The National Review 100

"Earlier this year, Random House announced that it would release a list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. The publisher had enjoyed success (and controversy) with its 100 best novels; now it would do this. Here at National Review, we decided to get a jump on them by forming our own panel and offering our own list. Under the leadership of our reporter John J. Miller, we have done so. We have used a methodology that approaches the scientific. But-certainly beyond, say, the first 40 books-the fact of the books' presence on the list is far more important than their rankings. We offer a comment from a panelist after many of the books; but the panel overall, not the individual quoted, is responsible for the ranking. So, here is our list, for your enjoyment, mortification, and stimulation."

THE PANEL:

Richard Brookhiser, NR senior editor
David Brooks, senior editor of The Weekly Standard
Christopher Caldwell, senior writer at The Weekly Standard
Robert Conquest, historian
David Gelernter, writer and computer scientist
George Gilder, writer
Mary Ann Glendon, professor at Harvard Law School
Jeffrey Hart, NR senior editor
Mark Helprin, novelist
Arthur Herman, author of The Idea of Decline in Western History
John Keegan, military historian
Michael Kelly, editor of National Journal
Florence King, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
Michael Lind, journalist and novelist
John Lukacs, historian
Adam Meyerson, vice president at the Heritage Foundation
Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things
John O'Sullivan, NR editor-at-large
Richard Pipes, historian
Abigail Thernstrom, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute
Stephan Thernstrom, historian
James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense.


1. Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War.
Brookhiser: "The big story of the century, told by its major hero."

2. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago.
Neuhaus: "Marked the absolute final turning point beyond which nobody could deny the evil of the Evil Empire."

3. Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia.
Herman: "Orwell's masterpiece -- far superior to Animal Farm and 1984. No education in the meaning of the 20th century is complete without it."

4. Hayek, F. A. von. The Road to Serfdom.
Helprin: "Shatters the myth that the totalitarianisms 'of the Left' and 'of the Right' stem from differing impulses."

5. Orwell, George. Collected Essays.
King: "Every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no enemies."

6. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Herman: "The best work on political philosophy in the 20th century. Exposes totalitarianism's roots in Plato, Hegel, and Marx."

7. Lewis, C. S.. The Abolition of Man.
Brookhiser: "How modern philosophies drain meaning and the sacred from our lives."

8. Gasset, José Ortega y. Revolt of the Masses.
Gilder: "Prophesied the 20th century's debauchery of democracy and science, the barbarism of the specialist, and the inevitable fatuity of public opinion. Explained the genius of capitalist elites."

9. Hayek, F. A. von. The Constitution of Liberty.
O'Sullivan: "A great re-statement for this century of classical liberalism by its greatest modern exponent."

10. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom.

11. Johnson, Paul. Modern Times.
Herman: "Huge impact outside the academy, dreaded and ignored inside it."

12. Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in Politics.
Herman: "Oakeshott is the 20th century's Edmund Burke."

13. Schumpeter, Joseph A.. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
Caldwell: "Locus classicus for the observation that democratic capitalism undermines itself through its very success."

14. Weber, Max. Economy and Society.
Lind: "Weber made permanent contributions to the understanding of society with his discussions of comparative religion, bureaucracy, charisma, and the distinctions among status, class, and party."

15. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Caldwell: "Through Nazism and Stalinism, looks at almost every pernicious trend in the last century's politics with stunning subtlety."

16. West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Kelly: "For its writing, not for its historical accuracy."

17. Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology.
Lind: "Darwin put humanity in its proper place in the animal kingdom. Wilson put human society there, too."

18. II, Pope John Paul. Centissimus Annus.

19. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Neuhaus: "The authoritative refutation of utopianism of the left, right, and points undetermined."

20. Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl.
Helprin: "An innocent's account of the greatest evil imaginable. The most powerful book of the century. Others may not agree. No matter, I cast my lot with this child."
Caldwell: "If one didn't know her fate, one might read it as the reflections of any girl. That one does know her fate makes this as close to a holy book as the century produced."

21. Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror.
Herman: "Documented for the first time the real record of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. A genuine monument of historical research and reconstruction, a true epic of evil."

22. Muggeridge, Malcolm. Chronicles of Wasted Time.
Gilder: "The best autobiography, Christian confession, and historic meditation of the century."

23. Einstein, Albert. Relativity.
Lind: "The most important physicist since Newton."

24. Chambers, Whittaker. Witness.
Caldwell: "Confession, history, potboiler -- by a man who writes like the literary giant we would know him as, had not Communism got him first."

25. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

26. Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity.
Neuhaus: "The most influential book of the most influential Christian apologist of the century."

27. Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community.

28. ed., 11th. Encyclopedia Britannica.
Helprin: "The infinite riches of the world, presented with elegance, confidence, and economy."

29. Mitchell, Joseph. Up in the Old Hotel.

30. Chesterton, G. K.. The Everlasting Man.
Lukacs: "A great carillonade of Christian verities."

31. Chesterton, G. K.. Orthodoxy.
O'Sullivan: "How to look at the Christian tradition with fresh eyes."

32. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination.
Hart: "The popular form of liberalism tends to simplify and caricature when it attempts moral aspiration -- that is, it tends to 'Stalinism.'"

33. Watson, James D.. The Double Helix.
Herman: "Deeply hated by feminists because Watson dares to suggest that the male-female distinction originated in nature, in the DNA code itself."

34. Feynman, Richard Phillips. The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Gelernter: "Outside of art (or maybe not), physics is mankind's most beautiful achievement; these three volumes are probably the most beautiful ever written about physics."

35. Wolfe, Tom. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.
O'Sullivan: "Wolfe is our Juvenal."

36. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.

37. Banfield, Edward C.. The Unheavenly City.
Neuhaus: "The volume that began the debunking of New Deal socialism and its public-policy consequences."

38. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams.

39. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

40. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man.

41. Becker, and Ethan. Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker.

42. Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform.
Herman: "The single best book on American history in this century, bar none."

43. Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
Hart: "Influential in suggesting that the business cycle can be modified by government investment and manipulation of tax rates."

44. Jr., William F. Buckley. God & Man at Yale.
Gilder: "Still correct and prophetic. It defines the conservative revolt against socialism and atheism on campus and in the culture, and reconciles the alleged conflict between capitalist and religious conservatives."

45. Eliot, T. S.. Selected Essays.
Hart: "Shaped the literary taste of the mid-century."

46. Weaver, Richard M. Ideas Have Consequences.

47. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities.

48. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind.

49. Sowell, Thomas. Ethnic America.

50. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma.

51. Freud, Sigmund. Three Case Histories.
Gelernter: "Beyond question Freud is history's most important philosopher of the mind, and he ranks alongside Eliot as the century's greatest literary critic. Modern intellectual life (left, right, and in-between) would be unthinkable without him."

52. Wilmot, Chester. The Struggle for Europe.

53. Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought.
King: "An immensely readable history of ideas and men. (Skip the fragmentary third volume-he died before finishing it.)"

