New York Times Bestseller “Freakonomics” finally arrived in stores in paperback this week, four full years after the hardcover version first appeared. This follows the July 2009 paperback release of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, which was initially set for release a full year earlier, in July 2008. The hardcover seventh book in the Harry Potter series first shipped in 2007.

Other than publishers raking in much bigger profits from hardcover book, I can see no other reason why these (and other) books are being kept from paperback distribution for so long.

This is why I won’t weep for publishers if/when e-books dry their profit centers.

Tags: Deathly Hallows, Freakonomics, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling, paperback

1.  From the movie-to-book category:   Almost 48 years after it was first published, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by Julia Child is finally topping the best-seller list, bringing with it all the butter, salt and goose fat that home chefs had largely abandoned in the age of Lipitor.

The book, given a huge lift from the recently released movie “Julie & Julia,” sold 22,000 copies in the most recent week tracked, according to Nielsen BookScan, which follows book sales. That is more copies than were sold in any full year since the book’s appearance, according to Alfred A. Knopf, which published it.

The book will make its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list of Aug. 30 in the advice and how-to category.

2. From the movie-to-book category, cont.: Audrey Niffenegger is enjoying a resurgence of success with her 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. Wife is No. 1 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list for the second time in three weeks, riding the wave of the movie version, which brought in $18.6 million over the weekend.

3. A melancholy “Happy Trails” to Sanford Dody, a lifetime ghost-writer who passed away this July at the age of 90.  We discussed in a previous post the future of ghost writing, of which Mr. Dody was one of the best.  He died having achieved great success as a ghost writer, but with regrets for being in the background:

Sandford Dody had his greatest professional success as a ghost, much to his dismay. The autobiographies he helped actresses Bette Davis and Helen Hayes to write became best sellers.

But Mr. Dody, who died July 4 at the age of 90, found the work spiritually destructive.

“After all,” he wrote, “how does one become a ghost without dying a little?”

Time after time, he came to a new ghostwriting project with admiration for his subjects, only to be let down by what he saw as stars’ vanity and pettiness. “The most suitable way to view stars is from a long way off,” he wrote in his own memoir, published in 1980.

By the time he got around to writing his memoir, Mr. Dody’s admiration of star power had clearly faded. “Let the next star,” he glowered, “write her own damned autobiography.”

4.  A second melancholy “Happy Trails” to Western novelist Elmer Kelton.  Kelton wrote 62 fiction and non-fiction books, and was named “Best Western Author of All Time” by the Western Writers of America.  Four of his books won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.  A West Texas native, Kelton passed away Saturday of natural causes. He was 83.

5. Ending on a lighter note: Now that the dreaded “Back To School” time is here, USA Today has recommended four books to deal with it.  It included “Punctuation Celebration”, and a Middle School Survival Guide:

“Sometimes being ‘in the middle’ gets a bad rap,” it notes, but stresses the possibilities: “Middle school is like the next level up in a video game. You get a clean screen, new powers, and the chance to turn yourself into the person you’ve always wanted to be.”

Alas, poor readers, I’ve been so busy that I’m going to have to return two unread books to the library (late) and they rest of my reading has been made up of things I’ve read enough times to be qualified as obsessive.
Once things slow down – or when I start having to blaze through reading for class – I’ll start posting reviews. In the meantime, keep reading and enjoy your own literary adventures!

