Stuff that makes you go hmmm...

BookBitchBlog - My weblog...basically, this is a journal that I can upload from any computer I happen to be at, whenever the mood strikes.  Includes all sorts of interesting tidbits as I come across them.  Feedback is always welcome...

Palm Beach Post Summer Reading - Including a couple of recommendations from the BookBitch

Florida Update - Book signings and author events around the state

A Fish Story - ramblings from the BookBitch on book covers

Poetry - a small selection of poems that I find meaningful, and therefore appropriate to this website.  

Lee County Reading Festival - Fun in the sun - including pictures - of my day in Ft. Meyers

Where Do You Like To Do It? Winners - I won a Random House Audio contest a couple of years ago. I didn't know this was posted online anywhere, but someone sent me this link.  

Les Standiford - South Florida writer/icon - my thoughts on his talk at the Florida Center for the Book

Miami Book Fair 2002 - Read all about the day I spent wandering the fair

Mystery Writers of America, Florida Chapter Meeting July 2002 - I was invited to speak, read all about it!

Web site helps old books turn over a new leaf -  I was very excited to find this site mentioned in my local newspaper, the Sun Sentinel, in an article on page one!  Check out the terrific piece by Nick Sortal about Bookcrossing.com, the website that promotes reading & releasing books into the "wild", including my experience with the program.  

Books for Summer Reading - NY Times recommended summer reading

The “Art” of the Review: Brilliant Sri Lankan novelists, go home by John Bloom - Very compelling article about what's wrong with the book reviews in major media.  

Court: Library Filter Law Illegal: A controversial library filtering law is unconstitutional; at the heart of the decision was one key point: Buggy software.

America's Reading Habits - results of a survey of who's reading what

More on the bestseller lists - Will  BookTrack change the face of Best Seller lists as we know them?  From the Washington Post.

More on NY Reads -  One City Reading One Book? Not if the City is New York.  From the NY Times.

2002 Awards - Edgar, Agatha, Book Sense and Borders Original Voices

Broward County Literary Fest 2002 - My report on this year's annual library fundraiser

"I'd Kill to Have Your Job" - That's what Gregg Sutter has heard for more than twenty years as the full time researcher for Elmore Leonard.  

Read & Release - This is an interest piece about an online program that puts stray books up for adoption on their Book Crossing website.  I tried it, so far whoever found my book hasn't posted anything.

Following Seattle’s Read:  Seattle started something with their community wide reading program.  

Follow that up with: 

"What book would you force on your neighbors?" about how One Book, One City became a political hot potato in (where else?) NY.

Corner Books - Bookstore redefines 'hard sell' 

BookMania - My report on an afternoon at the Martin County Library's annual book fair, circa 2002.

Edgar Awards - This year's nominees for the best in mystery and true crime.

Banned Books - The most frequently challenged books of 2000

Rose Red - Stephen King's new mini-series, soon to air on TV; based on fiction or non-fiction?  You will have to look very closely to determine that from the "official" website.

More Rose Red - The real author files for the copyright

It's OK to Hate Your Books - from the back page of the January 13, 2002 New York Times Book Review.

Best Seller Lists - or are they?  

Miami Book Fair 2001 - My report on the annual book bonanza.

A Reader's Manifesto - An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose, from the Atlantic Monthly.

Chicago Tribune - Interesting book news about the difficult choices for a followup to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD for Chicago librarians and the possibility of concluding Manchester's Churchill trilolgy.

Murder So Quirky Has It's Rewards - UglyTown is a small press making a name for itself in well written crime fiction.

Fiction, Thy Name is Woman - which sex reads what?

reason.com - another interesting article on the napsterism of books

Meet Me in St. Louis by Jonathan Franzen - courtesy of The New Yorker

Rejections & Lighthouses - Jo Ann Mapson's thoughts on receiving some nasty mail about her book

Cry the Beloved Oprah - Lifted from Michael Cader, Publisher's Lunch 07.13.01

Napsterized  - The nation's public libraries are struggling to deliver e-books. But do cardholders even want books online?

Book Reviews - What are you really reading in the customer reviews on Amazon.com?  Or rather, whose opinions are those exactly...

Literature Abuse - Do you suffer from this malady?

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered - Clive James venting/poetry

Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge - new technological breakthrough!

'Friendly' book reviews on the Web can be a relative term

by Nara Schoenberg,

June 21, 2001  Chicago Tribune

When it comes to the recent novel "Drowning in Hot Water," a certain Eileen Donnersberger of Chicago is a big fan.

