EarlyWord

The creator of Clifford the Big Red Dog, Norman Bridwell, died on Friday. He was 86 years old.

Scholastic published the first  Clifford book in 1963. The series became so important to the company that Scholastic adopted the dog as its official mascot.

In a statement released yesterday, Dick Robinson,  CEO, of Scholastic, paid tribute to the author, saying, “Norman Bridwell’s books about Clifford, childhood’s most loveable dog, could only have been written by a gentle man with a great sense of humor.”

In 2012, Scholastic celebrated Clifford’s 50th anniversary and released a video interview with Bridwell:

A live-action, animated 3D movie, Clifford the Big Red Dog is scheduled for release on April 8th, 2016.

The next book in the series will be published in April.

Clifford Goes to Kindergarten
Norman Bridwell
Scholastic: April 28, 2015
Ages 3 to 5, Grades P to K
Paperback
$3.99 USD

Get ready for a resurgence of the popularity of the name Ruby. Steven Spielberg has just announced that 10-year-old British actress Ruby Barnhill will star in his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s book, The BFG, (Macmillan/FSG YR).

In a statement, Spielberg gives the young actress high praise, “After a lengthy search, I feel Roald Dahl himself would have found Ruby every bit as marvelous as we do.” She will play a young girl named Sophie who befriends a giant, played by Mark Rylance.

Disney plans to release the film on July 1, 2016.

Meanwhile, BBC One has completed another Dahl adaptation,  a TV movie based on Esio Trot, starring Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman. It is scheduled to air in the U.K. on New Years Day. U.S. rights have been acquired by the Weinstein Co., but the U.S. release date has not been announced.

The UK’s Folio Prize, now in its second year, announced its longlist and it certainly lives up to its name, with a field of 80 fiction titles selected by the Folio Prize Academy, a group of writers and critics whose members read like a who’s who of literary fiction super stars.

The Prize was created in response to the 2011 Man Booker Prize shortlist, considered by some in the UK book scene as more “readable” than “literary.” Here is the entire 2011 Man Booker Prize list (long, short, and winner), in case you want to speculate on which titles triggered the debate.

Given the fuss, the Folio Prize longlist is remarkably similar to this year’s Booker longlist and includes the winner, Richard Flanagan’s
The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Also included are many of the titles that appeared on this year’s National Book Awards fiction longlist, but not the winner, Redeployment by Phil Klay.

The Folio shortlist will be announced on Feb. 9 and the winner on March 23, 2015. Last year’s winner was George Saunders for Tenth of December.

Many are assessing their favorite books of the year right now, but imagine summing up your favorites from an entire lifetime?

Jonathan Yardley, long-time Washington Post book critic takes on that task in his final, farewell column before retiring.

Only one of the total of 30 titles was published this year, Ward Just’s American Romantic (HMG), which Yardley counts as “perhaps his best, though the competition is fierce” (he also lists Just’s 1990 novel, The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert).

In nonfiction, one author gets three mentions, Rick Atkinson for his “magisterial World War II trilogy,” An Army at Dawn, (Macmillan/Holt, 2002), The Day of Battle, (Macmillan/Holt, 2007) and The Guns at Last Light (Macmillan/Holt, 2013),

In a separate column, Yardley looks back on his career with the Washington Post.(many of you will recognize the headshot, above, that once ran above his column), and resolves to “make one last attempt to read Ulysses, the gargantuan novel by James Joyce that was admitted to this country by my great-great uncle, federal Judge John Woolsey, whose famous opinion authorizing its admission I regard as considerably more engaging, witty and intelligible than the novel itself.”

A critic to the end!

When French author Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize this year, only a handful of his 30 books were available in the U.S. in English.

In a press release, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced today that they have acquired the rights to the author’s latest novel, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (French title, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier). They did not announce an anticipated release date.

As the Washington Post reports, this is not happy news for the founder of one of Modiano’s long-time U.S. publishers, David Godine, who tells the Post, “Money is what this business is all about, There is no venality that exists more than the venality that exists after the Nobel Prize is awarded.” He also notes that the company has done well with Missing Persons, one of the few books available in the U.S. at the time of the Nobel announcement, adding, “if you’re going to read a Modiano, that’s the one to read.”

