Page 99 Test

Via The High Definite, the Page 99 Test. Based on the Ford Madox Ford quote, "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you," this website provides the 99th pages of various published and unpublished authors.

Until today I had never heard of neither the 99th page rule nor Ford Madox Ford, who has an awesome name.

Scurrilous Amazon Reviews

Back to another of my favourite topics, online book reviews! Some Amazon reviews get attacked by paid hackers.

It all started when Rosie Alison’s novel The Very Thought Of You, was nominated for the Orange Prize, a prestigious award given to women authors in the united Kingdom whose books are passed over for other prizes. Alison’s book had not only been passed over for prizes but for any attention at all. But all that changed when the nominee list was announced: suddenly The Very Thought Of You was assailed by a barrage of nasty reader reviews on Amazon. “I feel cheated!” “One of the worst books I’ve ever, ever read.” “This book is so irredeemably awful that I didn’t get past page 58.”

Are Book Genres Being Replaced by Tags?

From io9: Are book genres being replaced by tags? Eric Rosenfield debates whether or not standard genres like 'fantasy' and 'sci fi' (and, one assumes, 'romance') can still be used to classify books when books have been splintered into tiny little niches that potentially cross over into multiple designations. Have an excerpt:

The thing is though, the handful of categories that fiction is still sold under-as classified on Barnes and Noble.com, "Fiction & Literature", "Mystery & Crime", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Teens", "Romance", "Horror", "Thrillers", "Westerns" (and lumped in is Poetry which is not fiction, and Graphic Novels which are another medium altogether)-are accidents of history and technology, and even these clear demarkations are of recent vintage; bookstores did not even have separate science fiction, mystery or romance sections until the 1980s or so, and books specifically marketed to niche groups were relegated primarily to book clubs, mail order, specialty stores, and if one was lucky, newsstands, all except the latter being where the modern genre categories really emerged after the implosion of the pulp magazine markets in the 1940s and of the bulk of the science fiction magazines in the 50s. And yet we now take these categories for granted and talk about "transcending" them as if they had such impenetrable physical form that they can only be passed over metaphysically.

The world that gave rise to these categories is fading rapidly into nonexistence. The new bookstores are not circumscribed by retail space, they're the limitless possibilities of a search box. We live in a world in which most any book you can think of can be downloaded to your home, and where anyone with an Internet connection can fill a blog with reviews, interviews, news items, and free-form ramblings about whatever she thinks is important. That is a paradigm shift on a level we don't fully understand yet.

I no longer believe we should stop using terms like science fiction and fantasy and so on; those terms can be useful in describing certain things, certain ways of reading. But their status as hard-and-fast slots into which we plug in all of our books is already starting to fade, as the once nebulous megacategory of science fiction and fantasy splinters into steampunk, urban fantasy, paranormal romance and so on, subcategories that once upon a time might have been merely commented on but which because of the 'Net have blossomed into subcultures all their own, distinct and often non-communicating with the groups reading the space opera or sword and sorcery that since Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings have dominated science fiction and fantasy respectively.

It is a big excerpt.

Bad Book Review Leads to Libel Case

Why do I keep coming back to book reviews? And how did I manage to fall behind in posting during Reading Week, which required no reading at all? So it's another three posts on one day, bam bam bam, thank you.

The author of a book about law has charged a reviewer with libel. In France! The author is French but lives in Israel; the reviewer is German but reviewed the book in English. Supposedly the French view of defamation includes 'views attacks on honor as a form of assault.'

Note to self: don't tell 'your mama' jokes in France.

Ms. Calvo-Goller did not respond to two e-mails seeking comment. In her correspondence with Professor Weiler, she said the review he published “may cause harm to my professional reputation and academic promotion.”

So may the prosecution she started.

Brian Leiter, a law professor at the University of Chicago, assessed Ms. Calvo-Goller’s case on his blog on philosophy and academic freedom. “The author has obviously done more damage to her reputation by making this criminal complaint than would have been possible by any book review, let alone the one in question,” he wrote.

Ta mere est si grosse que...

Loving Bad Writing

What constitutes bad writing, anyway? Apparently, cliches. Laura Miller talks about why we love bad writing, prompted by an article by Edward Docx. From reading Miller's article, I was expecting Docx's to sound much more snotty than it actually was. It wasn't very snotty at all.

