This, that and the other

1) It’s March which means many people pay a lot of attention to basketball and eventually I remember that the cool people over at The Morning News are holding the annual Tournament of Books. I’m still working my way through the first round but man, this is good stuff.*

2) Which is sort of related (smart writing about books — on the Internet!) to another thing: this recent, incredibly smart piece in Salon, examining Franzen v. Internet (for the record, I’m on the Internet’s team) and giving the best defense I’ve read yet on what the Internet has brought to the world of books and readers. It’s so good I’m going to quote from it at length. But you should still go and read the whole piece. And follow the links in the first excerpt.

The Internet has been amazing for book talk. There is more of it, and at a higher quality, than perhaps at any other moment, certainly in my lifetime. Dinosaurs love to lament the lost space in newspaper book reviews; a few years ago, the National Book Critics Circle fought, what seemed to me, a self-serving campaign to save the book review, by which a handful of people really wanted to save their right to sell the same lame 450-word book report to a handful of regional dailies. You didn’t have to bother reading the book to write many of those reviews, and as a one-time daily books editor myself, who once assigned reviews to some of those active in this debate, it was clear that many critics did not. Now we have the Rumpus and the Awl and the Millions and the Morning News and Maud Newton and Bookslut and the Nervous Breakdown and Full-Stop and the Los Angeles Review of Books and HTMLgiant and you get the idea. Professional freelancers didn’t save the book review – the battle was won by the Internet and people who love reading. The culture is richer for it. Twitter’s a useful tool for keeping track of the idea explosion.

and this:

That the online book culture is full of branding and image-burnishing is hard to deny. But it is also a generous place, at its best, and writers who use these social media tools understand this. They retweet, they send out links to positive reviews and articles about other people, they congratulate each other on publication day. Promotional, sure — but if it’s news that a favorite writer has a new story in a small journal I wouldn’t have known about, well, that’s valuable news. Indeed, it’s at least as valuable as the phony and promotional blurb industry which Franzen seems to have no problem being a part of.

 Hear, hear! Also, read, read! And write, write!

3) Speaking of writing … if you are a Keys person and you are a writer, aspiring or otherwise, there’s a cool contest this year at The Studios of Key West. It’s called The Writes of Spring and last I heard there were about 10 spots left (they’re only taking 25 registrants total). So get over there (digitally or otherwise) and sign up!

4) Illustration of The Book Reader of the Future, which came from the April 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics, courtesy of the awesome website Retronaut.

* Special thanks — and asterisk/footnote homage — to Citizen Reader both for reminding me about the Tournament of Books in general and for pointing out that this hilarious round in the ToB was judged by Wil Wheaton — a name that sounded vaguely familar when I read it but didn’t remember until I read the CR entry that goddamn, that *is* Wesley Crusher from Star Trek TNG! I’ve read occasional references and links to his blogging but had no idea he was this funny.

Beastly tales

I just reviewed another work of nonfiction for my alma mater, The Miami Herald — the book is Zoo Story by Thomas French and the review ran yesterday. I liked the book a lot — it was obviously based on years of reporting, which is the sort of thing that the St. Petersburg Times has been able and willing to do — and which may be pretty darn scarce on the ground in the future, even at papers owned by nonprofit foundations.

The story follows the expansion and consequences of that expansion at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, where the CEO pushed for an ambitious new Safari Africa exhibit featuring elephants imported from a game preserve in Swaziland. French makes characters out of some of the zoo’s animals, which is dangerous — my only problem with Mike Capuzzo’s otherwise excellent Close to Shore was when he claimed to be inside the shark’s head — but French navigates the perilous territory very well, describing more of what happens to the animals than pretending to know what they’re thinking.

The same book is reviewed today by Salon’s Laura Miller, one of the best book reviewers in the business. Not that I’m intimidated or anything.

Don’t worry I’m not writing about ebooks

I’m sick to death of reading about ebooks and digital publishing because it all seems to come from the poles — either we’re looking at the Glorious Future or the Terrible End of literature. Plus there’s so much being written and published, both online and in print, by self-obsessed media types, that you couldn’t possibly follow it all. Plus as a wise person once said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything. So why kill myself trying to figure it out when really smart people who are paid to do so obviously can’t?

I chose this image because I recently completed two online book club reads — in both cases, ahead of the official schedule. The first was Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for the inaugural One Book One Twitter. The second was Justin Cronin’s Passage for the inaugural Salon Book Club.

Recent reading roundup

I’m currently immersed in one of this summer’s Hot Books — The Passage by Justin Cronin — which I’m attempting to read with Salon’s Reading Club (look for a future post contrasting that with the One Book One Twitter experience reading American Gods — the short version is that I like the Salon experience better, at least so far). And there are a couple other titles I’ve read in the last month between everything else — though now we’ve got the cable with the World Cup on and the Tour de France right around the corner so my reading rate could slow right down. (There are three copies of The Passage in the Monroe County Library system, by the way, with two requests pending so if you want this one you should get on the list.) But here’s a report on a couple of recent reads before they get too far into the rearview mirror.

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliviera — historical fiction set during the Civil War about a midwife who longs to become a surgeon, with lots of family drama going on. For some reason, this one just didn’t grab me though I did finish it. It struck me as one of those “look how much research I did into the time period” historical novels. That stuff needs to come through not quite so obviously. We do have it in the Monroe County Library collection, just not at the Key West Library. I’ll give it 3 stars.