Books(in140) & Other Things

So Civilian Reads, the ripped-off inspired derivation of Canada Reads commenced today. I got stuck with had the pleasure of defending Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony. Other panelists included ACP’s Sarah Labrie and Nic Boshart, Dundurn Press’s Ashleigh Gardner, and Natalie St. Pierre.

(You can listen to the first round of debates here. In the photo, I’m the one that looks the most like a fucking hipster. Although Nic Boshart is a pretty close second.)

There were highs and lows, good times and bad, but basically if you want to hear how inarticulate I am in real life (and how much Natalie St. Pierre deserves to be on the radio), then this is the competition for you! A podcast will air every day this week until the winner is revealed!

And, if you want to hear pros show us how it’s done, check out the real Canada Reads debates next week on CBC.

Photo by Geoff Thomlinson

So. All that television and celebrity writing paid off. (Okay, I do it because I love it. This is a bonus). Suzanne Gardner and I are writing about about television. That’s right folks, expect Don’t Stop Believin’: The Unofficial Guide to Glee by Erin Balser and Suzanne Gardner to hit bookshelves in Fall 2010, courtesy of ECW Press.

If I’m nice, I’ll even autograph your copy.

I’m reading Daniel O’Thunder for the National Post’s the Afterword Reading Society. Sounds very gentlepersonly, doesn’t it?

I profiled the lovely foodie and bookish Good Egg for Torontoist.

Has Twitter completely warped your sense of time? BookExpo Canada was cancelled on Monday, and immediately after, quite a few people were twittering about what this meant for the book community and what sort of event should emerge from it’s ashes to replace it.

On Tuesday night, I had dinner with a few girlfriends and the big topic of the night was the cancellation of BEC. Well, it was for them. By then, it had been more than twenty-four hours since Reed made the announcement, BookCamp Toronto was taking shape and I was tired of talking about BEC.

But that’s an aside for another day.

Since entering publishing a little more than a year ago, I’ve been troubled by the fear-driven backwards-thinking happening (nearly) everywhere in publishing. Book publishing needed to move forward with confidence and gusto, needed to try new things, shake old things up and not to be afraid of failing. Clinging to the old way of doing things is a way to ensure its demise, but if we at least try to enter this brave new world, we’ll go down swinging.

I’m not the only one who feels that way. There’s a dynamic online community who is constantly chattering and sharing ideas and concerns about this. It’s amazing and I feel lucky to be (virtually) surrounded by and engaging with them.

Within hours of BEC being cancelled, the idea for BookCamp Toronto, an unconference modeled on the successful BookCamp in London and various other “camps” we’ve seen happening in Toronto over the past year, solidified. Hugh Mcguire of BookOven and Mitch Joel of Twist Image really took the reigns and created a community wiki for organization and secured MaRS as the location. Mark Bertils (whose blog, I think, has the smartest commentary on the state of Canadian book publishing I’ve ever read) and Alexa Clark (whose projects and ideas are always inspiring!) and myself are board too, and hopefully we’ll make this event a huge success. (It should be, I’m making buttons!)

So on June 6 at the MaRS Centre, BookCamp Toronto, the future of book publishing will be debated, discussed and challenged. Please join us by registering here (attendance is capped at 150 people. We learned from CupcakeCamp!) and be sure to share your seminar ideas and anything else you have.

Since it’s the holiday season, I’ve been shopping a lot. Every shopping trip involves a trip to a bookstore (and sometimes several-Matt can vouch for that!) and this bookstore is often Chapters/Indigo.

Every Chapters and Indigo has a giant display of Heather’s Picks–books the CEO has “read and personally loved” and this cheery little sticker is supposed to entice buyers to buy the book. “Well, Heather loved it,” they are supposed to tell themselves “my mother/friend/brother/father/Secret Santa/I surely will love it too.”

The problem with this situation is that I genuinely do not care what Heather is reading. It doesn’t help that her choices are always safe sure-fire best-sellers or books clearly on their way to that status. It doesn’t help her monthly Globe and Mail ads about these picks say nothing personal or insightful about these books. It doesn’t help her interviews with these authors are vacant, impersonal and ill-prepared. There is nothing appealing or intriguing about these selections because Heather does nothing to make herself or her picks appealing or intriguing.

This isn’t the problem with Oprah. Oprah picks books out of left field and she seems genuinely enthralled by and educated about them. Say what you will about the Oprah Bookclub stigma, she is an interesting and passionate woman, which inspires interesting and intriguing picks. Sometimes they are chick lit, something they are classics, sometimes they are cliche, but they are never boring.

So, what should Heather and Chapters/Indigo do about this?

