Issue of December 27, 2009

Our last issue of 2009 is filled with memories. Memories of the season in nineteenth-century bookmarks, memories of a twentieth-century sports rivalry that is still unmatched, memories of significant pain that provide a comfort and a hope. We wish you a happy and healthy new year.

When David Mitchell received a book about Auschwitz, he felt that reading it prior to Thanksgiving would give him a particular reason to be grateful that he was “born during the relative safety and security of the post-war years.” Little did he know that once read, the book would open far more to him than the horror, terrible as that was. And as he worked his way through the events that followed the reading he came to the conclusion that suffering and the memory of it provides, in its own way, a “comfort, and a hope, for our future” in Life Out of Death.

Laine Farley takes the holiday season back more than 100 years with bookmarks from the late nineteenth century. They have a “distinctive look in terms of their subject matter and . . .  fonts,” she says, and that helped her to date other anonymous bookmarks of the same period. What she also found was plants we today associate with Christmas was not always the same back then, in the era of fascination with the natural world in Christmas Bookmarks Circa 1880.

Legendary rivalries span all types of work but perhaps there are none more worthy of being a legend than the one that took place between 1969 and 1978. Pitted against each other, two colleges and two coaches—Ohio State University’s Woody Hayes and the University of Michigan’s Bo Schembechler—waged war on the football field. A new book on that infamous rivalry has Pete Croatto praising its character, storytelling, and the larger ideas that came of the competition in Coaching at the Edge of the World.

Lauren Roberts has the sense that the rapidly approaching 2010 is going to be different for her. But she’s not counting on being “lucky” as much as she is planning to be lucky with her choices in Moving Ahead.

How to Win Editors’ Hearts

I’ve mentioned before that one of my most important jobs here at BiblioBuffet is to hire the best writers and then get out of their way. It’s a clichéd phrase, but it’s also a truth that Nicki and I live by. All the writers choose their own topics, subjects, books to review; they offer their own opinions and they do it in their own way. All we require is that whatever they say they say it well.

We are proud of our contributors who do say it well. And one of the reasons for that—aside from their honed and practiced talent—is that freedom we offer them because we firmly believe that if a writer writes about her or his passion then the writing is going to be passionate. It can’t be anything less.

That point was driven home to me yesterday when I received an e-mail from Pete Croatto who writes “The Athletic Supporter,” a column centered on sports. In his introductory essay, Pete described himself as “someone who loves sports books and collects them.” But Pete is more than someone who parks himself in a sports book; he is the type of person who while breathing it in analyzes it, debates it, draws ideas from it, revels in it. And if I didn’t know that before, I knew it when I read his e-mail in which he declined to review an offered sports book that dealt with steroid use by athletes. “Thanks for understanding,” he wrote. “I want to review stuff that excites me, and the whole PED/baseball nonsense leaves me sad. There’s so much lying and hypocrisy involved that I’ve become exhausted plowing through it all.”

What sent my heart soaring, however, was his high compliment to the editorial team (Managing Editor Nicki Leone and me):

The one thing I love about writing for you and Nicki is that I have complete and absolute freedom to write on anything relevant to sports literature, no matter how far afield it might be. There’s more to being a book lover than just reviewing the latest titles—it seeps into my everyday life, and I relish the chance to get into that with readers. You and Nicki understand that the site is built on passion, and that goes beyond a standard review template. Don’t get me wrong: I love reviewing books, but at BiblioBuffet I feel like a kid in a candy store.

Again, Lauren, I can’t thank you enough for giving me the freedom and the vehicle to publish my zealotry.

With writers like that, how can I not be in love with them?

Merry Christmas to All!

I know the title is not PC so if you celebrate another type of holiday feel free to substitute your own title. But for me, it’s Christmas. Always has been, always will be. I love, love, love this time of year, though I admit living on the central California coast it’s not as exciting as it could be. I am filled with envy at Book Maven and want to know where she lives. Because it is my dream to live in a place with a scene like that.

I assure you that the Los Angeles smog has not drifted north far enough to have gotten to my brain. I have always loved cold and rain and fog and snow. I thrive in winter, rejoice in cold, come alive at the sight and smell and sound and feel of the white season. No doubt there are a number of you who would trade places with me in a second. Santa Barbara is known as the “Nice” of the United States, but you know what? I am not enthralled with it.

