2005 National Book Award Finalists

FICTION

* E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House), ISBN# 0375506713
* Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon), ISBN# 0375421459
* Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), ISBN# 0374278644
* Renè Steinke, Holy Skirts (William Morrow), ISBN# 0688176941
* William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking), ISBN# 0670033928

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NONFICTION

* Alan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), ISBN# 0374219737
* Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin), ISBN # 0618446966
* Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf), ISBN# 140004314x
* Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books), ISBN# 0805076824
* Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin), ISBN# 0618104690

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POETRY

* John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (Ecco), ISBN# 0060765291
* Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), ISBN# 0374269734
* Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press), ISBN# 0807130478
* W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press), ISBN# 1556592183
* Vern Rutsala, The Moment's Equation (Ashland Poetry Press), ISBN# 0912592540

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YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

* Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks (Alfred A. Knopf), ISBN# 0375831436
* Adele Griffin, Where I Want to Be (Putnam), ISBN# 0399237836
* Chris Lynch, Inexcusable (Atheneum), ISBN# 0689847890
* Walter Dean Myers, Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperTempest), ISBN# 006058291x
* Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt), ISBN# 0152051139

The winners of the 2005 Quill Book Awards are:

Book of the Year - presented by Brian Williams
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré (Illustrator)
Arthur Levine/Scholastic

Debut Author of the Year - presented by Kim Cattrall
The Historian
Elizabeth Kostova
Little Brown & Company

Audio Book - presented by Tony Roberts
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
Jon Stewart and the Writers of the Daily Show
Time Warner AudioBooks

Children's Illustrated Book - presented by Elmo
Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook
Shel Silverstein
HarperCollins Children's Books

Children's Chapter Book/Middle Grade - presented by Jules Feiffer
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré (Illustrator)
Arthur Levine/Scholastic

Young Adult/Teen - presented by Anthony Rapp
Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Ann Brashares
Delacorte Press

General Fiction - presented by Erica Jong
The Mermaid Chair
Sue Monk Kidd
Viking Press

Graphic Novel - presented by Jonathan Lethem
Marvel 1602 Volume I
Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, and Richard Isanove
Marvel Comics

Mystery/Suspense/Thriller - presented by Stephen J. Cannell and Annie Parisse
Eleven on Top
Janet Evanovich
St. Martin's Press

Poetry - presented by Robert Klein
Let America Be America Again: And Other Poems
Langston Hughes
Vintage Books

Romance - presented by Candace Bushnell
44 Cranberry Point
Debbie Macomber
Mira Books

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror - presented by Tamara Tunie
The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror
Christopher Moore
William Morrow & Company

Religion/Spirituality - presented by Matthew Modine
Peace is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End
Deepak Chopra
Harmony

Biography/Memoir - presented by Nick Hornby
Chronicles: Volume One
Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster

Business - presented by Maria Bartiromo
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
William Morrow & Company

Cooking - presented by Rocco DeSpirito
Rachel Ray's 30-Minute Get Real Meals: Eat Healthy Without Going to Extremes
Rachael Ray
Clarkson Potter

Health/Self Improvement - presented by Dr. Joyce Brothers
He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys
Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
Simon Spotlight Entertainment

History/Current Events/Politics - presented by Tony LoBianco
1776
David McCullough
Simon & Schuster

Humor - presented by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
Jon Stewart and the Writers of the Daily Show
Warner Books

Sports - presented by Len Berman
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King
Scribner

http://www.quillsliteracy.org/categories.php

Internet Grows as Factor in Used-Book Business
By EDWARD WYATT

In barely a decade, online booksellers have grown to account for two-thirds of the market for general-interest used books, a trend that calls into question the future of brick-and-mortar stores devoted to used books, according to a study financed by the publishing industry and released yesterday.

The study, by the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research organization whose membership includes nearly all commercial publishers as well as libraries and nonprofit book-related organizations, found that online sales of general-interest used books are growing at a rate of more than 30 percent a year, while sales of used books at stores are almost flat.

Used books account for a relatively small portion of overall consumer spending on books, with roughly $600 million, or 3 percent, of the $21 billion that Americans spent last year on general-interest titles going for secondhand books, the study found.

The market for used textbooks is far larger, at $1.6 billion, or more than 30 percent of the $5.3 billion spent by consumers on educational and professional books.

Over all, used-book purchases accounted for $2.2 billion, or 8 percent, of the $26.3 billion that American consumers spent in 2004 on books of all types. That total was up 11 percent from the previous year, the study found.

"The growth reflects how easy is has become to sell used books and to create inventory in this business," Jeff Abraham, the executive director of the study group, said in an interview.

Most of the growth is coming in the online sale of general-interest books, said Jeff Hayes, a group director of InfoTrends, a research company that worked on the study, a trend suggesting that traditional used bookstores might be an increasingly endangered species.

"The growth is really being entirely fueled by the online channels," Mr. Hayes said. "And without question, the volume is going to continue to go up." Mr. Abraham said that the sales growth was being aided by the fact that most customers of online booksellers report having good experiences with vendors, leading them to conclude overwhelmingly that they would recommend such services to friends.

The Book Industry Study Group report is based on transaction data from large online sites where books are bought and sold, including Amazon, eBay and others; data from Monument Information Resource, which tracks college bookstores; a survey of independent booksellers around the country; and online questionnaires aimed at used-book consumers. It does not include used-book sales by large national chain stores, like Barnes & Noble; used books are generally a small portion of those stores' businesses, however.

The study's findings are similar if different in scale to other recent studies. Ipsos BookTrends, a commercial research company, has reported that used books account for about 8 percent of overall sales of general-interest books to consumers.

Publishing companies and authors have long expressed concern over used-book sales, saying they cannibalize potential sales of new books and, because they generate no royalties for authors or revenue for publishers, they harm the ability of authors and publishers to make a living.