"Drowning" is a "fantastic mystery," Donnersberger writes in an Amazon.com customer review. The plot is "extraordinarily interesting." 

And that's not all: "I finished it in one day because I could not put it down! . . . This is an author to watch! Take note Book-of-the-Month Club: Put this one on your list to review -- it will quickly be chosen as the book to read and the author to watch."  

Is there anything Donnersberger neglects to say about "Drowning"?

Perhaps only this: The author, Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, is her brother.

No one really knows how many of the tens of thousands of customer book reviews at Internet retailer Amazon.com are written by the authors' friends and family members. But some book industry insiders say that a significant number do come from those who know (and love) the author best.

"I do think it's pretty common," says Andrew Ayala, marketing manager for Grove/Atlantic publishing house. "I couldn't give you any sort of percentage or any sort of firm figures, but . . . it's a fairly done thing."

Some Amazon.com aficionados claim they can even detect patterns suggesting author-reviewer ties: the very early, very positive review is suspect in some circles, as is the stream of positive reviews that follows a negative one.

"You'll have a one-star review and then you'll have five stars, glowing, like [the author and reviewer] grew up together. And they probably did," says a book company publicist who declined to be named, saying he feared retaliation by supervisors.

Of the four Amazon.com customer reviews posted for "Drowning in Hot Water," one is by the author's sister and two others are by friends who identified themselves by first and last name but did not indicate their relationship with the author.

Amy Gutman, the author of the recent legal thriller "Equivocal Death," acknowledged in an interview that three of her customer reviews at Amazon.com were written by people she knows. Two of those customer reviewers told the Tribune they are Gutman's friends. The third is described by Gutman as a friend she knows "slightly." All three disclosed their full names with their reviews but not their relationships with Gutman.

Playing by the rules 

Reviewers such as these aren't breaking any Amazon rules or guidelines. To the contrary.

"We completely encourage anyone and everyone to write customer reviews," says Amazon.com spokeswoman Kristin Schaefer, who adds that the company wants to keep the process of writing reviews as simple and flexible as possible.

"From a privacy standpoint, customers shouldn't be required to tell us [whether the author is a friend or relative] if they post a review," she says.

But at a time when readers are turning to the most popular Internet bookseller for opinions as well as products, the presence of reviews by friends and family raises questions in some quarters.

The traditional media ethics argument, put forth by Northwestern University journalism professor Richard Schwarzlose, is that a review by someone with close ties to the author must be assumed to be biased. Such reviews are "not as useful to the public [as reviews by more objective sources] and may well be deceptive," Schwarzlose says.

Under this model, if you review a friend or family member, you face a literary Catch-22: "Disclose [your close relationship with the author] and, of course, the review is worthless. And don't disclose it, and the review is worthless," Schwarzlose says.

But people who have reviewed friends or family at Amazon argue that an honest review is an honest review, regardless of who writes it.

Asked if her review is misleading, Donnersberger, 54, the executive director of a non-profit health care agency, says, "No. Those are my true thoughts about the book. I wasn't lying. I wasn't making it up, and I wasn't saying great things about a book that was terrible. I thought it was tremendous. . . . I believe everything I've said in that article and more."

Murphy says he didn't ask Donnersberger -- or the friends who reviewed him -- to write a review and he would have preferred it if his sister had disclosed their relationship.

"My sister probably should have said, `I'm his sister.' Absolutely, I would have done that," he says. "But is it false advertising? I don't think so. Frankly, how many people buy a book because there's something online?"

Gutman said she hadn't discussed with her friends what they would write in their reviews.

Follow your heart

"I would certainly not want anyone to write in anything they didn't strongly feel personally, but, yeah, obviously, people who know you and are excited about your work are going to have an incentive [to post a review], are going to want to do that, and want to take the time to do that."

One of the two friends who reviewed Murphy's book, Washington, D.C., lawyer Marty Ganzglass, has known Murphy since they were in the Peace Corps in Somalia together 33 years ago. Ganzglass, who gave "Drowning" four out of five stars, said he wrote an honest review that mentioned some shortcomings of the book.

Murphy also was reviewed by George Stapleton, 62, a retired teacher who lives in Park Forest. Stapleton, who has known Murphy since high school but isn't a close friend, said it didn't even occur to him that not mentioning his relationship with the author would be misleading.

"I figured it was sort of anonymous. It wasn't like I was writing a book review for the newspaper and they were going to pay me for it. Then I'd have to say, `Not really, I'm a friend. I know him.'"

Ethical guidelines

Further complicating matters, traditional book review publications often follow ethical guidelines that lie somewhere between the clear-cut conflict-of-interest model favored by journalists and the more forgiving, purity-of-intentions model suggested by customer reviewers.

