Bookish: It's a start-ish.

Due to a series of unfortunate events I barely blinked when Bookish launched this week. The site's three publisher parents (Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster) hope that it will become your new go-to for reviews and recommendations. At some point the site will also have its own app where you can buy e-books (as I'm checking on Friday afternoon, not yet though).

Here are the main challenges Bookish faces as I see it:

• As a social-media space for book lovers, it is already running behind Goodreads and LibraryThing as gathering places for the literary like-minded. (Oh, remember Shelfari? Good times.)
• Unlike the aforementioned three sites, you can't "friend" anyone on it, so its social dimensions are limited.
• Because it's run by 3 publishers, one might suspect -- without any evidence in this case -- that negative reviews will be somehow demoted and positive reviews will be raised...
• ...That is, where there are any reviews to begin with, and there aren't many on the site right now.

The idea that Bookish will tread the line between organic and paid content doesn't bother me as much (though you have to dig for its parentage) as the lack of interaction, especially that which popped out at me as I tested the recommendation engine. 251,000 titles and counting? Sign me up! I input the first book that popped into my head -- THE BELL JAR (probably because of that atrocious cover design that has been all over the blogosphere) -- and this is what came out:

I would not call this an optimal result. In tone and subject the closest of these is PROZAC NATION, but to read the latter after the former would be to see how much it imitates. As to the suggestion of VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE, dark joke or accident?

Goodreads' first four results for THE BELL JAR in its "Readers also enjoyed similar books" section are Donald Kagan's THE ARCHIDAMIAN WAR, the complete poems of Anne Sexton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's THE YELLOW WALLPAPER and THE PORTABLE DOROTHY PARKER. I'd give that a 75% hit rate.

Let's try another book I read more recently and liked a lot, Jami Attenberg's THE MIDDLESTEINS:

Just two suggestions? The easy get would have been FREEDOM since Franzen blurbed the book (you can kind of see it if you get really close to your screen). I've never heard of LOSING BATTLES and that looks like it has a lot of overlap, but what do the good people of suburban Illinois have to say to Cormac McCarthy?

I haven't signed in to Bookish yet; I want to see if they offer more features I would like and I struggle to keep up with Goodreads already. Have you tried it? Is it worth diving into?

Five authors to watch out for on Twitter

Last week I went to a reading cohosted by Jami Attenberg, an author I discovered solely because she's on Twitter. Because of that, I know she's been out of New York for five-ish months (photos of New Orleans, road trips, cute dogs) and if we're lucky she might read from her new book THE MIDDLESTEINS, out this fall, whose fast food-patterned cover bears a blurb from none other than Jonathan Franzen. Of course, Franzen famously hates Twitter, but in Attenberg's case he might make an exception.

From Attenberg's tweets, and her blog, I assembled a picture of a woman who was quiet and solemn and somewhat tall. This is why online impressions are dangerous, because at the reading I was acquainted with a happy, near-bubbly woman who read from her New Orleans travel journal and made me want to pack my bags right away. (Also, about average height, not that it matters.) Turns out that social-media first impressions can be just as dangerous as the other kinds.

Here are five other authors you should check out on Twitter, if you aren't already following them.


Meghan Daum (@Meghan_Daum): Apparently she's not going to answer my pleas to write a new book every year, but the author of MY MISSPENT YOUTH and the recent LIFE WOULD BE PERFECT IF I LIVED IN THAT HOUSE writes a regular column for the L.A. Times now, and tweets about her writing life ("Speaking tonight at my alma mater. Managed to get worst case of laryngitis in my life. Anxiety dreams can come true!") as well as pithy commentary on the viral human-interest story of the day (on Marina Keegan: "Death of young Yale grad indisputably tragic. Wondering how many others w/o NYer jobs lined up also died last wk that we haven't heard abt?") It was also on Twitter that I found out (via Sarah Weinman, newsbearer to the book world) that she just signed a deal for a new essay collection, UNSPEAKABLE. Maybe I'll get my wish after all.

Elif Batuman (@BananaKarenina): Come for the punny name, stay for the insights into Turkish culture ("Naming the one Turkish character on your TV show 'Kemal Pamuk' is like naming your only British character 'Sir Winston Shakespeare.'") and meta-jokes ("Twitter suggested I follow Dalai Lama - I considered it, but what if later I change my mind and unfollow him and he gets super-mad?")

Matthew Batt (@MattCBatt): This is my official debutante pick for the first-time memoirist whose book SUGARHOUSE, out this very week, chronicles the years when he and his wife bought an old crack house and planted their unsteady flag in it. His tweets are like a tiny window into a different life ("Nothing like a trip on a hot day to a public pool to make me feel like a complete patrician ass.") and while he's there to promote, he does so with whimsy ("Index of evildoers mentioned in SUGARHOUSE: Karl Rove; Idi Amin; Darth Vader (twice); my 8th grade shop teacher; Mr & Lady Macbeth.")

Andrew Shaffer (@AndrewTShaffer, also @EvilWylie, @EmperorFranzen): The busiest man on Twitter, the one who showed up to Franzen's first FREEDOM reading in New York City in an Emperor Palpatine-style cloak, was always working stealthily behind the curtain even as he quipped about the sad state of modern letters ("TELL ME you didn't just put a link to your Amazon book on my Facebook wall with the status "Indie Authors Rule!" delete block block block"). And if I take the time to read anyone's parody of FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY, it's going to be his, FIFTY SHAMES OF EARL GREY, for which I hear he was handing out branded tea bags at BookExpo America a few weeks ago.

Kate Christensen (@aquavita): Attenberg's cohost at the event I went to last week is new to my Twitter feed, a former Brooklynite who lives in Maine now (a place, like Batt's St. Paul, I can only imagine). Unlike her cohost as well as Batt and Shaffer, I had read Christensen's most recent book THE ASTRAL (and really liked it) before I was even aware that she was on Twitter. From the landscape, I look forward to her blog posts about cooking and advice on writing as she presses forward with the memoir she said last week she had to write.

For more recommendations: Social media for authors: Play now, get to work later

Shit Franzens say

I was sorry that while Jonathan Franzen and I overlapped a little in New Orleans, I had left by the time he hunkered down on Tuesday night at Tulane to give a talk about why he hates everything and Edith Wharton isn't pretty enough. Just kidding! It was part of the school's "Great Writers" lecture series.

Jami Attenberg was, and from her report here are my three favorite quotes:

• "I am committed to endings…I can no longer be mistaken for a post-modern author."
• "Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose."
• "I was taught to be nice to people, which is my credo even though I seem to have some small gift for offending people without intending to."

Sadly I missed the ensuing #jonathanfranzenhates series of jokes (in short, everything). According to the Tulane report he also said "Writing a novel is an experience. The process is more important than the product," which I'm definitely not sure I agree with. But Jonathan Franzen surely hates when we speculate on his process, and the best way to get us not to is to drop hints like this constantly and submit to major magazine profiles. Obviously.

Brooklyn Authorati Gather On Area Woman's Stoop For Some Reason

But be careful, some of them bite!

For a good time, Photoshop yourself into this Conde Nast Traveler portrait of a number of (though by no means all of) the borough's finest and pretend they all showed up to talk shop with you.

Check out the original via Jami Attenberg. (Also, that's not my stoop, although if you have an inkling of where it is...)