Last month, the University of California Press, reprinted Dora Bruder, one of Modiano’s more well-known books. In addition, Yale University Press released Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, (reviewed recently in the Washington Post).

Most libraries are showing holds on the winner of the National Book Award in Fiction, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio; Thorndike, OverDrive Sample)

Holds are likely to increase when Klay gets the Colbert Bump on Wednesday (which is the next to last day of the show. Here’s hoping Colbert continues to cover books when he takes over David Letterman’s chair on the Late Show in January).

Last month, Klay appeared on the PBS NewsHour:

Calling her as “The Cover Girl For A New Kind Of Ballet,” CBS Sunday Morning featured African-American ballerina Misty Copeland.

Her autobiography, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, (S&S/Touchstone; Tantor Audio), published in hardcover in March, is coming out in trade paperback this week.

She also published a children’s picture book in September, Firebird, illus. by Christopher Myers, (Penguin/Putnam) picked as a best book of the year by NPR:

“The book is for very young dancers who may not see many people who look like them in the world of ballet. It’s illustrated by Christopher Myers, whose collagelike work is painterly, vivid and emotional. Copeland’s writing and Myers’ art draw you into a beautiful world, rich with color, texture and drama. For all budding young artists who maybe don’t have role models they can relate to, this little book provides some inspiration.

Anderson Cooper talked about discovering mindfulness on 60 Minutes last night (it’s a long segment, so we haven’t embedded the video here). He was introduced to the practice by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is called  “the man who’s largely responsible for mindfulness gaining traction.” One of his ten books,  Mindfulness for Beginners rose to #2 on Amazon sales rankings as a result.

It was published in 2011 by Sounds True, a Colorado publisher focused on spirituality, and is available through wholesalers.

Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment–And Your Life
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Sounds True
Hardcover, 9781604076585, $ 21.95
Audio, 9781591794646, $ 19.95

Despite the  popularity of the Little House on the Prairie novels, their source material, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s actual autobiography, has never been published. That was corrected last month by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, with the release of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography.

Although the cover of the book paints a romantic picture, the real story is much grittier and is written for adults.

It was featured on the PBS Newshour last night:

The Wall Street Journal also featured the book this week.

Holds are heavy in most libraries. According to the official web site, PioneerGirlProject.org the book is now temporarily out of stock, and is expected to resume shipping in mid-January.

For fans who cannot get their hands on the book, the project’s blog offers a fascinating look at the extensive research behind it, such as the effort to verify the story of a teacher who improvised an igloo out of an overturned sleigh to protect his children during a freak blizzard.

Released just an hour ago, the first full length trailer of Insurgent. The movie arrives on March 20, 2015.

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The first LibraryReads list of the new year has just been released.

The number one pick is the most recent Flavia de Luce novel, As Chimney Sweepers Come
to Dust, Alan Bradley, (RH/Delacorte; BOT Audio — go behind the scenes of the audio recording here).

Also on the list of ten titles are two follow ups to book that have been popular with librarians, The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion (S&S; S&S Audio) and Golden Son: Book II of the Red Rising Trilogy by Pierce Brown, (RH/Del Rey; Thorndike; Recorded Books) and a debut that has been heavily buzzed on EarlyWord‘s GalleyChat, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (Penguin/Riverhead; Penguin Audio).

People magazine cut back their review coverage this year, so we wondered if they were going to do a best books list this year.

Those fears were unfounded. This week’s year-end roundup includes People’s picks of the Top Ten Books. This late in the game, most of the titles have already received multiple best books nods, but with a few differences.

Roz Chast gets her first #1 pick for her National Book Award finalist, the graphic novel, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

At number two is a book of essays that has been on only one other list, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, by Meghan Daum. Published in mid-November, it has received significant but belated attention this week . It is reviewed in Wednesday’s New York Times, and in the upcoming NYT Book Review. It is #10 on  Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Nonfiction list. The reviews universally praise Daum’s lead essay on her mother’s death, “Matricide.” An edited version is available in The Guardian.