54. Huzinga, Johann. The Waning of the Middle Ages.
Lukacs: "Probably the finest historian who lived in this century. "

55. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology.
Neuhaus: "The best summary and reflection on Christianity's encounter with the Enlightenment project."

56. Tyng, Sewell. The Campaign of the Marne.
Keegan: "A forgotten American's masterly account of the First World War in the West."

57. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Hart: "A terse summation of the analytic method of the analytic school in philosophy, and a heroic leap beyond it."

58. Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding.
Glendon: "The Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century."

59. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time.
Hart: "A seminal thinker, notwithstanding his disgraceful error of equating National Socialism with the experience of 'Being.'"

60. Blake, Robert. Disraeli.
Keegan: "Political biography as it should be written."

61. Babbitt, Irving. Democracy and Leadership.
King: "A conservative literary critic describes what happens when humanitarianism over takes humanism."

62. White, William Strunk & E. B.. The Elements of Style.
A. Thernstrom: "If only every writer would remember just one of Strunk & White's wonderful injunctions: 'Omit needless words.' Omit needless words."

63. Burnham, James. The Machiavellians.
O'Sullivan: "Burnham is the greatest political analyst of our century and this is his best book."

64. Pobedonostsev, Konstantin P.. Reflections of a Russian Statesman.
King: "The 'culture war' as seen by the tutor to the last two czars. A Russian Pat Buchanan."

65. Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox.

66. Genovese, Eugene D.. Roll, Jordan, Roll.
Neuhaus: "The best account of American slavery and the moral and cultural forces that undid it."

67. Pound, Ezra. The ABC of Reading.
Brookhiser: "An epitome of the aging aesthetic movement that will be forever known as modernism."

68. Keegan, John. The Second World War.
Hart: "A masterly history in a single volume."

69. Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse.
Lind: "Genuine discoveries in literary study are rare. Parry's discovery of the oral formulaic basis of the Homeric epics, the founding texts of Western literature, was one of them."

70. Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling.
Keegan: "A life of a great author told through the transmutation of his experience into fictional form."

71. Leavis, F. R.. Scrutiny.
Hart: "Enormously important in education, especially in England. Leavis understood what one kind of 'living English' is."

72. Gaulle, Charles de. The Edge of the Sword.
Brookhiser: "A lesser figure than Churchill, but more philosophical (and hence, more problematic)."

73. Freeman, Douglas Southall. R. E. Lee.
Conquest: "The finest work on the Civil War."

74. Mises, Ludwig von. Bureaucracy.

75. Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain.
Neuhaus: "A classic conversion story of a modern urban sophisticate."

76. Zweig, Stefan. Balzac.
King: "On the joys of working one's self to death. The chapter 'Black Coffee' is a masterpiece of imaginative reconstruction."

77. Lippmann, Walter. The Good Society.
Gilder: "Written during the Great Depression. A corruscating defense of the morality of capitalism."

78. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.
Lind: "For all the excesses of the environmental movement, the realization that human technology can permanently damage the earth's environment marked a great advance in civilization. Carson's book, more than any other, publicized this message."

79. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition.
Neuhaus: "The century's most comprehensive account of Christian teaching from the second century on."

80. Bloch, Marc. Strange Defeat.
Herman: "A great historian's personal account of the fall of France in 1940."

81. Douglas, Norman. Looking Back.
Conquest: "Fascinating memoirs of a remarkable writer."

82. Adams, Henry. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

83. Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age.
Caldwell: "The book for showing how 20th-century poets think, what their poetry does, and why it matters."

84. Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World.
Brookhiser: "What has become of eros over the last seven centuries."

85. Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind.

86. Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty.

87. McPherson, James M.. Battle Cry of Freedom.

88. Edel, Leon. Henry James.
King: "All the James you want without having to read him."

89. White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White.
Gelernter: "White is the apotheosis of the American liberal now spurned and detested by the Left (and the cultural mainstream). His mesmerized devotion to the objects of his affection-his family, the female sex, his farm, the English language, Manhattan, the sea, America, Maine, and freedom, in descending order-is movingly absolute."

90. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory.

91. Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

92. Behe, Michael J.. Darwin's Black Box.
Gilder: "Overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning."

93. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War.

94. Wanniski, Jude. The Way the World Works.
Gilder: "The best book on economics. Shows fatuity of still-dominant demand-side model, with its silly preoccupation with accounting trivia, like the federal budget and trade balance and savings rates, in an economy with $40 trillion or so in assets that rise and fall weekly by trillions."

95. Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station.
Herman: "The best single book on Karl Marx and Marx's place in modern history."

96. Clark, Kenneth. Civilisation.

97. Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution.

98. Collingwood, R. G.. The Idea of History.

99. Manchester, William. The Last Lion.

100. Starr, Kenneth W. The Starr Report.
Hart: "A study in human depravity."

Books to Chew On
By BLAKE ESKIN

FOR certain voracious readers, April 1 has become a red-letter day: It's the one time of the year when they get to eat books. They won't eat just any book, only those prepared especially for the occasion, known as the Edible Books Festival and celebrated in libraries, bookstores, galleries and private homes around the world. Judith A. Hoffberg, a California librarian, came up with the concept over Thanksgiving dinner back in 1999 and decided it would be best observed on April Fools' Day, which also turns out to be the birthday of the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of "The Physiology of Taste" (1825). Hoffberg describes the festival as a low-key affair: "From 2 to 4 p.m., one looks at the books, and takes photographs, and oohs and aahs. And at 4, you serve tea and serve the books."

Now in its seventh year, the Edible Books Festival has spread to 28 states and 15 other countries. In past years, much of what's been served (pictures can be found at books2eat.com) is book-shaped cake. Other edible books might not go so well with tea, but at least you can turn pages made of sliced bread, seaweed, cold cuts, pea pods or thinly sliced rutabaga. Every once in a while, edible books get political: one West Coast environmentalist incised earth-hugging quotations into leaves of heritage lettuce, and a women's collective from Chiapas used native dyes to write "hunger" on a bunch of tortillas. Most, however, respect the foolishness of the day. Last year, Carolyn Weigel, a librarian at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, arranged strips of bacon in the shape of France — a tribute to Francis Bacon, who wrote, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

Bacon wasn't actually telling his readers to eat books, any more than Weigel, Hoffberg or other librarians taking part in the festival would suggest a patron wolf down an item from their collection. As a metaphor, book-eating (or bibliophagy, to use the five-dollar word) has flourished over the centuries, invoked by everyone from Elizabeth I, who nourished her soul on "goodlie greene herbes" plucked from the New Testament, to the television chef Tyler Florence, who titled his latest cookbook "Eat This Book." It's an attention-grabbing title (and a popular one, shared by everything from a campy 1980's diet manual to a forthcoming dispatch from the competitive-eating circuit), but Florence lets his fans off the hook. "You don't actually have to eat this book," he writes in his introduction, a point I assumed would be obvious until I read the introduction to "Don't Eat This Book" (2005) by the director of "Super Size Me," Morgan Spurlock: "We put so many things in our mouths, we constantly have to be reminded what not to eat." Fast food, sure, but books? People don't eat books — they're bland and dry, plus the cellulose fiber in paper is indigestible. Or do they?