I think they should do something along the lines of “Canada’s Picks.” Line up a string of Canadian celebrities and public figures and have them select a book-any book-with the only stipulations being that they read it, they loved it, they want others to read it, and it can’t be self-promotion in any way. Imagine how much more intriguing book selections from Peter Mansbridge, Mary Walsh, Rex Murphy, Sara Slean, the Tragically Hip, Jean Chretien, Ben Mulroney, Leah Miller and Paul Gross would be? They wouldn’t have to be A-list stars. One pick a month. Each star would do a teeny segment about their selection on a CBC show (preferably George Stromobolopous). This would be more interesting, engaging and Canadian than Heather’s Picks could aspire to be. It would be like Canada Reads. All year long.

I recognize there would be for greater resources needed to make this program work. But I think we need to be aspirational in our efforts to promote books and Heather’s Picks isn’t. It’s a shell of what Oprah’s bookclub is-and what it could be.

Image credit: Joshua Sherurcij. Found via Wikimedia.

I read a lot. I read for work (and work [and even work]), and I’ve always meant to start writing book reviews on this blog. As you can tell, that hasn’t happened. And it probably never will.

I’ve been reading a lot about Twitter and different ways it can be used. Several television characters (for example, the character on Gilmore Girls and Mad Men) have fictional twitter accounts. Fellow b5 blogger Nikki Katz is doing something pretty cool on Twitter right now–she’s chronicling the (fictional) life of a high school girl on Twitter at My Life in 140.

There’s a lot of great stuff going on over at Twitter, but it’s also pretty hard to figure out what’s working, what isn’t, who you should follow, what you should post, etc. It’s a lot of fun figuring this kind of thing out.

And in that spirit, I’ve decided that I can handle reviewing books in 140 characters. Today I launched yet another Twitter account in which to do this: Books in 140. Book reviews. In 140 characters. That’s practically no characters at all! I can do this!

Feel free to share yours by emailing me, DMing me, @replying me or however else you want!

I’m also thinking about twittering a public-domain book, one sentence per day. Or writing my own book via Twitter (ha!). I’d love to learn about more book-related projects on Twitter. What ideas do you have?

I was reading this interesting article by Ann Patchett for The Atlantic and it was about book tours. The following quote struck me as odd:

We’re a country obsessed with celebrity, and trying to make authors into small-scale Lindsay Lohans does nothing but encourage what is already a bad cultural habit. Reading, no matter what book clubs tell us, is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

I understand Patchett’s point–and her other one about authors being inherently anti-social people–but book tours and publicity isn’t about turning everyone into a Lindsay Lohan.

Yes, we live in a world of celebrity (I, of all people, should know that!), but the author is as much the product as the book. It’s about culitvating a relationship between the author and the reader, so the reader, by virtue of knowing about the author or hearing the author speak, can divulge deeper into the book and become more likely to buy books by that author in the future.

Besides, what gives authors the moral authority to choose for what reasons people buy their books?

The article itself is fascinating and raises a lot of excellent points about the nature of selling books, book tours, and using authors as promotional tools.

The Boston Globe published a piece today that questions that validity of the non-fiction book Bringing Down the House, which inspired the recent hit film 21, starring Kevin Spacey. (I actually just read the book this weekend, and saw the film the weekend before that, but that proves no point other than I have no real social life.)

Both the author, Ben Mezrich, and his editor stand behind his book. However, as with A Million Little Pieces and Love and Consequences before, such a claim has spurred controversy and many readers are feeling betrayed.

While Sebastian Junger claims doing so is “lying,” on Papercuts. His argument is that “nonfiction is reporting the world as it is, and when you combine characters and change chronology, that’s not the world as it is; that’s something else.”

Mezrich ever intended for his book to be educational or representational of “the world as it is.” He tells the Globe that he “took literary license to make it readable.”

The Globe writes that such non-fiction trends are

Much like reality television shows, the shift is fed by the sense that what audiences want is reality, but packaged with an excitement and drama that the original facts lack.

And does anyone get truly angry that The Amazing Race, Survivor and the thousands of other shows like them, play with the idea of “reality”? I know it happens, but never with the vigor as it does in the literary world.

Non-fiction books, like reality television, has a spectrum. Television viewers don’t put the Discovery Channel documentaries and MTV reality shows in the same box. Why are non-fiction books treated differently? What literary high ground exists so that movies and television can take extreme creative liberties with “reality” with relatively little controversy and books cannot?

While publishers and authors should never misrepresent their books (and this is totally the case in some books!), readers need to take greater responsibility in recognizing and understanding why they are reading that particular book. Are you reading it to learn something? Or are you reading it for entertainment value?

Such critical thinking could even inspire greater debate around literature, the media and more.

Image by Falcifer. Licensed via Creative Commons.

I want this book.

Titled ABC3D and written by Marion Bataille, it’s sure to please any typography enthusiast. It’s too bad it won’t be for sale until October.