Robert Silvers, co-editor of The New York Review of Books, says that, in general, there is a presumption against close relatives and friends reviewing books, but that the presumption can be overcome in some instances. In each case, he says, the editor has to judge whether the reviewer can write fairly and honestly about the book.

Former San Francisco Chronicle book editor David Kipen rules out assigning reviews to close friends or family because they "tend to like a book or hate a book for reasons having very little to do with the book's intrinsic literary quality."

Cutting them some slack

Still, Kipen doesn't rule out the rare "stunt" review: a distinguished writer reviewing his or her equally distinguished father, for instance. And, in the matter of Amazon.com, he is willing to cut reviewers of family and friends considerable slack, on the grounds that Amazon is a commercial enterprise, rather than a journalistic publication. 

"I chortle at [the practice of friends reviewing friends at Amazon] but I don't think it's worth condemning, because I think everybody knows what's going on," he says.

In interviews with five people who reviewed friends or family at Amazon, all rejected the idea that their own reviews might be misleading.

However, Stapleton said he might view someone else's review differently if he knew there was a close relationship between the author and the reviewer.

One of the three friends who wrote about "Equivocal Death" suggested that someone should do a study of bias among Amazon.com customer reviewers.

"Ethics is very important to me and I wouldn't feel pressured to write something I didn't believe. I wouldn't do it," she said. "But there are other people who are different from that, perhaps."

Copyright 2001 Chicago Tribune

Edgar Awards 2001

The Mystery Writers of America have announced the Edgar Award nominations.  I am very excited about Harlan Coben's TELL NO ONE, nominated for Best Novel, and David Ellis' LINE OF VISION, for Best First Novel by an American Author.  WOOHOO!  Some of the nominees are:

Best Novel

The Judgment by D.W. Buffa (Warner Books)
Tell No One by Harlan Coben (Delacorte Press) 
Money, Money, Money by Ed McBain (Simon & Schuster)
Silent Joe by T. Jefferson Parker (Hyperion)
Reflecting the Sky by S.J. Rozan (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Best First Novel by an American Author

Open Season by C.J. Box (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
Red Hook by Gabriel Cohen (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Minotaur)
Line of Vision by David Ellis (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler (Uglytown)
The Jasmine Trade by Denise Hamilton (Scribner)

Just one glaring oversight that I noticed; MYSTIC RIVER by Dennis Lehane.  

Banned Books

Updated List of Challenged Books
The ALA has released their list of the most frequently challenged books in 2000. Here is the list, as published by the Christian Science Monitor:

1. Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, for occult/Satanism and antifamily themes.
2. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, for violence and offensive language.
3. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for sexual content.
4. Killing Mr. Griffin, by Lois Duncan, for violence and sexual content.
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, for using offensive language, racism, and violence.
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, for being too explicit in the book's portrayal of rape and other sexual abuse.
7. Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers, for offensive language, racism, and violence.
8. Scary Stories series, by Alvin Schwartz, for violence and occult themes.
9. The Terrorist, by Caroline Cooney, for negatively portraying the Islamic religion and Arabs.
10. The Giver, by Lois Lowry, for being sexually explicit, having occult themes, violence.

Makes me want to run out and read them all...actually, I've read most of them already!

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America's Reading Habits

Some fascinating numbers on American's reading habits, compiled by Dennis Lien, University of Minnesota Libraries, based on Gallup surveys from 1999 and 1990.

Poll asked "During the past year, about how many books, either hardcover or paperback, did you read either all or part of the way through?"

In 1999, replies by percentage were:

12 percent none
24 one to five
18 six to ten
34 eleven to fifty
10 fifty one or more
2 no opinion

In 1990, the same choices produced breakdowns of 16, 32, 15, 27, 7, and 3.

Other bits from the poll: 42% in 1999 and 39% in 1990 claimed to have a favorite author. Said author was Stephen King to 14% of the populace in 1999 and 18% in 1990. Danielle Steele was runner up in both polls (8%; earlier 9%). Tom Clancy and John Grisham each scored at 6% in 1999; Louis L'Amour and Sidney Sheldon both scored at 4% in 1990, and L'Amour was still at 2% in 1999. No one else scored above 3% in 1990, or above 1% (Sheldon, Mary Higgins Clark, and Dean Koontz) in 1999. 59% of those in 1999 and 44% of those in 1990 who claimed to have a favorite author listed someone other than King, Steele, L'Amour, Sheldon, Michener, VC Andrews, Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Clancy, Grisham, Clark, or Koontz.

