Continuing on a Southern theme, today is Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), the final day to let the good times roll before the Lenten season brings all celebrations to a halt for 40 days. (As a child in a small Alabama town, my mother was often denied a birthday party because her April 7 birthday usually fell during Lent.) While everyone thinks New Orleans is the birthplace of Mardi Gras, the first celebrations actually took place in the port city of Mobile, Alabama in 1703. N.O. was a johnny-come-lately to the party in 1853.  Mardi Gras means food, lots of delicious food, and if you want to sample some of Mobile’s specialties, check out Bay Tables: A Collection of Recipes from the Junior League of Mobile. Of course, if crayfish dip doesn’t appeal to you, try some of the unusual dishes concocted at the Girl Scouts Tombigbee Council’s Celebrity Chef Cookie Challenge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The key ingredient was a box of Girl Scout cookies. Winning recipes included Girls Night Out Lemon Chicken Casserole with Girl Scouts Lemonade Cookies and Peanut Butter and Jelly Pie. Bon appetit!

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) has announced its long list of nominees for the 2007 SIBA Book Award.Twenty-six novels, 24 nonfiction titles, 19 children’s books, 12 cookbooks, and six volumes of poetry made it past the first round of voting; following a selection of the finalists, the winners will be announced in June. 

To be eligible for nomination, a book has to have been published in 2006 and be about the South or written by a Southerner. Hence the fiction list has an interesting mix of the usual Southern suspects (Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill, Howard Bahr’s The Judas Field, Mark Childress’s One Mississippi) and some surprising picks (The Templar Legacy by South Carolina’s Steve Berry and The Collectors—well, David Baldacci is from Virginia, and the book is set in the nation’s capital, which at its core is very much a Southern city). But the novel  that should win just for the title alone is Mark Schweitzer’s comic liturgical mystery The Soprano Wore Falsettos, set in North Carolina.

On the nonfiction front, nominees included three regional reference works, The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, The Encyclopedia of North Carolina and South Carolina Encyclopedia, as well as Erik Reece’s compelling Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness (which was also picked as one of LJ’s Best Books of 2006), and the intriguing (to this oenophile) Thomas Jefferson on Wine by John Hailman. (Who knew the Founding Father was the Robert Parker of his day?)

For a complete listing of nominees, see Authors ‘Round the South (authorsroundthesouth.com), the SIBA-sponsored website to promote author appearances at independent bookstores in the South.

Hello,

Here are the latest titles reviewed in our web-only, freely accessible Xpress Reviews section.

Xpress Reviews for Week of Feb. 13th, 2007

NONFICTION
Chambers, Veronica. Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation. Free Pr: S. & S.

Cummins, Joseph. History’s Great Untold Stories: Larger Than Life Characters & Dramatic Events That Changed the World. National Geographic, dist. by Random.

Groopman, Jerome, M.D. How Doctors Think. Houghton.

Rieff, Philip. Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us. Pantheon.

Zinn, Howard. A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. City Lights, dist. by Consortium.

GRAPHIC NOVELS
Asamiya, Kia. Junk: Record of the Last Hero. Vol. 1. DrMaster Publns.

Delano, Jamie (text) & Goran Sudzuka & Goran Parlov (illus.). Outlaw Nation. Image Comics.

Hino, Matsuri. Vampire Knight. Vol. 1. Viz Media.

Inoue, Takehiko. Vagabond. Vol. 24. Viz Media.

Lee, Ki-Hoon (text) & Seung-Yup Cho. Phantom. Vol. 1. Tokyopop.

Mihara, Mitsukazu. IC in a Sunflower. Tokyopop.

Oh, Se-Kwon. Utopia’s Avenger. Vol. 1. Tokyopop.

Ueda, Rinko. Tail of the Moon. Vol. 2. Viz Media.

Urasawa, Naoki. Naoki Urasawa’s Monster. Vol. 6. Viz Media.

Yabuki, Kentaro. Black Cat. Vol. 6. Viz Media.

Yuki, Kaori. Godchild. Vol. 4. Viz Media.

It was a common scenario in the bookroom circa 1998: self-published or indie authors would call my line (I was then the assistant in charge of sorting galleys) looking for advice on making their books known. Often, said books had already been published and so were too late to be submitted to LJ. “What are my alternatives?” they’d inquire desperately. My eager response was, “Stage a reading at your local library!”

As I learned from a recent thread on Publib, however, librarians don’t seem so hot on this idea. Unless the author has a media profile, is backed by a reputable publisher, or has a ready-made audience owing to the local popularity of the book’s subject, they’d rather pass. Chances are, people would not turn up to see a writer without those credentials, and as Tom Cooper of the Webster Groves (MO) P.L. wrote, “[T]here’s nothing worse than working hard on an event that flops.”

