society will survive, supported by a vast network of committed women, who will provide stability, continuity, communal interconnection and moral consensus. These are the foundational pillars on which any society depends.

Societally, the romance genre plays a big role, and economically, it's a huge market. So it's curious that "women's fiction" is treated so dismissively. The term is a slighting one, faintly derogatory, though people who use it might deny this. This is why the issue is so charged: It seems that the mere declaration of gender confers belittlement. And why is this? Could this be that old, outdated bugaboo, gender discrimination? Aren't we way past that? But it's hard to see this as anything else. It makes no sense to dismiss this genre simply on the grounds of populism, because men have their own populist fiction.

Let's look at thrillers.

Thrillers, too, declare themselves on sight. The covers are ominous grays and blacks, with bold, hard-edged graphics, often in crimson, and often featuring ideologically coded designs, like swastikas. The copy declares that the protagonist is a man and the plot involves death. This, too, is escapist fiction. It's formulaic, obeys conventions, delivers a moral message and ends just as it ought.

The premise here, too, assumes a primal need for engagement, but here this means mortal combat. The narrative device is that of the hunt--a real, not metaphorical, one. The hero is hunter and prey. To succeed, he must be resourceful, elusive and homicidal. (Not ideal husband material.) The vehicle is an international ideological struggle, carried out at a personal level, and the hero is on the side of Right. (He's usually trying modestly to save the Free World.) The human objective is the enemy, the hero's shadow-partner, his other half. They, too, have a date with destiny: They're trying to kill each other.

The focus here is close as well, though the setting is international and the politics global. In the thriller, loyalty is given to an abstraction. The hero's primary task is killing, so his tools--guns, knives, tanks, bombs, warships and fighter planes--are described in exquisite detail. (You may find the lengthy and precise technical discussion of nuclear-submarine deployment in the North Atlantic fascinating. Or you may find it deeply soporific.) The heroes of thrillers are often loners--single, mobile and disengaged--who rely more on their own wits than they do on orders from their superiors. The fundamental struggle here concerns escape, the emotional engine is fear, and the animating presence is death. Fear of death is constant, and the more terrifying the action, the better the story. The hero risks his own death, and deals it out to others, in defense of his country. His escape, and his enemy's destruction, function as personal and political victories. The benefits here are clear: A society needs citizens who will risk their lives for the greater good. In our individualistic culture, the daring loner--James Bond, Walter Mitty--is valued more than the obedient soldier.

So why aren't thrillers called "men's fiction"?

Thrillers are every bit as shallow as romances: They're just as simplistic, just as formulaic and, just as often, poorly written. So why do the two genres receive different degrees of respect? Thrillers have a virile and swashbuckling air, romances, a pallid and sentimental one. Thrillers are cool and romances are not: It seems sex is not as sexy as death.

Yet if love and death are the two great subjects of fiction, if they embody the opposite extremes of our desires, and if they provide the two great pillars supporting the long arc of human experience, why do they receive such different levels of respect? Because the same discrepancy occurs among literary works, as Virginia Woolf observed:

"This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop--everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists."

Now we see why the term "women's fiction" is so difficult to define--because it's not confined to formulaic, mass-market works. It seems that this dismissive tone may be applied to any domestic fiction, written by a woman, that takes as its subject the great question of human desire. It doesn't matter how seriously the author takes the question, nor how beautifully she writes, nor how serious the question actually is--the work may still be swept right off the table and onto the floor with the bodice-rippers, using the all-inclusive denomination. Needless to say, the term does not apply to books on this same precise subject that are written by men. No wonder this is all so confusing: sometimes "women's" applies to the subject, and sometimes to the author.

So maybe we should define the term altogether differently.

Maybe it would simplify the issue, and drain the debate of acrimony, to define the work instead by its readers. Because women dominate the audience for literary fiction, the writers of "women's fiction" would be Updike, Cheever, Marquez, Lethem, Franzen and the other distinguished male authors whose work is read by women in droves.

If the term isn't sexist and contemptuous--and no one who uses it admits that it is--then these writers should be grateful for the title, and proud.


Chicago Tribune | A simpler, acrimony-free definition of `women's fiction'

For my daughter...

Ariel became a Bat Mitzvah this past week. She did a beautiful job chanting her Haftarah, and made me, her father, her family and friends very proud.

I asked her what the highlight of the day was, and she said when I cried reading the poem I wrote for her. So I'm going to float it out here in cyberspace...

ARIEL, A BAT MITZVAH
written with love by her mother
August 21, 2005

On this occasion I get to kvell
A captive audience I get to tell
How proud Ariel’s made her father and me
How much she’s loved by her friends and family.

I spent the summer of ‘92
Sweating, even while swimming in a pool
But it was worth it, come August 6th
Ariel was born, we got our wish.

She was always a sweet intelligent child
Never really misbehaved or was wild
And I’m very happy to say
Somehow she’s managed to stay that way.

