5 days ago
07 December 2011
(Nerds) Who Run The World
Wow, you'll really know Lev Grossman is ascendant at Time Magazine when you check out its #1 fiction book of the year. Not that I'm complaining (though I haven't read the book in question).
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For a second I thought it was going to be The Magician King. As if anyone would let that fly.
Happy to see Kate Beaton getting a shout-out!
Same here.
The plot thickens: someone pointed out on Twitter that George R.R. Martin blurbed THE MAGICIANS. Hmmmmmm.
I dunno, I don't see blurbs as a big deal. If Martin blurbed THE MAGICIANS then it happened a couple years ago, when he (GRRM) didn't have a new book out for anyone to praise in return. And since Grossman has that endorsement in hand already, and his second book is already out, I don't see that he stands to get anything from praising DANCE WITH DRAGONS. If the perceived conflict of interest is just "I have both literary and personal reasons for thinking GRRM is awesome," then that disclaimer could equally apply to almost any best-of-the-year list.
Yeah. I guess the counter-argument that people are making, is that he should have at least disclosed that in the blurb, or had someone else write its entry on the list. (There were a few other authors in the top 10, but Grossman wrote that one.) I guess on Twitter he said it wasn't necessary, because publishing is just like that -- which WE know (nose in the air!) but maybe other readers wouldn't be aware.
I think that Time might have been smart to disclose it, but I don't think it makes much of a difference. Listing one's favorite books of the year is always a subjective endeavor, and anybody who regularly reads Grossman's reviews in Time knows that he loves the Song of Fire and Ice series, so I would have expected it to end up high on the list, with or without the blurb.
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