1. According to Forbes, one in every 17 novels purchased in the United States lists James Patterson as its author.

(Note, I did not say he wrote them.)

That’s an incredible statistic. I won’t bother saying if I think Patterson saturation is a good or a bad thing. However, I do want to know if this is unprecedented.

When Michael Crichton, Nora Roberts or Stephen King were at the zenith of their popularity, did they ever dominate the market as Patterson has?

J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown may write more popular books, but I don’t think they are prolific enough to keep up with Patterson’s numbers. Rowling wrote seven books. Patterson (with his posse) writes about eight a year. One can only buy so many copies of The Deathly Hallows. Patterson has grabbed an astonishing market share by constantly feeding his fans new fodder.

There aren’t many surprises in Forbes’ highest-paid authors’ list. All the expected faces appear. Stephenie Meyer, King, Danielle Steel and Ken Follett finish the top five.

2. One of Langston Hughes’s Cleveland homes has been condemned, but that does not mean it will be demolished.

Hughes stayed in five different homes while he lived in Cleveland. Three have been destroyed. Two have been condemned.

3. “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation ... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

The Library of America looks back on the history or Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov’s best known work has a success story fit for this century. It didn’t become popular until critics complained it was smut.



4. @GrammarHulk and @EditorHulk have clarified. They are different Hulks. As are @FeministHulk, @LonelyHulk, @DrunkHulk and the legion of other gamma-powered superheroes who invaded Twitter.

5. Jimmy Carter is scheduled to appear at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Legacy Village on Sept. 28 to sign his new book, White House Diary. Line tickets are required, limited and available by purchasing a copy of White House Diary at Joseph-Beth.
Carter, in addition to being a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president, is a prolific author. He has written more than 20 books.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Tricia, if you're looking for a detective story, I'd recommend The Man Who Was Thursday. I think that would qualify. The main character is a detective who's pursuing what he thinks is a dangerous anarchist. Yes, the novel has fantastic and metaphysical trappings, but it still counts, right?

I gave Nicholas Sparks a hard time for criticizing Cormac McMarthy, but author-vs.-author smackdowns are nothing new.

Michelle Kerns, The Book Examiner, was kind enough to compile 50 of the best authorial insults. Here are some of my favorites.

Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Navokov:
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

Bells, Balls and Bulls would be an excellent name for an unauthorized Hemingway biography (or, at least, a Hemingway blog.)

William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway:
Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.

Yeah, Hemingway’s one to talk. He wrote with a pencil in one hand and a drink in the other. In fact, new game — read a Hemingway story and try to guess when he passed out on the page.

Voltaire, according to Charles Baudelaire:
I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire...the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.

Baudelaire took the Joakim Noah route and didn’t just diss the man. He dissed the locale. (Personally, I thought Voltaire was clever when I read him in college. Now, I realize how worthless cleverness is.)

John Updike, according to Gore Vidal:
I can’t stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I’m supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I’m more popular than he is, and I don’t take him very seriously...oh, he comes on like the worker’s son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he’s just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.

See, Gore, this is why nobody likes you.

Bret Harte, according to Mark Twain:
Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace. How do I know? By the best of all evidence, personal observation.

I am disappointed that Bret Hart never tried to avenge his namesake. Hart v. Twain — the sharpshooter v. the sharp wit — I’d drop $30 on a pay-per-view to watch.

As a final stray link, enjoy some passive-aggressive library signs.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

It’s too late to add anything new to the debate surrounding The Original of Laura.

The final (incomplete) work of Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov has been on book store shelves for more than two weeks now, and was a popular discussion topic for years before that.

The question amongst the literati is not if Laura is good or bad. In fact, it’s too far from finished to be anything more than interesting.

The question is should Laura even exist.

Nabokov asked the story, which only exists as 138 index cards with fragments of ideas scrawled upon them, be burnt after his death. The request in itself is not unusual. Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works. (Brod couldn’t bring himself to do it.) Nabokov even threatened to burn his classic Lolita, but his wife prevented him.

It was the same wife, Vera, who Nabokov charged with burning Laura after he died. She could not bring herself to do it. Nor could she bring herself to profit from it. The decision eventually fell to their son Dmitri Nabokov.

Dmitri doesn’t smell like a profiteer. He has protected the fidelity of his father’s work. He hasn’t sewn Vladimir’s words together into some revisionary piece as Hemingway’s grandson did. He has even included facsimiles of the index cards, so readers can sequence them in the order they think Vladimir intended.

Naturally, Dmitri’s decision to publish Laura has its critics.

Tom Stoppard said, “It’s perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it ... At best, it’s natural curiosity – personally, I’d love to read Nabokov’s last work, but since he didn’t want me to read it, I won’t – and it’s hardly modest to make one’s own desire more important than his.”

Aleksandar Hemon compared Laura’s release to publishing someone’s grocery list.

No one can convince me that Vladimir Nabokov would be OK with the release of Laura, in this form or any other. As Hemon notes, Nabokov once wrote, “An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying cancelled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.”

But I wouldn’t criticize Dmitri Nabokov for his decision.

Dmitri said he chose not to burn Laura because “if it happens nobody will ever have a chance to read it.”

But I don’t think Dmitri did this for others. He did this for himself.

Perhaps, Dmitri could not live with the thought of burning Laura. It is, after all, much easier to give the order than to be the hatchet man.

Maybe it’s my agnostic nature, but I don’t think Vladimir Nabokov is looking up or down from his place in the afterlife and shaking his fist at Dmitri. Who cares what Vladimir Nabokov would think of Laura’s release? He is not here to think it.

Dmitri made a difficult decision, a decision that could not satisfy everyone. While it may have public ramifications, it was still a personal matter. This is a man trying to decide what to do with a piece of his father’s legacy. With all due respect to Hemon and Stoppard, this does not involve them.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com