She starting playing t-ball when she was four
Moved up to softball, had fun when she scored
Loves to go camping & hiking through the ‘Glades
Ariel & her dad have seen lots of nature this way

In middle school she joined the band
Picked up a bassoon and thought it sounded grand
She also has fun playing video games
And her computer keeps her busy, chatting on AIM

She practically grew up surrounded by books
Between Borders & the library no wonder she’s hooked
There are worse addictions I’m sure
Than the one she shares with me, reading books by the score.

One day Ariel came to her father and me
And said a Bat Mitzvah is what I want to be
I want to follow the same path my brother took
And study the Torah and the prayer book.

Daniel is a terrific older brother
He does good things, one after another.
Ariel notices and follows his lead
He’s not even aware that he plants these seeds.

Through the years they’ve given us so much pleasure
That it would be impossible to measure
I'm honored to speak for me & Larry today
As we share in this very special day.

The Proverbs state: “Train up a child in the way one should go.”
What we’ve sown, may you grow.
We hope that we’ve filled your head with our voices
Because ahead lies a road strewn with many difficult choices.

Be strong, be healthy, and believe in yourself
Cherish your family and friends, for they are true wealth
A life lived “Jewishly” and filled with love and happiness
This is what we wish for you - only the best.

Thanks for being our sweet Ariel
You’re smart and fun and funny as hell heck
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to say my fill
We love you very much and we always will.

A Book to Read Carefully, With a Physical Therapist Near

By EDWARD WYATT


"Hunger's Brides," Paul Anderson's debut novel, is certain to be one of the biggest books of the fall. The question is how many readers will want to do the heavy lifting required to read it.

At 1,360 pages (not counting 8 pages of titles and contents at the beginning of the book and 8 blank pages at the end, presumably added for production reasons) the book, quite simply, is massive. It weighs 4 pounds, 9 ounces, equivalent to two and a half copies of "The Da Vinci Code," and it is thicker than Verizon's Manhattan telephone directory (either the white or yellow pages).

"The size implies a certain audacity, especially since we are living in the age of the sound bite," said Philip Turner, the editor in chief of Carroll & Graf Publishers, which will release the book on Sept. 14. "But we figured, why not publish the apotheosis of the big novel?"

"Hunger's Brides" puts other behemoths to shame, including Michel Faber's "Crimson Petal and the White," (848 pages, 3 pounds); Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver" (944 pages, 3.3 pounds) and the recent reigning champ, Vikram Seth's "Suitable Boy" (1,349 pages, 4.1 pounds).

The plot of "Hunger's Brides" revolves around Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century Mexican poet and nun whose vow of silence at the age of 40 was signed in her own blood. Her life and work have inspired writings by Octavio Paz, Robert Graves and Diane Ackerman.

But the book is more - much, much more - than an extended piece of historical fiction. It is also the story of Beulah Limosneros, a graduate student who immerses herself in the study of Sor Juana, and Donald Gregory, her professor and a serial adulterer. And in addition to narrative fiction, it is told in the form of poetry, dramatic plays, letters and notes in the margins.

"It is an elaborately beautiful, intricately baroque game that has at its center this mystery about Sor Juana's silence," said Anne Collins, the publisher of Random House Canada, which published the book last fall. Ms. Collins who said she fell in love with Mr. Anderson's writing in 1999 after reading a 50-page sample from the draft of the novel, in which he wrote lyrical passages in four distinct voices.

"Not many first-time novelists have even a clue how to do that," she said. "He totally hooked me."

When Mr. Anderson - a Calgary, Alberta, resident, who worked on the book for 12 years - submitted his 1,000-page manuscript, Ms. Collins had one piece of advice for him: Make it longer.

"What was missing was something that I knew he already knew was missing," Ms. Collins explained - the leap into what, from her childhood or whenever, haunted Sor Juana and eventually forced her into her vow of silence. "I told him, 'You can't not go there.' And that's how it got longer."

Mr. Turner, the American publisher, said that other than making minor changes, he never considered re-editing the book or trying to shorten it. "Because of the sumptuousness of the package - this is a gorgeous piece of typesetting - we weren't inclined to alter it," he said.

"In for a penny, in for a pound," he added - or in this case, four and a half of them.

"Hunger's Brides" has received attention for more than just its girth. After generally good reviews, the book won the top prize for literary fiction at the Alberta Book Awards. Random House Canada sold its entire first press run of 5,000 copies and has gone back to press.

Carroll & Graf has printed 10,000 copies, and the book received starred reviews in Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews and is on the September recommended list of BookSense, a trade group representing independent bookstores.

But there is no escaping its size, which evidently has presented problems for the book's printers as well as its readers. (One copy arrived at this newspaper with the book's pages bound upside down within the cover.) To aid readers, the author himself has contributed some helpful hints. The book's elaborate Web site (www.hungersbrides.com) features a slide show of "safe reading positions."