"It certainly is a threat," Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, said in an interview. The guild has complained in particular about Amazon.com, whose Internet site offers consumers the ability to buy used copies of a book on the same screen where it offers new copies. In many instances, used copies are made available for sale by outside parties almost as soon as a new book goes on sale.

Sales of used copies of recently published books "can affect publishing decisions, such as whether to do another printing or whether a book is doing well enough to warrant further publicity," Mr. Aiken said.

A research paper released a year ago, however, found that online used-book markets like Amazon cannibalized potential sales of new books only about 15 percent of the time. The researchers - Anindya Ghose of New York University and Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang of Carnegie Mellon University - also hypothesized that because the lower prices of used books leave more money in consumers' pockets, the gains from additional readership might result in more purchases of new books and in the increased exposure of authors to new audiences.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/books/29book.html

If you have any concerns about Hurricane Katrina and the way things were handled by the government...
If you have any concerns about the way things are going in this country in general...
If you have any concerns about how things have deteriorated to this point...
then this is a MUST READ --

Sugar for Sugar, Salt For Salt - Go Down In The Flood Gonna Be Your Own Fault
by Christopher Cooper
Link to Article

This won't take long. And it won't be much fun. But duty and decency demand that we do it.

Sometimes you buy a cantaloupe because it looks good and you have enjoyed some fine ripe cantaloupes in your time, even though a buck and a half for a little melon that went three for a dollar within living memory seems pretty pricey. And you leave it on the kitchen counter for a few days, because it's a little green, but it softens and gets a better color so you slice it open, but it's mushy and rotten and smells like feet and tastes like vomit and you remember other, similar, corporate grocery chain cantaloupe experiences and vow as you heave the mess into the compost not to get fooled again.

Maybe you've bought a car. Reasonable mileage, no rust, convincing salesman who chatted you up about your hobbies, agreed with your prejudices, and made you feel you were a pretty clever guy for choosing this vehicle from his selection. But you couldn't keep it aligned, it ate tires, the brakes, exhaust system and radiator didn't survive the life of the payment book, and when you tried to sell it three years later every seventeen-year-old who looked at it was astute enough to reference the oil blown past the rear main seals as his reason for declining your “Best Offer Over $500 Dollars” prayer.

Some of you lady readers married men whose virtues are now no more apparent to you than they were pre-nuptually to your mothers, friends or even relatives of the groom himself. True, he was a successful inseminator but, sadly, the children look disturbingly like him. Of you, people say, “She could have done so much better.” What were you thinking? What can you do?

Or let's say a whole country was riding a foaming crest of good times, new cars, low interest rates, affordable gas, electronic gadgets and a We're Number One world view that was maybe weak on history, geography and empathy, but sure did by God show the big stick to the heathen foreigners. Such a people might toss a coin in a contest between a dorky, dull Democrat and an insipid dry drunk Texas fratboy Republican whose every and many failures had been rendered moot by family money and connections. They might not be paying much attention.

Then, let's say, some really nasty guys from a country larded up with ugly, corrupt fat cats blew a great big hole in a part of that country. Suppose the new president “rose to the occasion” by starting a war with another country in the same part of the world as the one where the bad guys came from, but which, for political and personal reasons and reasons having very much indeed to do with very valuable mineral resources and very profitable corporations and some other complicated considerations having to do with weapons sales, it was not convenient to invade because those particular rich foreigners were personal friends and business partners of that new chief executive.

And further (stay with me; I know it's a weird trip), imagine that just as it was made startlingly clear that pretty much everything this president had advanced as a reason for that war was a fabrication, a misdirection, a deliberate under- or over-statement (well, hell, yes, I guess just a pile of tremendous lies, really, if we need to use such an ugly word), imagine that he got re-elected despite his manifest incompetence and venality and smugness because the same Democrats who had advanced the very dull, unappealing candidate four years previously selected this time a cipher who ran against his own finest, most decent history and tried to seem more and more like the dull incumbent until, finally, some voters stuck with the dummy they knew, and some voted against the sad-sack they'd come to not respect, and the rigged Republican voting machines in two critical states made up the shortfall.

Now what if the best-studied, most carefully-observed, best-tracked, most predictable-coursed hurricane ever seen, and one of the biggest, wiped out a major coastal city that, had the president in question not been so intent upon “drowning government in a bathtub” and reducing the unwelcome sting of taxation upon the richest people and corporations he knew (outside of his friends in Saudi Arabia, I mean), might have received enough money to fortify its dikes and seawalls in the true spirit of “Homeland Security”, and maybe every old lady trying to board an airplane could have been spared the burden of taking off her shoes. (OK, I know it doesn't cost much to humiliate old ladies, and I know the money saved wouldn't have been diverted to New Orleans, but great craziness must be recognized and ridiculed and, when it is public policy, repudiated, and that's what they pay me to do here.)

You've seen the pictures. Twenty per cent of the residents of New Orleans lacked the resources, the vehicles, the health, the money to evacuate ahead of the storm. Too old, too sick, too poor to save themselves, and mostly, given America's great secret still, all these years after we thought we'd equalized these things, even after the token Scalia wannabe on the Supreme Court and the sad yes-man who abandoned the Secretary of State job after the lies he told finally began to curdle on his lips, mostly black. Poor blacks. Indeed.

You've seen the Superdome, the convention center footage. You've heard the first-person accounts of scores of hurting, hungry homeless (poor, black) persons trying to cross a bridge to dry ground but ordered back by white officials with guns. You've seen the misery, the neglect, the abuse. So has the rest of the world. We're Number One! Say it loud.

Is it time yet? Can we all just admit we made a stupid mistake? We weren't paying attention? We heard what we wanted to hear? We succumbed to slick advertising? The fruit was rotten; the car was a lemon; that bum was just piss-poor husband and father material and your momma was right. Stay the course? What course? Our country, its citizens, its principles have been reduced, abused, worked-over, bled-out, violated and humiliated. Not by terrorists or foreign enemies or tsunamis or tornadoes or an angry god. We have rotted from within.

