It’s hard to be a book. That is to say, it’s hard to be a book and get noticed because there are so many and, as National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) member Scott McLemee pointed out in his April 25th “Critical Mass” column, book review coverage in newspapers is making like the dodo and dying out.

To stop this insanity, the NBCC is launching an awareness campaign throughout the month of May that is calling for people to sign a petition to stop the nixing of The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s book review section. I’m going to echo McLemee and our own Wilda Williams (see her blog Save This Endangered Species: Book Reviews) and say that librarians can and should play their part in this initiative. Without books, many of you wouldn’t have a pay check, much less a rewarding profession. Without book dialogue, you wouldn’t have patrons to browse your stacks.

This is my ninth year in the book review world, and I can’t imagine fitting in anywhere else (except maybe the chocolate-tasting arena, if that even exists). My point: I want to give back, and the best way I can is to expand LJ’s coverage of our pulp friends. Doing so in print is not feasible owing to paper costs, etc. Doing so online via our weekly Xpress Reviews, however, is easy.

Almost two years into our online book review experiment, things are going better than I ever expected. Not only have we increased the number and quality of books covered (Ann Burns now contributes audio books), we’re finding an increasingly appreciative audience. I can’t supply any hard numbers, but I think it’s safe to say that even the die-hardest of print-demanding librarians are beginning to see the perks of online reviews—they’re free; they’re always there; they’re informed, impartial, and to the point (like LJ’s print sisters); and they’re going to multiply like rabbits if I have anything to say about it.

With this blog, I hereby invite the closeted book reviewers of the world to bust out of their moth-balled existences and join my online-only roster. Whatever your subject area, I need you to make this venture a success. Submit an application today, save book reviews, and maybe even save the world.

Thanks to the efforts of my media-obsessed little sister, last week I had the opportunity to sit in the studio audience of The Colbert Report, Comedy Central’s often gut-busting spoof on the conservative political pundit show. The guest: actor Sean Penn. His affront to the Reagan-looking Colbert: writing (and reading) a poem condemning President Bush for our involvement in Iraq.

What twisted the TV host’s tighty whites most of all was the actor’s metaphor for Bush’s sins: “soiled and blood-soaked underwear.” To settle the score, Colbert challenged Penn to a “Meta-Free-Phor-All” moderated by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinksy. Watching this all being filmed wasn’t nearly as exciting as its implications. Colbert & Co. looked like wooden actors from my seat, I was dying of thirst (no water allowed), hungry, and needing to use the ladies’ room.

But as I tried to point out to my screaming sibling, they were promoting poetry during National Poetry Month. Colbert actually quoted Pinksy, who even took a silly swipe at Robert Frost. This had to be good for what often seems like a dying genre, though I couldn’t find any evidence of sales spikes for Pinky’s The Inferno of Dante. LJ’s Barbara Hoffert, a great supporter and writer of poetry herself, would have been proud. For her take on the best poetry of 2006, click here—and keep poetry promotion going all year long.

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.’

Like many bookies since Kurt Vonnegut’s death last week (see Heather’s blog of April 12th, below), a library fundraiser friend of mine reminisced about the author — and of his own encounter with the man:

“As a child of the Sixties, I regarded Vonnegut with awe for his truth-telling, hallucinogenic imagination, which was combined with a clear perspective – unusual qualities in members of our parents’ generation! As a college sophmore in 1972, I even wrote him a letter. It went unanswered — for a few decades, anyway.

“One May evening, five or so years ago, Vonnegut came to a benefit that I was running here in NYC. My assistant, 25 years my junior but as excited as she knew I’d be, told me that Vonnegut was “outside, smoking.” I went outside. I went over to him, declaring myself a fan and requesting an audience. I was even taller than he was — maybe that’s what did it. Anyway, he consented. I bummed a cigarette, saying I thought smokers were God’s true optimists.

“After only briefly talking about the event we had ducked out of, we spoke of his work and inspiration, and then I turned the conversation to sanity and drugs. We talked about his son Mark’s book Eden Express, which I had found deeply moving. Vonnegut said he thought it was the best description he had ever read of sliding into madness. We talked about LSD, how it could catalyze some into mental illness. I asked him if he had ever tripped and he said that when he was at Iowa in 1965, his friends had tried to get him to, but he never did, fearing it would leave him insane. With his offbeat creative abilities, perhaps one could presume a brain biochemistry that didn’t need hallucinogens.

“Cigarettes extinquished, we went inside. My letter had been answered.”

Yes indeed.

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.

I was at ACRL in Baltimore in late March (yes, it’s now mid-April. So many books, so little time. You’ve heard it before — you’ve said it before yourself!). I was sent on a press pass by LJ to be a roving reporter there. I guess since I’d worked in a research library for many years, LJ figured it made sense for me to go to the annual meeting of Academic and Research Libraries  in Baltimore.

I dug out my Reporter’s Notebook, those narrow ones that look like something Jimmie Olson would use (Q: why is a Steno Pad twice as wide as a Reporter’s Notebook — and why is one a notebook and one a pad?  Does it matter?), put on my Calvin Klein pinstripes from the sample sale at CK’s “Better Sportwear” offices here in the Reed Elsevier building (on the fancy Elsevier side), and tried to remind myself to feel like Lois Lane, rather than Jimmie Olson.

I managed to banish Jimmie, which meant it was me and Lois there together in Calvin Klein — followed on Saturday by Carole Little — at ACRL. The LJ roving reporter submitted her report by email to the news folks here at LJ, but here is what Lois Lane has to say:

LJ had rooms booked in a truly charming inn. Granted I’m not a world traveler — except for a few special flights — but this was a lovely retrofitted brick wharf building in the Fell’s Point district. What it lacked in adjacentcy to the convention center it more than made up for in appeal. There was even a bottle of wine, gratis, with a personalized card. But Lois Lane doesn’t drink, alas.

