Three quick points for your Tuesday:

1. The Reviewerspeak Awards have returned!

Let it not be said that Michelle Kerns’s nitpickery has not produced tangible good. She seems to have squashed New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani’s predilection for the word “limn.”

Also, Kerns explains her hiatus:

“Hell, I was sick unto death of the whole thing ... And I realized that reading all of those reviews each month prevented me from occasionally doing some really quality things with my time. Like eating. And sleeping.”

2. A Canadian man has been arrested for reading while driving.

The article doesn’t address the important question. What was he reading?

3. HTMLGiant proclaims Margaret Atwood a Twitter Champion. (What does that make Colson Whitehead, a Twitter Grandmaster?)

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

One thing The News-Herald Book Club does better than Slate Magazine or The New York Times Book Review: gender representation.

First, Slate learned that about two out of every three authors reviewed in The New York Times and three out of four writers who received the preferential double review were men. (This is in the wake of the Picoult-Weiner-Franzen fracas.)

Then, Slate checked its own numbers, which is frankly the decent thing to do.

Since I haven’t been a bean-counter, I dug into the archives of pieces under Slate’s “Books” rubric in suspense. Between Jan. 1, 2009, and Sept. 6, 2010, Slate ran 34 reviews of fiction under the “Books” rubric. Nine of them were of books by women (I’m squeezing in Agatha Christie’s journals), for 26.5 percent of the total.

Slate noted that the discrepancy shrinks if you take into account DoubleX, the Slate spinoff that focuses primarily on women.

Add in DoubleX’s book-related pieces for 2009 and 2010 so far, and a grand total of 88 books by men were covered, compared with 72 by women, or 45 percent.

This can be read two different ways. If you want to be negative, you can say that Slate places most female authors in a ghetto. If you want to be positive, you can say that Slate recognized there was a need and created DoubleX, which is staffed entirely by women.

Inspired by Slate’s self-awareness, I checked the numbers for The News-Herald Book Club. Coincidentally, Tricia and I have reviewed 39 men and the same number of women since the blog’s creation. (One caveat: I used the “book review” tags to tabulate. If we reviewed a book and didn’t use the book review tag, then they wouldn’t figure into my numbers. That means my live blogs of Finnegan’s Wake and Moby-Dick wouldn’t count toward the totals, neither would Cheryl and Danielle’s countdown to Sweet Valley Confidential.)

As per double reviews, the numbers skew in favor of women. However, we do so few double reviews that I’m not sure these numbers mean much. In almost two years, only five books have been reviewed by both Tricia and I. Two were written by men (Jim Fergus and Junot Diaz;) three, women (Maggie O’Farrell, Daphne du Maurier and Stephenie Meyer.)

Then again, all of those Sweet Valley books that Danielle and Cheryl read should probably count as double-reviews also.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Unrelated postscript, Flavorwire classifies the five clichés of promotional author photos.

1. Slate fact-checked Picoult and Weiner’s accusations and tabulated if The New York Times reviews more men than women.

They do, almost two to one.

Of the 545 books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and Aug. 27, 2010:
—338 were written by men (62 percent of the total)
—207 were written by women (38 percent of the total)

Of the 101 books that received two reviews in that period:
—72 were written by men (71 percent)
—29 were written by women (29 percent)

Slate hesitated to conclude that the paper treated certain types of literature differently when they were written by men.

2. Meanwhile, Lincoln Michel of The Faster Times rebuts the claims by Picoult and Weiner that commercial fiction deserves more respect.

Somehow it isn’t enough that we are inundated with mass culture work—that the subways are plastered with ads for the latest formulaic thriller or romance, that Hollywood blockbuster trailers play non-stop on TV, that corporate record labels get their artists constant rotation on the radio—or that such work, as its fans and creators are always quick to point out, makes the most money 99% of the time. We also need Michael Bay winning Oscars, Twilight getting the Pulitzer, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry reviewed in favor of Big Boi or Animal Collective, and probably McDonald’s being reviewed by NYT food critics instead of whatever new Keith McNally restaurant has opened. After all, McDonald’s is where people are “actually eating.”