Blame the Republicans? Nah, they're just “protecting their base.” Like helping like. It is the party of wealth and privilege. Blame the Democrats? Sure, if you can distinguish 'em from the Republicans. It sure ain't the party of FDR any more. Or even Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter. I'll see your Tom DeLay and your Bill Frist and raise you a Joe Biden and a Joe Lieberman. Blame the press for avoiding or killing any story that wasn't a press release from the Pentagon, the White House or the American Association of Yellow Ribbon Manufacturers. Blame our stars. Blame ourselves; we weren't paying attention; we didn't do the work democracy demands.

Do I exaggerate our desperate straits? The man at the top in his own words and by his own actions. Add the smirk and swagger yourself; you've seen it often enough.

First response? Fly over on Air Force One; go play golf. Condi Rice shopped shoe boutiques. Dick Cheney bought a three million dollar vacation home.

While you and I watched the Superdome and convention center fiascoes? Lunch with Al Greenspan. “Hurricane Katrina will represent a temporary setback for the U.S. Economy and the energy sector.”

As WalMart water trucks, Red Cross workers, TV reporters and Canadian Mounted Police forces tended the stricken city while FEMA and the National Guard waited for orders that didn't come? “Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.”

Days after we'd all heard testimony from the engineers and planners who'd repeatedly sounded the alarm about Category Five storms and Cat. Three levees: “I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

With hundred of thousands homeless, uncounted dead, the poorest among us hit the hardest: “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- the guy lost his entire house -- there's going to be fantastic house. I look forward to sitting on the porch.” [Yes, rubbles, plural. I know it sounds stupid, but I got it right off the White House website. He's proud of it, for Christ's sake!]

There's more. You've seen it, heard it, been repulsed by it. But did you get this from his mom, the husband of one bad president, the mother of the worst one yet, a woman who you'll remember said she couldn't find the time to trouble her “beautiful mind” about Iraqi civilians we'd bombed to death by the tens of thousands? Of those who'd lost all they owned, including, in many cases, loved ones, to the flood and were now enjoying the hospitality of Texas shelters: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [chuckle] is working very well for them."

Oh, those lucky, lucky homeless, sick people! What happy niggras we have here on our grand plantation. It makes a person feel dirty and disgusted and sick to his stomach. Don't you suppose a couple billion other people all over the world heard that chortle, you bloated, ignorant, overprivileged mother of a moron?

Hey, folks, things have gotten so bad that even the press is beginning to pay attention. Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan said at least fourteen times during two press briefings last week that now is not the time to “play the blame game.” I say it's an excellent time, while the dead are still floating on the polluted tides and we are not yet distracted by the World's Series or the run-up to Christmas or another newly-discovered “Axis Of Terror” triumvirate.

Now, for pure, wholesome, refreshing local idiocy we have the Maine Republicans' brilliant plan to make us forget the screwing we're getting from Exxon by canceling the state gasoline tax for a few months and (this is really too perfect for me to have made up) forgiving the sales tax on home heating oil (struggling, low wage, two-job homeowners get ready for this!) for business use.

OK. I'm done. Gotta go wax the yacht and wind my Rolex. Jesus, I wish I could be homeless and eat some donated food in Texas while my wife rots in a drainage canal and my dogs starve to death on the balcony of our ruined home.


The Neil Rogers Show - News - Sugar for Sugar, Salt For Salt - Go Down In The Flood Gonna Be Your Own Fault

WOO HOO! Oprah's back in the book biz!

Oprah's Book Club Reopening to Writers Who'll Sit and Chat

By EDWARD WYATT

Oprah Winfrey said yesterday that she was expanding her highly influential television book club to include the works of contemporary authors, reversing a policy of choosing only classic novels and once again offering authors and their publishers the hope of huge sales resulting from her picks.

"I wanted to open the door and broaden the field," Ms. Winfrey said in an interview. "That allows me the opportunity to do what I like to do most, which is sit and talk to authors about their work. It's kind of hard to do that when they're dead."

As her first selection under the new criteria, Ms. Winfrey chose "A Million Little Pieces," by James Frey, a harrowing 2003 memoir about the author's stay in a treatment center to address his alcoholism and drug addiction.

From 1996 to 2002, a book's selection for Oprah's Book Club typically resulted in sales of more than a million copies, a boon to authors and publishers in a business where selling 20,000 copies of a literary novel is considered a success. Her picks drew readers both to well-regarded authors like Toni Morrison and to relative unknowns like Wally Lamb and Anita Shreve.

Ms. Winfrey abandoned the book club in 2002 but restarted it a year later in a different form, choosing only classic novels, mostly by authors long dead. While sales soared for some of her classic picks, like "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck, others did not reach expectations, most notably this summer's selection of three novels by William Faulkner.

In an interview, Ms. Winfrey, who does not profit from the sales of the books she chooses, acknowledged that some recent selections did not draw the enthusiasm of some of her early ones. In a break with the past, no shows this summer were devoted to the Faulkner books; rather, she had extensive materials available on her Internet site (www.oprah.com).

Ms. Winfrey said she intended to widen her choices to an array of genres, including history, biography and historical fiction, to give herself more room to follow her instincts about what makes a positive reading experience.

"For six years, I couldn't really read any nonfiction or biography because I thought I was wasting my time" by spending hours on a book that did not fit her book club format, she said. "Now, when I read something really interesting or promising, I can find a way to introduce it to the public." Her aides say she alone reads potential selections and makes the choice.

Publishers were quick to welcome the announcement yesterday.

"It is fabulous news," said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of HarperCollins. "I think her impact will be as great if not greater than it was initially," when she began her book club shows in 1996.