One unexpected bit from Laura Miller's article: C.S. Lewis wondered why people liked bad writing, too. He even wrote about it.

Until recently, hardly anyone considered why some readers might actually prefer clichés to finely crafted literary prose. A rare critic who pondered this mystery was C.S. Lewis, who -- in a wonderful little book titled "An Experiment in Criticism" -- devoted considerable attention to the appeal of bad writing for what he termed the "unliterary" reader. Such a reader, who is interested solely in the consumption of plot, favors the hackneyed phrase over the original

... because it is immediately recognizable. 'My blood ran cold' is a hieroglyph of fear. Any attempt, such as a great writer might make, to render this fear concrete in its full particularity, is doubly a chokepear to the unliterary reader. For it offers him what he doesn't want, and offers it only on the condition of his giving to the words a kind and degree of attention which he does not intend to give. It is like trying to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay.

A hieroglyph of fear. What a great turn of phrase. Is that the difference between good writing and bad writing? Does it matter, so long as we enjoy it?

Bad Reviews and Typewriter ASCII Art

The sad world of bad book reviews and responding to bad book reviews. (Perhaps that last one is a cautionary tale against Twitter?)

And then, just because I couldn't quite bring myself to use an entire post for this:

Your Favourite Book in Four Panels

Sadly, the contest is closed now, but CBC Canada's All in a Day radio show asked for people to send in summaries of their favourite books in four panels in honour of Jeff Lemire, one of five finalists in the Canada Reads contest. His novel, Essex County, is the first graphic novel to make the finals. The article shows a few entries; I wish they'd had more. My favourite was The Great Gatsby as rendered by Ian Martin, 17.

The facial expressions are awesome. I love the panel where Gatsby demands Daisy look at the money he earned so as to win her love: "LOOK AT IT". The hand drawing and (lack of) punctuation remind me of Kate Beaton, whom I apparently pimp out at every opportunity.

LOOK AT IT

Better Book Titles

Also nabbed from Miss Kathleen at Mentalfloss: Better Book Titles!

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

Some of my favourites:

Protective Literature

If you can't spend under three minutes watching, you were best off with 'Witz', though one commenter pointed out the books 'would be constricted under a coat' while the books in the video just flew open. Another stated they should have tried Mark Twain's autobiography, too. Me, I was sold with the jaunty declaration, "Let's shoot some books!"

Maybe that's not the best thing for a wannabe librarian to be amused by, but really, it's for protection, folks.

Steve Donoghue's Worst Fiction of 2010

Steve Donoghue did not like these books. Pretty brutal!

Crace has always thought it acceptable to waste the readers’ time (and money) with pointless, meandering digressions on any little subject that happens to be fascinating him at the moment he sat down to his computer. As a result, his stack of tellingly slender novels are as stinky and insubstantial as a rack of farts. This novel, like his previous two, doesn’t even bother to conclude – it just appears, offends, and vaguely dissipates.

Some Great Book Suggestion Sites

Pilfered from my Reference class today, here are some great sites to go to for book suggestions:

Book Spot is a portal site with links to other sites based on genre.

All Readers has this crazy search function that goes by plot, main character, main adversary, setting, and style. You can also specify how much (percentage-wise) of the book you would like to be violence or feelings or a few other things. You can specify the gender of the main character and whether they have special powers or not, how smart they are, how much violence they use, and a whole host of other options. Seriously, if you just click a few times and play around you'll be amazed.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

'Tis a pitiful showin' on the blogs t'day fer Talk Like a Pirate Day! All ye librarrians must be swashin' their buckles an' such to post about it. Here be Matt Stagg's list o' pirate books over on Suvudu!

As fer meself, I be recommendin' 'On Stranger Tides' by Tim Powers fer yer readin' delight, an alternate history involvin' Blackbeard, voodoo magic, an' puppet shows.

Fer yer viewin' pleasure, here be Flickarrr's Talk Like a Pirate Day photostream.

I looted the Pirate Name Generator from Dundee City's library's page. 'Tis not Lagomorph Watson today, lads. 'Tis Gangrenous Evelyn Napier!

Bless the internet fer allowin' us our made-up holidays!

Yarrr?

Sweet Valley High Drinking Game

Oh, wow. My sister had a pretty long run of the Sweet Valley High books and I wound up reading them as a kid. They seemed okay at the time, even if they were girly (ewww), but in hindsight some of that stuff was just awful. Erin at Forever Young Adult has been rereading the books and reviewing them. With a drinking game!