There are two instances of bibliophagy in the Bible. The first comes in Ezekiel, when a heavenly hand offers the prophet a scroll covered on both sides with "lamentations, and moaning and woe." God commands Ezekiel to eat the scroll, and he reports that "it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness." Revelation, Chapter 10, has a variation on this theme: an angel hands John a scroll to eat, telling him it will taste like honey but also "turn your stomach sour." According to the theologian Eugene H. Peterson, the author of yet another "Eat This Book" (2006), the scroll became the source of John's apocalyptic vision: "The book he ate was metabolized into the book he wrote." For Peterson, this episode illustrates lectio divina, a spiritual mode of reading "that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes holiness and love and wisdom."

Peterson stops short of telling Christians to snack on the Bible, and some ministers tell the cautionary (and spurious) tale of Menelik II, the Ethiopian king who supposedly self-medicated with a few pages of Scripture whenever he fell ill and eventually died from an overdose of I Kings. Some religions, meanwhile, do quite literally put words in their followers' mouths. Tibetans ingest printed or written mantras as a treatment for epilepsy, or as a preventive measure akin to a multivitamin. And when ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys are about to start school, they undergo a ritual in which the 3-year-old initiate licks honey off a slate showing the Hebrew alphabet, then eats a cake adorned with a quotation from Isaiah and a hard-boiled egg inscribed with the aforementioned verse from Ezekiel.

Of course, nobody needs to teach children how to eat books. "A young child's attitude toward a book is not unlike that of a cannibal toward a missionary," wrote A. S. W. Rosenbach, the noted book collector, who cited bibliophagy as one reason that so few first editions of early children's classics have survived. It's probably too early to tell whether my year-old son's propensity to gum the board books in his library will develop into a refined literary palate, but there's hope. Margaria Fichtner, The Miami Herald's former book critic, once recalled how as a child she had gobbled a few pages of "Johnny Had a Nickel" "because I became so absorbed in whether the hero was going to buy an ice cream cone," and Maurice Sendak remembers cutting his teeth on "The Prince and the Pauper." An "Eat This Book" for children appeared in 2002, with potato-starch pages and a food-coloring pen, but the paper has an unpleasant, artificial-vanilla flavor that lingers in the mouth. No wonder it's fallen out of print.

Bibliophagy seems to become less common after elementary school. A recent episode of "Grey's Anatomy" featured a frustrated novelist who ate an unpublished manuscript that had to be surgically removed. A layman's search of the medical literature, however, yielded only a solitary French article from 1951 that defined la bibilophagie as a psychological disorder that manifests itself by reading "anything, anywhere, anyhow." The British bibliophile Holbrook Jackson, in "The Anatomy of Bibliomania" (1930), says he searched in vain for "any serious study of the dietetics of literature, or any evidence of research into this curious subject."

But Jackson apparently never stumbled upon the work of Carlo Mascaretti (1855-1928), an Italian editor who wrote a column under the anagrammatic pseudonym Americo Scarlatti. He devoted an entire column to bibliophagy and provided several historical examples. The 17th century, in particular, seems to have been a golden age of coercive bibliophagy: the Danish author of a denunciation of Sweden staved off beheading by eating his book boiled in soup; the Duke of Saxony forced the satirist Isaac Volmar to eat his lampoon of the duke raw; the German jurist Philip Oldenburger suffered through a whipping that ended only when he had polished off every morsel of a pamphlet that offended a prince. Peter Greenaway presented a gory vision of this literal-minded punishment in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," but if this form of torture persists today, it's not exactly a major concern for PEN or Amnesty International.

In 1966, John Latham, a British artist who often used books — intact, painted, cut-up, burned — as materials in his work, invited his art-school students to a happening called "Still and Chew." They chewed up pages of Clement Greenberg's "Art and Culture," taken from the school library, then spat his influential essays into a flask, where they were mixed with sulfuric acid, baking soda and yeast. Months later, when an overdue notice arrived, Latham turned in a glass vial filled with the fermented results. He lost his job, but the documentation of his experiment, from the Greenberg grappa to his letter of dismissal, is enshrined in the permanent collection at MoMA. And last month in Discover magazine, Homaro Cantu of the Chicago restaurant Moto — which prints its menus in soy ink on Parmesan-flecked rice paper — shared his vision of "dispensing vitamin-enriched edible books in regions where people suffer from malnutrition."

But for now, eating books remains a stunt, a punishment, an act of devotion, a habit of infants and other members of the animal kingdom — bookworms, rodents, goats and at least one fish, caught in 1626 off the coast of England. It had supposedly swallowed the writings of John Frith, a Protestant martyr, which were subsequently republished as "Vox Piscis, or the Book-Fish containing Three Treatises, which were found in the belly of a Cod-Fish in Cambridge Market on Midsummer Eve." Then there is "The Great Green Squishy Mean Bibliovore," a creature envisioned by the children's songwriter Monty Harper. The bibliovore — a cross between a dinosaur and a bookworm — invades a library, where a brave librarian domesticates him by teaching him to read. The bibliovore's fate? According to the lyrics, "Today he makes a living writing book reviews."

Blake Eskin is the author of "A Life in Pieces" and the editor of Nextbook.org.



Books to Chew On - New York Times

ITW's First Award Nominees Are In!

You may not have been at Left Coast Crime in Bristol, but that doesn't mean you're out of the awards' loop.

At a dinner on Friday, March 17th, 2006, the co-presidents of ITW, Gayle Lynds and David Morrell, announced the nominees for the new International Thriller Awards (or more simply "The Thrillers").

Over three hundred titles were reviewed by our judging committees, along with a slew of screenplays by our film panel. And as stipulated in ITW bylaws, no one on the board of directors, nor myself as chair of the awards, was eligible to compete. Each judging committee was selected to balance men and women, authors and reviewers, while also incorporating an international flare with judges from beyond US borders. Operating under a strict code of silence and isolated from prejudicial interference, they have deliberated for the past several months to pare down the towering pile of submissions to the nominees listed below.

So with great pride and delight, and congratulations to all, here are the nominees (listed alphabetically by writer) for the first International Thriller Awards.