Libraries, the message seems to be, want to compete with Barnes & Noble and Ye Olde Slam Poetry Bar down the street. They want in on popular culture—not at all an earth-shattering revelation for me, but it makes me feel for the nobodies who may have a worthy work on their hands. If they can’t find a forum for engaging in person-to-person contact at the library, where can they?

The obvious answer is MySpace and personal websites, but so many people are clamoring for attention now that it’s a miracle to capture and hold an audience. It’s been said that best sellers originate in libraries—a patron stumbles on a book, falls in love, and spreads word—but my feeling is that, increasingly, time-pressed readers are taking their leads from TV book clubs, radio shows, and off-the-cuff comments by established writers or actors and actresses.

The cult of celebrity has infiltrated American reading habits so much, in fact, that decided nonwriters like celebutant Nicole Ritchie (The Truth About Diamonds, now in paperback) and former model Paulina Porizkova (A Model Summer is due in April from Hyperion) can publish novels. I confess that I haven’t even cracked the galley of Porizkova’s book, but my point still stands: having a marquee name seems like more of a requirement for a book contract than being able to construct an artful sentence.

I know, I know. My gripes are older than Grandpa Simpson, but I dare argue that the celebritization of publishing has only gotten worse since I entered the fold nine years ago. Although Judith Regan’s getting the ax is encouraging, we’ve still got a long way to go toward putting democracy back in publishing. And libraries can help by mulling over a genius suggestion by Linda Ballard of the University City (MO) P.L.: “Have any of you experimented with having an evening or weekend afternoon ‘Local Authors’ Day,’ where these authors could come, perhaps speak for a few minutes apiece, and peddle their wares?”

The Enlightened Bracketologist, out next month from Bloomsbury, caught my eye, as did some of the contributors and topics of the 102 bracket competitions (modeled after the NCAA March Madness pools) within it.

It’s loads of entertainment for people like me, who fill in that big bracket in the newspaper around this time of year based soley on a team’s location or their name.  (Those blank lines are so enticing.)

Contributors with new books out are worth noting: Kurt Andersen considers “omnipotent God created and controls the universe” the winning conspiracy theory (the one “with the greatest number of devotees who display the greatest passion”); Ben Yagoda—whose newest, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, is reviewed in the Feb. 15 issue—calls clichés the most serious “sins against the language”; and Publishers Weekly’s editor in chief, Sara Nelson, has On Bullshit beat Of Mice and Men, The Old Man and the Sea, and Night for short books, the criterion being “bang for the word, or literary fuel mileage.”

Other topics to satisfy bibliofiles include punctuation (winner: the space), typefaces (winner: Gill Sans), Shakespeare insults (winner: “Thou wouldst eat thy dead vomit up, And howl’st to find it”), and scrabble words (winner: qat).  For everone else, topics range from chick flicks to rednecks to political bludners of the last 50 years. 

A blank bracket at the end told me my favorite book was Ellison’s Invisible Man. It’s a result I am okay with (though I’ve always said my favorite is Steinbeck’s East of Eden), but I don’t feel as relieved and enlightened as the editors so blithely promise.

As the editor responsible for assigning child rearing books, I must say I’m surprised it’s taken so long for a manual like Candice Kelsey’s Generation MySpace: Helping Your Teen Survive Online Adolescence (April, Marlowe & Co.) to rear its helpful head. Social networking sites have been around since the early 00’s, and MySpace.com—the leader by leaps and bounds with more than 100 million accounts—is definitely a force with which to be reckoned. Its multimedia capabilities require users to learn a set of technologies, and this is where I think adults got lost, and lost track of their kids in the process.

Kelsey, who cofounded a private high school in Santa Monica, CA, and acts as an evaluator for the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, seems to know her way around the site and more than that, as our resident teen expert Linda Beck points out in her starred review, Kelsey has investigated and witnessed the negative messages of online culture (among them, “privacy is not important”). And she shows parents “how to create a MySpace account safely and how to interpret what other bloggers are saying.”

For the full monty of Linda’s review, make sure to see the March 15th issue. See also her starred reviews of other recent teen-centered titles like American Academy of Pediatrics Caring for Your Teenager and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer’s I’m, Like, So Fat!: Helping Your Teen Make Healthy Choices About Eating and Exercise in a Weight-Obsessed World.