A Book to Read Carefully, With a Physical Therapist Near - New York Times

This Into That

Need bookshelves? Appreciate the unusual? Believe in recycling?

Here's a novel idea that you will appreciate.

Have a look at www.thisintothat.com

Authors to give eBay bidders a read

by LESLIE WALKER
The Washington Post

Now is your chance to die in a Stephen King novel or be portrayed "in a good light" in the next thriller from John Grisham – while championing the cause of free speech.

That is the idea behind a charity auction on eBay Inc. that starts Sept. 1 and features 16 authors selling character names to the highest bidders.

All proceeds go to the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit legal group dedicated to free speech.

In addition to King and Grisham, writers agreeing to sell a name in their upcoming books include Amy Tan, Peter Straub, Nora Roberts, Lemony Snicket and Dave Eggers.

All have penned summaries of what they plan to offer in an auction preview at www.ebay.com/fap.

Not all are selling characters. Neil Gaiman has offered to include "your name or the name of someone you love" on a gravestone in his upcoming novel.

Snicket, a popular children's writer, is offering "an utterance" by a certain character but concedes the spelling might be "mutilated."

The most priceless preview comes from horrormeister King, who writes that he will want his buyer to provide a physical description and nickname – "can be made up, I don't give a rip," he writes – and that "a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female." The winning bidder will appear in King's book "Cell" next year or in 2007.

In all cases, anyone named must grant their permission, said David Greene, executive director of the First Amendment Project. Each auction will last 10 days. To deter fraudulent bidding, once bidding goes over $1,000, participants will be contacted to verify that they intend to pay, said Eric Gazin, president of AuctionCause, the company managing the event.

The auction was started by novelist Michael Chabon. He began soliciting contributions from writers a few months ago, when he realized the group was running out of money.

Gaiman suggested he consider an auction modeled after a smaller charity event he held last year, in which he sold the name of a cruise ship in his next novel for $3,500.

Chabon, who also plans to sell one of his character's names, said almost every writer asked to participate agreed immediately.

One who did balk told him, "It's a great cause, but I just can't give somebody else that amount of control over my book. I need to be able to name my characters."

Chabon admitted that the couple of times he has auctioned off minor characters in his novels — to raise money for his children's school, for example – he wasn't too happy with the results.

"The winning names were not even remotely names I would have chosen or invented," he said.

But that paled beside what happened to a novelist who held a similar charity auction years ago, Chabon said.

A rival author won and asked that his name be inserted in the novelist's book. That is why he has a line in his preview reserving "the right not to use the name if it is offensive, mischievous, ill-intentioned or inappropriate."


Northwest Herald - Online

Can't Wait for a Book? Paris Can Help
By JENNY BARCHFIELD, Associated Press Writer
Fri Aug 19,10:40 AM ET

Readers craving Homer, Baudelaire or Lewis Carroll in the middle of the night can get a quick fix at one of the French capital's five newly installed book vending machines.

"We have customers who know exactly what they want and come at all hours to get it," said Xavier Chambon, president of Maxi-Livres, a low-cost publisher and book store chain that debuted the vending machines in June. "It's as if our stores were open 24 hours a day."

Stocked with 25 of Maxi-Livres best-selling titles, the machines cover the gamut of literary genres and tastes. Classics like "The Odyssey" by Homer and Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" share the limited shelf space with such practical must-haves as "100 Delicious Couscous" and "Verb Conjugations."

"Our biggest vending machine sellers are 'The Wok Cookbook' and a French-English dictionary," said Chambon, who added that poet Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" — "The Flowers of Evil" — also is "very popular."

Regardless of whether they fall into the category of high culture or low, all books cost a modest $2.45.

Installed in four busy Metro stops and a chic street corner in central Paris, Maxi-Livre's distributors were designed to bypass the characteristic vending-machine-drop, which can be punishing for books.

"We knew that French bibliophiles would be horrified to see their books falling into a trough like candy or soda," Chambon said. "So we installed a mechanical arm that grabs the book and delivers it safely."

Books are but the latest offering in France's ever-expanding vending machine market, which is responding to off-hour demand for everything from toilet paper to carnations.



Can't Wait for a Book? Paris Can Help - Yahoo! News

The BookBitch gets interviewed!

I was interviewed by David English for Book Talk, an Internet radio program. My interview is scheduled to run the week of Aug 22, 2005 on David's Book Talk. The interview will air Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 3:00, 7:00 and 11:00 AM & PM on Leisure Talk Radio Network. Listeners can access the feed at: http://www.leisuretalk.net An audio player, such as Windows MediaPlayer, WinAmp, iTunes, Real player, or several others can be used hear the show. In September, they will put the show up on the Podcast feed so that it will be available for download for on-demand listening or for play on a portable MP3 player such as an iPod.

Check it out and send me feedback!