Sonny Mehta, the chairman of the Knopf Publishing Group at Random House Inc., which has published more than a third of the 58 books chosen for Oprah's Book Club, said the book club had "brought the act of reading home to people in a way that publishers have not always been successful at doing."

"The fact that she had 300,000 people reading William Faulkner over the summer - she should be given a cabinet post," he added.

But Ms. Winfrey's recent emphasis on classics has contributed to a drop in her book club's popularity, said Kathleen Rooney, the author of "Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America" (University of Arkansas Press, 2005).

"There wasn't the widespread enthusiasm that was evident when she was picking contemporary fiction and nonfiction" for the club, Ms. Rooney said.

That led a group of mostly female writers to send a petition to Ms. Winfrey this year, asking her to return to her advocacy of contemporary writing and citing evidence that sales of fiction began to drop about the time her book club went on hiatus in 2002.

Meg Wolitzer, a novelist who was one of the early signers of the petition, said Ms. Winfrey's effect on authors, particularly novelists, "was to make us feel relevant," whether they were chosen for the club or not.

"To have somebody with a really loud mouth and a lot of power saying to people, 'You need to read this,' is important," she added.

Ms. Winfrey said she was aware of the petition and was moved by it. When she stopped choosing contemporary books, Ms. Winfrey said she was struggling to find enough titles that she felt compelled to share with her viewers, a statement that angered many publishers. But the change also followed by a few months a highly public quarrel with Jonathan Franzen, whose novel "The Corrections" was chosen by Ms. Winfrey in September 2001.

After Mr. Franzen made public comments suggesting that her choices were unsophisticated and appealed mainly to women, she revoked an invitation for him to appear on her show.

Ms. Winfrey dismissed the notion that his remarks influenced her decision to drop the book club. "Jonathan Franzen was not even a blip on the radar screen of my life," she said. "I didn't think one day about it."

Mr. Frey, whose memoir was published by Anchor Books, said he received a call about a month ago asking if he would appear on a show about drug rehabilitation. After he accepted, Ms. Winfrey got on the phone and told him her intention to recommend the book.

"I was shocked and thrilled and had this sort of amazing and surreal moment," he said.

Mr. Frey and Ms. Winfrey then conspired to have Mr. Frey's mother, who he said had given him copies of many of Ms. Winfrey's picks in the past, in the audience for yesterday's show. When Ms. Winfrey started talking about her son's book, the author's mother started to scream, "That's my son!"

Fictional character eBay auction wins over book fans - By GARANCE BURKE, Associated Press Writer
Monday, September 19, 2005


(09-19) 00:01 PDT San Francisco (AP) --


Stephen King's new horror story focuses on a set of rampaging zombies controlled by cell phones. As of Sunday night, one may bear the last name Huizenga.


King fans around the world spent much of last week on eBay, outbidding each other in an online auction organized by prominent authors selling the right to name characters in their new novels. Initially conceived as a creative fund-raiser for the First Amendment Project, a struggling nonprofit that defends the free speech rights of writers and artists, the auction quickly became the Internet site's most watched item.


As the online auction's first round closed Sunday night, Pam Alexander of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., won the right to name a character in King's novel, "CELL," with a $25,100 bid. That money, plus an additional $50,000 in proceeds from other auctions, will go directly to the First Amendment Project.


"I thought it would be a great gift to give to my brother to have his name in the book," said Alexander, whose brother, Ray Huizenga, is a longtime King fan. "It's definitely extravagant but it's a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and he's worth it."


Alexander beat out a disappointed Paul Stegman, of Papillion, Neb., who was poised to take out a credit line on his house to buy a way into King's head.


"How many times do you have the opportunity to purchase immortality?" said Stegman, who owns 300 King books and bid on a borrowed computer he felt would increase his "winning karma.""This was very out of character for me, because my general rule of thumb is to be cheap whenever possible. I thought I was the only person crazy enough to spend that much money."


On Sept. 1, eBay Giving Works, the site's dedicated program for charity listings, went live with the electronic auction. Since then, hundreds have been bidding 24 hours a day to insert names into their favorite writers' books. The auctions already have fetched well over the nonprofit's fund-raising goal of $50,000.


It's also became the "most watched" item on eBay, an internal marker the company uses to gauge popularity, and has warranted so much attention that eBay Italy requested organizers translate the entire auction into Italian.


"We can safely say we're not going to close now," said David Greene, executive director of the Oakland-based First Amendment Project, which was founded in 1994. "I'm thrilled."


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.


The auction's second phase, which will allow bidders to vie for the chance to name a character in books by John Grisham, Dave Eggers, Neil Gaiman and others continues through Sept. 26.


The benefit was the brainchild of Gaiman, who approached Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon with the idea when he heard the group was running out of money.


It has become the single largest fund-raising event for the First Amendment Project, whose lawyers are currently defending a publisher who produces a magazine distributed in prisons and a former sailor seeking information from the U.S. Army.


Some of those bills may be paid through the generosity of science fiction writer David Brin, who joined the cause last week. In the next round, he'll auction off the right to name a rogue moon, an exotic and gruesome disease or an entire species of extraterrestrials in his new book, which he said he wrote, thanks to First Amendment freedoms.


"Only a knowledgeable, empowered and vocal citizenry can perform well in democracy," Brin said in an e-mail interview.


For San Francisco author Andrew Sean Greer, the tone and structure of his new book gave him so much to think about that he hadn't even begun to figure out how to fit a fan-designated name into the plot line.


"I'm happy to try to please whoever wins the bid and give them prominent placement," said Greer, who sold the chance to name a creamery for $895 but didn't know yet what the winning bidder had in mind.


"Usually a soda shop isn't called Englebert Humperdink, so they'll have to content themselves if it gets reworked," Greer added. "We're trying to make this like a secret, a little Easter egg in the novel, not a hurdle for the writer to overcome."