Respondents were also asked to identify (in 1999) who wrote each of five titles. 72% knew CAT IN THE HAT was by Dr. Seuss, but only 29% identified the author of OLD MAN AND THE SEA (Hemingway); 26% THE FIRM (Grisham); 18% A TALE OF TWO CITIES (Dickens); and 15% THE GREAT GATSBY (Fitzgerald). 

Numbers don't lie. 

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Web site helps old books turn over a new leaf
By Nick Sortal
Sun-Sentinel

July 12, 2002

The chain is forming rapidly, and in the most public of places. At a bench outside your local grocery store. In a laundromat. In the nearby coffee shop.

Book lovers are committing random acts of literary kindness, quietly leaving their favorite reads for the next person — and hopefully someone after that. It’s part message in a bottle, part literary crusade.

By logging onto a Web site — www.BookCrossing.com — after they make a drop, book lovers are tracking where their titles go. Since July 1, the average has been about 1,000 releases a day, including surreptitious book abandonments throughout South Florida. The droppers download labels and place them inside each book, directing book finders to the Web site.

Sharing a good book isn’t new — “read one, take one” boxes have been found in youth hostels around the world for decades — but the tracking portion is. All readers have that special book or two that resonated with them, and they’d like to know if others feel the same way about it that they do.

“It’s fun to see where a piece of you has traveled,” said Renee Smith of Delray Beach, whose three releases include The Lion’s Game by Nelson DeMille. She left it recently outside a dollar store at Powerline Road and Hillsboro Boulevard in Deerfield Beach.

The originator calls it “read and release.”

Ron Hornbaker, a partner at a small software firm in Kansas City, started BookCrossing after kicking the idea around with some coworkers. He was surprised that no one had thought of it before.

“I knew it was a decent idea and technically it would work, but the passion and excitement people are exhibiting is just blowing me away,” he said. “People have been doing this their whole lives. We’ve just given it a legitimacy and put a technology behind it.”

Both the person releasing the book and the finder get a little adrenaline surge, like they’re being subversive somehow, Hornbaker said. That’s part of the appeal. That, and the idea of feeding the karmic wheel by getting more people to read.

“They can still remain anonymous but can find out where and how their altruism affected people,” he said.

The site is free, but Hornbaker links the BookCrossing.com drops to Amazon.com, so people can buy a book if it can’t be found “in the wild,” as the site says.

Authors and publishers, surprisingly, have been “100 percent supportive,” Hornbaker said, even to the point that they are using the site to create their own buzz. Publishers Hyperion and Simon and Shuster have sent him books to release.

“I guess to them the publicity more than makes up for lost royalties,” he said.

The momentum is picking up, spurred by a May report on National Public Radio and ensuing media groundswell. There have been about 38,000 documented releases in 36 countries since BookCrossing was launched 15 months ago, and about one-fourth have been in the past 10 days as friends e-mail each other about it. In the United States, Florida is the second-most active state, trailing only California.

Lisa Schwartz has no idea what happened to her first drop. A two-book-a-month reader, she left The Island of the Lost Maps by Miles Harvey last month at a coffee shop in Boca Raton but never heard what happened.

Monday she tried again. At about 11:30 a.m. she walked into the same Starbucks store at Clint Moore Road and Military Trail carrying a copy of You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again.

She said she was “kind of embarrassed” about leaving a paperback about prostitution because she usually reads more highbrow fare. But her sister-in-law had given her the book, and Schwartz had zipped through it by the pool during a vacation. Before that book she read The Once and Future King by T.H. White, and her all-time favorite is Memoirs of a Geisha.

“I’ve lent it out a lot, but only one person, who I don’t have anything in common with, was as enthusiastic about it as I was,” she said. “You’d think that people you have things in common with would have similar reading interests. But that’s not the case at all.”

Schwartz quietly walked into the coffee shop and sat down at the center table. About 15 minutes later she left. But the book stayed.

She had already cleared the first hurdle.

“A lot of times people will say, ‘Hey, you forgot your book,’” Hornbaker said. “Then you either have to explain or make another drop.”

The book sat untouched for the next hour, partly because at noontime the Starbucks shop has more of a carryout crowd than a sit-down one. And the few visitors who stopped to dine shied away from the table because they saw a book on it and took it to be a “reserved” sign.

At one point, five 20ish-looking men, wearing jeans with cell phones clipped to their belts, stood briefly by the table. One picked the book up, smirked at the big red lips on the cover, then put it down without opening it.