'Incendiary': The Book That Became Too Hot to Handle

By Vanessa de la Torre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 18, 2005; C01

The Brit might as well be reclining on a psychiatrist's couch, but instead he broods in a Washington hotel suite, trying to understand how two grisly narratives -- one fact, the other fiction -- could collide on the morning of July 7. How his novel, "Incendiary," in which a grieving mother unloads in a rambling letter to Osama bin Laden, could become a PR mess for his publisher.

"I wrote about something that could happen, and then it did happen, and now I feel that I'm fundamentally tied, probably for the rest of my life, to those events," he says. "Within 20 years' time, people will still be reviewing my book and saying, 'Chris Cleave, whose controversial debut was published in London the same day as the London attacks, comma, has written another book.' "

What happened that July morning on CNN: Suicide bombers (with al Qaeda ties, officials speculated at one point) pulled off simultaneous attacks in the London Underground and on a double-decker bus, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more.

What happens in the first chapter of "Incendiary": Al Qaeda suicide bombers kill more than 1,000 soccer fans packed into Arsenal Stadium for the team's title game against Chelsea. "There were feet and halves of faces and big lumps of stuff in Arsenal shirts with long ropes spilling behind them like strings of sausages," Cleave's narrator describes.

After the "morbid coincidence," the novelist is promoting his book but also trying to assure readers that he is no prophet, no al Qaeda operative and, thanks to pulled advertisements in the U.K., not profiting from terror.

"A lot of people imagine I started writing this book at 9:35 a.m." the day of the attacks, says Cleave, 32. Or that terrorists got wind of his publishing date. Or that 52 people had to die before he sold one book.

"I was going to be in all the shop windows, I was going to be on TV, I was going to have print advertisements taken out for months," Cleave says. "It was going to be on two-for-three promotions, 'Best Summer Reads.' " Then all the shiny new "Incendiary" posters that decorated the tube stations were promptly taken down. Waterstone's, Britain's famed bookstore chain, also pulled its in-store displays. Cleave says he agreed with the decisions: "It was a huge book. And now it's a small book in the U.K."

While "Incendiary" had a first printing of 25,000 copies in Britain (an exceptional number for an unknown author), criticism surrounding its timing and gore has slowed sales.

"We knew there was going to be a lot of dissenting voices," says Laetitia Rutherford, Cleave's literary agent based in London. "It's a very provocative book even if you take out the terrorist attack. It's dealing with death, mutilated bodies. . . . We knew we'd hear a lot of voices saying, 'He's a nutter.' "

The immediate plan is to release "Incendiary" in 15 countries; film rights have already been sold to the producers of "Bridget Jones's Diary." Sonny Mehta, the longtime editor in chief at Knopf, made an offer for "Incendiary" within 24 hours of reading it, says Rutherford. (Knopf originally trumpeted a U.S. printing of 100,000 copies; when it was released this month, that number had been reduced to 50,000.) "It's not about a terrorist attack but a human response to tragedy," says Paul Bogaards, Knopf's publicity chief. "For us in New York on 9/11, some of the imagery resonates."

Bogaards calls the book "a slow burn" -- dependent on a word-of-mouth campaign, and so far the reviews in the United States have been mixed: The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani admonished Cleave for his decision to open the novel with "Dear Osama," branding it "a case of simple tastelessness." Newsweek marveled that it was "arguably the strangest epistolary novel ever written," driven by a nameless heroine with an "ordinariness that's compelling."

The Oxford-educated Cleave is a former copy editor for the Daily Telegraph (he says he got fired for writing personal responses to readers who'd sent in letters to the editor). His narrator, meanwhile, is an East End mother addicted to gin-and-tonics and sex when she gets nervous and who becomes manic-depressive after the murders of her husband, a Scotland Yard officer on the bomb disposal unit, and her 4-year-old son in the fictional May Day attack.

"I know you can love my boy Osama," she writes in her slightly mangled grammar. "The Sun says you are an EVIL MONSTER but I don't believe in evil I know it takes 2 to tango. I know you're vexed at the leaders of Western imperialism. Well I'll be writing to them too.

"As for you I know you'd stop the bombs in a second if I could make you see my son with all your heart for just one moment. I know you would stop making boy-shaped holes in the world."

* * *

It was March 11, 2004, when suicide bombers struck Madrid's commuter system during morning rush hour, killing 191 people. The same day, Cleave's son stood on his own for the first time and continued to grow amid a world reeling from car bombs, jihadists, Abu Ghraib. Every day brought more barbaric news, says Cleave, who at the time was writing an odd-couple comedy set in 1980s Brooklyn (wife is a pornographer, husband a mortician). He was writing a fantasy in which the world of terror was not on people's minds, he says, "so I had to stop. And I wanted to write a book that was honest."

The result was a six-week dash to produce the first draft of "Incendiary."