It is said (at least by me) that book review editors come out of the womb reading. Everyone here does it so much that it’s easy to forget it’s a skill, a way to inform and entertain ourselves, more than a cheap illegal substance. I know I was taking reading for granted last week when I caught a nasty cold/sinus infection that had me in bed for the better part of two days. After the first day, my fever broke, and I was ready for some stimulation. I deemed the TV too glaring on my eyes, which were still watering from the sinus pressure. So I reached for my stack of bedside books on the floor and fished out the galley of Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer (May, Faber & Faber).

As I said in my blog “Staying Alive a la Biography,” this is a book I’ve been waiting on for years. Oh, the deep, dark secrets it promises to reveal about the late Clash singer and songwriter. What really went awry between him and “Jonesy” (guitarist Mick Jones)? How did he meet his first wife, Gaby Salter? And what was with that short-lived acting career in Jim Jarmusch films? Unfortunately, I was not about to get any answers. I didn’t think it was possible for me not to be able to read—I dream about reading—but literary dung happens. I stared at the same page for several minutes, focusing and wiping my gushing eyes until I chucked the galley on the floor.

The lesson, boys and girls? Read truly, madly, and deeply when you’re well. And wash your hands to keep evil-doing germs at bay. That is all.

In today’s New York Times resident pop fiction reviewer Janet Maslin gives a favorable review to a first novel by Joe Hill. Calling it a Valentine from Hell, Maslin praised Heart-Shaped Box  as a “wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty tale of horror”. And who is this Joe Hill? None other than Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of you-know-who. While our reviewer Kart G. Siewert of the Tulsa City County Library noted some predictability in the plot, he called the novel “a wrenching and effective ghost story…that reads like good early [Stephen] King mixed with some of the edgier splatterpunk sensibilities of David J. Schow (The Kill Riff)”.

I know there will be high demand for this title, but make sure your patrons don’t confuse with it with April Henry’s amateur sleuth mystery Heart-Shaped Box. However, this might be the perfect time to steal a page from Entertainment Weekly and do a reader’s advisory display of novels with the same titles. A Battle of the Books! How about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas versus Liam Callanan’s The Cloud Atlas? Or Geraldine Brooks’s March duking it out with E.L. Doctorow’s The March? Or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man going head to head with  H.G. Well’s Invisible Man? Check out  library blog Papercuts for more suggestions.

These are exciting times, let me tell ya. Borderline indecently exciting. But I digress. 

The 2nd annual New York Comic-Con is on the horizon! And, did you know that librarians can get a free weekend professional pass to the conference? Furthermore, did you know that on Friday, February 23rd (trade day), Library Journal is the presenting sponsor of four panels of librarian luminaries specifically for you?

So don your geek cap, wear that witty and irreverent T-shirt, put on those steel-toed Doc Martens, and slip on that backpack shaped like some weird plushy animal/alien. I, for one, am planning to put my hair in pigtails, because if I can’t wear pigtails at Comic-Con, then where can I?

And hey, if you see that corset vendor who was there last year - try one on! It’s a trip - and considering that your oxygen intake is cut in half, I mean that literally.

Be sure to sign up at the Professional Registration page - deadline is Feb. 12th!

For more information about the panels, go to this webpage and scroll down to the bottom. The panels ae all moderated by John Shableski of Brodart and the panel titles are:

Feb. 23rd: Panels for Librarians

10:00 AM: Superheroes and Manga: Making Room for Both at Your Library

11:15 AM: Format and Genres: Understanding Comics, Super Heroes, SciFi, Fantasy, Manga, Comics Lit, Humor and Web Comics

1:30 PM: Anime: Making the Most of this Video Entertainment

2:45 PM: Graphic Novel Classics Every Library (public and school) Should Shelve and Circulate

This Con is not to be missed. You make valuable contacts, learn from peers and publishers, get the pulse of the industry…while having fun with frothing fanboys and fangirls leering at manga, graphic novels, figurines, and anime. If the idea makes you giggle with glee (rather than back away slowly), this is the show for you.

I’m actually not as scary as I sound.

A happy February to you all! This week in our web-only, freely accessible Xpress Reviews section we’ve got new science fiction, a menacing debut novel, multiple sclerosis health advice, and the big book of birth!

Xpress Reviews for Week of Feb. 6th, 2007

FICTION
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. Solaris: BL Pub.

Wilson, Andrew. The Lying Tongue. Atria: S. & S.

NONFICTiON
Boroch, Ann. Healing Multiple Sclerosis: Diet, Detox & Nutritional Makeover for Total Recovery. Quintessential Healing.

Lyon, Erica. The Big Book of Birth. Plume: Penguin Group (USA).