King, meanwhile, appears to be busy writing CELL, a novel he warns will read "like cheap whisky ... very nasty and extremely satisfying."


"He's been busy," said Marsha DeFillippo, his personal assistant. "He just didn't have time to follow the auction that closely."


___


On the Net:


www.givingworks.ebay.com


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/09/18/state/n204234D93.DTL




Fictional character eBay auction wins over book fans

Monday, September 19, 2005
S&S Sales Site Goes Live

After adding a number of enhancements that include making the shopping cart more prominent, Simon & Schuster began selling books and spokeword audio products directly to consumers last Thursday via its www.simonsays.com Web site. S&S has been working on adding a sales capability to its site for most of this year. "Offering products for sale yourself is the next step in the Net's evolution," says Kate Tentler, v-p and publisher of S&S Online and who oversaw the development of the sales feature.

Books and audios sold on the site will be offered at full price and consumers will pay all shipping and handling charges. S&S has been selling e-books on simonsays for several years, but now all books and audios listed on the site will have a button that will allow them to buy the item straight from the site. Links to other online e-tailers, who in all likelihood are selling the book at a discount, will continue to be included.

Ingram is handling fulfillment for all orders. In addition to its own titles, books from S&S' distribution clients are also available for sale on the site.

While S&S is clearly eager to see how consumers respond to the sales option, in a nod to its retail accounts, the company is not planning any major efforts to promote the new feature.--Jim Milliot

from PW Daily: SimonSays Buy; Chilly NEBA (Monday, September 19, 2005)

MYSTERY GIRL
Uncovering the hidden history of a pre-feminist icon

Jennie Yabroff, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, September 18, 2005

"Dear Carolin Keene ... Wen I get big my mama sez I can rite stores like you rite..." So began a 1938 fan letter to the author of the hugely popular series of children's mysteries starring an amateur sleuth named Nancy Drew. But Carolyn Keene is as fictional as the plucky blond sleuth herself. Dreamed up by children's book magnate Edward Stratemeyer, Keene was the pseudonym of two women: first, a no-nonsense Iowa journalist named Mildred Wirt Benson, and then Edward's daughter, a suburban mother of four named Harriet Stratemeyer Adams.

"In Nancy Drew's world people take sides - either you're a Mildred person or a Harriet person, because until now a lot hasn't been known about what happened," says Brooklyn writer Melanie Rehak, whose book, "Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her," examines the cultural history of the beloved young detective. Rehak combed through the more than 350 boxes in the Stratemeyer archives at the New York Public Library, where she had a yearlong fellowship, to research the book. "Unless you have the time I did, to go through it all is impossible, so people read the box they need and don't have full continuum of the story," she said, discussing the book in her sunny brownstone in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood.

Mildred and Harriet were as opposite as Betty and Veronica, and their personalities are reflected in the changing tone of the books over the decades. The early mysteries, penned by Mildred in the '30s and '40s, feature a sassy, straightforward Nancy, who isn't above passing judgment on her peers or bending the law by exceeding the speed limit in her trusty blue roadster in the name of solving a mystery. When Harriet took over the series in the '50s, Nancy became more demure, less inclined to use slang or talk back, and more concerned with the affections of her perennial boyfriend, Ned Nickerson.

"There's a cult of personality based on which books you liked," says Rehak. For many years Harriet took credit as the sole creator of Nancy Drew. It wasn't until Mildred went public in the early '70s about her turn as Carolyn Keene that she won her own group of supporters. But rather than come out in favor of one woman or the other, Rehak says she felt "duty-bound to give each of them their due." She believes the women deserve equal credit. "Without either one of them the character wouldn't exist," she says.

If Harriet and Mildred share maternity of Nancy, paternity belongs solely to Harriet's father, Edward Stratemeyer. As Rehak describes him in "Girl Sleuth," Edward was a combination of Horatio Alger and P.T. Barnum, with a gift for intuiting the taste of young readers. As a young man he sold stories to the publishers of "50-cent serials," but soon began farming out the actual writing to a stable of ghostwriters who turned his two-page synopses into 250 page children's books. His company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, created the Rover Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys and many more series featuring wholesome, adventure-seeking boys and girls.

In 1929, Edward wrote a treatment for a series about a high-school-aged amateur sleuth, who he suggested might be named Stella Strong, Diana Dare or Nan Drew. The books were to be "bright, vigorous stories for older girls having to do with the solving of several mysteries." They would sell for 50 cents a piece, and their writer would be paid $125 for each book. He sent the treatment to a young Iowan named Mildred Wirt. A few weeks later she sent back the manuscript for "The Secret of the Old Clock," and Nancy Drew was born.

Rehak was driving one day when she heard an obituary of Mildred Wirt Benson on National Public Radio and became fascinated with her story. "Initially, my sympathies were with Mildred, because she was portrayed as the real Nancy Drew, who Nancy Drew would be if she was a real person," she says. Edward Stratemeyer died shortly after the first book was published, and his daughters, Harriet and her younger sister Edna, took over the syndicate themselves, with Harriet assuming most of the burden despite her lack of business experience.

As Rehak read the letters in the Stratemeyer archive between Harriet, Edna, Mildred and other business associates, it "became clear that Harriet had done this incredible thing" in taking over the syndicate, she says. "She had not been prepared for it, but she saw her chance and took it. I began to love Harriet, as I thought about what that must have been like for a 1930s wealthy suburban woman. In the letters, she talked about how all her friends said her children would be ruined, male publishers looked askance at her and I related to that because the same pressures are out there -- should I work, should I have kids, how am I going to figure it all out," she says.

Rehak sees the story of Nancy Drew and her creators as a way to talk about the women's movement over the course of the 20th century. Though neither Mildred nor Harriet (nor, most likely, Nancy) considered herself a feminist, all three were simultaneously of their times and years ahead. Nancy is "both a reflection of Harriet and Mildred's different personalities and changing pressures of society. They both invested her with who they thought she should be."