Garth Nix is one of my favorite writers. I first encountered Nix when I was loaned the Abhorsen Trilogy (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen) by a friend of mine.
Later on, that same friend and I discovered the Keys to the Kingdom series while browsing through Barnes & Noble in the children’s section. The first book of the series is Mister Monday – and I recently got my own copy of the most recent book to hit the shelves: Superior Saturday.
Each person (or entity?) that carries the name of a day of the week seems thus far to embody one of the seven deadly sins. The hero of the story, who is a rather unlikely hero given that he should have died in the first chapter, must overcome the devices of each of these in order to piece together the Keys – magical artifacts that have the power not only to keep him alive, but that are his by right according to an ancient will. Actually, the Will, with a capital W. This isn’t just some sheet of jumbled legalese but a living, breathing (okay, maybe not) entity capable of pretty independent thought and bizarre actions.
Now, it’s going to be a while before I review Superior Saturday because I feel the need to go back and start my week over again with Mister Monday – and on top of that my personal life is well in the way of my reading life (darn it) so it’s going to be a while before I have the chance to start again.
Fortunately for you, dear readers, I am a speedy reader so once I have the chance to settle down with a book those reviews will be popping up like…you know, poppy things.
POPCORN! That’s it. Yes. Popcorn.
Oh, and…if you feel like posting your own reviews here to make up for my lamentable lack of literary accomplishments. Just shoot me an email, or a comment. I’ll be happy to cut, paste, spell check and blame it all on you!
In the meantime, enjoy your own reading adventures and I shall endeavor to throw my self back into the fray – figuratively speaking.

This book is published by Penguin, and I have the second edition. Technically it’s a book fro my Linguistics class, but I’ve already read it and I have to say that it’s pretty interesting! One thing I discovered after changing my major was the the history of the English language as it changed (and changes) over time is something that the geeky part of my brain is enormously interested in. Intially I discovered this in my Old & Middle English Lit. class while looking over Old English and Middle English works of literature such as the Exeter Book riddles, The Wandered, The Seafarer, The Dream of the Rood, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Canterbury Tales. I managed to get many of this in the editions in which facing pages have Old English/ Middle English on one side and the Modern English “translation” on the opposite side. Old English was fascinating because I kept coming across words that seemed almost English to me, Middle English even more so.  Of course, after 1066 the rate of change picked up dramatically – and this book covers the development of Old and Middle (and Modern) English in different chapters.

The beginning of the book deals primarly with facts – facts and statistics about English that I find entertaining. For example, the surprising ratio of native English speakers versus English  speakers who learned English as a foreign language. One statistic that amuses me is that American English now accounts for more English speakers than native speakers of English in Britain. In fact, if I’m not recalling my number entirely incorrectly then U.S. speakers may outnumber Britian, Australia, New Zealand and North African speakers combined. There is also an interesting discussion on slang, creoles, dialects – the difference between them – and how they shape language.

All in all, it’s really an interesting book and it gets my start of approval because it’s one of the few nonfiction books I’ve read that has captured and held my attention, then made me want to go out and read more about its subject. I was especially interested by the way English borrowed words from other languages – and how similar English originally was in structure to  the Romance languages.

If you were ever curious about language development – even if it’s not English  – then this book would be a good read, and English has gone through so much change that I would think its history demonstrates many of the ways languages can and will change over time, how words get added or dropped from vocabulary – and who’s responsible for that.

Thankfully, my linguistics textbook seems equally interesting (if a little liberal in some notions) to me and I can start on reading that next.

Tags: American English, British English, English, English history, English language, history, language, linguistics, nonfiction

Sherrilyn Kenyon has yet to write a book I don’t absolutely love, and this is no exception. Bad Moon Rising actually goes back a little on the series time line to tell the story of a couple of people that we met in an earlier story as rather peripheral characters.
I was especially excited to find this in the book store because everything said it wouldn’t be out until the 18th…and yet there it was on the shelves, about ten days early! So, naturally, I snatched it up and tried desperately to contain my maniacal laughter.
Now, I won’t give you a very thorough review because the back story would take too much explaining and admittedly, Kenyon does it better than me since she – you know, wrote it. The series is technically categorized as “Paranormal Romance”, but it appeals to me especially because it relies very heavily on mythology, cultural history, and actual historical/cultural knowledge to shape its stories and characters. So, yes it’s a fantasy world with fictional characters, but it is shaped by reality and classical mythology in such a way that gratifies the geeky, intellectual side of my brain AND manages to make me laugh out loud AND makes for a d*** good romance.
The characters are better than well-rounded and believable…they’re like real people. I shall call them spherical characters. They aren’t just round, they’re deep and sometimes enigmatic, the characters feel things we can all relate to and yet they still manage to be “untouchable” in a good way – they are characters you wish you could be, but that you can’t envision yourself as. (And I hate ending a sentence with a preposition like that, but what could I do? It’s just an awkward phrase.)
For those of you who would like to be clued in as to what on earth I’m talking about, check out the Dark Hunter and/or Dream Hunter books. The first book is “Fantasy Lover” (please PLEASE don’t let the title fool you into thinking it’s a crotch novel, I would never read something so crass) and from there you can get the reading order from Sherrilyn Kenyon’s own site. Don’t worry, fans are legion and slightly rabid so if you google it, you’ll find it – and I think I may have linked to it on my sidebar…depends on how lazy I was the last time I updated my author links.
Anyway…I finished Bad Moon Rising the day after I got it, with many happy dances and exclamations of “SQUEE!”.
Kenyon is an artist as a writer in many ways, and the addition of Bad Moon Rising to the Dark-Hunter story line is just another charm on the bracelet, or piece of the puzzle, or something. You come up with the right flattering metaphor.
Oh, and go start reading these books – and if you’re leery, go read the excerpts.