The Thrillers

BEST NOVEL
PANIC by Jeff Abbott (Dutton)
CONSENT TO KILL by Vince Flynn (Atria)
VELOCITY by Dean Koontz (Bantam)
THE PATRIOTS CLUB by Christopher Reich (Delacorte Press)
CITIZEN VINCE by Jess Walter (Regan Books)


BEST FIRST NOVEL
IMPROBABLE by Adam Fawer (William Morrow)
THE COLOR OF LAW by Mark Gimenez (Doubleday)
COLD GRANITE by Stuart MacBride (St. Martin's Minotaur)
PAIN KILLER by Will Staeger (William Morrow)
BENEATH A PANAMANIAN MOON by David Terrenoire (Thomas Dunne Books)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
SLEEPER CELL by Jeffrey Anderson (Berkley)
PRIDE RUNS DEEP by R. Cameron Cooke (Jove)
UPSIDE DOWN by John Ramsay Miller (Dell)
THE DYING HOUR by Rick Mofina (Pinnacle Books)
EXIT STRATEGY by Michael Wiecek (Jove)

BEST SCREENPLAY
MATCH POINT, screenplay by Woody Allen
SYRIANA, based on the book by Robert Baer, written by Stephen Gaghan
CACHE (Hidden), screenplay by Michael Haneke
OLDBOY, screenplay by Jo-yun Hwang, Chun-hyeong Lim, Joon-hyung Lim, and Chan-wook Park; story by Garon Tsuchiya
MUNICH, screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth; based on the book by George Jonas

James Rollins
ITW Awards Chair

New homes have top-shelf libraries
By Maria Puente
USA TODAY

Most British country estates have libraries. Most American suburban McMansions have TV rooms (and better plumbing). Until now.

Architects and builders say more of their high-end clients want a library in their homes, but not the kind on ''Masterpiece Theatre.'' An American home library might be out in the open, on a stair landing or in a loft or an alcove. It might double as an office and have climate controls, high-tech lighting, TVs and computers.

''The library has come back strongly,'' says Santa Barbara, Calif., architect Barry Berkus, head of the award-winning firm B3 Architects.

About half the custom-designed million-dollar homes built by Witt Construction of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., feature libraries. ''People want something a bit more elegant than an ordinary office,'' says Suzanne Pitts, Witt sales director. ''And when they have guests, they want them to see it.''

Gopal Ahluwalia, research director at the National Association of Home Builders, says home libraries are most common in houses 3,000 square feet or larger, which is about 20 percent of the total U.S. housing stock.

Home libraries fit in with affluent homebuilders' desire for ''specialty rooms'' that reflect personal interests and hobbies, from meditation and massage rooms to wine cellars and yoga rooms. This year's New American Home, a 10,000-square foot Caribbean-style home built for the International Builders' Show in Orange County, Fla., featured a second-story loft library.

Sometimes, the homeowner collects costly antique books that he has actually read. But sometimes the library is just for show. Antiquarian booksellers, such as New York's 85-year-old Argosy Book Store, say about half their sales of antique books go to homeowners who care more about the looks than the books.

''They buy just to fill up the shelves, and they want it to look pretty,'' co-owner Naomi Hample says.''Some want all the same color. Some don't care what language it's in.''



Tallahassee Democrat - www.tallahassee.com - Tallahassee, FL.

Booked Solid
Some Readers' Cherished Collections Have Nowhere to Grow

By Annie Groer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 23, 2006; H01

Law librarian Rick Ramponi's collection of 3,000 regional cookbooks --including "Talk About Good" from the Lafayette, La., Junior League and "Shalom on the Range," which celebrates southwestern Jewish cuisine -- was manageable while he lived in a large house in Kalorama.

But when he moved to a one-bedroom Dupont Circle apartment with a partner who collects large art and architecture books, Ramponi had to exile those cherished culinary texts to a pair of rented storage units several blocks away.

Since 2002, he has spent more than $5,000 to keep them there, which "may be more than they are all worth," he concedes. "But there is a sentimental attachment and I associate them with places I've been, people I know."

Accountant Jennifer Kimball, who is studying for a master's degree in English, and policy analyst Matt Cail, who has a pair of master's degrees, call themselves "huge bibliophiles." Thus their chief requirement when condo shopping two years ago was enough wall space for shelves to hold their books. Already they have run out of space in their Alexandria flat. "Next year we will start looking for a house to buy that has room for children," she says. And books.

Then there is the Georgetown widow who requests anonymity to keep her literary "addiction" secret. She admits she once seriously considered buying and moving into the house next door, leaving her mushrooming book collection at the old address. Ultimately she could not justify carrying two mortgages, even though her own living space has been reduced to narrow paths winding past groaning shelves and grocery sacks filled with secondhand books.

"You think if you keep buying books you will never die until you've read them all," she says. "Of course, that's absurd."

Books, it turns out, inflame a particular kind of passion. They inform, they amuse, they provoke. They keep us company and lull us to sleep. They give manifest evidence of our intellect. They show off our interests and our values. And when we've run out of places to put them, they prove extremely difficult to part with.

Washington, with its affluent and educated populace, is a natural habitat for bibliomaniacs, defined by the late British author Sir Hugh Walpole as those "to whom books are like bottles of whiskey to the inebriate, to whom anything that is between covers has a sort of intoxicating savour."

The Association of American Publishers reports nationwide sales of nearly 969 million new books in 2004, the most recent available figure from 20 major U.S. publishers. The Washington area ranked fourth last year in sales, after New York, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay/Silicon Valley axis, according to Nielsen BookScan, a retail book sales monitoring service.

More than 100 million used books also change hands each year, reports the American Booksellers Association. Many are scavenged from secondhand bookstores, thrift shops or estate sales, where paperbacks can be found for a dollar or less and hardcovers for as little as $2. Voracious readers also hit sales at libraries and schools, where $5 or $10 can often buy a shopping bag stuffed with books.

"There is a feeling that words written on a page have some kind of power," says Carla Cohen, co-owner of Politics and Prose bookstore in the District, whose own Northwest Washington home is filled with books she cannot bear to part with. "Books talk to us. They are like friends. Certainly some of my books are," says Cohen. "They actually do more than evoke the story. They evoke the place I read it -- Maine, college, a trip. They become almost a memento of the trip."

The effort to contain a growing collection can last decades. Nearly a half-century ago, Daniel Davidson -- lawyer, former diplomat and book reviewer (sometimes for The Washington Post) -- paid $150 for five custom bookcases, including one with a built-in bar. They've survived several moves with him, and now anchor the den of the Northwest Washington home he shares with his writer wife, Susan Davidson.

"The serious stuff, books I've reviewed," crowd a quartet of nine-shelf, 10-foot-high bookcases in the living room. "I figure that after we go, it's my daughter's problem. I told her to throw out everything but the books autographed by [former secretary of state] Dean Acheson."

Professional organizer Kim Oser of Put It Away! in Gaithersburg says it can be difficult to persuade clients to jettison the literary surplus. "People treat books as trophies. When they finish a book, they have to put it up to show 'I read that.' "

Her tough-love solution is simple: "Books that you keep are childhood books, historical books, classics. There are two options with the other books: If it's so good that you would tell friends to read it, you pass it along. If it's so awful, you donate it."

Avid readers consider such advice heresy, preferring instead to grapple with storage, from basic bricks-and-board shelving to exquisite, and exquisitely expensive, custom cabinetry. They have discovered that books can be tucked under the stairs, over doorways, into headboards, atop the refrigerator and inside kitchen cabinets. The cliched decorator's trick of stacking large, glossy art books on their sides can give new life to occasional tables. Indeed, several uniform, knee-high piles of books on the floor can become a table when topped by a piece of glass.