I think bookshelves and reading, and writing for and editing an online publication are made for quiet nights at home. Wool blankets and flannel sheets, feet encased in warm socks, an oversized New Yorker cartoon sweatshirt for a nightshirt, cats draped on me, and a book in my lap could not be bested even by the ocean air and crash of the waves at high tide.

So I think this multi-generational (second on one side, fourth on the other) California native will be getting out of the state in 2010. At least I am going to try my darndest. And if I succeed the picture I show next year at this time might very well be my own yard.

Issue of December 20, 2009

This week’s issue is unusual in that you’ll find the contributors have written all over the map. From somber to thoughtful, hilarious to poignant, each review or essay or story offers a thoughtful, take on the issues of family, relationships, self-perception and holiday expectations.

With Christmas rapidly approaching, the time for shopping is coming to a close. Lauren Roberts’s list of links to literary gifts, the final in her 2009 series, draws to a close with more shopping suggestions (though you’d better hurry), in Shopping—the Final Week.

Nicki Leone recently found herself facing a startling and disturbing reminder of the worst terrorist incident in our country when, while listening to a playlist on her new iPod, her own voice came at her with “an earlier, younger and grieving version” of herself trying to talk about books in the aftermath of 9/11 in Voice from the Past . . . My Own.

Mark Bastable returns to BiblioBuffet with a hilarious short story designed to put the snark in your Christmas and a smile on your face in Granny Vents. You tell us whether you want this granny in your life.

Lindsay Champion’s most recently read memoir had an unusual aspect: it wasn’t written by the memoirist but by her daughter because the subject was not only unable to read or write but died eight years before the book was published. And though the daughter’s eyes and experiences may have overlaid her mother’s perceptions, the lesson taken away by both writer and reviewer is that strengths are to be shared and the rest . . . well, the rest may not much matter. Read about it in My Mother’s Story.

Dystopian novels are becoming an increasingly popular subgenre in the young adult market where adults are also often seeking them out. They’re not new—books like Brave New World and Animal Farm also fit the description—but these new books offer the opportunity to simultaneously wallow in the terribleness of today’s world and feel uplifted by the idea that it, painful as it is, can be better than the novel’s world. Or so says Lauren Baratz-Logsted in Ah, Dystopia! (And don’t forget: you have the opportunity to win a copy of each of Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s first four books in her Sisters 8 series. These are for readers ages 6-10.)

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanzaa to all!

Bookmarks Make Me Blush

Not actually. What is making me blush today is the article by columnist Robert Gray in today’s Shelf Awareness, the e-newsletter for the book trade. “Collecting Bookmarks” is the resultof his recent column about his discovery on bookmarks in which he talked about how a short story he had read led him on a curious journey though his own library:

There are few objects in a reader’s life that are more ubiquitous yet personal than the common bookmark. This realization was reinforced last week as I read Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s story, “The Bookmark,” from his wonderful collection, Memories of the Future (translated by Joanne Turnbull for NYRB Classics).

The story, he says, inspired him, and he talks about finding several “old friends” that reminded him of “voyages we had taken together.”

Hidden in an old, broken down Modern Library edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was a bookmark from the Hartford Bookshop, Rutland, Vt. Although the bookmark reassured me that the shop was “est. 1835,” the sad truth is that the Hartford did not make it beyond the 1970s.

A 17-year-old copy of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient preserved a black bookmark from Vintage International promoting Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières by linking it back to back with the Booker Prize winner. I must have kept it because I was a handselling fool for both books.

He also asked his readers to “journey round your shelves and see what ancient bookmark treasures are hidden there. So I did. Then I told him how the discovery of a clump of golden brown hair (male) had been in a old book I had picked up, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, had been the start of my collection of bookmarks. I shared what bookmarks were my favorites and why. I talked about why I began to collect them. Then I forgot about our conversation. Until today.

Robert, thank you! We may have just converted a few people because I’ve already had three requests for BiblioBuffet bookmarks. My day has certainly been made brighter!

‘Tis the Season to Shop

But I hate to shop. I truly do. I loathe even the idea of getting in my car, driving downtown, finding a parking space, and then wandering walkways and aisles, while my feet hurt and my patience ebbs, looking at stuff—just stuff—in hopes of finding something that isn’t really what I need at all.