Then, 87 minutes after Schwartz left the book, a Starbucks employee doing routine cleanup picked the book up and set it aside. He had planned to put it in the store’s lost and found box, but then was advised to read the inside cover notice about BookCrossing.com. He won’t read it, but he will re-release it, he said. Well, at least the intrigue somewhat remains: He didn’t say where.

The success rate of a book being found and then logged on the Web site is 10 percent to 15 percent, Hornbaker said, noting that it’s taking a while for this game of follow-the-reader to catch on.

But that doesn’t deter Stacy Alesi, who left Got Your Number by Stephanie Bond at a Starbucks in Shadowood Square on Glades Road west of Boca Raton. [Because Starbucks patrons fancy themselves as readers, and bookish NPR broke the story, the coffee shop has evolved into a logical drop zone.]

“It’s just a great idea,” said Alesi, who works at the Southwest County Regional Branch of the Palm Beach County Library System and writes about books on her Web site, www.bookbitch.com.

Alesi didn’t get a response after posting her book release on the Web site, but people looked at Starbucks for it, even though the odds are pretty good that a book will be snagged well before the releaser can get to a computer to post it.

“I went to Starbucks as soon as it was posted, and the book was gone,” said Schwartz, who is so addicted to the BookCrossing idea that on a recent trip to Germany she and her husband tried to track a book that had been posted according to satellite coordinates.

The BookCrossing site has made a reader out of Michael Pelaez, a senior at Hialeah-Miami Lakes High. He was turned on to BookCrossing.com via a link from wheresgeorge.com, a Web site that tracks that dollar bills by recording and posting their serial numbers.

He began scooping up books throughout his house and releasing them at his school cafeteria and on public buses.

“But then I realized I was giving away something that I hadn’t enjoyed first myself,” he said.

Pelaez has made 10 drops. And, like Schwartz, he’s searching BookCrossing.com to retrieve books that others have released.

“It gets addicting, because I find myself scouting out places I would like to make a drop at,” he said. “It’s like the whole world is a library.”

Nick Sortal can be reached at nsortal@sun-sentinel.com or 954-385-7906.
Copyright © 2002, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Mystery Writers of America

Florida Chapter Meeting, July 2002

I want to thank the Mystery Writers of America, Florida chapter, for inviting me to speak at their July meeting on a panel called Booksellers: What Writers Need to Know.  Any time I get to talk about books I'm a happy girl, so needless to say I had a great time!  And I hope the members found it helpful.  It was moderated by the very funny Elaine Viets, who is working on a new mystery series called the Dead End Job series.  The first one comes out next spring and it's set in sunny Florida: I can't wait!  Also on the panel was Joanne Sinchuck of Murder of Miami Beach, which is the only mystery bookstore in the state of Florida.  She has tons of author signings, and sends out a terrific newsletter via email.  Angela Ricchiuti, who is the Community Relations Manager from Barnes & Noble in Hollywood, Florida, and my good friend Judy Kamiat, who worked with me at Borders for years and still does the reading group with me, and is currently working for the public library, rounded out the panel.  Judy is a serious mystery reader, and has given me hours of pleasure with her suggestions.  I got to meet some other wonderful people too, including one of my BookBitch Virgins, Carolyn Cain, author of Secret at the Breakers Hotel, which was a first for me!  Also, I had the pleasure of meeting Bob Williamson, author of the The Seriously Pink V, which I am really looking forward to reading.  And did I mention they bought me lunch?  It truly was a wonderful afternoon, and I hope I get to do it again some time. 

Les Standiford

If you read my piece on the Miami Book Fair then you know I didn't get to see him at the fair.  But in a way, that turned out to be a lucky break for me; he was a guest of the Florida Center for the Book at the Broward County Library last week.  He didn't say word one about the Deal books (which I love,) and I didn't ask.  He was there to talk about his newest book, a nonfiction page turner called Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean.  He spent over an hour talking, showing slides, and answering questions, which was considerably more time than he must have been allotted at the fair.

Mr. Standiford started off the evening with a mock script he prepared when his agent informed him he might be interviewed by Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America.  He did a good job, including notating commercial breaks and such, and would have done Charlie proud.  It was a marvelous introduction to an informative and interesting talk about Henry Flagler and his dream of having a train run all the way to Key West.  When he started his project, the only way to get to the Keys was by boat.  The man had extraordinary foresight regarding South Florida and the tourism industry - no wonder they wanted to name Miami after him.  The slide show featured all the pictures in the book, including Henry Flager, his three wives, and some of his incredibly grandiose homes and hotels - and without prompting, it would be impossible to tell which was which.  It is an amazing story, and Les Standiford tells it very well.

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