The ultimate luxury, of course, is a personal library. To Washington designer John Peters Irelan, a traditional library boasts wood-paneled walls, with bookcases of various widths and depths topped by pediments, leaving a bit of wall exposed below the crown molding. A contemporary library contains just floor-to-ceiling shelves to create "a tapestry of books" needing no further embellishment.

One Irelan client offered a tip to keep dust off shelves: Make them no deeper than the books themselves. Eight inches works for most hardbacks; a foot will do for art books.

For those who have yet to unbox their favorites, Marco Fogg, the hero of Paul Auster's novel "Moon Palace," has a solution: "Imaginary furniture" for his apartment made from dozens of cartons filled with 1,000 books once owned by his late uncle.

"One set of 16 served as the support for my mattress, another set of 12 became a table, others of seven became chairs, another of two became a bed stand, and so on," Fogg mused. "Imagine the pleasure of sitting down to a meal with the entire Renaissance lurking below your food."



Booked Solid

Gumshoe Awards 2006

The 5th Annual Gumshoe Awards are given by Mystery Ink to recognize the best achievements in crime fiction. This year's nominees were chosen from books first
published in the United States in 2005. The winners will be announced on May 9, 2006.

Best Mystery:
The Nominees:

As Dog Is My Witness by Jeffrey Cohen (Bancroft Press)
The James Deans by Reed Farrel Coleman (Plume)
Savage Garden by Denise Hamilton (Scribner)
To the Power of Three by Laura Lippman (William Morrow)
The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Best Thriller:
The Nominees:

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
Company Man by Joseph Finder (St. Martin's Press)
The Only Suspect by Jonnie Jacobs (Kensington)
Falls the Shadow by William Lashner (William Morrow)
Creepers by David Morrell (CDS Books)


Best European Crime Novel:
The Nominees:

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde (Viking)
Kiss Her Goodbye by Allan Guthrie (Hard Case Crime)
Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason (St. Martin's Minotaur)
Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas (Simon & Schuster)
The Vanished Hands by Robert Wilson (Harcourt)


Best First Novel:
The Nominees:

The Color of Law by Mark Gimenez (Doubleday)
Tilt-a-Whirl by Chris Grabenstein (Carroll & Graf)
The Baby Game by Randall Hicks (Wordslinger Press)
Sacred Cows by Karen E. Olson (Mysterious Press)
Beneath a Panamanian Moon by David Terrenoire (St. Martin's Minotaur)

JAMES O. BORN in depth interview in January Magazine

Interview | James O. Born

The literary novelist as paperback writer
By Edward Wyatt The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006

Knock-offs of "The Da Vinci Code," made-up memoirs and accounts of life with ornery pets are selling tens of thousands of hardcover copies a week. But publishers say there is no harder sell in the world of books these days than literary fiction.

Even critically acclaimed literary novels often have a short shelf life in hardcover, with one-half to three-quarters of the books shipped to stores often being returned to the publisher unsold.

That has a growing number of publishing companies, from smaller houses like Grove/Atlantic to giants like Random House, adopting a different business model, offering books by lesser- known authors only as "paperback originals," forgoing the higher profit afforded by publishing a book in hardcover for a chance at attracting more buyers and a more sustained shelf life.

"In the last four or five years, it's gotten hard to publish fiction by lesser- known authors, and even by some better-known authors," said Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic.

And when a book fails in hardcover, booksellers often will limit their orders for a paperback edition, making it harder to sell the author's next book.

"When you're taking back 50 to 70 percent of the hardcover copies you shipped," Entrekin said, "the stores - rightfully so - are not willing to take another chance."

Entrekin recently revived a dormant imprint, Black Cat, to highlight his trade paperback originals. Last month, Black Cat released "White Ghost Girls," a debut novel by Alice Greenway, in a paperback edition that included flaps on the paper cover and the ragged-edge pages that bespeak "quality fiction." Other publishers, like HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Random House, have also been ramping up their efforts.

"It has been more of an evolution than a big jump," said Jane von Mehren, publisher of trade paperbacks at Random House. "Getting somebody to spend $22 on a book by an author who they've never heard of is hard, but getting them to spend $13.95 on a paperback is much easier."

The paperback original is not an entirely new concept. European publishing companies have been doing it for years; in the United States, the so-called Beat Generation writers were often published only in paperback in the early 1960s. More recently, in 1999, Jhumpa Lahiri's volume of short stories, "Interpreter of Maladies," was released only in paperback by Houghton Mifflin's Mariner Books. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Still, the paperback-original format has been used relatively infrequently by publishers, in part because it is often fought by authors and their agents, who are sometimes unwilling to give up the prestige and higher royalties from hardcover publication, as well as the chance for a second release in stores with a paperback edition.

Publishers have plowed ahead, however. Harper Perennial, the literary paperback imprint of HarperCollins, is planning to publish 22 paperback originals this year, up from 10 last year.

"We see it as a great opportunity to publish some young debut writers," said Carrie Kania, publisher of Harper Perennial.

She cited as an example Nick Laird, the husband of the British novelist Zadie Smith; his first novel, "Utterly Monkey," was published as a paperback original in January.

"Part of our strategy was that we believe Nick Laird is going to be a great writer, and we want to build him up," Kania said. "That is hard to do when there is a lot of hardcover competition."

The economics of the decision to publish in hardcover or paperback are not simple.

Publishers generally receive a wholesale price for new books that is about half the retail cover price. Thirty percent of the publisher's share, or 15 percent of the cover price, goes to the author as royalties, and 40 percent of the publisher's take goes for the production, distribution, marketing and publicity costs of the book.

On a typical hardcover priced at $26, that would leave a little less than $4 a copy for the publisher, before accounting for the cost of corporate overhead or the books that will be returned - on which the publisher earns nothing.

For paperbacks, authors generally earn only 7.5 percent of the cover price as a royalty. But the lower price also means publishers earn far less, about $1 to $2 a book before returns. The advantage of paperback is that if a book proves to be even a modest seller, booksellers are less likely to return all of their copies, figuring they can stock a small number permanently on their shelves - something they rarely do with hardcover books.

"Book for book, you're obviously going to make more money on a hardcover," said Martin Asher, editor in chief of Vintage/Anchor Books, part of Random House's Knopf Publishing Group.

"But you can usually sell two or more paperbacks for every hardcover, and when you bring in the question of building an audience for a new writer," the scale tips further in the paperback original's favor.

One longtime argument against paperback originals has been that book critics are less likely to review them. Several publishers say that has changed, citing what they described as a watershed event: the review on Feb. 6, 2005, of "Death of an Ordinary Man," by Glen Duncan, a paperback original book published by Entrekin's Black Cat imprint, that was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

"Historically, getting the books reviewed was a big concern for us," Kania of Harper Perennial said. "But increasingly, paperback originals are being treated as new books."