At one point in the novel, the reader has an image of the narrator's little boy in his tiger pajamas, holding a stuffed animal called Mr. Rabbit. Then several pages later, the mother is in an adulterous embrace with a haughty journalist while her son and husband are at the soccer game. The TV is on and she imagines them cheering in the stands of the raucous soccer stadium. She experiences sexual ecstasy at the moment 11 suicide bombers, six with fragmentation bombs under their Arsenal jerseys, the rest wearing incendiaries, detonate their explosives.

Rebecca Carter, Cleave's British editor, has heard accusations (from the press, mainly) that "Incendiary" is sensationalist and insensitive in a time of mourning.

After the July 7 attacks, "I knew people would read the book in the wrong way and that kind of saddened me," says Carter, who rushed the editing process for fear that an inevitable attack on London would precede the book's release. "Our whole campaign appeared tasteless, and in a way that wasn't intended."

In "Incendiary," the British government -- which keeps a sinister secret about the fictional attack -- orders that Muslims be fired from all high-profile jobs, but also in other fields, such as health care. It also installs the "Shield of Hope" to protect the city from kamikazes, clogging the city skyline with gigantic balloons bearing the bloated faces of victims. Meanwhile, Elton John belts out "England's Heart Is Bleeding," a piano anthem that will top the pop charts "probably forever or at least until the sun and the stars burned out like cheap lightbulbs and the universe ended for good and it couldn't come soon enough if you asked me but nobody did," the narrator muses.

In one scene Cleave has Prince William making an appearance at a London hospital, shaking hands with the novel's battered heroine right after she is informed that nothing remains of her son and husband except their teeth. Vomit spills all over his royal shoes. Cameras flash.

"What if," Cleave says, pondering whether a novel can really change world events. "What if Osama bin Laden picks up that book, in a moment of weakness . . . and says, 'Oh, God. Well, maybe I'll think slightly differently.' What if it changed one atom in his brain? I don't know. What if. And I know it's clutching at straws in a drowning world, but you got to clutch 'em. . . .

"If I want to be remembered for anything other than this sick coincidence, then my next book had better be bloody good," he says. "My next book had better be unbelievably fantastic to the point where people talk about that, rather than the coincidence."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/17/AR2005081702109.html?referrer=email

I've never read a book says Posh

Former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has admitted she has never read a book in her life - despite having apparently written her own 528-page autobiography.

The 31-year-old wife of England captain David Beckham told a Spanish magazine she does not have time to read.

The singer, who has three sons, also revealed to Chic magazine she was keen to have a daughter.

And she said she did not get jealous when other women paid attention to her famous husband.

She told the magazine: "I know what other women think and I say to myself 'He is very good looking, he dresses very well, he is great with children and he has an enormous heart'.

"I am not jealous and when people look at him, I think it's because he's great."

In the article, she said she would rather listen to music than read - although she admitted to "loving" fashion magazines.

Mrs Beckham, who is already mother to three sons - Brooklyn, 6, Romeo, 2, and six-month-old Cruz - said she wanted a daughter.

She said she could imagine "painting her nails, putting on make-up and choosing clothes" with her.

The interview will appear in next month's edition of Chic magazine but has been leaked to Spanish newspapers.

Mrs Beckham's autobiography, Learning to Fly, was published in 2001.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4155082.stm


BBC NEWS | UK | I've never read a book says Posh

Authors Let Bidders Name Characters

By GARANCE BURKE
The Associated Press
Monday, August 15, 2005; 2:59 PM

SAN FRANCISCO -- It can take years of late-night navel gazing for a novelist to name a character _ or it could come as quickly as an Internet auction on eBay.

Next month, Stephen King, Amy Tan, Lemony Snicket, Nora Roberts, Michael Chabon and 11 other best-selling writers will auction the right to name characters in their new novels. The profits will go to the First Amendment Project, whose lawyers have repeatedly gone to court to protect the free speech rights of activists, writers and artists.

"It feels a little scary for most writers because when you're writing, you're completely in charge _ you can say this book is all mine, it's my world," said Chabon. "Whether giving over some of that has any monetary value or not, we'll see."

But bidders beware _ most of the authors are clearly retaining creative control to use the names as they see fit.

King says the highest bidder will get to name a character in a new zombie novel he describes as being "like cheap whisky ... very nasty and extremely satisfying." Cult comic author Neil Gaiman will let his top buyer select the name for a gravestone. Andrew Sean Greer promises the winner may choose the name of a "coffee shop, bar, corset company or other business in another scene," but only "should it suit the author."

John Grisham is one of only a handful promising to portray the top bidder's chosen name "in a good light."

On Sept. 1, eBay Giving Works, the site's dedicated program for charity listings, will go live with the electronic auction. For the next 25 days, anyone with an Internet connection can bid 24 hours a day to insert names into their favorite writers' heads. The event's organizers say they believe it will fetch well over the nonprofit First Amendment Project's goal of $50,000.

