Cormac McCarthy is having a very good year. As if an Oprah endorsement weren’t enough (see From the Book Review Vault: McCarthy’s The Road), now he’s got Joseph Pulitzer on his side. With this much brouhaha over his postapocalyptic novel, you know patrons are going to be asking for readalikes in the not-too-distant future. Nobody writes quite like McCarthy, but other scribes have successfully played with the idea of an American wasteland.

Just today, I came across our Xpress review of a 2004 graphic novel reissue from Drawn & Quarterly: Anders Nilsen’s Dogs & Water, according to our reviewer J. Osicki, is “a compelling, one-of-a-kind trip akin to Samuel Beckett conceiving Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a graphic novel”; it’s made up “of a series of spartan black-and-white illustrations of a young man on a road to nowhere in a vast, denuded landscape.” A stuffed teddy bear and various and sundry packs of animals are the boy’s only pals—the few people he encounters, meanwhile, are “desperate and hostile.”

The Road, of course, centers on a father and son who scavenge for food in “a devastated country,” to quote our reviewer Stephen Morrow. Here, “friends are extinct.” The protagonist in Dogs & Water can no doubt relate. Order his odyssey, and watch the circ numbers escalate.

Books don’t have feathers; books are not birds, but I’m going to apply the old saying about sticking together anyways because it’s Thursday, and my multitasking brain is leaking out of my ears. But to the point, dear readers: I’ve come across two forthcoming titles that are made for each other, possibly for the same audience

They are Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (May, Twelve: Warner; see LJ 4/15/07), which—and I’m slipping into Sneak Peak mode here—our reviewer C. Brian Smith dubbed “provocative, challenging, and passionate,” and Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion (April, AMACOM).

I’m going to try to make this a regular blog series. Call it off-the-cuff reader’s advisory. Do add any further like reads.

• 8:15-9:00           Registration and Buffet Breakfast
• 9:15-10:15         The most banned children’s book of the year: Authors Peter Parnell (playwright, author of QED; screenwriter/producer for West Wing and The Guardian) and Justin Richardson, MD [co-author of Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid They’d Ask)], their editor, David Gale (S. & S.), and  librarian Pat Scales discuss the creation of And Tango Makes Three and the reaction to it. 
• 10:15-11:30       Editor’s hot picks: Top editors from adult trade houses reveal what fiction and nonfiction you should be buying for the fall and what the latest trends to watch are.
• 11:30-11:40       Break
• 11:40-12:15       LJ Talks to:  A conversation with a long-time editor/publisher.
• 12:15-1:15        Lunch
• 1:15-2:30        YA crossover: Many books speak to both adults and young people, but how do the editors and authors make the decision to pitch them to one audience or the other—or both. (TK).
• 2:30-2:40         Break
• 2:40-3:55        Romance: An editor, author, reviewer, and librarian discuss the latest trends in the most popular genre, including erotica, ebooks and e-marketing, and more.  Panelists include Eloisa James, whose latest book, due in June from Avon is Desperate Duchesses, and Kris Ramsdell, LJ’s romance columnist.   
• 3:55-4:00       Wrap up.
• 4:00-5:00       Cocktails

At Heather’s impetus, I, too, will emerge from the depths of winter-holiday-season office decampment to wish for and wonder about a book. 

The tie between folklore and linguistics may seem flimsy to those not buried in a world of fricatives and syntax, vowel shifts and universal grammar. (I often worry over the difficulty of linguistics for lay readers and why the study hasn’t yet been very popularized.) But the Grimm brothers saw a very close tie, and I’ve been told (albeit by a biased linguistics professor) that they began their accumulation of fairy tales for language study purposes. Give me a good biography to prove it!

The Brothers Grimm by Jack Zipes got a good review from LJ at first publication in 1988 and after being updated in 2002, but its focus on the literariness of the tales is clear. 

I would love to see a linguistic biography of the brothers. Jacob is responsible for Grimm’s Law, which can be used to trace English words to their Indo-European predecessors, to find the links between English words and their German, Latin, and even Hindi counterparts, and to recreate ancient, extinct parent languages.

Now, if someone could find a way to explain this fascinating history in an accessible way (maybe via the Grimms’s lives and studies, nudge, nudge), I would be one very happy reader.

And please, by all means, any of you secret linguistics enthusiasts out there, let me know of any easy-to-read linguistics books that exist!  (I’ll check out my shelf of college linguistics textbooks, but something tells me I won’t come up with too much to recommend in the layperson’s linguistics category.)

Pity the book bloggers who abandoned their electronic abode for two weeks. We meant no offense—we were drowning in books, reviews, Christmas candy, and hateful administrative tasks. We wanted to blog our way into oblivion, but we had consumed too much sugar and had crashed out in our cubicles. But now we’re back (sans Mirela and Willy), diabetic, and badder than ever.

First on the agenda for this staffer is my Wish List of books that I would personally like to see published over the coming year. These titles sometimes serve selfish purposes, though they also undoubtedly interest a sizable portion of the public. Take, for instance, my hope for a decent biography of recent Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductees Blondie. I’ve been griping about the lack of intelligent literature on this seminal group since my arrival in 1998, and I’m not going to stop until I get something on the scale of Phoebe Hoban’s excellent Basquiat: The Life and Death of an Art Star, something that digs deep into the punk, hip-hop, and art culture of ’70s and ’80s New York—and doesn’t forget to reflect on singer Deborah Harry’s still-powerful influence today.