The full list:

1)   Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast, (Macmillan/Bloomsbury)

2)  The Unspeakable : And Other Subjects of Discussion, Meghan Daum, (Macmillan/FSG; Dreamscape Audio)

3) Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”, Lena Dunham, (Random House; RH Audio)

4) Redeployment, Phil  Klay, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio)

5)  Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home, Nina Stibbe (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio) — a LibraryReads pick, it did not appear on other  best books lists

6)  All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (S&S/Scribner, May 2014; Audio exclusive from Midwest Tape)

7)  The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters, (Penguin/Riverhead; BOT, read by Juliet Stevenson)

8)  What if? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Question , Randall  Munroe, (HMH; Blackstone Audio)

9)  Nora Webster, Colm Toibin, (S&S/Scribner)

10)  Big Little Lies, (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn; Penguin Audio; Recorded Books; Thorndike)

Last night was the premiere of The Interview, a satire about an assassination attempt on the leader of North Korea. Recently, through a series of hacked emails, it’s been revealed that Sony ordered that the movie be toned down due to fears about reactions from North Korea.

The night before, Jon Stewart’s audience gained some perspective on the North Korean culture from Suki Kim, author of Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite,  (RH/Crown; BOT; OverDrive Sample). As a teacher in a private school, Kim saw how the future leaders of the country are being trained.  “All their lives are about ‘The Great Leader’ — they took ‘Great Leader’ classes every day. They did ‘Great Leader Duties’.” She says they had no knowledge of the outside world and her students didn’t have access to computers and hadn’t even heard of the internet.

Stewart ended the interview with, “It’s a book like no other book I’ve ever read. It’s a look into a society, a culture but objective and humanizing and terrifying. Really, an amazing book.”

Libraries we checked are showing heavy holds on light orders.

For the past ten days librarians have been doing their own year-end roundup of the best books by tweeting their favorites. The votes have now been tallied and EarlyWord can exclusively announce the results (eat your heart out, Entertainment Weekly!).

There were over 1,000 total votes for over 600 titles, just another indicator of how widely librarians read. As opposed to other best books lists, the titles on this list reflect librarians’ appreciation for the genres, particularly science fiction, and Young Adult titles.

With the number of titles, there was little overlap, but the number one title, also the number one LibraryReads Favorite of Favorites, is Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, (Workman/Algonquin Books; Highbridge Audio, OverDrive Sample) a book librarians embraced early on. Close behind it is a book that began as a self-published science fiction title and has since made its way to on multiple best books lists,  The Martian, Andy Weir, (RH/Crown) OverDrive Sample.

But the real fun of exploring this list is the amazing range of titles (how many have you even heard of, yet alone read?).

Thanks to the librarians who started this project three years ago, Stephanie Chase, Robin Beerbower and Linda Johns, it has now grown by leaps and bounds. And thanks to the people who helped with the vote counting, Janet Lockhart, Vicki Nesting, Melissa Samora and Gregg Winsor.

We urge you to take a look at  the full list to make your own discoveries (please let us know about them in the comments section); #LibFaves14 — Full List

To see the actual tweets, with some great 140 character recommendations, e.g., “WOMEN IN CLOTHES. I want 2 roll around in the book like it was money & I was Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal,”, check our Storify transcripts:

Days 1 through 7

Day 8 

Day 9

Day 10

Following on the success of the STARZ 2010 adaption of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, ABC is planning a 10-episode series based on the first book in the author’s Century Trilogy, Fall of Giants, (Penguin/Dutton, 2010).

According to The Hollywood Reporter, if it does well, the other two books in the trilogy, Winter of the World (Penguin/Dutton, 2012) and Edge of Eternity, (Penguin/Dutton, 2014) will each get their own series.

The script is being written by Ann Peacock, who will also executive produce. She wrote the adaptation of Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers, (S&S/Scribner tie-in, 3/17/15) for Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, which is set to air on March 31 and April 1 on CBS.

First look, below (Downey’s dove seems a bit anxious).