My Salinger Year

I am a huge fan of well written memoirs (reading at least a dozen per year in recent years), and when I find a good one written by a publishing insider, I feel as if I've hit the memoir jackpot.  

When I read Joanna Rakoff's My Salinger Year back in August, I wrote this review for use on a couple of websites.  Because I did not write the review specifically for Book Chase, it might be a little rough around the edges.  The sentiments expressed in the review, however, are sincere ones:

Joanna Rakoff was fortunate enough to experience the atmosphere of an old-school literary agency, one that managed to represent some of the most respected writers of the 20th century - and she did it just in the nick of time: 1996.

As recounted in her memoir "My Salinger Year," the agency and the agents were nothing like the author expected them to be. Instead of finding a high tech (well, as high as high tech was in '96, anyway), Rakoff walked into an office that still thrived on manual typewriters, carbon copies, dictaphones, and walking down the hall to speak with co-workers. These people thought that having a copy machine was too high tech to fool with and there was no way they wanted computers in the office. When they finally got a copy machine, the typists were overjoyed - but when they got one IBM computer for the entire office and were pretty much told to stay away from it, they were reminded where they worked and for whom.

Joanna Rakoff

Rakoff was 23 years old in 1996 when she found herself working for J.D. Salinger's agent, and her encounters with the man are both interesting and endearing (especially for fans of Salinger's work). She only met him one time, as I recall, but had numerous phone conversations with the hard-of-hearing Salinger during which he shouted into the phone at her.

Joanna Rakoff grew into her job. She was little more than a secretary (1950s-style) when she started at the agency but, by the time she left just a year later, she had sold a story on her own and identified a new client for the agency via a manuscript she plucked from the company slush pile. But, ultimately, Rakoff decided to move on with her life - one in which she finally shed an anvil of a boyfriend, married and had a couple of children, divorced, and finally joined the college boyfriend she pined for throughout the length of "My Salinger Year."

Avid readers will enjoy this insider's look at a New York literary agency as seen through the eyes of someone fresh from school. It is one of the better books-on-books of 2014.

And here's a bonus book trailer featuring author Joanna Rakoff in which her enthusiasm and excitement (almost twenty years after her "Salinger year") is still evident:





This one will appeal to a diverse group of readers, I think: memoir fans, fans of Salinger, fans of books about books...it's a good one.

Backpack of Library Books Stops Bullet

First Book Struck by the Killer's Bullet

The recent shooting outside the Florida State University library should have claimed one more victim than it did.  

According to an article in USA Today, 21-year old Jason Derfuss was the shooter's first intended victim - but two books he had just stuffed into his backpack saved the student's life.  The books were so effective in stopping the bullet, in fact, that Derfuss did not even realize that he had been shot at until he emptied his backpack at home, noticed the damage to the books, and found the spent slug.

The slug passed all the way through the book pictured above but was stopped by a second book.  

To read the entire USA Today article, CLICK HERE.  The article includes a video interview with the student.

"The Top Ten Words Invented by Writers"

I have been a dedicated reader of the book pages of the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper for what must be at least two decades now, and seldom am I disappointed by the offerings there. This morning, for example, I found this little throwaway list of "The Top Ten Words Invented by Writers." 

On the list were several words whose origin surprised me.  In particular, this one:

6. Freelance

i) One who sells services to employers without a long-term commitment to any of them.
ii) An uncommitted independent, as in politics or social life .
The word is not recorded before Sir Walter Scott introduced it in Ivanhoe which, among other things, is often considered the first historical novel in the modern sense. Scott’s freelancers were mercenaries who pledged their loyalty and arms for a fee. This was its first appearance: “I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them – I will lead them to Hull, seize on shipping, and embark for Flanders; thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.”

 If you are interested in more from the list (such as the origins of words like: "hard-boiled," "serendipity," and "Banana Republic"), do click on the link to the article. 

And while you are there, take a look at all the fabulous stuff in the Guardian book pages (you can thank me later).

 

The Last Kind Words Saloon

First, the bad news.  The Last Kind Words Saloon is Larry McMurtry’s first novel in five years, and, at that pace, it could well prove to be his last.  But the good news is that it marks a return to the kind of fiction for which McMurtry is best known – and most revered – his comic debunking of the mythical history of the American West. 

The Last Kind Words Saloon is filled with real life heroes and villains from America’s past: Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Doc Holliday, Charles Goodnight, Buffalo Bill Cody, the Clanton brothers, Teddy Blue, Johnny Ringo, plus Indian chiefs Quanah Parker and Santana, among them.  Readers familiar with the historical versions of these men, however, might see them a little differently after reading this one because McMurtry, as usual, is more interested in their personal insecurities, drinking problems, general laziness, and womanizing than in the legends they ultimately became. 