"Mildred's approach was to be very aggressive. That was her generation's way of dealing with being female in a man's world," Rehak says. In 1953, Mildred decided to focus on her job as a reporter for the Toledo Blade, so Harriet took over as Carolyn Keene and Nancy learned to bite her tongue. "Harriet's Nancy is a regression to what Harriet had learned being married in the 1950s - you should be sweet and nice, and that was the way to get what you wanted in a man's world," Rehak says.

Rehak grew up in Manhattan and first became acquainted with Nancy Drew by reading her mother's collection of mysteries from the '50s, which seemed quite exotic. She went to University of Pennsylvania, then got her master of fine arts in poetry from Boston University. After graduate school she worked as literary editor of the New Republic, where she now serves as poetry editor.

She moved back to New York in the late '90s, and wrote poetry and literary criticism and profiles. Though she agrees that a biography of a poet would seem a more natural choice for her first book, she hesitates to make a distinction between the sort of "literature" she normally reads and writes about, and Nancy Drew. "I don't pass judgments on the books for not being good writing, they don't need to be good writing," she says. "There's a lot to be said for books that suck you in. And they're not as entirely without merit as we think of them. That was the great lesson of going back and re-reading them, especially the early ones -- Nancy is a lot more complicated than we remember her being, she experiences a whole range of emotions."

As for Nancy herself, she lives on in a contemporary series published by Simon and Schuster, who bought the syndicate in 1984, two years after Harriet's death. This new, modernized Nancy does not interest Rehak. "For me, the Nancy Drew we all think about, the one in the national consciousness, ended with the Stratemeyer Syndicate," she says. And though Nancy's approach to the world may have evolved and regressed according to the sensibilities of the times and her creators, Rehak believes her essential spirit endures. "The books change," she says, "but Nancy stays the same."

Jennie Yabroff is a freelance writer based in New York.

San Francisco Chronicle

Selling a book by its cover: Did flap lead to new jacket?

Steven Zeitchik, a senior editor at Publishers Weekly who writes regularly on pop culture and technology
Published September 11, 2005


When reports surfaced several weeks ago that the cover to Rick Moody's new novel, "The Diviners," had been changed because of bookseller ambivalence, it caused something of a tingle in the book industry.

To some, the jacket on a book is inextricable from the words inside it--and equally non-negotiable. If we're changing the cover because of what other people think, what's next? Altered prose? New endings?

Whether the final product--which has a similar image, but one that appears on a movie screen--proves sufficiently different might never be known. Certainly Moody publisher Little, Brown, is hoping it does. Publisher Michael Pietsch said he believes the new cover still conveys the book's humor while also satisfying more readers, and, while he liked the original, "there was this crescendo of resentment that was simply unignorable."

The incident (which came after printing but before publication) brought to the fore one of the little secrets of book design: Jackets are now one of the most marketing-driven pieces of a title.

Indeed, jackets are routinely scrapped and redone, often many times, sometimes for dubious reasons. It's just that it's done in publishers' offices, out of sight of the rest of us, while here there was a quasi-public backlash as members of the media and booksellers balked while at an industry convention.

An anecdotal study by my own magazine, Publishers Weekly, shows that Kevin Guilfoile's genre-bending thriller, "Cast of Shadows," went through dozens of covers before the publisher decided on the red, neo-Impressionist version. And reports abound of jackets that have been changed after high-ranking employees at the country's bookstore chains intimated a certain cover would mean a lower order. For all their designers' ambitions, covers are like everything else that surrounds our cultural products: the result of assumed commercial appetites.

Certainly there can be unsavory consequences to this. Dicey marketing logic has led to the absurd proliferation of women's legs on book jackets. And critics seem right to fear that changes around the book could slippery up the slope and lead to changes to the words inside it.

But there's a reassuring parallel here too. The fact that designers and publishers now worry a lot more about what people think means their role has changed. They now balance their own ambitions with the perceived wants of an audience. They have become, in other words, just like authors.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-0509100271sep11,1,5377385.story?coll=chi-leisurebooks-hed

Booker Shortlist Announced Today

Julian Barnes' ARTHUR AND GEORGE
Zadie Smith's ON BEAUTY
Sebastian Barry's A LONG LONG WAY
Ali Smith's THE ACCIDENTAL
John Banville's THE SEA
Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO

Enough About Me #23: In Which the Author Learns from Conversations with Newspaper Editors that It Can Be Easier to Get into Harvard than to Get One's Book Reviewed

August 29, 2005
By Adam Langer

Back in my bachelor days, it was often easy to tell what my friends really thought of me by the people with whom they tried to set me up. One good friend generously offered to send me on a date with her best friend, while another suggested an evening with a distant acquaintance she described as “kind of attractive and interesting, but not in any conventional way.” In the latter instance, my best friend, who was then a police officer, advised me to avoid the date altogether. “Warning! Warning!” he yelled, pretending that he was responding to a bomb scare. “Cordon off the perimeter! Secure the area!”

In similar fashion, book-review assignment editors can often seem like the yentas of the critical process, sometimes unconsciously revealing how they view an author by whom they assign to review a book, by how much space they allot to the review, by where they position the review and, most importantly, by whether they assign the book at all. For example, the Chicago Tribune, which just published a review of The Washington Story, has assigned long reviews of both of my novels to authors of national stature, one a National Book Award–nominee, the other the winner of a National Jewish Book Award. The Miami Herald’s editor assigned both books to herself, and gave them a fair amount of space. On the other hand, one editor of a mid-market daily paper, who has allegedly made disparaging remarks about me to mutual acquaintances, assigned a tiny capsule review of the first book to a college intern, and has decided not to review the new one. Not that I harbor a grudge or anything.