The benefit was the brainchild of Gaiman, who approached Chabon with the idea when he heard the group was running out of money. It will now constitute the single-largest fund-raising event for the First Amendment Project, whose legal staff will gratefully leverage the goodwill of authors willing to help keep its doors open. Other writers include Dave Eggers, Dorothy Allison, Peter Straub, ZZ Packer, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Ayelet Waldman, Andrew Sean Greer and Karen Joy Fowler.

"It's nice when people say they want to raise money for you," said David Greene, executive director of the First Amendment Project, which was founded in 1994. "Because it was brought to us by the writers, it was even more special."

Greene said that money raised by the auction will go to support the organization's pro bono work representing clients being sued over free speech, free press and freedom of expression. One such case, over whether a high school student's angry poetry constituted a "criminal threat," recently went before the California Supreme Court.

Board member Chabon, who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," said his own work would be meaningless without the freedoms afforded under the First Amendment.

"I don't think anything else can be hopeful or accomplished if you have the fear that you will get arrested or prosecuted or censored," he said. "I saw a cry for help. So it was my goal to try to get writers whose work and whose name would be meaningful to the greatest number of people."

Snicket, who will let the top bidder determine an utterance by Sunny Baudelaire in his upcoming 13th installment of his "Series of Unfortunate Events," said he holds the First Amendment dear because "the only trouble I should get in for my writing is the trouble I make myself."

His only caveat: The meaning of the utterance may be slightly "mutilated."

Authors Let Bidders Name Characters

Getting new books to buzz

BY BECKY AIKMAN
STAFF WRITER

August 15, 2005

On a bright Saturday afternoon, a youthful team that often hands out nightclub leaflets fanned out across Central Park, Hamptons beaches and sites in five other cities with an unusual assignment: Give away the first two chapters of a novel.

The team scored right away with Monika Krejeirova, a 31-year-old hedge-fund worker who was sunning herself on Central Park's Great Lawn. "It's just enough to get me excited," she said as she finished the excerpt of "The Black Silent," by David Dun. "I want to know what happens next." She planned to stop by a Barnes & Noble store to ask when the science-fiction thriller would go on sale.

A few blankets away, though, Jackie Spitz, a 26-year-old teacher, tossed the booklet aside. "I only took it," she said, "because I felt sorry for the people handing it out."

Pity the book industry. Of all forms of media, it may face the greatest challenge enticing people to sample its products.

That's why a few publishers are trying guerrilla marketing to build all-important buzz for their books. Some are employing teams to give out samples at concerts, parks and movie theaters to people they hope are trendsetters. Others are using stealth Internet campaigns, the way movie companies do, creating mysterious Web sites to intrigue potential readers. Both techniques helped promote a summer science fiction bestseller, "The Traveler," by an anonymous author with the pseudonym John Twelve Hawks.

In perhaps the most unusual move, some publishers have recruited thousands of ordinary people to act as so-called buzz agents to talk up books to their friends. Books ranging from the bestselling "Freakonomics" to literary novels have recently gotten the buzz treatment.

Reading in decline

These days, it's especially important to find better ways of pushing books, publishers say, as reading continues to decline, especially among young adults. And for books that do catch on, publishing has become a winner-take-all business. One or two runaway bestsellers become the books that seemingly everyone is reading and talking about while the rest of the 195,000 titles published in a year languish.

"This is a business where people know one very difficult fact: Americans want to read hits. They don't want to read flops," said Albert Greco, a professor of marketing and book-industry researcher at Fordham University. "What works? It's hard to say. Most people think that it's word of mouth, called 'buzz' in the business."

Buzz is what propels a book such as "The DaVinci Code" to 124 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. The same goes for "The Kite Runner," a first novel set in Afghanistan, now at 47 weeks. Traditional methods like media appearances, ads and author readings help, especially for famous authors, but it's everyday chatter at dinner parties and offices that puts a breakout book over the top.

"Word of mouth is very important," said Laurie Parkin, vice president and publisher of Kensington Publishing, publisher of "The Black Silent." "It's what gives a book what we call 'legs.' Media attention is great, and it's instant and it's immediate. But if people like the book, they talk about it, and that's when you see books hit the bestseller list for 50 weeks, 100 weeks. It's what we all aspire to."

Getting people talking

That's why the new techniques aim at getting people talking. And talking is the essence of BzzAgent, a 3-year-old Boston company. It has 90,000 recruits who've agreed to talk up products ranging from shoes to sausages to books -- for no pay, just for access to some free stuff and the feeling of being in the know about the latest things.

"It definitely sounded kind of kooky," said Rick Pascocello, vice president of advertising and promotions for the Penguin Group of publishers. BzzAgent approached him back in 2002 to do a campaign for free if Penguin would be its first client. So he took a why-not plunge with "The Frog King," by a first-time novelist, Adam Davies.