The many photo books are nice (e.g., Mick Rock’s Picture This, Roberta Bayley’s Blondie: Images, 1976–1980) but in a way reinforce the idea that Blondie was only a pin-up when its founding members pioneered sampling disparate musical streams like disco, calypso, and rap.

And now for something completely different: I also am desperate to see a demystification of the American healthcare system for readers aged 20-something and up. If you are lucky enough to have coverage, there should be breakdowns of HMOs and definitions of lingo like primary care physician and deductible. If you don’t have diddly but want to scrape some together, there should also be a strategy to that end, not to mention a history of how America developed its abysmal system—and how other countries take care of their own. Fred Brock’s recent Health Care on Less Than You Think: The New York Times Guide to Getting Affordable Coverage came close, but no cigar.

I can go on, dear readers: Where, oh, where, is a field guide to the various head-shrinking therapies (do I want to go the way of Freud, or cognitive-behavioral techniques)? Why is there no manual for communicating with the “pod people” (those who sleep, eat, and commute wearing headphones plugged into MP3 devices)?

Before this turns into a desperate rant, I’d like to turn the discussion over to you and my fellow editors.

The e.coli outbreak that has sickened Taco Bell customers in New Jersey and on Long Island has now spread to  New York City, Delaware, South Carolina, and Utah. Health officials have traced the tainted green onions thought to be responsible back to a California farm. While this indicates a problem in the oversight of our national food production chain, your patrons and the local restaurants in your community also need to be reminded of the importance of safe food handling practices. Margaret Merrill’s November 1 collection development article,  “Handle with Care”, offers an excellent overview of key resources for both consumers and restaurants. Post a link to this article on your website, make a display of the titles you do have in your collection, or create hand-out flyers listing these titles. Get the word out!

A popular post on CAPHIS last year and this year came from librarian K.D. Proffit. The topic? Internet shopping sites. Drawing on the results of her call for the best of the web, Proffit organized an immensely popular class on Internet shopping at the Sutter Resource Library in Sacramento, CA. Said Proffit, “[I]it brought people to the library who had never visited before.”

Another possible tactic to up traffic came to me this morning when I glanced a redhead reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans on the subway: the banishment of late fees. By which I don’t mean a patron’s debt should be canceled automatically; I just mean why not make it possible for a friend or relative of that patron to cover the fees as a kind of holiday gift? This would call for some marketing ingenuity, but think of all the people who dodge using libraries because they know they owe, so off to Barnes & Noble they go.

One more suggestion: as we Book Review Editors complete our Best Books 2006 list (check here next week for the winners), I couldn’t help but think how ours and other lists could serve as, well, gift guides for bibliophiles. Much as consumer magazines compile ideas (”For The Insanely Glamorous, a Swarovski crystal–encrusted iPod”), so could libraries by posting these lists or doing a display of winners. Collection development librarians could flex their cerebrums and break the books into categories for thriller fans, romance heads, etc.

The end of the year is fast approaching and critics’ Best Books lists are starting to litter the literary landscape. Our sister magazine Publishers Weekly announced its top 100 picks a few weeks ago, and yesterday the New York Times issued its 100 notable books of 2006 (Its 10 Best Books of 2006 will be announced tomorrow on its web site.) And we LJ editors are in the final throes of making our choices, which will be announced online next month and published in our January issue.

While I always enjoy seeing what my fellow critics have chosen, one of my reviewers, Teresa  Jacobsen of Solana County Library, did raise an interesting question about best book lists when she admitted that she had only read one novel on the list (Anne Tyler’s Digging to America)! ” Is this what happens when you love thrillers and genre fiction?”, she emailed. ”Thankfully, the B & T collection development librarian put many of those titles on my ODC list this past year–and I did order them–so perhaps I’ll read a few next year.  I’m curious to see if the folks in Fairfield, CA will want to read them or if they will stick with Robert B. Parker and Nelson DeMille?”

Is this the old case of you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink? For years publishers have debated the impact of literary awards on book sales; many don’t see much difference. Does the same hold true for library circulation? One librarian seems to think so. On his blog ChipK.com, Ohio librarian “Chip” noted  that a “disturbing portion” of books his library purchased largely on the basis of positive reviews in LJ did not circulate at a rate that justified their purchase. His post implied that LJ reviews were a waste of taxpayer money. 

So what is LJ supposed to do? Review only the Stephen Kings, Dean Koontzs, the Nora Roberts,  and other authors whose circulation stats are guaranteed? That would make for a pretty shallow collection. Our young librarian friend also failed to take a good look at our LJ bestsellers column, which identifies the books most borrowed in U.S. libraries. Many of the titles making the cut had received strong or starred reviews in LJ: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter , and Lisa See’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan  .

While I hope our reviews played an important part in these books’ success, marketing was also key. In the case of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, it only became a bestseller/best-circulator when the paperback edition was picked up by reading groups. No longer can librarians order books, shelve them, and hope that patrons will find them. Librarians have to take a more active role in promoting their collections through creative displays, readers’ advisory, book groups, and author programs. And the time to start is now with our 2006 Best Books List.