Stephenie Meyer’s four-book Twilight series has sunk its fangs into USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list — with no signs of letting go. Meyer’s domination of the list for the past 12 months has smashed records that until now had belonged to J.K. Rowling.

The Twilight books have stayed in the list’s top 10 for 52 consecutive weeks. They held the first four spots a total of 13 weeks in the past year.
In contrast, J.K. Rowling’s first four Potter books were top 10 for 13 consecutive weeks, 24 weeks total, for the first year after Harry Potter an the Goblet of Fire’s publication and held the first four spots for two weeks.
Rowling, overall, has sold more books than Meyer — her seven-book series about boy wizard Harry Potter has 143 million copies in print in the USA, while Meyer has sold 40 million copies of her four books. But Rowling can’t match Meyer’s control of the list.

Breaking Dawn and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the two authors’ fourth installments, entered the list at No. 1, but Meyer’s series has had more staying power.

Based on aggressive marketing of Meyer’s series, this November’s release of the film version of New Moon and the upcoming holiday gift-buying season, Twilight books could dominate the list well into 2010.

Tags: Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, new moon, stephenie meyer, Twilight

For those of you who have caught on to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series it may (or may not ) come as news to you that Riordan has been writing for a while and it may be news that his previous works were mysteries – and nothing like the teen/ young adult series that will be hitting movie screens soon.
So, Gambit went looking and found Big Red Tequila. Naturally I borrowed it and found myself with a pretty good read. One thing about mysteries, for me, is that I often guess the ending before I get to the end of the book – especially if the author is dropping little clues they want you to put together at the end – so I usually avoid them. However, this book surprised me.
Jackson “Tres” Navarre (and his cat) have just moved back home to San Antonio after a ten year absence.
The catch is that his reappearance on the scene has stirred up a lot of memories for everyone he knew before – some good, some bad. If they pick up where they left off it could make Tres’ future better, or…it could end up with him in jail, dead, or worse. Especially since he has to consider the safety and emotional well being of his mother, his ex-flame(s), and former business partners while trying to stay alive and relatively unscathed.
Corrupt politicians play a big role, but how large a role is hard to determine and some parties who seem to be innocent may turn out to be guilty after all.
Of course the personal story is just as interesting…
You see, Tres left town after he saw his own father gunned down – and he wants to know who is really responsible for his father’s death – but after ten years the case is rather cold and his relationship with the local law enforcement is less than cordial. There are some people willing to help, but there are others that want to put up roadblocks if for no other reason than because he is the former Sheriff Navarre’s son.
One thing I must mention as a reader is that I had a hard time getting into the story. What really helped me keep reading was the way Tres, the character, was written. He’s sarcastic, he’s capable and able to take care of himself, and he has a sort of reckless stubbornness that keeps him going. In short, he’s interesting and that keeps the story ticking.
The good part is that Big Red Tequila is also the first book in a series so it makes me want to pick up the next book and keep reading. I would recommend you try it yourself.

Oh, and sorry about the radio silence, folks. I’ve been so busy lately that it’s been hard to find time to read.

Tags: Big Red Tequila, Mystery, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Percy Jackson movie, Rick Riordan