Although this is a novel not long on actual plot, McMurtry packs a lot into a relatively short book (its fifty-eight chapters total only 196 pages), catching most of his characters toward the tail ends of the lives that would turn them into “cowboy legends.”  This ramble through the history of the Old West has a feeling of inevitability about it as the Earp family, always in search of a way to make the most money via the least effort required, decides to move to Tombstone, Arizona, just in time to clash with the Clanton clan at the O.K. Corral.  Fittingly, this thirty-second gunfight, one for which both the Earps and the Clantons will be forever remembered, takes up only the last half-page of The Last Kind Words Saloon – a half-page that can be read in approximately thirty seconds.

Author Larry McMurtry

But the best part of the novel is the dialogue between Wyatt and Doc that sometimes rivals that of Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae in McMurtry’s masterpiece Lonesome Dove, with Wyatt often reminding the reader of Call, and Doc sometimes sounding a bit like Gus.  McMurtry has a talent for revealing much about his characters through humorous conversation and he uses it to advantage here.  So while The Last Kind Words Saloon may be no Lonesome Dove, it is Larry McMurtry and that’s a good thing.  His fans will not want to miss this one.

Enhancing the E-Book Experience: Long Way to Go

Publishers are actually doing a little better job these days when it comes to the "covers" they attach to their e-books, but seeing a cheesy, cheap looking cover on an e-book is still one of my biggest turnoffs.  

So let's take it one step further, publishers because, let's face it, reading an e-book is not nearly the experience that reading a physical book is.  There's just too much about physical books that cannot be replicated.  But...there are a couple of things you can do easily and cheaply to bring the two experiences a little bit closer to being the same:

• Emphasize the cover art by taking as much care with it as you do with your physical book covers - front AND back.  Have the cover appear at logical break points in the e-book presentation, be it at the beginning of chapters or, at least, before already-designated section breaks.  Those books that are written to be presented in multiple parts now generally use nothing to emphasize the section breaks other than two or three blank pages.
• Take advantage of chapter breaks, especially in books that don't have more than a dozen or so chapters.  Show the cover between chapters or, at the very least, have a separate page between chapters that show the chapter number - and maybe put the cover there every three chapters, or so.

Pelican Books is one publisher that gets it:  

"When reading a book in print, we interact with the cover every time we open and close the book – we see it all the time, it reinforces our perception of the book in our minds," Pelican book designer Matt Young told Creative Review. "Whereas when reading an ebook, the cover often has a much smaller role to play – reduced to a thumbnail, and sometimes never seen again once the book has been purchased. With Pelican, the cover is echoed throughout the entire book: each chapter begins with a full-page/full-screen chapter opener, acting as an important visual signpost and echoing the cover, reinforcing the brand and the series style."

This is a great marketing tool that should create some brand consciousness for e-books, Pelican.  And here's hoping that other publishers take your ideas and run with them.  

U.S. Book Sales Up 5.7% Over 2013

According to figures just released by the Association of American Publishers, book sales are doing surprisingly well these days, thank you.  ( I say "surprisingly" because of all the doom and gloom associated with most all of the recent projections having anything to do with publishing.)

Granted, the numbers are only through August 2014 sales, but a comparison with the same eight months in 2013 shows book sales having grown by almost 6% year over year.  Some genres, and some formats, are doing better than others, of course, and that's what makes the numbers interesting.

As measured in sales dollars (total sales of $10.7 billion):

• Children's / YA e-books             Up 56.5%
• Adult e-books                            Down 0.1%

• Children's / YA board books      Up 47.1%
• Children's / YA paperbacks       Up 21.2%
• Children's / YA hardcovers        Up 18.3%

• Adult paperbacks                      Down 0.7%
• Adult hardcovers                       Down 7.2%
• Mass Market                             Down 3.4%

• University press hardcovers     Down 3.5%
• University press paperbacks    Down 4.7%
• University press e-books          Up 14.0%

• Physical audiobooks                 Down 13.4%
• Downloaded audiobooks          Up 27.7%

I suppose the best news is that, while adults may be buying fewer books for themselves, they have increased what they are spending on books for their children at a healthy clip.  As you can see from the numbers, all of the "Down" categories are in adult books - and all of the children's categories are "Up."

I find interesting, too, the obvious trend away from purchasing physical audio books to downloading them.  And, in the category of "very good news," the percentage gain on downloaded audio is more than twice the amount lost on physical sales of the books.

(For those who really enjoy number-crunching: combined sales of  "children's" categories were $1.08 billion, leaving $9.62 billion for all other categories.  Of this $9.62 billion, $0.014 billion is for audiobook sales and $0.007 billion for University Press sales.  So, despite being a mix of good news and bad news, the takeaway here is that Total Sales are up almost 6%.  And that's a good thing.