What Elena Kagan is reading

I couldn't find anything on what the Supreme Court nominee likes to read for fun (clearly, the most important part of her nomination). But she once argued that federal campaign law could not ban campaign books paid for by corporate funds, contrary to what someone on Fox News said. So we know she likes free speech and hates books that aren't boring...

For the writers in the crowd, Editorial Ass handles the question of what to do when you're trying to sell a book whose title has recently been used by another book in your genre. Oof, that sucks!

I collect titles, as I've established, but this is one I really envied when I saw it.

Filmbook: Now is the summer of our discontent

Publishers Weekly featured a couple of the comic books behind this summer's blockbusters, including recent box office winner "Iron Man 2" and "Scott Pilgrim Versus The World." But are there any movies coming out based on ordinary books?

Short answer: no. (Long answer: noooooooooooooo.) I guess I shouldn't expect better, given the reputation of The Summer Movie, but the pickings seem especially slim this year. Semi-prodigy Nick McDonell's novel TWELVE about New York City prep schoolers with drug problems gets the big-screen treatment (starring Chace Crawford of "Gossip Girl" -- should've gotten Westwick) on July 2nd; July 23rd brings the further desecration of my childhood with a big-screen adaptation of Beverly Cleary's Ramona books (although the author said she was pleased overall). "The Switch," based on a story by Jeffrey Eugenides and opening August 20, looks good 'cause it's Jason Bateman and bad 'cause it's directed by two guys who worked on "Cavemen," the inexplicable sitcom based on the Geico ads.

The only real heavy-hitter in this category not involving vampires and werewolves (yup, Twilight 3 is happening) is the long-awaited/-dreaded adaptation of "Eat Pray Love." Warning: trailer may cause violent eye-rolling, worries about Javier Bardem's Hollywood career. Well, at least I'll be getting a lot of reading done this year.

But wait! It's the Kobo!

Kepkanation has a solid piece on the Kobo, Borders' entry into the e-reader market announced by the store this week and on sale June 17.

Clearly they've tried to make a more single-function device, and I appreciate that even if the market doesn't. But its introduction echoes what a lot of Borders' decisions look like recently: Too little, too late. The Kobo shares a lot of similarities with the Kindle (black and white screen, e-Ink, the blocky white '80s-computer shape), so what took them so long? Even if they had been able to move this announcement up a few months, they could have played up the affordability angle against the iPad.

The Kobo and the Nook both have one advantage over other devices in the brick-and-mortar stores, but whether they will be able to harness it, I'm not sure. If your mother (for demographic example -- I'm sure she's very nice) has a problem with her e-reader, she would probably rather take it into Borders or Barnes & Noble to get it looked at than spend time on the phone with Amazon customer service and then have to mail her Kindle in. Same with the iPad and Apple stores, although you can't buy actual books when you're there. But I haven't heard that either store is trying that.

Here, there, somewhere else

I can't remember if Lorrie Moore ever names the state in which her new book, A GATE AT THE STAIRS, is set, but most of it takes place in a city called Troy. Often tagged with the phrase "the Athens of the Midwest," Troy is the home of the big state university where the book's narrator, Tassie, has been studying, and when we're not there, we follow her home to the small town where she grew up.

Troy probably resembles a lot of cities, but I had decided for myself pretty early on which city it was. Moore would probably disapprove of this, but then she shouldn't have borrowed the historical event Tassie's dad jokingly refers to, one I'm pretty sure didn't happen in every Midwestern college town, and assigned it to Troy.

What are the advantages to setting a novel in a fictional place? Freedom of invention, to begin with. It's more critical for fantasy or science fiction works, I should think, but any author might want to add streets or even neighborhoods in which to place her characters without the interference of "But that corner isn't zoned for a restaurant in real life." (Tassie nannies for a couple in the book, one of whom owns a restaurant.) If the author is writing about a real-life event, altering the landscape of an existing city may not be enough to protect against libel charges -- or pesky reviewers who point out how similar Book X is to News Item Y. Then again, it's easier to make up a small city than a large one, and region makes a difference, too; I suspect going to your agent with a realistic work set in "a major East Coast city" wouldn't go over well, but the Midwest can be a little... more hazy in the minds of other people.

I don't think I can get out of this topic without throwing in a mention of Yoknapatawpha County, one of the most famous fictional places in American literature. (So here it is.) I wonder whether critics of the day probed him for details of the "real" Yoknapatawpha or even journeyed to Lafayette County, MS, the widely accepted real-life analogue, to examine it for his reading public. Maybe our mania for 'realness' is more recent, more of a fad, driven by the fact that we can Google "real location of TITLE" and give ourselves an 'answer' that way.