The book is a somewhat humorous take on a young man coming of age in the work world. But despite its possible appeal to 20-something readers, Penguin had low expectations: no money for advertising, virtually no reviews. Yet, crowds of more than 100 showed up at readings, and the book went on to sell a healthy 50,000 copies.

Pascocello credits 1,000 BzzAgents, who read the book on subways, asked for it at bookstores, reviewed it on Amazon.com and buzzed their friends about it. He's since used BzzAgents for 30 more books, including an Iraqi war memoir, "Generation Kills," by Evan Wright. After selling 40,000 copies in hardcover, it would have been expected to pull in similar numbers in paperback, but it more than doubled that after a buzz campaign.

For the middle-tier book

"This isn't for the big commercial books that are on the bestseller list," Pascocello said. "This is for the next layer of books that everybody here in the industry knows and loves but struggles with how to get people to find them." Other publishers have tried BzzAgents, too, including HarperCollins and Rodale. Doubleday is considering it.

In practice, BzzAgent campaigns lead to encounters like this one in an apartment-complex laundry room, reported on the company Web site: "A woman walked in with her wash. I looked up and smiled, as did she. After a few minutes she asked what book I was reading, and I told her about the 'Young, Fabulous & Broke' book [by Suze Orman]. Her eyebrows raised and said, 'Wow . . . that's me!'"

After comparing stories about debts and child-rearing, the agent gave the woman postcards about the book and reported: "She was completely exstatic !" Authentic or not, that sort of personal connection is hard to duplicate in traditional promotions.

Michele Hanson, in charge of book campaigns at BzzAgent, said agents are encouraged to be honest and buzz books only if they like them. Still, there's been some backlash. Someone posted a reader's review on Amazon.com warning that other positive reviews of "The Frog King" might be the untrustworthy result of buzz marketing.

Stealth is inexpensive

One reason publishers like stealth promotions is they aren't expensive. Pascocello said he spends in the low six figures to buzz 10 books a year.

Low marketing budgets are a leading obstacle to unknown books, according to Greco of Fordham University. Unlike movie companies, which might spend $50 million to market a $100 million film, book publishers rarely allocate more than 10 percent to 20 percent of what they've spent on a book to go out and sell it, he said.

However, publishers have borrowed one page, if an inexpensive one, from movie marketing by trying some stealth Internet campaigns. Faced this summer with promoting "The Traveler," Doubleday set up a series of Web sites.

Posted months before the book was published in July, the sites weren't identified as having any connection with "The Traveler," the idea being to create some mystery and capture the attention of alternative-reality fans, a target readership. Gradually, they discovered the sites and began to chatter about them, including a site that allows people to break into the files of the book's sinister Evergreen Foundation, and a blog for a major character.

Handouts on the street

At the same time, Doubleday hired Sniper Marketing, a Brooklyn street-team company that hands out promotional items for nightclubs, record companies and other youth-oriented products. "They're very good at reaching a younger male market, and that's part of who we were looking for here," said John Pitts, marketing director of Doubleday. It was the first book assignment for Sniper.

The teams targeted campuses, comic book shops and lines for the latest "Star Wars" movie with a promotional DVD. "On the first day of 'Star Wars,' we got the fanatics," said Ozzie Salcedo, the founder of Sniper Marketing. "It was awesome. People were eating it up."

That, along with some good reviews, pushed the book onto The New York Times best-seller list for two weeks when it came out last month. Now 200,000 copies are in print. Not bad, said Pitts, "considering it's a first-time novelist that nobody's ever met."

For its second book project, Dun's "The Black Silent," Sniper hit a glitch: A Central Park employee asked the teams to stop -- he claimed the sample chapters were litter. Still, Sniper gave out 150,000 samples over the July 4 weekend. Kensington Publishing also took out some newspaper ads.

The result? So far, the publisher is shipping 20 percent more copies than it had for Dun's previous books. Absent detailed market research, unheard-of in publishing, it's hard to measure the impact of the new efforts to promote outside the bookstores, said Parkin, the publisher of "The Black Silent." But it's worth trying, she added: "You've got a very limited time to market a book. This gives it a little added dimension."

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

Newsday.com: Getting new books to buzz

Books, Not Tales, Get Taller Before Baby Boomers' Eyes
By EDWARD WYATT

They carried dog-eared copies of "On the Road" in their back pockets during college and devoured Tom Clancy paperbacks on airplanes as young executives. But as baby boomers near retirement, they are finding it harder and harder to read the small type of mass-market paperbacks, the pocket-size books that are the most popular segment of the publishing business.

Faced with declining sales, two of the biggest publishers of mass-market titles, the Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster, have begun issuing new paperbacks by some of their most popular authors in a bigger size that allows larger type and more space between lines.

"We've been losing the foundation of our customer base because their eyesight is getting worse, and the books are getting harder and harder to read," said Jack Romanos, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, whose Pocket Books division introduced the mass-market paperback format in the United States in 1939.