Next, let me tell you that at the convention center at the same time was a Mary Kay Cosmetics confab. Mary Kay doesn’t say “So many books, so little time.” She says “So many gift-giving occasions. So many perfect gift ideas.” I doubt she suggested the free wine at our inn. And the inn’s lotions and shampoo were from — another vendor. Pleasing mixture of basil and lime.

Yes, it was rather easy to distinguish the Mary Kay conventioneers from the librarians, but maybe not as easy as you’d imagine. To complicate matters, there seemed also to be a conference of young cheerleaders in attendance. On the escalators, we librarians and publishers’ reps would encounter clumps of lithe girls with lots of bows in their hair and with cute warm-up clothes on. We wondered, amongst ourselves, whether they noticed the Mary Kay-ers, the librarians, and the academic publishers, and how or whether their observations might influence their career paths once cheerleading loses its lustre.

Lois Lane has blogged long enough. For the professional news about ACRL, you’ll need to read LJ’s Academic Newswire (it’s easy to subscribe to that and other LJ news outlets), or see LJ’s brief report, with a longer one to come in the May 1st issue!

To paraphrase my curmudgeonly coworker, it’s a wonder ole Vonnegut didn’t die sooner—the guy packed more tobacco than a tobacco tree. But I’m not here to cuss the poor sod out for his smoking habits—I’m here to celebrate him, LJ style, with a quick recap of relevant reviews from our database.

While I couldn’t come up with our take on his seminal Slaughterhouse-Five (except the audiobook version, read by actor, er, writer Ethan Hawke), we do boast coverage of his late career material, some of which may deserve another look:

• At Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut, edited by Kevin Alexander Boone
• Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction by Vonnegut
• Bluebeard by Vonnegut
• Fates Worse Than Death by Vonnegut
• Galapagos by Vonnegut

I said it last year, but I’m going to say it again, kittles—April is Autism Awareness Month, and I’ve been steadily increasing our coverage of conditions on the autistic spectrum since 2002. I couldn’t have done it, of course, without one Corey Seeman, an LJ star reviewer if there ever was one. The father of an autistic child, he signed on to tackle autism for LJ five years ago when there wasn’t a lot being published. That all changed when autism made the cover of Time magazine in May 2002—soon, the New York houses were treading the traditional turf of Woodbine House, Guilford Press, and Jessica Kingsley.

To keep up with the resulting boost, I sent poor Corey a book a month, and he kept his head above water, dutifully reviewing the likes of groundbreakers like Judy Karasik and Paul Karasik’s The Ride Together (Washington Square), Carolyn Thorwarth Bruey’s Demystifying Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Guide to Diagnosis for Parents and Professionals (Woodbine), and Charlotte Moore’s George & Sam: Two Boys, One Family, and Autism (St. Martin’s).

Thank you, Corey, for your valuable contributions, including what I’m pretty sure is the first analysis of relevant literature, “Sending Postcards from the Airport,” a 2003 entry in our collection development series, and its sequel, “More Postcards from the Airport: Playing Catch-Up with Autistic Spectrum Disorders.” Thank you, too, Lisa Jordan and Elizabeth Safford for bringing up the back and helping expand LJ’s scope. 

No, I’m not talking about audio CD or DVD versions of J.K. Rowling’s best-selling sorcerer tales—I’m talking about two Boston brothers who so love the Harry Potter series that they formed a band in honor of it, that is, Harry and the Potters. Their MySpace mantra: “We play songs about books!” Speaking of tunes, titles include “Save Ginny Weasley” and “The Yule Ball” (both from the band’s debut, Harry and the Potters).

Music and book lovers, you might’ve found your perfect match. And libraries looking to incorporate live music into their outreach programs, take note because these boys actually tour, and word on the street is that they’re good, for muggles anyway.

In other Potter news, the contract that Scholastic required librarians to sign if they were ordering Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows through Baker & Taylor is sparking more headlines. The AP wrote a story on it last week, though surprisingly, it didn’t address the fact that the fax number suffered, er, complications, which made for a lot of peeved librarians (see my blog Have Harry on Order from B&T? Sign the Contract!).

When this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were announced (the actual ceremony is on March 12), I had the sneaking suspicion that Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five would be the first practitioners of hip-hop to make the cut. A quick check of the inductees since the hall’s inception indicates as much, and while I’m not stunned, I’m also somewhat perplexed.

Sure, it’s the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but this is America, the melting pot, a metaphor that can be applied to our native music. Everything, in theory, mixes, and the results are often exciting and, as in the case of hip-hop, world-shaking. Before it even turned 25, hip-hop music and culture boasted a global audience, from Brazil to Japan. And already seven years into the 21st century, hip-hop still has a hold on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart.

Strangely, as popular as hip-hop is, it still doesn’t generate that many hit trade nonfiction books (the magic formula seems to be put “Tupac” or “Notorious B.I.G.” in your title). For the most part, I still see the stuff of African American studies syllabi, a la T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (April, NYU Press). Commercial houses, meanwhile, will try their luck this spring with the anthology Beats, Rhymes, and Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop (May, Harlem Moon) and Roni Sarig’s Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, and How Hip Hop Became a Southern Thing (May, Da Capo).

Then, again, I shouldn’t forget street lit. We tackled the genre in a collection development article last summer (“Streetwise Urban Fiction”), and it’s no stretch to say it’s probably the most powerful propagator of the “thug rapper” lifestyle outside of MTV. This platinum-selling pulp will be the subject of our best sellers list in July, and our own Barbara Hoffert moderated a panel on street lit at lasts year’s Day of Dialogue in Washington, DC. For a recap complete with authors and titles mentioned, click here.