I couldn't even engage with Troy, the fictional city, but it didn't affect my enjoyment of the book. Late in it Moore pulls off this one revelatory sequence to make a creative writing major fret (aided by the fact that no one had spoiled me for it, so I will follow suit) and for which I could mostly forgive its earlier linguistic frills.

In the elevator yesterday

Two office workers enter. One is carrying James Frey's MY FRIEND LEONARD.

#1: Is that what you're reading right now?
#2: Yeah, I just started it last night.
#1: Were you surprised?
-pause-
#2: Yeah, you wouldn't think it would have a pink cover.

#2 wasn't liking the book very much yet, but self-described as a person who always has to finish a book, no matter how bad it is. A third coworker chimed in from behind me to say that she would always leave the bookmark in a book she didn't like much, but almost never went back to it.

Merriam-Webster's lame game

I subscribe to the Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day, one of that cluster of e-mails I read as the coffee kicks in. Sometimes I'm a little disappointed when it turns out to be a word I already use all the time, but I've never been bored enough with it to unsubscribe. But they've done something deeply annoying to their format so I'm thinking about breaking up with them.

Classically, these e-mails were always titled with the word in question, like so*:

(Great word, too!) In the last month or six weeks, however, they switched to providing little "clues" in the subject, so that you have to open up the e-mail to be bitterly disappointed by how lame those clues are... I mean, to figure out what word they meant.

Barely a month in, the writers have clearly run out of amusing things to say about the day's words. Here's April 30:

Is it "a fun word," or is it perhaps the only noun used for "cave explorers"?

Exhibit B, from May 1st:


So I look at this subject and I think: "...Deaf?" Then I feel like an asshole, but one might argue that Beethoven is famous not only for being a great composer, but for doing so despite going deaf while producing his great work. See, Merriam-Webster? You did this to me!

Also, I might use "spelunker" but when am I honestly going to use pianistic?**

Okay, one more example, from May 3:


Here's a word I didn't know, but which, once I'd read the rest of the e-mail, I thought "They've got it all wrong!" The two definitions provided are

1 : to feel or express dejection or discontent : complain
*2 : to long for something

How are those "the blues"? I guess the second definition may qualify, but discontent is not "the blues." Complaining can be an aftereffect of "the blues," but it is not "the blues." Toss in the faux-catchiness of "This word's for you," and I can't even appreciate that it's related to the more common "to pine (for)," because I'm just annoyed.

I know they're only trying to help by making word acquisition more "fun," but given that these e-mails hit me at Maximum Annoyance Hour, I think they could be more clever and less "Uh, well, we have to title it something quick." It's not as if the creators of this e-mail are sitting over their coffee during their Maximum Annoyance Hour, thinking: "Spelunker. Why do we have to do this again?"

So I'll nominate myself for the job. I send a lot of e-mails and I'd be happy to recycle some of my own private subject lines until I have time to write eye-catching, click-through-inspiring masterpieces. How can you not open an e-mail with a title like "THERE IS NO GOD," "Don't forget to pack the world's tiniest violin" and "This is a horrible case, but I LOL'ed*** at the rhetorical question"? 'Cause I may have used all of those in the past week.**** Call me, dictionary denizens, and we'll go spelunking in the wide world of words together.

---
* These screenshots are not terribly exciting, I know. But I wanted some illustration.
** At work I have somehow (heh) gained a reputation as being the spelling/grammar person, proof I guess that one can only pose as normal for so long before Hulking out into full nerd. In my defense, apparently this chair needed to be filled; one of my colleagues recently asked me what a proper noun was.
*** Technically, L'ed OL. What.
**** I cherry-picked the most dramatic ones, but my point stands.

Spotted on the subway: That's a bingo

Writer Lauren Bans, of Salman Rushdie fan fame, snapped this photo of a woman reading GOING ROGUE on the subway, "book cover removed so peeps wouldn't be all 'judgery.'" Too late!

I had been waiting for this to happen; since it was on a train I take a lot, I guess I'll never know how close I was. So what should be my next "Where's Waldo" subway sighting goal? It can be an incongruous book or an incongruous combination of book and reader.

In which Find and Replace is your friend

Via Ed Champion on Twitter: Author Alexandra Sokoloff is being sued by a friend who claims she defamed him in her novel THE UNSEEN. It's hard to throw out his claim when he and the protagonist share the same first and last name -- at the very least, that seems like an avoidable error.

Filmbook-to-Be: Freakonomics (2010)

I wasn't all that excited about the news that the best-selling FREAKONOMICS was being turned into a movie until I actually read something about it this week. Instead of one long work, the documentary (which just played in New York this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival) is comprised of five short films, each with a different director tackling one of the concerns (?) of the book. The talent recruited is pretty stellar, from Alex "Taxi To The Dark Side" Gibney to Heidi "Jesus Camp" Ewing, and the whole thing is stitched together by Seth "The King Of Kong" Gordon.