More mass-market paperbacks are still sold each day than any other type of book; last year consumers bought 535 million of them. But that number has steadily declined for a decade and is down 11 percent in the last five years, while the overall number of books sold has fallen just 7 percent, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a publishing trade group.

For publishers, the main advantage of the new book is that it is the same width as a traditional mass-market paperback, which allows it to fit in the wire racks at airports, grocery stores and drugstores. Those outlets are among the biggest sellers of the romances, westerns, mysteries and thrillers that make up the bulk of paperbacks sold. Publishers have also raised the cover price of the new books to $9.99, $2 to $3 more than the traditional paperback but still less than the $14 cover price of the digest-size books, known as trade paperbacks, that are now the primary format for nonfiction books and literary novels.

Readers appear to be responding well. Larger-edition paperbacks of six authors have made it onto the New York Times paperback best-seller list since last month, when they started appearing regularly in stores. The Pocket Books edition of "White Hot," the latest suspense novel by Sandra Brown, is in the new format and will top The Times's list on Aug. 21, the first time one of the new, bigger editions will reach No. 1. (That list reflects sales in the week ended Aug. 6.)

"We've gotten so many letters and e-mails from readers saying, 'Thank you for making the type larger,' " said Leslie Gelbman, the president of mass-market paperbacks at Penguin, which test-marketed the first larger paperback in December. Good response to that offering led Penguin, a division of Pearson, to expand its program this year to seven of its best-selling authors, including the romance novelist Nora Roberts and the thriller writers Clive Cussler and Robin Cook.

Harlequin Enterprises, the biggest seller of romance novels, has also joined the movement. Last month it began issuing larger-format paperbacks of its new line of romances for older women, called Next.

Not all of the responses have been positive, however. Publishing industry executives said that some big discount retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores, objected to the higher price of the new paperbacks and ordered smaller-than-normal volumes of the books because of doubts whether their customers would buy as many.

And at least some readers have complained about the new format. On the electronic message board on the Internet site of Vince Flynn, whose latest thriller, "Memorial Day," was published in the new format last month by Pocket's Star imprint, some fans have said that the new books feel clunky and are difficult to hold. Others say they like the changes, however, and over all the new book is selling better than Mr. Flynn's last novel, according to Simon & Schuster, a unit of Viacom.

The large bookstore chains, including Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, are taking a wait-and-see attitude. "We need more time to be able to judge," said Allison Elsby, the manager for genre fiction at Borders and its Waldenbooks division. "There are just a handful of titles out in this format, and while the initial reaction looks relatively positive, it has only been a few weeks."

Publishers have tinkered with the size of mass-market paperbacks over the decades, mostly to meet the demands of printing presses. But at a time when sales of ready-made reading glasses are up - they grew 11 percent last year alone, to $439 million, according to VisionWatch, an eyeglass industry research group - this change is meant to meet the needs of those who buy and read paperbacks.

To make the new books easier to read, publishers increased their height by three-quarters of an inch, to 7½ inches, while keeping the same width, 4¼ inches. The longer page allows publishers to increase the type size by up to a half-point, to 10½ points, and to increase the leading - the space between lines - to 14½ points from about 12. As a result, a page of the new books has about 32 lines, compared with as many as 38 lines in their predecessors.

Sales of mass-market paperbacks have also been declining for reasons other than America's worsening eyesight. Book superstores and warehouse clubs routinely discount the price of hardcovers by as much as 50 percent, giving readers less reason to wait - customarily, a year - after a new book is published to buy the cheaper paperback version.

In addition, the decline of the mall bookstores led to fewer impulse purchases of the lower-priced books, and the popularity of trade paperbacks grew significantly when Oprah Winfrey began recommending those books exclusively for her book club.

Because price-conscious discount merchants like Wal-Mart and Target also grew in importance as booksellers, publishers of mass-market paperbacks have been unable to raise prices, which have been essentially flat for a decade. To maintain their profit margins, publishers have resorted to lower-quality paper and other methods of lowering production cost.

But the smaller pocket-size paperback is still used for the authors whose books sell the most copies, like John Grisham, whose novels reside for eternity on the backlist, the most profitable part of a publisher's inventory. And it is those continuing sales - which sometimes total five or more times the number of hardcovers sold - that allow publishers to pay the large advances that those most popular authors demand.

Some publishers remain skeptical about the changes. Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group at Random House, said that Bantam Books had tried a similar experiment in the late 1980's but abandoned it after issuing about three books.

"We think the current mass-market format is best," he said.

But Mr. Romanos of Simon & Schuster said that without the change, the mass-market segment was in danger of withering. "If you go back 20 years, the mass-market paperback was really driving the business," he said. But more recently, "it hasn't been carrying its weight."

"As long as we have to continue to pay what we do for brand-name authors, we need a healthier paperback format to make it work."



Books, Not Tales, Get Taller Before Baby Boomers' Eyes - New York Times