The literary novelist as paperback writer - Technology - International Herald Tribune

Blogging book competition hots up

The first short-list for a literary prize that rewards bloggers turned bookwriters has been announced.
Dubbed the Blooker Prize, the contest is for those bloggers who have turned their episodic journals into something more substantial.

British entries on the Blooker short-list include the intimate diary of a prostitute and a guide to the UK's best "greasy spoon" cafes.

The first winner of the Blooker Prize will be announced on 3 April.

Cafe culture

The Blooker Prize was first suggested in October 2005 and was the creation of Bob Young, founder of self-publishing site Lulu which sponsors the prize.

In the last few years, regularly updated web logs - or blogs - have become a major feature on the internet and now there are believed to be more than 60 million of them in existence.

There are blogs on any and every subject and many of the writers behind blogs have found their passions for a particular subject and writing style has won them a regular and appreciative audience.


There's definitely a romance to cafes. Once there you can easily get yourself into the frame of mind that you are about to start a novel
Russell Davies

Some blogs or their authors have become so popular that they have turned to traditional print to collect their thoughts or explore their interest at greater length.
Books from blogs, or "blooks", were becoming hugely popular, said Mr Young.

Any blook published in English anywhere in the world before the deadline of 30 January 2006 was eligible for entry.

A total of 89 entries made it to the Lulu Blooker's long-list and this has been whittled down to just 16 that will compete for the prize money.

The entries are arranged into three categories - fiction, non-fiction and comics - and the winners of two of these sections get a cash prize of £550 ($1,000). The winner of the grand prize gets a cash prize of £1,100 ($2,000).

The short-list is dominated by US entries but the UK has two strong contenders in the running. One is notorious Belle De Jour, who blogs about life as a prostitute.

The other contender is Russell Davies, who turned his affection for "greasy spoon" cafes into a blog called eggbaconchipsandbeans and a book detailing the 50 best cafes in the UK.

"I was looking for something to blog about that was not a picture of a cat," Mr Davies told the BBC News website, explaining his choice of subject matter.

"I'm drawn to a full English," he said, referring to the colloquial term for a fried breakfast.

"There's definitely a romance to cafes. Once there, you can easily get yourself into the frame of mind that you are about to start a novel."

Co-judging the event are writer and activist Cory Doctorow, Robin Miller, editor-in-chief of online publisher OSTG and Paul Jones, director of Ibiblio.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/4780774.stm

Published: 2006/03/08 00:03:18 GMT

THE LULU BLOOKER PRIZE HOMEPAGE

The Short-List
Non-fiction (6 finalists)

All The President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth by Bryan Keefer, Ben Fritz, and Brendan Nyhan

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (paperback, $14.00)
Source blog/site: Spinsanity - www.spinsanity.com

Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Anonymous

Publisher: Phoenix (paperback, £7.99)
Source blog/site: Belle de Jour - http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com
Biodiesel Power by Lyle Estill

Publisher: New Society Publishers (paperback, $16.95)
Source blog/site: Piedmont Biofuels Energy Blog - www.biofuels.coop/blog
Egg Bacon Chips and Beans: 50 Great Cafes and the Stuff That Makes Them Great by Russell Davies

Publisher: HarperCollins Entertainment (hardback, £9.99)
Source blog/site: eggbaconchipsandbeans - www.eggbaconchipsandbeans.com
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell

Publisher: Little, Brown (hardback, $23.95)
Source blog/site: The Julie/Julia project - http://blogs.salon.com/0001399
Stone Cold Guilty - The People v. Scott Lee Peterson by Loretta Dillon

Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $16.50)
Source blog/site: Observations of a Misfit - www.misfitting.com
Fiction (5 finalists)

Action Poetry: Literary Tribes for the Internet Age edited by Levi Asher, Jamelah Earle, and Caryn Thurman

Publisher: Authorhouse (paperback, $17.50)
Source blog/site: Literary Kicks - www.litkicks.com
Africa Fresh! New Voices from the First Continent - edited by Rod Amis

Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $15.00)
Source blog/site: G21: The World's Magazine - www.g21.net
Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest

Publisher: Tor (paperback, $13.95)
Source blog/site: Heretic Spire, a Damn Lie - http://wicked-wish.livejournal.com
Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal by Keith Thomson

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (hardback, $23.00)
Source blog/site: Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal - http://blubberybastard.tripod.com/blog
hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble by Tom Evslin

Publisher: dotHill Press (hardback, $24.95)
Source blog/site: hackoff.com - www.hackoff.com
Comics (5 finalists)

Ambidextrous: Collection 1 by Kevin Cornell

Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $11.99)
Source blog/site: Bearskinrug - www.bearskinrug.co.uk
Comic Strip Volume 1: Scarybear and Friends by Jason Pultz

Publisher: self-published
Source blog/site: Comic Strip - www.scarybear.org
Dinosaur Comics: Huge Eyes, Beaks, Intelligence, and Ambition by Ryan North

Publisher: self-published through CatPrint (paperback, $8.00)
Source blog/site: Dinosaur Comics - www.qwantz.com
The Dada Alphabet: An Absurdist's Illustrated Primer by Stephanie Freese, David Milloway, and Matthew Wood

Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $15.00)
Source blog/site: The Dada Detective - www.likelystories.com

Totally Boned: A Joe and Monkey Collection by Zach Miller

Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $14.95)
Source blog/site: Joe and Monkey - www.joeandmonkey.com

BBC NEWS | Technology | Blogging book competition hots up

BOOK OR MOVIE? It’s time to stop the comparisons LIT vs. FLICK?

By JOHN MARK EBERHART
The Kansas City Star

If you still don’t know why many bibliophiles cringe at seeing their favorite books turned into films, here’s a timely answer: &.

That’s an ampersand, as in this year’s Oscar-nominated “Pride & Prejudice.” I’ve yet to find a reason why Hollywood felt the need to change the title from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but I suspect it was nothing more than the nonsense that went into advertising “Terminator 2” as “T2” or “Alien vs. Predator” as “AVP.” Tinseltown loves typographical tomfoolery.

Actually, “Pride & Prejudice” is a fine film. Also nominated in various categories this year are “Brokeback Mountain,” from the Annie Proulx short story, and “Capote,” from the biography by Gerald Clarke.

My, my; could it be that Hollywood finally has learned to respect literature?

Nah.

This is just coincidence: Three films getting released in the same year, all of which do justice to their source material. They just as easily could have been released in three different years. Every film that gets made is a caprice of time, the end result of certain opportunities and obstacles, including the schedules of hundreds of people, from director and actors to gaffers and key grips.

So my first reaction to the literary sparkle of this year’s Oscar-nominated films: big deal.

I can cite many movies in which the filmmakers eviscerated the literary cow. The one that still sickens me is “Simon Birch,” the execrable 1998 weepfest so unfaithful to A Prayer for Owen Meany that author John Irving asked for the radical title change.

The truth is that none of us really should care whether a book makes it to the screen in good shape, because these two art forms are two different animals.

Vivid as any book or story may be, assimilating it remains a function of our ability to imagine. We must create, in our heads, the story’s faces, rooms, voices and so on — based, of course, on the author’s little black marks on white paper.

