Jewel of Medina U.S. Publication Date Moved Up

The Jewel of Medina is now scheduled to be released in the United States tomorrow according to an Associated Press article. The same article characterizes the book's U.K. publication as "in doubt."



I have not seen this book in any form but I am determined to do whatever I can to publicize it and to hopefully sell a few copies that may have otherwise remained on the shelves. I am not endorsing the quality of the book at all because I have nothing on which to base an opinion on its literary merits. I am promoting the book on principle - the principle that a bunch of murderous thugs stuck in their Dark Ages mindset should not be allowed to tell the rest of us what we can or, more importantly, cannot read.

Big Bucks for Books

Some writers, and we all know their names, have a real knack for selling huge quantities of the books they write every year. Their very names have become brands that appear on the covers of their books in a larger font size than the title of the book itself. Forbes has just published a list of the authors who put the most money in the bank between June 2007 and June 2008. There aren't many surprises:

J.K. Rowling, $300 million

James Patterson, $50 million

Stephen King, $45 million

Tom Clancy, $35 million

Danielle Steel, $30 million

John Grisham, $25 million

Dean Koontz, $25 million

Ken Follett, $20 million

Janet Evanovich, $17 million

Nicholas Sparks, $16 million

I can't imagine how Ms. Rowling can get by on only $822,000 a day, so I really have to feel sorry for Janet Evanovich having to limp along on her $47,000 a day stipend. They don't call them best sellers for nothing, do they?

Once Were Cops

Being a fan of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series, I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to Bruen’s spare, but brutally harsh, prose. (Jack Taylor fans will note that Jack makes a very brief cameo appearance in this new novel, by the way.) Bruen is not a man who wastes words on the niceties of long descriptive passages about his settings or characters. Rather, his characters speak for themselves and, through them and their words, Bruen paints a more vivid description of their world, and where they fit into it, than many authors could do half as well in a 500-page novel.

Bruen has done it again in Once Were Cops, his new novel about an Irish cop who comes to New York City on an exchange program of sorts and impacts the NYPD in negative ways that no one would have believed possible beforehand. O’Shea, who blackmailed a superior into recommending him for the transfer to New York, is a psychopath of the first degree, a man thrilled to be carrying a gun and who seems to be perfectly paired with his new NYPD partner. That partner, a veteran cop by the name of Kebar, is as much a wild man in his own way as O’Shea, and the two are soon having great success on the city’s streets.

Unfortunately for both men, though, Kebar has already drawn the attention of Internal Affairs and it seems to be only a matter of time before he finds himself jailed, or at the very least, drummed out of the department. Bruen tells his story largely through the eyes and words of O’Shea, who is finding it so hard to keep his psychopathic urges under control that he has become little more than a ticking time bomb.

Bruen masterfully builds the suspense until events force Kebar to a breaking point from which he is unlikely to escape and it becomes just a question of who will survive to pick up the pieces, and whether or not O’Shea will go down with him if he crashes.

Once Were Cops is set in a surrealistic world in which extreme violence is the order of the day. It offers a dark vision of those in charge of enforcing the law on both sides of the Atlantic, often characterizing cops as little more than criminals that wear uniforms and badges. But, even though the novel seems to be set in the Gotham City of the darkest Batman movies, it works well because of the way that Bruen presents it without wasting a single word – a “black and white” style that perfectly fits the scary world he has created.

Once Were Cops is scheduled for an October 28 release.

Rated at: 4.0

Books That Are "Stuck" on My Shelves

Thanks to Christopher Schoppa of the Washington Post for a clever idea about a category of books that many readers find on their bookshelves these days, titles that have been there for a number of years, never tossed out, but still not read. These are titles we are certain that we will read...someday.

Schoppa lists these five from his own collection:

1. A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth

2. Constantine's Sword, by James Carroll

3. Marie Antoinette, by Antonia Fraser

4. An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears

5. The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan

(See the article for Schoppa's comments regarding each of the books and why he still feels compelled to read them after all the time that he has owned them.)

Schoppa's list got me wondering about what major, unread titles I might find on my shelf and how long they've been there. These are five of the ones that jumped out at me:

1. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan - I bought this one in a pristine hard cover first edition way back in 1989 from a local bookstore. It is still in perfect mint condition, hardly ever having been opened and one book dealer offered me $385 for it a couple of years ago. When I finally get around to reading the book, I'll probably do so from a "reading copy" rather than risk doing any damage to the one on my shelves.

2. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie - I bought two copies of this one from a B.Dalton bookstore in 1989 just as all the controversy about it began to hit the press. I've never really tried to read it, and bought the books more to show my support for the author than for any other reason. I traded one copy for a perfect first edition of John Irving's The World According to Garp and am still pleased about that. Several years ago, a local dealer offered me $300 for my remaining copy but I doubt it's worth that much today.

