Britain’s top best-selling female author is surprisingly a New Hampshire-based writer. In a Observer magazine profile, “The Great Unknown”, writer Louise France examines the reasons for the astonishing success of Jodi Picoult’s commercial novels like My Sister’s Keeper and The Pact, and ponders why the literary establishment ignores her.

France acknowledges that Picoult’s narratives may not be literary or elegant and that her prose sometimes can be clumsy and sentimental, yet her books are impossible to put down. Her formula for success, France determines, Is: “choose a subject which is soon to become controversial and tell the story through a rotating cast of characters. Stem cell research, date rape, domestic violence, sexual abuse, teenage suicide - here are some of the knottiest moral issues of our times sandwiched between the soft-focus covers of what is commonly dismissed as an airport novel.”  

And Picoult’s latest, Nineteen Minutes, is bound to be even more controversial in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy in which 33 people were shot to death by a lone gunman.

In the profile, Picoult describes in now chilling detail how she drew on the Columbine tragedy of 1999 to research  her story of a high school shooting. Noting that one high school principal thought the book should be banned, Picoult begs to differ, “‘This is a topic we need to start talking about. We can go on not talking about it, but a lot of kids are going to die. People want to believe that school shootings happen in big cities like New York, but they also happen in small towns like this, where there is a high socio-economic bracket.’

Such a bizarre Jerry Springer-like story today about the NASA astronaut arrested for the attempted kidnapping and murder of a female Air Force engineer whom Lisa Nowak believed to be a rival for the attentions for a male astronaut. (I’m sure the Lifetime Channel is buying the movie rights as I write!) While the press obsessed about the case’s weirdest element (aside from the pepper spray, BB-gun, buck knife, and sundry disguises)—the diapers Nowak wore on her 900-mile drive from Houston to the Orlando airport to confront her rival—I thought about the eerie similarities to Stephen Harrigan’s insightful novel Challenger Park.

Like Nowak, Harrigan’s Lucy Kincheloe is a wife, mother, and an astronaut. In Lucy’s case, she is training for a mission to supply the international space station; this past July Nowak flew her first mission to the space station. Like Nowak, Lucy falls in love with a NASA colleague, but the other end of her romantic triangle is not another woman but Lucy’s troubled ex-astronaut husband. Harrigan vividly captures the personal and professional stresses facing female astronauts, although I don’t think he had stalking and marathon diaper-wearing in mind as the end result. 

Looks like librarians have been spared having to wrestle with their conscience about buying O.J. Simpson’s forthcoming theoretical tell-all, If I Did It.  News Corps announced today that it was cancelling the book and television special. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying, “I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project. We are sorry for any pain this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.” Ill-considered?  Really? What were Murdoch and the rest of the people involved in this project thinking? Did they really believe that no one would object? Have we become so morally debased that making money is more important than simple justice or basic human decency? As for O.J., to have written this book about the murder of his children’s mother, he has gone way beyond the pale.  

Publishing has hit a new low with the November 30 release of O.J. Simpson’s new book, If I Did It (Regan Books), in which the former football star speculates how he would have committed the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and waiter Ron Goldman—but of course the Juice didn’t do these crimes because he was acquitted. While publisher Judith Regan in the New York Post justified her decision to acquire the book in part because, like Nicole, she had been a battered wife, the email newsletter Shelf Awareness reports that the controversy has raised questions among booksellers over whether they should sell this book. 

The newsletter quotes Nancy Olson, owner of Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, N.C.: “Do we take a ’stand’ on such a book, thereby sending our customers who want to buy it to our competitors? Is this a form of censorship? Or do we make it available without displaying it other than having it on the shelf?” She added, “I’m disturbed to be put in such a position. Freedom of the press notwithstanding, the way they’re marketing the book raises huge ethical questions. We all know the publishers are desperate to make money on commercial books, but this takes the cake.”  If bookstores feel this way, what about libraries? Do you, my dear librarians, plan to order this distasteful opus or are you waiting for patron demand? This inquiring mind wants to know! (As for a Library Journal review, thankfully the November 30 release date makes the book too late to be reviewed in print, although we could still run an online review. That unhappy decision falls to our social sciences editor.)