Not so with film; much of the work is done for us. And so, confronted with the literality of an actor’s chiseled chin or an actress’s flawless lashes, we sometimes find that it was more fun doing the imagining ourselves. That can happen even with a good film.

That said, there are cases in which the Hollywood product can transcend the printed matter. I’ve always thought Francis Ford Coppola’s brooding “Godfather” superior to Mario Puzo’s florid novel. And I suspect Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was better off once director David Fincher, along with actors Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, got their mitts on it.

If you’re a Palahniuk fan and you find the previous sentence heretical, consider this: In the supplemental material included on the double-disc DVD of “Fight Club,” the author remarks that he was so impressed with the contributions of Fincher and Co. that he began to wonder if his book didn’t suffer by comparison.

But wait … we’re doing it again: judging the apples against the oranges. I like “Fight Club” a great deal … and I like Fight Club immensely, too, but the former is a film and the latter is a novel and the twain don’t really meet.

The film, as films tend to be, is more linear, and its directness is a result of the filmmakers taking some of the bends out of the novel’s narrative river. The book is a serpentine thing; it toys with time even more playfully than the film does. Both are valid works of art.

I do confess I saw “Fight Club” before I read Fight Club; thus, approaching the book, it was hard for me to see Tyler Durden in my mind without seeing Brad Pitt. I suspect some of you who saw “Brokeback Mountain” before reading the Annie Proulx story might have had trouble forgetting hunky Heath Ledger.

That leads to this point: I’ve often been asked if one should not read the source material before seeing a film. Actually I think it’s entirely up to you and partly dependent on the situation. If a good film is in limited release instead of enjoying a long run at a multiplex, this books editor has no qualms about seeing the flick first, then reading (or re-reading) the book.

Our lives are bound by many rules. I’m not sure the arts should be. Forcing ourselves to read every book before seeing the film or insisting on finding fault with one or the other after we’ve experienced both — why, that’s nothing but pride, & prejudice, too.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FROM PAGE TO SCREEN

The famous “I wish I knew how to quit you” scene from “Brokeback Mountain” differs only slightly from the short story. We pick up Annie Proulx’s story after the oft-repeated line.

“Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable — admisssions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears — rose around them. Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face gray and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving, hit the ground on his knees.

“ ‘Jesus,’ said Jack. ‘Ennis?’ But before he was out of the truck, trying to guess if it was a heart attack or the overflow of incendiary rage, Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been for what they’d said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.”

But Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s script continues the confrontation:

“ENNIS: Then why don’t you?! Why don’t you let me be? It’s because of you, Jack, that I’m like this. I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.”

“(JACK starts toward him, but ENNIS jerks away.)

“ENNIS: Get the (expletive) off me!

“(JACK moves towards him again, and this time, ENNIS doesn’t resist.

“JACK: Come here … it’s all right. It’s all right … damn you, Ennis.

“(And then … they hug one another, a fierce desperate embrace, managing to torque things almost to where they had been …”)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FROM BOOK TO OSCAR

Movies based on an original screenplay seldom win a best picture Oscar — only 10 times since 1982. Sometimes those winners were based on plays (“Chicago”) or historical texts (“Titanic”), but here are some recent winners that started out as books:

? “Million Dollar Baby”: A book of short stories by F.X. Toole.

? “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”: The final book in the trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien.

? “A Beautiful Mind”: The biography of John Nash by Sylvia Nasar.

? “The English Patient”: A novel by Micheal Ondaatje.

? “Forrest Gump”: A novel by Winston Groom.

? “The Silence of the Lambs”: The second Hannibal Lecter novel by Thomas Harris.

? “Out of Africa”: Based on several texts, including Judith Thurman’s Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, Errol Trzebinski’s Silence Will Speak and the memoirs of Isak Dinesen.

? “Ordinary People”: Novel by Judith Guest.

? “Kramer vs. Kramer”: Novel by Avery Corman.

? “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: Novel by Ken Kesey.

? “The Godfather”: Novel by Mario Puzo.

? “The French Connection”: Novel by Robin Moore.

? The first big-screen adaptation to win a best picture Oscar was “All Quiet on the Western Front” in 1930 — only the third year of the Academy Awards. The film was based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel.

Sources: Internet Movie Database, Amazon.com, 70 Years of Oscar by Robert Osborne (1989), ACNielsen Academy Awards Guide


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Compiled by David Frese The Star Source: Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana Compiled by David Frese The Star Source: Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana


Kansas City Star | 03/05/2006 | BOOK OR MOVIE? It?s time to stop the comparisons LIT vs. FLICK?

From the truth is stranger than fiction file...

King County Journal, Bellevue, Washington

ISSAQUAH

SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY: A resident called 911 at 4:15 p.m. Oct. 20 to report seeing a handwritten note in a car window at the Safeway on Northwest Gilman Boulevard. The note read, ``First Kill Michael Kronenwetter.'' An investigation revealed that ``First Kill'' is the name of a novel by author Michael Kronenwetter.


kingcountyjournal.com - Police

B&N Finds Great New Writers

Winners of the 13th annual Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards are:

Fiction:

First place: Beasts of No Nation (HarperCollins), Uzodinma Iweala's first novel about an African boy forced to become a soldier early in life. Fiction jurist Carrie Brown commented: "For its breathtaking portrayal of the survival of the human spirit in the face of suffering and cruelty, Beasts of No Nation would be a remarkable accomplishment for a writer practicing at the height of maturity and skill. Uzodinma Iweala was only 23 years old when he published this novel, but it is unmistakably an imaginative tour de force. [He] has found a voice for young Agu, an African child soldier conscripted into a brutal guerilla army, which is both harrowing and heartbreaking. The novel is testament to the profound ability of literature to show us horror, dismantle it and identify its parts, and arrive in the silent ether of the aftermath with something utterly unforgettable and, most importantly, worth cherishing."

Second place: Kitty Fitzgerald's first novel, Pigtopia (Miramax Books).

Third place: Catherine Tudish's short-story collection, Tenney's Landing (Scribner)

Nonfiction:

First place: One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick (Houghton Mifflin), a memoir of the author's Marine Corps service. Nonfiction judge Tom Groneberg said, "One Bullet Away is about two wars in different places. It's about . . . [a] fight to become a Marine officer . . and . . . the fights on the streets of Iraq and in the countryside of Afghanistan, the battle within a young soldier to do the right thing despite what the textbooks or his superiors might command. . . . While the book's subtitle might be: 'The Making of a Marine Officer,' ultimately, [Fick's book] heralds the making of a truly powerful new writer."

Second place: Martin Moran's memoir, The Tricky Part (Beacon Press)

Third place: Louise Brown's groundbreaking foray into a world of dynastic prostitution, The Dancing Girls of Lahore (Fourth Estate)

First-place winners receive $10,000 and a year of additional marketing and advertising support. Second-place winners receive $5,000, and third-place winners nab $2,500. All finalists are also given Tiffany awards and were honored yesterday at a private ceremony and read from their works in the evening at the Lincoln Triangle B&N in New York City.