Often, the critic is perceived as being all-powerful, while little consideration is given to the person who assigns a review to that critic. But, generally, it is that assignment editor who is making the most important decisions—whether to give the book a 1,500-word front-page treatment, bury it inside with a 150-word capsule or, in the great majority of cases (more than 90 percent for just about every publication), given how many books are published and how little space most editors have to work with, ignore it altogether, donate it to the library or sell it to the Strand Bookstore. (Not that I know any critics or editors who’ve done that. Ahem.)

In the past week, I’ve been corresponding with 11 book section editors from daily newspapers to try to get a sense of how the assignment process works. The answers should make any writer thankful that their books get any attention whatsoever. With rare exception, even small newspapers are inundated with hundreds of books every week; if they’re lucky, they can assign perhaps five percent of them to critics. Based on a comparison of percentage rates, it would be more probable for an author to be admitted to Harvard (which traditionally has an acceptance rate of 10% of its applicant pool) than to have his or her book reviewed by The Austin American-Statesman (2.25%), The Baton Rouge Advocate (7%) The Capital Times (4%), The Denver Post (3.75%), The Kansas City Star (.9%), The New York Post (4%), The San Diego Union Tribune (3.33%), The Rocky Mountain News (3%) or The St. Petersburg Times (1.67%).

Some conclusions drawn from discussions with these editors (who were chosen based on the fact that they responded to my e-mails) are liable to strike fear in the hearts of publishers, publicists, editors, and writers everywhere. Among them:

1) In most publications, more than 90% of books get tossed because review sections don’t have sufficient space.
2) Editors rarely bother to read press releases.
3) Editors often assign books without having read more than a book jacket or a chapter here or there.

Here’s a look at some of the aforementioned editors, which should give some idea of what all of them are up against. I’ve edited their remarks for the sake of clarity, pacing, brevity and, in some cases, my own amusement.

to read the rest (and it's fascinating stuff):
http://snipurl.com/ih32

Knowledge for Sale
Are America's public libraries on the verge of losing their way?—By Chris Dodge, Utne magazine
July / August 2005 Issue

Before joining the Utne staff in 1999, Chris Dodge worked for 19 years in a suburban Minneapolis library system, helping the activist librarian Sandy Berman reinvent the art of cataloging. Long before search engines swept the Web, Berman and his team created a network for searching the system with plain words and phrases, not arcane jargon. Today, that innovative system has been dismantled -- a symbol, Dodge argues, of wider trends that are transforming public libraries across the country. Are we on the verge of losing a cultural treasure? Dodge finds reason for both concern and hope. -- The Editors

Imagine a social space that's designed for individual enlightenment, a "people's university" where all can read and learn. A haven from commerce where everyone can conduct research or enjoy the arts. A place for children to escape their family bonds just long enough to glimpse a broader world. A home away from home for those curious about ideas and passionate about knowledge.

Such is the American public library at its best. And who doesn't love a library, at least in concept? In a land where private ownership is the rule, libraries lend items and offer help for free. Historically, they've provided things to be shared, not consumed and thrown away. Good libraries are deeply conservative in that they guard and archive the culture's diverse wisdom and beauty, its vast oddities and amusements. But they're also radical bastions of mutual aid. In a "knowledge economy" where information carries an ever-steeper price, where the rich get wealthier and the poor have less, libraries are one of the few ways still available for many to educate themselves -- ideally, an American right.

By some measures, these wellsprings of the democratic spirit have never been more popular. According to the American Library Association (ALA), public library visits have risen from 500 million in 1990 to about 1.2 billion a year. Reference librarians now answer more than 7 million questions a week. And as the ALA likes to note, there are more public libraries in the United States -- 16,421, counting all branches -- than there are McDonald's restaurants.

But lurking in that comparison is a hint that all is not well with libraries. In fact, the same forces that have turned the United States into a fast-food nation could soon drive the traditional American library out of existence. In a society where everyone's basic needs for health care, housing, education, clean air and water, meaningful work, creative expression, and open space are not met, the historical model of the public library, open to all, is under siege. Critics say it's a crisis that mirrors a larger one rooted in the failures of capitalism and perhaps democracy itself.

Though tax-supported public libraries first appeared in the United States in the mid-19th century, their spread began decades later, thanks to industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie. After working his way from bobbin boy at a textile mill to owner of the world's largest steel company, Carnegie saw libraries as a way to help self-motivated individuals benefit society by bettering themselves. For 30 years following 1886, his vast wealth funded the building of nearly 1,700 libraries in more than 1,400 American cities and towns. To get a Carnegie grant, a community first had to show the need for a library, provide a site, and agree to support the library with annual taxes totaling 10 percent of the grant.

Libraries still do what they did in Carnegie's day, at least in principle. In the words of ALA president Michael Gorman, their mission is "to select, acquire, give access to, and preserve the records of human civilization and to provide instruction and assistance in the use of those records." In the view of scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library (Basic Books, 2004), "a library is a temple to the antielitist notion that knowledge should be cheap if not free." How many inventors, artists, farmers, healers, bus drivers, teachers, and writers have been nurtured in public libraries, made important discoveries there, or simply survived, thanks to these welcoming spaces? More important, how many will in the future?

The question arises because libraries have entered an era of change, evidenced most dramatically by widespread cutbacks and closings. In Salinas, California, birthplace of John Steinbeck, a funding shortfall nearly closed the city's three libraries this spring, including the branches named after the writer and the labor activist Cesar Chavez. After a national outcry, a fund-raising campaign kept the libraries open at a reduced level of service. Earlier this year, Philadelphia's library director ordered 20 of 49 branches turned into so-called "express libraries" that would be open only in the afternoons and be staffed by nonlibrarians, a move accompanied by layoffs. Responding to the librarians' union, a judge stopped the partially completed process at least until July 1. Other such crises are springing up from coast to coast.

