Month / December 2006

by Edward Champion

Selling Your Soul for a Pittance

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books points to this remarkable advertisement:

We need 5 reviewers for 3 of our newly released titles. We ask that you write a 1-3 Paragraph review with a 5 star rating (5 being best) of each of the 3 books. We will then ask that you forward the reviews over to us so that we can look over them before you post them on Amazon.com and Barns and Noble.com. Most of our reviewers are paid from $5- to $10 per review or $15.00 to $30.00 per 3 review book set.

In other words, this publisher, who goes by the name “kenwelsh,” is all too happy to buy your opinions for less than the price of going to see a movie or two pints on a Saturday night.

Some preliminary investigation reveals no other ads by Ken Welsh on the site, but given that the man can’t even spell “Barnes & Noble” correctly, one fears the worst: not just for the poor saps who actually sell out for so little, but for this sleazeball named Ken Welsh.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Michael Gove digs up the obligatory article about David Lodge’s “Humiliation,” the game whereby each participant admits what they haven’t read. He confesses that he hadn’t read Stephen King until he read Lisey’s Story, which he describes as “more painful for me than being trapped alone in one of the pods of the London Eye with a flatulent Appalachian mountain man anxious to re-enact a scene from Deliverance above the flowing waters of the Thames.” I didn’t care for Lisey either, but I don’t know if it’s fair to castigate a writer, particularly a prolific one, for a misfire.
  • Fascinating details on George Bernard Shaw’s last will and testament.
  • Anne Petty: “A case in point is the third Harry Potter film directed by Alfonso Cuarón. In that film, the familiar setting for Hogwarts was replaced by an incredibly precipitous landscape, especially the approach and immediate surroundings of Hagrid’s hut, and the interior for the school we thought we knew so well emerged in highly disorienting camera angles with ”House of Usher” look and feel. The effect was so distracting that I found it hard to lose myself in the flow of events on the screen.” Just keep ordering those lima beans from the menu, Anne. I hear they go great with castor oil. Leave the appreciation (and concomitant commentary) of cultural innovation to those willing to swim in the deep end or, better yet, those who still have a pulse.
  • Christ, some madman has released The Match Game to DVD. And it’s a four-disc collection no doubt full of the grand sleaze I didn’t come to appreciate (although I’m not sure if “appreciate” is the word) until decades later.
  • Alas, the Christmas season can’t save indie bookstores.
  • More FBI documents on John Lennon have been released.
  • 2006: the coldest year in the last five years. (via Books Inq.)
  • Chasing Ray takes umbrage with the Underrated Writers Project, noting that YA authors were not present. I fully confess that I’m quite in the dark on YA titles, but certainly not adverse to them. If anybody has some good YA author recommendations, do list them here.
  • Call me a skeptic, but am I the only one who sees through the blatant marketing of offering John Hodgman’s book on iTunes for free? You’ll get no link from me. No download either. Of course, if it came from a conduit outside iTunes, that might be another story.
  • Who knew that Jason Boog was a closet boxer who liked to knock the wind out of unfairly matched opponents who criticized his work?
  • The sublime Mr. Parr regularly underestimates himself. To wit: this very helpful guide to New York indie bookstores, quietly updated. (via The Written Nerd)
  • William Frith: Victorian hypocrite?
  • “What gives the school the right to decide when children should know the truth about such a harmless matter when knowing the truth does take away that little bit of magic?” What gives this mother the assumption that her kid still won’t believe in Santa, despite all claims to the contrary? (via Bryan Appleyard)
  • Various notables offer thoughts on Woody Allen’s movies. (via Quiet Bubble)
  • Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel lecture.
by Edward Champion

Too Many Angles

Callie Miller, who has cornered the blogosphere market on lengthy writeups of author events, offers a new one involving Heidi Julavits. But she notes, “I have tried (and clearly failed) to create an ‘epic’ series of posts about the recent Julavits reading at Skylight Books. I’ve tried to come at it from many angles – the waiting, the wondering, the bizarre fans that arrive and conduct bizarre little rituals prior to the reading.”

Tell me about it. If you’re an incessant observer or note-taker, it never gets any easier. You just kind of do it and eventually you stumble upon an angle.