3. Beloved - Toni Morrison - I had a hunch back in 1987 that Morrison was going to win the Pulitzer prize that year and when I spotted a dozen first editions on a bargain book table I bought them all for something like four dollars each. I've been offered anything from $150 to $250 per copy since then but haven't sold any of them, why I don't know. I tried reading this one once but found it difficult to lose myself in Morrison's style - but I do plan to read the book even though I've had 12 copies in my collection for 21 years and haven't managed it yet. Sad, that.

4. Sarum - Edward Rutherford - As fascinating as I find Stonehenge and all the theories associated with its origin, I have still not managed to read this 897-page novel from 1987. But I'm not giving up on the idea.

5. R.E. Lee (four volumes) - Douglas Southall Freeman - Many historians believe these four books to be the definitive biography of Robert E. Lee and , although I've owned them for close to 20 years, I've only managed to read the first volume - which itself is over 600 pages long. The other three volumes will be read; it's only a question of when.

What about you guys? Do you have any long-term unread books on your shelves - and will you continue to keep them indefinitely?

Nobel Prize for Literature Committee Chairman to America: Drop Dead

The head of the awards committee (some guy called Horace Engdahl) for the Nobel prize for literature went off on the state of writing in America in a big way yesterday. In reality, in his attempt to insult American authors, the man revealed more about his own petty world view and political prejudices than anything else he spoke about. He came across as a pompous simpleton, but maybe for him that's as good as it gets. According to London's Guardian newspaper:

It's been 15 long years since an American author was last honoured with a Nobel prize for literature.

Judging by the low opinion the head of the award jury holds of American writing, it is not going to happen this year.

Today, the literary world on this side of the Atlantic reacted in bemusement and anger to an extraordinary tirade against American writing by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury.

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States," he told the Associated Press today.

"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

...

The US literary community has long had an ambivalent attitude towards the Nobel prize - not helped by the long drought. The last time American to win a prize for literature was Toni Morrison in 1993.

In the years since then, Europeans have been recognised nine times, including Britain's Doris Lessing.

The prestige of Nobel prizes, because of the personal political views of its various judges, has been been drastically discounted for several years now. In effect, Nobel Prizes of all types have become something of a joke because the first standard that potential winners are judged on is their political philosophy. If that philosophy is not the same as that of the judges, they are booted from contention. It's become as simple as that. Frankly, I lost respect for the prizes after watching the politics involved in the awarding of them to people like Jimmy Carter and Albert Gore.

Mr. Engdahl is just another chump of a judge in a long line of chumps.

April Fool

I suspect that Alfred Hitchcock would have loved April Fool, John Neufeld’s darkly comic novel about a man struggling to cope with the realization that more years of his life are behind than ahead of him. April Fool, in fact, shares many of the elements often present in classic Hitchcock films of the 1950s and 1960s: suspense, a gallows sense of humor, and quirky, often unlikable and weak, characters that get into situations way over their heads.

George Willetts and his wife Peg, in search of what they see as a more suitable lifestyle for people their age, have moved from New York City to small town Connecticut. Peg has settled in rather nicely to her new life but George is not adjusting nearly so well. George, in fact, has developed the unfortunate habit of imagining that he is having a fatal heart attack during the wee hours of the morning and has become quite the regular at his local hospital emergency room. He has even admitted to his analyst that his one remaining desire in life is to have one last romantic fling so that he will be able to die in the knowledge that he truly experienced life and did not waste his final years.

George, ever hopeful that he will find an attractive woman for that one last fling, largely confines his search to the internet where he exchanges romantic email fantasies with would-be lovers. But that all changes one day with his chance meeting of well-known author, Valerie Herrick, a beautiful woman who seems as attracted to George as he is to her.

To say that George is smitten by Valerie is an understatement, so once she makes it clear that she wants no part of a relationship in which she plays the role of “the other woman,” George has to decide just how much he is willing to do to keep her in his life. He is a world-class liar, having worked most of his life as campaign consultant to various politicians of all stripes, so he has little difficulty in explaining the presence of a wife in a way that keeps Valerie on the hook, at least for the short term.

But George wants much more than the kind of long distance relationship he and Valerie have limited themselves to, and he knows that he must decide, once and for all, whether or not he is willing to do whatever it takes to become a real part of Valerie’s life. And that is when George learns who he really is.

April Fool does not offer the laugh-out-loud variety of dark comedy. Rather, John Neufield uses humor to get inside George Willetts in a way that keeps him from coming across as quite the villain that he probably is. George, though, is really kind of a dolt and watching him scheme his way into the arms of his new lover is a bit like watching a train wreck – hard to look away from even though you anticipate the impact of the crash.

Rated at: 3.5