Between the Covers

Everybody's a critic

Now I thought this furry fellow was making a comment on Christine Dolen's excellent Weekend cover story about the annual Summer Shorts festival - my favorite theater event of the year - but it turns out he's miffed over my review of Sex and the City, at least according to his owner Paula, a Herald reader, who agrees that I'm more than a little off base in my disappointment over SATC. She loved it, and so did her friends.

Apparently he does not randomly attack the Herald, and so it's obvious what he's targeting. Cats love SATC, because the characters are just as self-absorbed as they are. See, this is why I have dogs. They're not so judgmental. I just hope this guy doesn't get hold of any of my book reviews. I'm extremely fragile, and that might reduce me to tears.

"I don't recall Oprah calling George Bush a liar when he was on her show"

Great story on David Sedaris over at EW.com in which he defends James Frey and asks an excellent and extremely pointed question about Oprah's treatment of the beleagured (and very bad) faux memoirist. I didn't think it was possible to love Sedaris more, but apparently it is!

His new collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, comes out June 3. Watch this space for a review.

And click here to read the EW story.

Sex and the pity

Here it is, SATC fans. Read it and weep (or send me hate mail, which is what I'm expecting). Look, I wanted it to be good, too! It's the biggest, most talked about movie for women ever. And yet, it's just...OK.

Still. I love Miranda's hair. And how is Kim Cattrall 50?!

Go ahead. Read the review of the movie here.

Gloom and doom

News flash: the immediate future is bleak for book sales, according to the speculations of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit supported by the publishing industry. AP reports that BISG announced today at Book Expo America that it estimates growth of only 3 to 4 percent through 2011.

Without Harry Potter to guide it, the children's book market is projected to barely break even. Worst hit, BISG believes, will be mass market paperbacks. The Good News: religious book sales are rising. What could help mass market? Dan Brown to finally finish his sequel to The Da Vinci Code. Of course, the way his books dominate the bestseller lists, it could be years after publication before the sequel makes it to paperback.

In praise of library books

And here you thought this post was going to be a gratuitous, non-book related one about the relentless Sex and the City coverage that is so all-pervading that it's starting to make my nose bleed. But no! This is not some cheap excuse to show a photo of Big in bed with Carrie. Note what Carrie is holding: a library book.

Said book prompts a conversation between the soon-to-be-unhappy couple, with Big saying she must be the only person in NYC who checks out library books, and Carrie saying how much she loves the smell. Then she makes him smell the inside of the book. Not an aphrodisiac for everyone, but I have to admit, I love the smell of library books, and thought of this scene this morning when I checked out Andre Dubus III's House of Sand and Fog, which I hope to read over the weekend.

Yes, I still check out books, too, as well as the audiobooks I'm always going on about. My house has reached critical mass bookwise, so sometimes it's a relief to have a book I can borrow for two weeks and then return, my clutter demons silenced momentarily. I used to check out suspense novels when I'd decide I needed to go back and read the earlier works of an author I'd just fallen in love with (Laura Lippman was the most recent prompter of this behavior). Now I'm more in audiobooks mode, but this morning, I was thinking, I love the smell and feel and crinkly covers on the library books. If only I had loved the SATC movie so much. But more on that later.

Thinking ahead

It's early, and Lord knows I'm not one to plan things out in an intelligent manner, but it's not a bad idea to get your tickets for Salman Rushdie's appearance for Books & Books and the Florida Center for the Literary Arts. He'll be here at 7:30 July 8 at Temple Judea, 5500 Granada Blvd., and tickets are required for the reading/signing. You get two tickets for each copy purchased of his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, available at any of the B&B locations.

The return of Bond. James Bond.

On NPR this morning: a good if short interview with British author Sebastian Faulks, who has just published a new James Bond book. Faulks, whose novel Engleby drew raves last year and just came out in paperback, wrote Devil May Care as a tribute to the 100th anniversary of Bond creator Ian Fleming's birth.

Click here to hear the interview and read a short excerpt from the book.

Fleming, who died in 1964, was also responsible for the children's classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was my favorite movie when I was about 7 (liked the book, too).

Westerns - not dead yet

Talked to novelist Leif Enger today for an upcoming Q and A, and though he denies it, I am starting to believe he's keeping the rousing tradition of the American western alive and well. His new book, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, continues the tradition of the western with style to spare. It's narrated by a Midwestern writer who joins a retired outlaw in his quest for the wife he abandoned decades ago. It's got cowboys, posses, shootouts, chases, flights, reunions, one really big flood, pretty much everything you might ask for. It's got short, fast-paced dialogue-driven chapters for good reason: "A lot of those books I remember reading had really short chapters," Enger says. "So they had this galloping rhythm that works well for creating and maintaining momentum. I thought something like that would be fun to do - and to read."

And he's right. Enger, who wrote Peace Like a River, which is one of my favorite books, says he grew up reading Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey, and later learned to love Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove = genius) and Charles Portis (True Grit, another classic). I've never really been a western fan (despite my love for the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, which I swear is not solely due to Russell Crowe's presence), but So Brave is just one of those books you can't help but love.

Enger will be at Books & Books on Wednesday, June 4.

R.I.P., Mr. Adams

I DID IT! I DID IT! I finally finished the John Adams audiobook today. More fitting, perhaps, if I'd finished listening on July 4 - and believe me, a few times I thought it was going to take precisely that long - but I will settle for completing it on Memorial Day.

As everyone knows, it's a brilliant book. Just terrific. I'm so happy to have read - or at least listened - to it. It's so good it has made me want to tackle David McCullough's Truman next, although some have suggested I read the Alexander Hamilton bio, which makes sense, as he plays such a large role in Adams.

Will leave you on this Memorial Day with something Adams once wrote to his friend Francis van der Kemp:

"Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding."

Blogging about book clubs

Stumbled across a good site for recommendations, especially if you're looking for the next thing for your book club when they're squabbling over whether to read Middlemarch or something shorter (i.e., anything). Check out Book Club Girl. Description on the blog states she works in the publishing industry but that she does not "flog" books only from her own publishing house. Looks to me like she's got a wide array of authors and publishers listed here, but judge for yourself.

For the record, I loved Middlemarch. Really. I wasn't slagging it.