For introducing mainstream audiences to these up-and-coming directors, this may actually do some good. Keep an eye out for "Freakonomics" in November.

Unbookening will be sorry one day, yes you will, yes you will

(If you're new here, this is the origin of the term unbookening, back when it still had its hyphen [!]; these are all the entries that followed.)

March-April edition:
Received 19 books to review
Checked 9 books out of the library
Borrowed 1 book from a friend
Bought 6 books
Won 1 book in a contest (I am lucky on the Internet right now)
+36

Donated 24 books (OK, so I did do a little spring cleaning)
Gave away 5 books
Returned 12 to the library
-41

Programming notes:
First, this feature is going bimonthly (first definition) until further notice. I'm still trying to reduce my stash of unread books and think about every book I acquire; I just am running out of things to write about that, which is why I have to pull shenanigans like cramming a bunch of non-related material into the bottom of those posts just to keep myself interested, ahem.

Second, Baseball Week is definitely going to happen -- but not till July. I'm thinking the 5th? It will definitely include those Roth and Mahler books, plus two titles to be announced in a few weeks. This doesn't mean that summer of DFW isn't happening, either; I just need to go back to the lab a little bit and perfect my 29-hour day. (Also, make room on my shelves to buy those. Hey, that is slightly relevant!)

Third, whose hotly anticipated summer novel did I get in the mail to review last week? And whose remaining body of work (four novels and a short-story collection I haven't read yet) am I going to crush into the next four weeks before I get to it, I hope? Stay tuned 'cause I will probably be writing about him and that process soon. (Three unhelpful clues: He was born in the 1960s, he lives in Los Angeles and he has a Twitter account he appears to run himself.)

But I do plan on reading them... honest...

No Hipster Puppies entry has ever hit home as hard as this one.

When I went to bed at night I suffered my first bout of insomnia. This is what death would be like, I feared: not sleep but insomnia. To sleep no more, as I had learned in Pre-1700 British Drama. I had never feared insomnia before -- like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read? I'd always been able to sleep. But now I lay there, fretful as a Bartok quartet. My mind wandered through the night hours uneasily, and it was indeed like prison: when the sky began to lighten, I was in disbelief and filled with terrible, buzzing tiredness.

Once I woke with the feeling that I had actually died in the night. I awoke with a sense that during ostensible sleep I had encountered not just life's brevity but its speed! and its noise and its irrelevance and its close. How we glamorized our lives! our bodies! which were nothing more than -- potatoes! with a potato's flat eyes and pink snappable roots. I lay there in bed in a peaceful form of depression. In another town, one less antagonistic toward religion, this mood -- pre-prayer, pre-God, pre-conversion -- might have been assigned some spiritual significance. But for people in Troy, God was mind-clutter: a cross between a billboard, a charlatan, a hamburger, and a fairy king. I had always thought God was part of a sensible if credulous denial of death, one that made life doable. How could that be wicked? Why bother criticizing that? Why disparage the crutches of the lame? Why vainly imagine one's own gait unhobbled? Besides, religion gave us swearing. Before Christianity, what was there? "By Jove"? But life in Troy was to be taken without any lucky charms of any sort. It was neo-reformation. The walls of my winter room seemed a silvery, quilted satin, like the interior of a coffin. I began to feel there was no such thing as wisdom. Only lack of wisdom.

--Lorrie Moore, A GATE AT THE STAIRS

Bill Murray Reading Poetry

This is probably the second most important thing I will post here all year, so straighten up.

Small fabulists

I taught a class on autobiography and memoir this week, in which my students (ages 10-13) were writing short essays about one memorable event in their lives. I had to talk multiple students down from their insistence that they remembered the day they were born well enough to write about. One stared meaningfully off into the distance and said, "I saw a bright light. A man in a white coat. Slapped me on the back." Even if this is theoretically possible, what would be the odds of having more than one in the same room?

Obviously I couldn't verbally fact-check all of them, so I'll never know whether L. was allowed to play nickel slots in a casino on vacation or if my co-teacher M. really pushed her sister off her bike and then told her it was an accident. But after protesting that nothing had ever happened to them, they all wrote very specific accounts with a bizarre level of detail. I sat feeling blank till S. asked me for a story about "doggies"; I never had a dog, so I wrote about the time I got attacked by an Irish mastiff instead. (This didn't bother her.) She wrote about learning to swim in a deep pool and the feeling of looking down past your toes, down into the water.

If you've bothered to read this far you must be quite bored; but it's Free Comic Book Day, so go out and do that.