It was 13 degrees this morning as I trekked past Brooklyn’s McCarren Park with my back to a wind that felt like acid-dipped razor blades. As bad as this sounds, it wasn’t as awful as being sandwiched between two pod people blasting crappy nu metal on the L train. I looked around for my savior, and when he didn’t materialize (he was back the way I’d come, making toast probably), my eyes came across a watery blue book jacket: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.

While the title conjured nonfiction, I pegged it for a novel, which it is, indeed. Krauss, a Brooklyn-based writer, offers a sweeping tale about a book (and a love) lost in World War II Poland. That this was picked up by a young woman in my environs makes a lovely poetic sense: Williamburg and Greenpoint especially bear the mark of Polish immigrants. I hear Polish, in fact, more than I hear English on my side of McGuinness Boulevard. It’s the only place in New York City where natural blue eyes and blonde hair abound.

Even though Krauss’s book fast-forwards to contemporary New York City (the Lower East Side, I think), I can’t help but take this sighting as, well, a sign. I just finished an exhausting 650-page biography and am looking for an absorbing, economical read. It seems I’ve found my match, just out in very subway-friendly paperback. 

As you  know by now, the steamy novel about baseball great Mickey Mantle that led to publisher Judith Regan’s downfall has found new life and a new home. On April 3 Lyons Press plans to publish Peter Golenbock’s controversial  7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, which was cancelled by HarperCollins after it fired Regan and disbanded her imprint. With an initial print run of 250,000 copies, Lyons obviously has high hopes, although judging from all the negative hoopla when the book was first announced, one wonders.

At least I don’t have to worry about assigning this book for review again. When HarperCollins killed the novel in January, we were put in the embarrassing position of running a review that too late for us to pull from our February 1 issue. But now you can re-read our review and judge for yourself whether to order 7 for your patrons.

If 7 is not your cup of tea, coming out this month is another novel featuring a rookie ball player also named Mickey. Published by Kent State University Press, James T. Farrell’s Dreaming Baseball revolves around the infamous 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. (Look for our review in the March 15 issue of Library Journal.)  

The author of the classic Studs Lonigan trilogy was a passionate baseball fan, longing to play second base for his beloved Chicago White Sox. HIs 1957 My Baseball Diary is considered one of the very best fan books ever written. At the same time, Farrell was unable to find a publisher for his novel, and the work remained unpublished for more than 50 years, until editors Ron Briley, Margaret Davidson, and James Barbour joined forces with Farrell’s family  to bring the book into print. The trio were careful not to tamper with Farrell’s words except to correct typos and to change Farrell’s fictional names to the historical names of the players involved. The foreword is written by Eliot Asinof, who in 1960 consulted with Farrell when he began his reseach on what is now the classic history of the scandal, Eight Men Out. 

Interesting article in yesterday’s Washington Post, “Read Any Good Ads Lately?”, about the growing trend of marketers commissioning original novels to plug their products. Profiled is Los Angeles author Mark Haskell Smith who was paid an undisclosed sum of money and the use of a Lexus in exchange for writing Black Sapphire Pearl, a serial novel published in three installments in the Lexus quarterly magazine (sent to owners) and on the company’s web site, which features interactive features such as profiles of the main characters like Lydia Stark (see below), crime writer and owner of a missing Lexus LS 460.

Lydia Stark

“I bet you don’t even have a fedora.�

A best-selling author whose 10 mysteries starring ace detective Theo Rose have been translated into 16 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Raised in the relative isolation and comfort of suburban Minneapolis, Lydia developed an interest in noir, hard-boiled detective fiction, and violent crime stories when she was left dateless for her high school prom.

Turn-ons: The Lexus LS 460, blue jeans, picnics, witty banter, a dry martini
Turnoffs: High school boys, Chihuahuas, diet soda
Favorite movie: L.A. Confidential
Favorite song: Anything she can dance to
Favorite book: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Life philosophy: “To thine own self be true. That’s the best advice ever given.�

“I can tell fact from fiction,” says the narrator in the opening chapter, but I wonder if readers can tell the fiction (or is it “fictomercial”?) from the branding. Then there is Electrolux’s comic Men in Aprons, available as a paperback or downloadable audio at  audible.co.uk/meninaprons. The novel, which British journalist Alex Mattis (Alex is a she) describes as a story “about misguided twentysomethings trying to forge careers against a backdrop of nightmare flatmates, failed romances and bad housekeeping”, does not mention the Electrolux brand but vacuuming is obviously a key plot point. 

Of course, this is really not new. Remember the controversy that broke out five years ago when British author Fay Weldon admitted she was paid to mention an Italian luxury-goods retailer in The Bulgari Connection? And chick lit writers have been brand name-dropping for years. Think The Devil Wears Prada, Gucci Gucci Goo. The only difference is these authors now should demand the big bucks and a plug for their own books on the marketers’ web sites.

  

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.

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.

 

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. 