Read the rest of the article (very long) in its entirety: http://www.utne.com/pub/2005_130/promo/11706-2.html

Amazon's Vital Statistics Show How Books Stack Up

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 30, 2005; C01

Hey! Remember books? Sure you do. Your parents read them. So did their parents. Now for all those folks who like to talk about books without actually reading them, some exciting news! Amazon.com, the pack-leading online superstore, has figured out an innovative, and some would say insidious, way to talk about books.

Text Stats.

It's part of the company's ingenious "Search Inside" capability, which allows you to comb through the entire text of a book online.

Sure, "Search Inside" has been around for a couple of years and, by looking at the first few pages of a book that uses the feature, you can get to know a little about it before you buy.

But with the addition in April of Text Stats, "Search Inside" now takes books completely apart. It slices! It dices! It can uncomplicate comedies, trivialize tragedies, diminish legitimate discourse and completely humiliate the humanities!

Through Text Stats you can know such arcane things as the SIPs, or Statistically Improbable Phrases, that appear in a book. The strange pairing "reindeer socks," for instance, shows up four times in Eric Jerome Dickey's "Naughty or Nice." Text Stats will also tell you the number of characters (letters, not protagonists) in a book and the relative "complexity" of the words. It ranks works according to difficulty. Three different computer-driven indexes suggest whether a book is easier -- or harder -- to read than others.

And, thanks to a sensational subsection called Fun Stats, you will know just how many words you are getting per dollar and per ounce with each book. For instance, "War & Peace" by Leo Tolstoy gives you 51,707 words per dollar, while "Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme" by Calvin Trillin delivers only 1,106 words per dollar.

Confronted with the evidence, Trillin says, "I don't mind being compared to Tolstoy literarily, but when it comes to Fun Stats it's a little humiliating."

Trillin also says he was surprised to learn that of the words he used in his book, 10 percent of them were deemed "complex."

"I thought I was hitting around 6 or 7 percent," he says. "That's what I usually aim for."

Virginia author Robert Bausch is also concerned about his statistics. "There is something really kind of disturbing about this," he says while checking the Text Stats of "The Gypsy Man," his novel from 2003. "You can't tell me that 96 percent of books have fewer sentences than mine. If that's true, I'm in [expletive] deep [expletive]."

Kristin Mariani of Amazon.com says the "Search Inside" features were designed to make it "even easier for customers to find, discover and buy books they'll love." She adds that the program has helped increase sales.

How, you may be wondering, will Text Stats enhance your life? Say you must choose between two best-selling novels: "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" by Mark Haddon. Both are in paperback; both sell for about $10.

"Kite Runner" is 384 pages long; "Curious Incident" is 240. On Amazon.com, you can read the publisher's synopses and the editorial and reader reviews -- helpful tools for making an intelligent choice.

But now, with Text Stats, you can reduce your decision to utter absurdity. You can learn, for example, which book scores higher on what is known as the Fog Index. Conceived by the late Robert Gunning, an English professor at Oxford University, the index states the number of years of formal education you should have in order to read and comprehend a random passage.

Here's how the index works: It picks a sample -- of 120 words or so -- from the text. It finds the average number of words per sentence, then picks up all the words in the sample that contain three or more syllables. Compound words are ignored; so are verbs that become polysyllabic through tense endings. The first word of each sentence is tossed out, so are proper nouns. Then it takes the polysyllable count, adds it to the average number of words in a sentence, multiplies that number by 0.4 and, voila! The answer is a number that supposedly represents a comprehension grade level.

The Fog Index shows that you should read at a seventh-grade level to digest "Kite Runner" and at ninth-grade level for "Curious Incident." The first novel contains 6 percent complex words, meaning three or more syllables. Five percent of the words in "Curious Incident" are considered complex. There is an average of 1.4 syllables per word in both books.

At 11,702 words per dollar, "Kite Runner" is obviously a better bargain than "Curious Incident," which contains only 6,156 WPD. That is, unless the words in "Curious Incident" are more meaningful, poetic or carefully chosen.

Text Stats still has a few kinks in its system. According to the Fog Index, a simple child's book such as "The Runaway Bunny" requires seventh-grade reading proficiency. And James Joyce's "Ulysses" is said to be easier than 80 percent of other indexed books.

But in its pure form, Text Stats is a triumph of trivialization. By squeezing all the life and loveliness out of poetry and prose, the computer succeeds in numbing with numbers. It's the total disassembling of truth, beauty and the mysterious meaning of words. Except for the Concordance feature, which arranges the 100 most used words in the book into a kind of refrigerator-magnet poetry game. Here's a poem made from the Concordance of Dave Ramsey's "Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness": Emergency. Find first friend. Give kids life. Live myth.

Yes, you heard right: This site is under deconstruction.

Authors! Imagine how Text Stats will help you write books that are, if not better, at least easier to read according to the Fog Index and that offer the reader more words per pound than "Moby-Dick."

Publishers! Who needs editors anymore? If the software can find SIPs, surely it can be programmed to ferret out PCSs (Poorly Constructed Sentences), ORDs (overly romantic drivelings) and DIPs (Dreadfully Implausible Plots).

And readers! You can settle bar bets. Yes, "Ulysses" by James Joyce (9 on the Fog Index) is more complicated than William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" (5.7 on the Fog Index). Yes, Charlotte Bronte provides more words per ounce (13,959 in "Shirley") than her sister Emily (10,444 in "Wuthering Heights"). And, yes, Ernest Hemingway used fewer complex words (5 percent) in his short stories than F. Scott Fitzgerald (9 percent).

That's right! Now you too can sound like a literary insider at Washington cocktail parties. You can throw around statistics and make clever conversation about the hard history books, the long-winded novels, even those thick, heavy, make-you-think philosophy tomes that contain really, really long words. And the beauty of it is, with Amazon's "Search Inside" Text Stats and other features, you won't even have to read them.

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)