I did not remember how crazy this stuff was.

Regina, having never experienced cocaine before even though her mom was a model and her parents are rich and she went to school with rich kids all her life, is all “why are you carrying around powdered sugar?” Everyone makes fun of her ignorance, which leads her to deciding to sample the cocaine. She snorts two lines, and then has a heart attack and dies.

Man, Regina Morrow kicking the bucket. That was maybe the one storyline that I can actually remember! It was sad, because Regina was so pretty. Or something like that. Anyway, if you ever read these books, this is hilarious. It's hilarious even if you just want to see what Young Adult fiction was like in the 80's. Not quite Degrassi crazy, but pretty crazy nonetheless.

Morgan Rosenburg

On the subject of crazy books, please see Baltimore City Paper's story on Morgan Rosenburg by Blake De Pastino.

In a nutshell: this guy named Morgan Rosenburg who lies about himself a lot writes books about a fictional guy named Morgan Rosenburg who goes out, has sex with, and then kills women. With extreme, explicit violence. Seriously, that's some pretty nasty stuff just quoted in the article above.

Self-insertion stories are nothing new; people have been writing them for a long time, often creating fan fiction, stories set in the universes of popular TV shows. Some of the first appearances of fan fiction were based on the original Star Trek series, where there were few women in the cast. While some fan fiction is concerned with the stories of the setting, quite a bit is self-insertion and can get kind of disturbing. At first confined to mailing lists and the like, with the advent of the internet people's stories got an even bigger audience. And now with vanity publishing, just about anyone can release a book without the benefit of things like editors and psychiatrists. Morgan Rosenburg is one of those people!

Video Game Tie-In Books

There are lots of books out there written as promotional tie-ins with video games. Warcraft, HALO, and Dragon Age come to mind. In some video games the backstory is highly detailed and complex; those who enjoy the game might find the expanded stories interesting (I, for one, am tempted by the Dragon Age books, as I'm fond of the setting).

The quality of these books is usually pretty suspect, however (and that's one reason why I haven't read the Dragon Age novels). Sometimes it's hilariously suspect, like in Elemental: Destiny's Embers by Brad Wardell, reviewed by Unamommer here:

Now generally when you introduce an important character to the audience for the first time, you want to give a strong impression of that character, be it through personality or physical traits. This is what we get when pretty, pretty Princess Angenica is first introduced.

She was wearing a long cloak. Underneath it, he saw, was a dress.

The dress is actually my favorite character in the book. A few short pages later she is accosted by bad guys and they have a conversation about the dress. Her thoughts reveal to us the backstory and political importance of the dress. After she is rescued from the bad guys by the clever orphan boy she has a crush on and a handsome knight, she flings herself into her father’s arms while sobbing and he stops to notice the dress before noticing the knife wound on her neck. That’s how badass the dress is. Later in the story other dresses get introduced. The author even makes the mistake of trying to make them more attractive than the dress.

Yes, she had been wearing dresses those last few months at the Keep, but this was different. This was a gown. This was silk or something.

Silk or something can never stand up to the awesomeness of the dress and shame on the author for trying to steal its spotlight.

...Wow. Silk! Or something! I kind of want to read the book now.

10 Great Books for Traumatizing Children

10 Great Books for Traumatizing Children! It's from Cracked, so you probably won't look like a serious professional if you read this where someone can see you.

Jane Yolen's Foiled

WIRED ran a small review of Jane Yolen's Foiled. Where was all this good YA fiction when I was young? I keep seeing books I would've loved that I'm tempted to pick up even today.

Rocket Men: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

So this book called Rocket Men was published. Supposedly all about the history of space travel, it is factually incorrect yet receiving positive reviews from the press. Does no one fact-check these days?

I suggest authors and reviewers who get space history wrong be required to take a punch from Buzz Aldrin.

Sabotage Via Amazon Reviews

From The Guardian: a historian's wife wrote disparaging reviews of the books of his rivals.

Well, that's certainly... loyal.

Mean Amazon Reviews of Classic Books

As someone who loathed Sense and Sensibility, mean Amazon comments about classic books make me laugh. Though mean-mouthing The Diary of Anne Frank seems a bit much.

Recognizing a book for its value capturing a time period or even what its being popular means is still important, but man, did I hate those S&S characters.