Seeing Paulo Coelho’s forthcoming The Witch of Portobello (out from HarperCollins in May; with a Starbucks prepublication campaign) on our shelves flashed me back to reading a galley of The Devil and Miss Prym not 9 months ago. Although that was first published in Europe in ‘92, I do feel like Coelho’s churning ‘em out, and they’ve got a lot in common. 

The Alchemist, many readers’ introductory Coelho novel, was passed among my group of friends when we were teenagers—a wide-eyed audience that seems well-suited to his writing (although, not tapped as consumers of these books, it seems). The 1993 LJ review called The Alchemist “a familiar theme in a New Age package.” Now, 14 years and 5 novels later, is the familiar theme getting old? 

 And is this flood of ”best-selling inspirational fabels” (a phrase our reviewer of The Zahir used to describe The Alchemist) Coelho’s beat alone?  A quick search on Amazon came up with authors as varied as Amy Tan, James Redfield, Alice Hoffman, Milan Kundera, Kathryn Davis, and Scarlett Thomas in this so-called metaphysical fiction genre.  Coelho’s books keep selling, so we’ll see if readers need something different or if a change from an alchemist to a devil to a witch is enough to keep fans devoted.    

Like Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s excruciatingly prolonged death in 1975 (”Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!), the Judith Regan soap opera continues apparently with no end in sight. PW reports today that HarperCollins announced the closure of the Los Angeles office of the fired publisher’s ReganMedia imprint. While the company expects to publish most of the titles Regan acquired, it has canceled the publication of 7, Peter Golenbock’s controversial novel about MIckey Mantle. Ooops! Unfortunately we have just closed our February 1 issue in which our review of this steamy book is running. Too late for us to pull. Oh well, at least my reviewer has the consolation of owning a now-valuable galley. And I don’t doubt that Golenbock will find another publisher, despite the tawdry nature of his novel. It definitely lacks the radioactive toxicity of O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.    

‘Tis the season for stocking stuffers, caroling…and romance novels? Last year, when LJ expanded its romance reviewing to six times a year, one reason was to make sure we could provide early coverage of the flood of titles we always anticipate for Valentine’s Day. This year’s December column includes a few little red-hot treats, but, like the October 15 column, it is piled high with a veritable sleighload of Christmas romances. In addition, the October 15 issue featured our second roundup of general Christmas fiction, with titles ranging from mystery (Anne Perry’s A Christmas Secret) to humor (Dave Barry’s The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Dog) to biblical retellings (Elizabeth Berg’s The Handmaid and the Carpenter). So why is the Nativity so hot? Perhaps it is the success of Richard Paul Evans’s seasonal fables, starting with The Christmas Box; or the holiday’s high profile in our consumer society; or, alternately, and especially regarding romance, the neat parallel between the reclamation promised by Christmas as holy day and the reclamation promised by love. Or maybe Valentine’s Day had worn out its possibilities. In any case, as we anticipate the spring season, with titles like Christopher Moore’s You Suck: A Love Story on the horizon, here’s betting that the next big holiday for romance is Hallowe’en.

I’m not sure how most people approach a vacation (extended or just a weekend), but almost as important as my destination/arrival activities are the books I bring along. I recently had back-to-back trips: a weekend in Connecticut, followed immediately by five days in Las Vegas. The weekend trip involved one book (Mary Jo Putney’s Petals in the Storm, a historical romance–my genre of choice), read during brief snippets of free time. The nearly 400-page book was a good choice, leaving me quite a bit to begin the longer trip to the West Coast.

Perhaps it was carlag (we drove to Connecticut), but in turning around to leave early Monday morning for the airport, I only packed an additional two books along with the remainder of the historical, which, it turned out, was just enough to get me from New York to Vegas, a nearly six-hour flight. OK. Two books left. Not terrible. Unfortunately, one was a title I had bought at a fundraiser the previous weekend for the paltry sum of $1. After about ten pages, I realized I had read it. My loss was my sister’s (and traveling companion’s) gain.

Now I’m down to a galley I borrowed from the office by an author I have read and liked before–a follow-up to a previous title I had not read. I quickly discovered that not having read the earlier book made the new book less than compelling. What to do? With numerous finished books/galleys sitting in my office and in my home, I went into a Las Vegas bookstore and discovered Putney’s Angel Rogue, the sequel to the historical romance I finished on the westbound flight. What were the odds of that happening? I was in Vegas; I’m sure I could have found out.

The new volume was working out fine until the day of departure and a four-and-a-half-hour weather delay. Sitting at the gate, I read a chapter, closed the book. Read a chapter, closed the book. Then, I walked around the airport. I completed the novel halfway through the return flight, leaving me with nothing to do but peruse inflight magazines and finish the already started crossword puzzles of a previous passenger.

Perhaps a book shop in another town would have had a larger selection than one in Las Vegas. Perhaps not. I just know that packing the proper reading material is more important than packing enough socks. One can always do a hand wash.