Twenty years ago I would have said that shopping was a fabulous way to spend my free time, and I would not have been exaggerating. But over the intervening years the feeling that it was fun changed until it became something to be avoided as much as possible, farmers’ markets and occasionally bookstores excepted. Oh, and now my annual shopping spree for BiblioBuffet’s readers.

My preparation for my annual holiday shopping columns generally begins in October or early November when I create a database with columns for category (furniture, bookmarks, jewelry, etc.), company name, and link. I then google “gifts for book lovers” and “gifts for readers” among other terms. I also check shops at well-known museums and libraries. There are numerous small online shops, nonprofit organizations that help people from second- and third-world countries become financially independent by making handcrafted items, and Etsy, the online store for independent handcrafters. Then I hit as many virtual stores as I can searching out products for book lovers and readers.

When I find things I like I add them to my database. This usually results in several hundred items, which is far more than I can use. So the next step is narrowing them down. It’s not easy. How does one choose among dozens of bookmarks or hundreds (yes, hundreds) of journals?

Once I’ve narrowed down my selection—the final number of items depends on how many “holiday shopping” editor’s letters I intend to do. This year I had three (number two is up now), and those three have a combined total of 170 links.

Have you ever linked more than fifty times in a single piece? I can tell you it’s not fun. It especially not fun when you have a half-dozen (or more) in a single paragraph, and you find you that because you were tired or got distracted that you are missing one or did the same one for two different items thus throwing all the ones behind it, in that and subsequent paragraphs out of place—something you (I) may not discover until you (I) go to post the piece online. As I said, not fun.

Other than making all the links, though, I do enjoy this. Anything related to books and reading interests me even though I wouldn’t want to own most of it. (I am a minimalist, and prefer not to have my  home filled with “stuff”—other than books and bookmarks, that is.) This year, however, I found something I want very much: a shelf-sized reproduction of Edward Gorey’s stage production of Dracula.

Since I even have the shelf space for it, I think I might order it this week. It would make a lovely addition to one of the top shelves where the ever-curious cats can’t get to it. What about you? I’d be interested in hearing if any of you found some gifts through my lists, and if so what they were? Are there any changes you’d like to see me change for next year?

Issue of December 13, 2009

What’s new on the menu at BiblioBuffet this week? Let’s say we have a nice selection of writings that range from spicy to tender. And we promise that each one of them is delicious.

In Thriller, Thriller, Burning Bright? Lev Raphael examines the kind of model  The Da Vinci Code created for subsequent thriller writers, and evaluates a NYT-besteller with Jewish themes that has clearly been conceived in the shadow of Dan Brown’s audacious megahit.

Pickling has been a part of human culinary existence almost from the beginning. Without refrigeration, spices like salt and processes like pickling were used to preserve many foods. They still are, but today they are used because we have acquired a taste for them rather than because they are needed to keep foods fresh. For most Americans, though, pickling means the pickled cucumber. In Pickling Bookmarks, Lauren Roberts explores the history of this snack and how it came to mean so much for the world of hamburgers and other foods with which it is unquestionably associated.

What is the difference between a professional sportswriter and a fan when talking about sports? After all, professional sportswriters are perceived as having one of the best jobs in the world. How could that not be but perfect for the sports fan? Pete Croatto discovered, through his extensive reading, is that it is actually the worst ways to be involved in sports for the intimate view is like viewing acne close-up. Far better to be the amateur who follows sports for fun, he says, in Keeping the Passion Alive by Keeping Away.

David Mitchell takes a look at a poignant book that reminds him that the holiday season has memories of a different kind for some people. In mid-December 1944, what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge began. For a battle to take place when none was expected was horrible; for it to become the nightmare it did is something that ought to be remembered and honored. David shares both his feelings and his gratitude for the soldiers who were part of it and through a book that honors their memory in Lest We Forget.

And in The Shopping Continues . . . (part two of three), Lauren Roberts continues her exhaustive hunt through the virtual stores in search of literary gifts. No matter what your budget, you’ll find things that any book lover and reader on your list will enjoy. Toys, clothes, jewelry, bookcases, bookmarks, bookplates, bookends, bookholders, books, stationery, journals, kitchenware, games, and more are listed and linked here.

The Amusement Park of Your Mind

BiblioBuffet has a page called Literary Amusements that is composed of two parts: Literaria du Jour and Reading Remarks. This page is intended to be a kind of drive-by place for readers to stop in for a quick literary snack between issues. We promise it won’t spoil your dinner, nor will you have to brush your teeth.

