If a subway commute can set the tone of a day, it’s going to be an atypically good Tuesday. This morning, I didn’t have to lubricate my shoulders to fit into a car, AND there were sightings galore. Standing directly in front of me were two nursing students highlighting away in textbooks whose titles escape me; to my left and right, I took in at least four examples of popular fiction, most in subway-friendly mass market paperback.

Michael Connelly’s The Concrete Blonde (Warner, 1994) captured my attention because of its title, a nod, I couldn’t help thinking, to Concrete Blonde, a favorite band of mine from Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, that’s where Connelly’s Edgar Award–winning Harry Bosch novels take place. The second in the series, Blonde homes in on a serial killer who disfigures women’s faces, not an original conceit as far as I can tell, but what do I know about mysteries?

I admit it: I’ve never read a Connelly. In fact, as I wrote in The Case of the Nonmystery Readers, I haven’t killed time with a single contemporary mystery. Not even a 20th-century old schooler like Raymond Chandler, Connelly’s hero. I’m not sure if this makes me squeamish, prudish, snobbish, or just plain poorly read. How can I be out of the biggest genre-fiction loop ever? My answer: other books (including last week’s Subway Sighting, The History of Love) just get in the way.

There comes a moment in every editor’s life when she just wants to scream, “Eat me!” at a precarious stack of galleys. This was my situation a few days ago as I was sorting through the diet and fitness titles. In all seriousness, I hardly need a gym membership given how many of these books I have to haul from the Bookroom to my desk, where I do my assigning. This round, I counted no fewer than 34, out of which I could assign only three.

To call this overkill is an understatement. I’m of the mind it’s an epidemic. Americans are addicted to the idea that there’s an alternative to weight loss beyond eating less and exercising. The publishing world feeds that delusion with an appealing goulash of gimmicks—see Jim Karas’s The Cadio-Free Diet (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, May), Joe Marion’s The Cheat To Lose Diet (Crown, May), and Ronald Glassman’s The Alpha Solution for Permanent Weight Loss: Harnass the Power of Your Subconscious Mind To Change Your Relationship with Food—Forever (April, Broadway).

Although it’s my job to bring some of these books to librarians’ attention, I take solace in the fact that there are voices of dissent out there. Just when I was about to lose it over another sugar-water diet, I came across Gina Kolata’s latest book, Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—And the Myths and Realities of Dieting (May, Farrar).

Author of the notable Clone and the best-selling Flu, Kolata, the head science writer for the New York Times, now analyzes the first study to contrast the Atkins diet to a low-calorie diet and purports to answer questions of eating and self-control, genetics and weight, the sensation of hunger across individuals, and diet plateaus. To an editor like me, this book is a gunshot blast of fresh air. Of course, only the review will tell. Stay tuned.

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. 

A year ago, several of us Book Review editors were sweating bullets over a one-time supplement called Spiritual Living, LJ’s first concerted effort to size up the growing market of self-helpish titles with a spiritual angle (Raya Kuzyk defines the market better in “Brave New Genre”).

To keep up with the rainbow of, e.g., Jewish child rearing and Buddhist-infused medical titles, Arts & Humanities Editor Mirela Roncevic recently renamed and rejiggered the “Spirtual Reading” column by Graham Christian. So far in 2007, two entries of “Spiritual Living” have run (in the January and March 1 issues), and the titles covered go way beyond the devotional titles of old. Graham tackles marriage woes, soul lessons courtesy of cats and dogs, and punk rock Buddhism.

For more soul glow–inducing material, don’t miss the May 1 issue. 

As an adult circulation desk attendant at the Fargo Public Library, I spent a lot of time reshelving Zane Gray novels—or at least trying to. I’d be in the middle of putting a book back in its place when I’d feel a soft tap on my shoulder. Sure enough, one of the male senior citizen regulars wanted to get their hands on the title before somebody else. This was in 1998, but I would bet my nonexistent horse that Gray’s books remain top circulators.

Of course, we all know that in public libraries on the whole, mystery rules genre fiction (see Barbara Hoffert’s “Budgets Rebound: Book Buying Survey 2006″), but a call for Louis L’Amour readalikes this week on Publib reminded me of the appeal of Westerns. It may very well be that only “little old men readers,” to use one poster’s expression, devour them like biscuits and gravy at a Texas canteen, but they are part of the public and deserve more of the same, so to speak. 

