EarlyWord is the home of GalleyChat, monthly online discussions where library staff share excitement about upcoming books. More information here.
Summaries of chats and announcements are posted to the right. Use them to add to your own TBR piles and for collection development.
Links on the far right of the site offer information useful to readers advisors.
Hope to see you during our next chat,
GalleyChatters
We love the idea of reading flow charts, like the Summer Reading Flow Chart from Teach.com.
GoodReads has just published a tongue-in-cheek Hipster Lit Flowchart that works as a visual representation of a readers advisory interview.
Several commenters complained that there is nowhere to go if you answer “No” to the first question.
Come on guys, that’s the point.
You might not guess it from the trailer, but the new Brad Pitt movie, Killing Them Softly, opening this Friday, is based on George V. Higgins’ Cogan’s Trade, published in 1974.
Several of the reviews, however, note the connection. Reviewer David Edelstein comments in New York magazine, “Everything in Killing Them Softly that springs from George V. Higgins’s 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade is very fine: grimly amusing then shockingly brutal.”
In the New Yorker, Anthony Lane devotes half his review to Higgins, wondering why there aren’t more movies based on his books, calling them “a trove, begging to be raided for linguistic loot. If you want to grade postwar novelists on the strength of their ears alone—how fast they prick up at the crackle and blare of American speech—then Higgins and Elmore Leonard, you could argue, lead the pack, ahead of more distinguished names.”
If the reviewers have their say, the movie would bring a renaissance of interest in Higgins, which makes it fortunate that Random House’s Vintage/Lizard imprint recently re-released several of the author’s 25 novels (in print and ebooks, available on OverDrive), including Cogan’s Trade.
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The tie-in uses the movie title.
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USA Today calls Matched, Ally Condie’s YA dystopian trilogy, “the most popular series of books for teens since The Hunger Games,” noting that Matched has “less violence and more poetry.”
The final title in the series, Reached (Penguin/Dutton) debuted at #6 on last week’s USA Today best seller list, a series high.
Condie tells USA Today that the idea for the series, which began with Matched (2010) and was followed by Crossed (2011), came from a discussion with her husband about what would happen if the government decreed who you would marry.
To what does Condie attribute the series’ growing populatiry? To “teachers and librarians who embraced it.”
And, no surprise, film rights have been sold to Disney. David Slade has signed as director. He has had some experience with teen movies; he directed Eclipsed, the third film in the Twilight Saga.
When Nancy Pearl talks books, buyers listen. On NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, she presented four of her “Under the Radar” picks (the full list of seven, along with a link to the audio, are on the NPR site). Two of the titles received dramatic bumps on Amazon’s sales rankings.
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, David Goldfield, (Macmillan/Bloomsbury). Rose to #189 from #102,066)
Nancy says this book that claims the Civil War could have been avoided, made her “look back and reassess my knowledge and beliefs” about the war and its aftermath.
Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein, (Hyperion). Rose to #216 from #5,238)
This one is not “below the radar” among YA readers. It’s on both the Publishers Weekly and Amazon’s Best Books lists. However, it may be lesser known to adults, who, as Nancy says, will also enjoy this “story of deep friendship, incredible bravery and the difficult choices that life sometimes forces on us.”
A new book about the “boring” Warren Buffet, Tap Dancing to Work by Carol J. Loomis, (Penguin/Viking/Portfolio), rose to #26 on Amazon’s sales rankings after the author and the subject appeared together on the Today Show yesterday and in a much more in-depth interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night.
Selections of the year’s best books are rolling in. The latest; the New York Times Book Review‘s 100 Notable Books of 2012, which will be available in print this Sunday.
We’re particularly happy to see Wiley Cash’s debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, (Harper), as well as several other GalleyChat favorites, among the 50 fiction selections.
Kirkus has also posted their top 25 fiction picks.
Below are links to our Excel files of the major best books picks (you can also find them to the right, under the Best Books links),
2012 Adult Nonfiction (includes poetry)
Several of the annual best books lists have appeared recently (see the links to the right). Again this year, we will collate the titles from various lists into one Excel file, with ISBNs, for your use in spending any left-over book funds.
First up is the 2012 — Childrens Best Books Collated, Excel File, with a total of 175 titles selected by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post as well as the New York Times Book Review’s selection of the Best Illustrated Books [UPDATE: The list is up to 275 titles, now that we’ve added the Horn Book and SLJ picks].