The left side, which is called Literaria du Jour, is where you will find literary factoids. These can be amusing words, some information about an author or a book, a bit of lilterary history, or some unusual truth or fact about related issues. The right side, Reading Remarks, offers quotes from famous, infamous or unknown people about reading and books (including closely related subjects like censorship, libraries, etc.).

It changes daily except Sundays so keeping this going on a six-day-a-week schedule takes some doing. Finding things to include involves a lot of research, both online and in books. I read interviews, articles, blog and discussion forum posts, trade pieces, essays. I will follow links nearly to the end of the earth. I read literary magazines and book reviews. In fact, I’ll take my quotes and facts from almost anywhere I can trust and/or verify.

While googling “literary quotes” about five months ago I came across an online edition of a nineteenth-century book that was full of them, many of them unseen before. I couldn’t copy from the PDF version of course, but there was an html version that because of its narrow side margins, required I tediously copy and paste it in relatively small chunks to avoid overloading and shutting down the Word document. Just that part took me more than a week.

Because html made the text lines short in the Word version, I was looking at 396 pages. There was also extra spacing where it didn’t make sense, and names were in the center of quotes. In short, it was baffling and frustrating, and it required time for me to figure things out. I spent eight weeks of night-after-night work closing up lines and googling names to match them to the quotes. Were it not for the fact that many of these quotes were wonderful and were apparently nowhere else on the web I would have given up. But I didn’t—and I am glad.

While I only have about two years’ worth of “Literaria,” I now have 1,530 or four years, two months, and ten days’ worth of quotes. And with all the new material constantly being generated online it just keeps increasing. My database is now a nice combination of quotes from Plato’s time to 2009.  And since I don’t often remember them, I am frequently as amused, as annoyed, or as intrigued by them as any other BiblioBuffet reader.

Issue of December 6, 2009

In this week’s issue, we have some new and fabulous reading for you. We hope you are hungry for good books because two writers—Nicki Leone and Lindsay Champion—turned their enthusiasm toward culinaria. Lauren Baratz-Logsted, no cook but a great interviewer, has turned her attention to the second author to be enticed into her space. And Lauren Roberts went shopping—for you!

The holiday shopping season, love it or loathe it, is here. And if it includes readers and book lovers, Lauren has been out shopping for you. Not literally, but for this week and the next two, she will be listing and talking about all kinds of gifts for literary person in your life, or even for you in all price ranges. Think of it as having a personal shopper to come up with the ideas and do the work so you don’t have to in A Shoppin’ We Will Go.

Soup, according to Nicki, soothes, heals, calms, restores, and enlivens the spirit all while making the house smell wonderful. Black Bean soup. Creamy tomato soup. Chicken and noodle or chicken and rice. Even Campbell’s Alphabet Soup. But it’s Hot and Sour Soup that has eluded Nicki’s grasp until now. Fortunately, her search for a good recipe has come to an end with a new cookbook she found that has put her need for take-out versions out of business in Soup Magic.

More food. Lindsay finds that her dream of cooking school may not be all it’s whipped up to be. Or maybe she should say it’s more. When something that she have long dreamed of doing meets a new memoir by a woman who had the same dream and followed it to the end. It didn’t destroy Lindsay’s dream, but it did kick some reality into it in Écoutez Votre Cœur.

Lauren has been out seeking more victims for her “Disrespectful Interviewer” series, and this time she drew into her web the young adult author, A.S. King. Silly Lauren. She thought she was getting A.S. Byatt, so she had to make a quick switch. Fortunately King appears not to have noticed, and she graciously came up with some smart answers in The Disrespectful Interviewer: Dissing A.S. King.

The Ten Databases of BiblioBuffet

You  may be singing the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” but I tend to favor the “Ten Databases of BiblioBuffet.” And not just at this time of the year.

Running BiblioBuffet actually requires the consistent use of the ten separate Excel databases. Without them, it would be impossible to stay on track because there are so many factors that make up the site. I use every one of these regularly:

• Book Festivals
• Columns
• Contacts
• Contest Winners
• Editor’s Letter Recommendations
• Literaria du Jour
• Publicists
• Publishers
• Quote du Jour
• Requested & Reviewed Books

I’m actually amused at how many I use because when I first got the MS Office program I could not imagine what I would use a spreadsheet for. Accountants use spreadsheets, for god’s sake. I  even asked my computer guy about deleting it, but he advised against it, telling me that even if I never used the program there was more than enough room for it. So I let it be. Until I began BiblioBuffet and realized I needed to stay on top of certain pieces of information.