So who to turn to when your patrons have exhausted Mr. L’Amour’s bibliography? Here are some names that were mentioned:

• Tony Hillerman (who, one poster pointed out, was born in the same town as L’Amour, that is, Sacred Heart, OK)
• Frederick Chiaventone
• Terry C. Johnston
• Douglas C. Jones (Hasford Family Saga)
• Elmer Kelton
• Larry McMurtry
• Howard Frank Mosler
• Douglas Hirt
• Don Coldsmith
• Dusty Rhodes (author of “clean” Westerns based in Arkansas)
• Robert J. Conley (Cherokee specific)
• Lauran Paine
• Ralph Cotton
• Ralph Compton
• Elmer Kelton
• Alistair MacLean
• Max Brand

“The world’s forgotten boy”—that is, Iggy Pop, born James Osterberg in Muskegon, MI, in 1947—has finally gotten a biography on par with his musical achievements and brain-blowing stage antics. For Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (April, Broadway Books), British journalist Paul Trynka worked his contacts like a Russian masseuse to produce what our reviewer Matthew Moyer calls “a complete portrait of the man and his work—from mayhem in Detroit with the Stooges to making albums with David Bowie in Berlin.”

As if Matthew’s impassioned assessment of the book isn’t enough (for the full monty, see the April 1 issue), his illuminating interview with Trynka will appear in the same issue, about a month after the release of Iggy and Stooges’ first studio album in decades.

For Iggy-related books, see our reviews of Martin Roach’s Morphing the Blues: The White Stripes and the Strange Relevance of Detroit and Roger Crimlis and Alwyn Turner’s Cult Rock Posters. And this just in from Arts & Humanities Editor Mirela Roncevic: although then pushing 60, a few years ago Iggy posed, often in the buck, for a serious of striking photos collected in Gavin Evans’s Biopic. Too nude and rude for the pages of LJ, but we’re still punk rock.

The furor over 2007 Newberry Medal winner Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky rages on, now with the help of graphic novel god Neil Gaiman. In his blog entry from yesterday, he says he loves librarians “unconditionally” but sticks it to the “rogue” types who have kicked up a fuss over, well, a scrotum (the word appears on the first page of Patron’s novel). Gaiman even inclues a link to a list of YA books probably already shelved in libraries that contain the dastardly noun. All I gotta say is, eat your heart out, penis.

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 popularity of mystery books never ceases to amaze this peripheral admirer of the genre (read last year’s Book Buying Survey and catch the latest coming in the Feb. 15 issue). I say “peripheral admirer” because I quite literally have never read a contemporary mystery—unless I can count the several volumes in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series I devoured in the mid- to late 1980s—and yet I love the idea of murder as formula. Oh, the gruesome possibilites! Oh, the intrigue!

Strangely enough, my reading habits aren’t so unique. Yesterday, I ate pizza with two co-workers who are avid readers yet have never consumed a modern mystery to their knowledge either (!!). When we tried to get to the bottom of why, no one cited poor literary breeding. Mysteries, we well know from reading LJ’s Mystery Column, can be very accomplished and intellectually stimulating. Check P.D. James and Walter Mosley, favorites of our own Francine Fialkoff and Michael Rogers, respectively.

One of us did, however, make the point that mysteries can seem almost demanding. There’s quite literally a case to crack, and her brain balks at that kind of a challenge. I can relate to that point, but I would augment it by saying mystery readers seem like a slightly scary gang. What if I don’t fit in? Will I get a pair of cement shoes if I don’t lap up the gory details? What if I don’t “get” the mystery even at the end (this happens to me with mystery movies all the time)? I hate feeling stupid after having indebted myself to Uncle Sam for tens of thousands of dollars for grad school.

For the record, I don’t want to remain a nonmystery reader forever. My brain could use a good stretching and blood splattering, and I might as well start with the best of last year as determined by LJ’s Jo Ann Vicarel. 

‘Tis the season to stuff our faces, so I’m not surprised to spy cookbooks in the top 25 of the big best sellers lists (the New York Times, Amazon, and, of course, Library Journal). As of today (for LJ’s, I’m drawing on the December 15th list), all three feature Irma Rombauer and others’ Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition and Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa at Home.

Holding the No. 1 slot of the NYT’s Hardcover Advice list, however, is an even more enticing entry (at least for this editor): Mehmet Oz and Michael Roizen’s You: On a Diet: The Owner’s Manual for Waist Management. At least some portion of the population, it seems, is already thinking about how to rid themselves of the gingerbreadmen and -women ringing their middles. LJ’s got just the thing for those forward thinkers. For the last few years, we’ve reviewed the slews of diet/fitness books that publish in January and February, just in time for those “I’m going to lay off the Oreos” resolutions.

From 2005 and 2006, respectively, there’s “Starting on a Lighter Note” and “Diet and Fitness Roundup,” both by the very ambitious Susan Hagloch (I don’t know who else could, er, stomach reviewing a dozen diet books in four weeks). Susan has my respect because she can suss out commerical appeal and sound nutritional advice. Her 2007 roundup will publish early next month and would make for an excellent starting point for those sorry Janes and Joes who ate their way through a Paula Deen butter-and-lard fest.