As we’ve learned to expect, there’s very little concensus. Just two titles were picked by all four sources:
Wonder, R. J. Palacio, (RH/ Knopf BYR)
Son, Lois Lowry, (HMH)
Even the National Book Award finalists aren’t shoe-ins; the only one selected as a Best Book is Bomb: The Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin (Macmillan/ Flash Point), a Washington Post pick. Even the winner, Goblin Secrets by William Alexander (S&S/ Margaret K. McElderry) wasn’t picked by any other source.
More best books lists are coming. As they appear, we will add the titles to the file.
Look for the collated spreadsheet for adult titles later this week.
Thanks to Edelweiss Tags and Custom Exports features, compiling the lists was much easier this year. Also, for the first time, we were able to include links to publisher descriptions of each title, which often include valuable selection information, such as views of interior pages (for instance the recently-release, This Moose Belongs to Me).
In the video below, Peter Jackson describes the final stages of post production on The Hobbit, which premieres in New Zealand on Wednesday and opens in the U.S. on Dec. 14.
The second trailer for Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful, arrived last week (see video, below).
James Franco stars as the Wizard with Rachel Weisz as the Wicked Witch of the East, Mila Kunis as the Wicked Witch of the West, and Michelle Williams as the Good Witch, Glinda.
The movie is scheduled to arrive in theaters on March 8, 2013.
The Disney Book Group will, of course, publish several tie-ins, including a junior novelization, an early reader, a storybook and a behind-the-scenes book. They are also republishing the first two titles in L. Frank Baum’s series, The Wonderful World of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz.
On NPR’s Morning Edition today, cartoonist Ellen Forney talks about her memoir of her own mental illness in the graphic novel Marbles. Several libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering.
The book is also on the Washington Post‘s list of the ten best comics of 2012.
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Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham’s new book, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, (Random House, RH Audio and BOT, RH Large Print) is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings, where it is now at #2, and in the number of holds in libraries.
It has been reviewed widely (in both the daily NYT and the Sunday Book Review, as well as the Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly) and debuted on the 12/2 NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list at #2.
The author appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
As Americans look forward to the third season of the UK’s Downton Abbey, news arrives that there will be yet another season to anticipate. ITV says they will begin filming in Februray, to air on British television in the fall of 2013.
The third season begins on Jan. 6 in the U.S. on PBS.
(Yes, the music is Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” sung by a choir.)
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail offrers photos from the upcoming Downton Abbey Christmas special and warns fans to get their tissues ready.
The companion volume to the third season was released here earlier this month.
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Andrew Solomon wrote the National Book Award Winner and best seller The Noonday Demon, about his own debilitating depression. His new book, Far From the Tree (S&S/Scribner) examines how parents deal with children who are different from them.
The book is showing heavy holds in libraries where ordering was light. The author was profiled by Chip McGrath in the New York Times in Tuesday’s issue. The NYT also reviewed the 1,000 page book last week.
Solomon appeared two weeks ago on Rock Center with Brian Williams.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Do More, Spend Less: The New Secrets of Living the Good Life for Less (Wiley) is a title with special appeal in today’s economic climate, so it comes as no surprise that it is rising on Amazon sales rankings. Currently, it is at #38, two months prior to its Jan. 14 publication date.
It is by Brad Wilson, the found of the coupon website, BradsDeals.com, who was profiled by Crain’s Chicago Business in August.
Libraries we checked have not ordered it at this point.
The Wall Street Journal reports, based on anonymous sources, that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns HarperCollins, has expressed interest in buying Simon and Schuster.
This follows closely the announcement of a merger between Random House and Penguin, to be completed sometime next year. News Corp tried to make a bid, but was rebuffed.
As a graph in the WSJ story shows, the 2011 estimated market share for each publisher is:
Random House — 19%
Penguin — 9%
Combined RH/Penguin– 28%
HarperCollins — 12%
S&S — 9%
Combined Harper/Simon — 21%
Hachette (which includes Little, Brown and Grand Central), has an estimated 11% share. The market share for Macmillan, the other company in the so-called “Big Six,” is lumped in with the 41% “Others” category.
The new landscape may not be the Big Four, but the Big Two, Plus Four (Hachette, Macmillan, Wiley’s trade division and Harlequin).