The awards honor the best of the 70 authors featured in B&N's Discover Great New Writers program last year.

Paul Levine interview

Paul Levine, author of the terrific SOLOMON VS. LORD series, was recently interviewed by his alma mater, Penn State. It's a fun interview - check it out here:
http://live.psu.edu/story/16224

Online book videos bring words to life
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
So have you seen any good books lately?

When HarperCollins' Amistad imprint wanted a fresh, new way to promote Lolita Files' fifth novel, Sex.Lies.Murder.Fame, it jumped on the hottest promotional bandwagon in publishing and created its first online book video.

"Consumers are online," says Amistad's Gilda Squires, "so that's where we want to reach them."

Files' novel is a satirical look at the literary and music worlds and the lengths to which people will go for fame and fortune. Because of the novel's music industry influences, HarperCollins produced a music video that features rising pop singer Silena Murrell's debut single I Like My Man Hard. (See it at video.google.com by typing sex.lies.murder.fame in the search field.)

Advertising on the Web and through cellphones and other handheld media players is nothing new. Music videos and movie trailers are wildly popular downloads. And though it might seem ironic to reach readers through pictures instead of words, publishing industry observers say it makes sense.

"Why not use the tools and technology that all other entertainment media use to promote their wares?" says Jerome Kramer of The Book Standard, an online publication that covers publishing.

The Book Standard and Bantam Dell, a division of Random House, are sponsoring a competition for student filmmakers to create 30-second videos for three upcoming novels: The Thieves of Heaven by Richard Doetsch, Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters and Shadow Man by Cody McFadyen. And in November, The Book Standard will launch a book video channel on the Web.

Producing book videos is a fledgling business, and they are created in various ways. HarperCollins used actors, but vidlit.com creates high-tech slide shows. Vidlit videos are narrated by the authors but lean toward photos and illustrations. M.J. Rose, Bill Maher, Julie Powell and Meg Cabot have videos on vidlit.com.



USATODAY.com - Online book videos bring words to life

Avid readers swap their books online
By Marilyn Gardner | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Avid readers everywhere can identify with the challenges Phyllis Gatto used to face in finding space for books she had read. After finishing a paperback, she would put it on a shelf. When the shelves filled, she moved books into cartons, hiding them under beds and in closets.

"The pile would just grow," says Mrs. Gatto, of Dayton, Tenn. "I'd give some to friends, but basically, they just accumulated."

Then a friend told her about an unusual book-sharing website, PaperBackSwap.com. Members swap used books, paying only the cost of postage - usually $1.59. In addition to saving money and freeing space, members can make electronic connections with far-flung readers.

Similar online book-trading sites in the United States include FrugalReader.com and TitleTrader.com. A British website is ReadItSwapIt.co.uk.

At PaperBackSwap.com, members list at least nine paperbacks, earning three credits. Credits allow them to search available titles and choose up to three. Senders pay the postage. They receive one credit for each book they mail, enabling them to order other titles. The website formats a mailing wrapper. The sender then prints out the wrapper, adds stamps, and mails the book.

"It's very user-friendly," Gatto says.

The venture grew out of founder Richard Pickering's years as a business traveler. "Traveling through so many airports, you accumulate a lot of books," he says. "I had no easy way of doing anything with them at home. They collected on my bookshelf."

He tried selling them on eBay and Amazon.com, but grew tired of fees. Determined to find a better way to trade books, he teamed up with partner Robert Swarthout, who had developed a college textbook exchange.

They now list more than 300,000 paperbacks, along with audio books. Because books are sent by media mail, membership is limited to the US, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

Participants include a range of ages and demographics, with women outnumbering men. Mr. Pickering describes a typical member as a woman who loves to read, is bored by TV, and owns many paperbacks. Some members post as few as 10 titles. Others have posted more than 1,000 and have traded hundreds. In all, members mail from 1,500 to 2,000 books a day.

Romance novels and mystery thrillers are the most popular genres. Other favorite categories include home and gardening, home schooling, and Christian books - "anything you can imagine," Pickering says.

Megan Aepli of Boston, who joined PaperBackSwap about nine months ago, reads about eight books a month. "I'm constantly reading three books at a time," she says. "That's why this is great for me."

Gatto orders both books and audio tapes, listening to the latter while traveling. "I like historical novels for reading," she says. "I don't normally read mysteries, but I listen to them." She has listed nearly 60 titles, shrinking the literary cache under her bed.

Books must be in "good" condition. A few readers, however, have complained that a book doesn't fit that description. "It's a legitimate concern in some cases," Pickering says. "We try to put it in perspective and say, 'They were free.' " He estimates that one or two books out of 100 might not live up to the proper rating.

Other features on these sites include readers' reviews, a wish list of titles not listed, discussion forums, and chat rooms.

Gene McCabe, who is president of FrugalReader.com, says that his site's credo is "Read, share, relate." Beyond helping people save money, he says, "It's about helping them connect with each other. They love to read, but they also love to talk about that reading experience, talk about the books, plots, authors."

Such connections can have far-reaching effects. After hurricane Katrina, members in the discussion forum at PaperBackSwap.com decided to donate books to the ravaged area. They found a county in Mississippi where two libraries had been destroyed. "Our members mailed boxes and boxes of books from all over the country to help rebuild the libraries," Pickering says. Librarians have asked them to stop sending because their warehouse is full.

The sites are free, but modest membership fees are ahead. At PaperBackSwap.com, Pickering expects fees to be $10 or $20 a year. McCabe, too, says, "At some point we will have to recover costs and get a revenue stream."

ReadItSwapIt.co.uk encourages reading by giving everyone in the United Kingdom access to free books, says Andrew Bathgate, cofounder.

Environmental charities have praised the site for recycling books. Libraries in London and elsewhere have also promoted it. Traffic peaked after Christmas, Mr. Bathgate says, when recipients of unwanted gift books began "swapping like crazy."

Book-sharing websites help people who can't get out or who have little access to books. "In a lot of places in rural America, you might have to go 100 miles for a bookstore," says Susan Siegel of Book Hunter Press in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., who has studied the used-book market. "For them, it's a fantastic outlet."

No figures track the impact of the Internet on sales of used paperbacks, so no one can say whether cyberspace swaps will siphon business from bricks-and-mortar bookstores. "There's certainly a potential for that," Pickering says. "But we cater to a different market that wants ease of use. They don't have to get dressed and drive down to the local used-book store."

Dena Russ, assistant manager of B & L Books in Altamonte Springs, Fla., which offers a book exchange, says that swapping online has not affected her store. "Die-hard people who really love bookstores are never going to get out of the habit. They like the atmosphere. They like to go in, peruse the books, smell the books, hold them."

Readers like Ms. Aepli remain enthusiastic about cyber-trading. Recalling the books that once collected dust in her apartment, she gives the website a succinct, thumbs-up review: "It works really well."

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