The first database I set up is still the primary one I use though it has become more sophisticated as BiblioBuffet has grown. “Columns” is what enables me to track the year, the week (running from 1-52 each year), the publication date, column name and frequency, columnist name, payment, and the title of current piece. This is the database I could not live without. And because of that I frequently back it up.

Following closely on the “must have” list are the Literaria du Jour and Quote du Jour databases. These two are places where I stash the bite-sized information I use on our Literary Amusements page. As you may know, this page is updated six days a week. Several months ago, a friend made me laugh by mentioning that she was amazed I would spend so much time online each day looking for tidbits and quotes to use. Uh huh. I simply go to the Word sheet on which are copied approximately two weeks’ worth of tidbits from each database, and copy and paste one piece of Literaria and one quote into the site each night. As of today, the quotations database contains 1,527 quotes to date or four years, two months, and seven days’ worth about books, reading, or related issues like libraries and censorship. Not one of them is a duplicate of another. The literaria database is smaller, possessing not quite two years’ worth of tidbits, and I am constantly on the look out for more material to add to it, actually to both. (In next week’s post I will detail the whys and hows and wherefores of the research that goes into the pieces for Literary Amusements.)

The Book Festivals database came about when I decided to begin listing the upcoming book festivals in my weekly editor’s letter. There are book festival pages on our Table of Contents (or home) page, but these are not always up to date. One of the most frustrating things is their changes that don’t always get recorded in time because of my lack of time. (However, I do go in periodically and make the changes.) The database allows me to update more regularly since it contains the date, state, festival name, link, and city, precise information I need for the letter. As one year’s festival ends, I search out information on the date for the next year. If it is not up yet, I mark the date in red to remind myself to look later for it.

You’d think Contacts and Publicists could be merged into one database, don’t you? Well, I guess they could. Technically. But practically, I prefer to have the publicists separated out since they are most often the people with whom I interact. There’s also the fact that career movement in that area seems . . . busy at times. So having not just their names, titles, e-mail addresses, phone and fax numbers, agency or publisher names, addresses, and important notations, but also the last date of contact is essential. And having them separated out from all my other professional contacts is the only way to keep up with this.

Closely aligned with the publicists’ database is the the newest database, Requested & Reviewed Books. That one incorporates columns for Requested Date, Received Date, and Reviewed Date (each with a checkmark column behind it), Book Title, Company, Publicist, and E-mail. Yes, I actually keep these filled in. It’s essential if a publicist wants to know if we have received a book, and I like knowing I can answer for any book that we received.

Contest Winners is where I keep track of who wins the books we give away. With every new column of “Writer-in-Residence,” Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s bi-weekly column, readers can win one or more of her YA books. And just last week I gave away a lovely hardcover of the book Lindsay Champion reviewed in her column, Memoirama. We even have an upcoming interview with the Penguin Classics staff about their unique imprint, and have several books we will be giving away then. Those winners will be included in this database.

Finally, in my editor’s letter I offer several recommendations. These include Upcoming Book Festivals, The Pub House (“introductions” to smaller publishers and interesting imprints of larger houses and their specialties), Of Interest (anything that catches my eye), and This Week (where I try to talk about and link to literary goings-on). In addition to the Book Festivals database noted above, I have two other databases that keep me on the straight path: Editor’s Letter Recommendations and Publishers. The former is where I keep a running list of publication dates and what recommendation I made for The Pub House, Of Interest, and This Week so I don’t repeat myself. Publishers is a constantly updated database of large publishers with their imprints, university publishers, and medium- and small-sized commercial publishers, a list of what kinds of books they publish, and a link. Here is where I note the date I wrote about them for The Pub House.

Some people are amazed I can keep all the information straight. The truth and the secret is these databases. I could not do it without them. They do take time, more than I’d like, to keep up, but they are my maps, my set of directions, my guides. And believe me, if I didn’t have them BiblioBuffet would end up with all its roads, highways, detours, dead ends, and signs piled up in one huge hole. It wouldn’t be a pretty sight. Nor would it be a pretty site.