I don’t disagree with Michel’s assessment, but Big Boi is an awful example. He sold more than 20 million records as half of Outkast.

(Then again, I rolled my eyes when The Dark Knight didn’t get a Best Picture nomination from the Oscars.)

3. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series is in the early stages of development for a television series. I have four thoughts.

One, I love Sandman and would love for other people to love Sandman. Without Sandman, I would have never read Lord Dunsany, Hope Mirrlees or Italo Calvino.

Two, a television series is preferable to a movie. There is no way to encapsulate all that makes Sandman wonderful in a 2-hour movie.

Three, I really hope this doesn’t suck. I didn’t love Watchmen, so I was OK with the mediocre, hyperviolent movie. But if Sandman sucks... I don’t know. I’ll complain about it on the Internet.

Four, Gaiman’s name is not yet attached to the series. It should be. Even if it’s only a respectful consultant position.

4. Borders will be putting Build-a-Bear stations into its bookstores.

The decision smacks of desperation but it makes some sense. They want to get kids into bookstores, but kids can easily download books. So dangle a carrot to get them inside the store — for example, an adorable, customized stuffed bear — and hope they buy a book or two while they are there.

Borders CEO Mike Edwards talked about tweaking the stores in an interview with Publishers Weekly.

Edwards clearly articulated the reason for adding more nonbook product—as more books are sold in digital formats, retailers need to redeploy the space they have used to sell trade titles. For Borders, that means adding more educational children’s toys and games, more adult games and puzzles, plus high-end stationery.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Just bullet points today:

1. Marmaduke and Franz Kafka?



Why not? It’s the Internet, after all — the wonderland where Kanye West’s tweets and cartoons from The New Yorker can be juxtaposed.

The best thing about Keith Wilson’s Kafka and canine combination is that he has carefully matched the quote with the image. I’m amused by The Nietzsche Family Circus, also, but it only smashes together random Nietzsche quotes and Family Circus drawings. Yes, it’s good for a chuckle; but it is a coincidence if the final product reveals something new about Nietzsche or the Keane family.



2. Speaking of Kafka, lawyers have just opened four safety deposit boxes that are thought to be filled with unread Kafka manuscripts.

You may recall that Kafka instructed his friend, Max Brod, to burn all of his unfinished work when he died. If Brod had listened, nobody would have read The Trial, The Castle or Amerika.

This Guardian article details all the recent legal wrangling regarding Kafka’s still unread writings.

3. Jimmy Chen of HTMLGiant is so tired of birds on book covers.

4. Editor Janice Harayda tweeted the five most overused insults in book reviews.

They are “cardboard characters,” “thin plot,” “cookie-cutter characters,” “the book falls apart at the end,” and “I just didn’t care about the characters.”

Harayda’s not wrong, but she’d be better off just posting a link to Michelle Kerns’s monthly Reviewerspeak Awards.

5. Finally, Susan Miller of Salon asks why there can’t be more to these Jane Austen mash-ups than dropping some stock horror element in Hertfordshire.

“We couldn’t help noticing that the vast majority of the Austen mash-ups involve injecting some action element from contemporary pop culture into Austen’s stories in order to make the novels more interesting. This seems to work for quite a few readers, but those of us who find Austen’s books sufficiently interesting on their own are left to wonder when the favor will be returned. We’ve been shown what zombies and monsters and bare-knuckle brawlers can do for Jane — when do we get to see what Jane can do for them?” Miller asks.

Miller is asking, more eloquently, the same question I did when I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Why not use the zombies for something more than comedy? Why not make them a metaphor for socially solvent but intellectually bankrupt socialites?

However, I suspect it’s too late for this craze to beget anything more useful than a laugh. If nothing else, it probably coaxed some people into reading Jane Austen who might not have.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I have a bit of ground to cover after disappearing for a week.

I could talk at length about Amazon getting into direct publishing or Penguin sex scandals. (Sadly, the “penguin” in question is the book publisher, not the bird. It would be funnier to write about salacious avian affairs.) But I’m too late to either of these topics to say anything new.

Instead, allow me to use this post as a purge for all of the worthwhile links that I have accumulated in the last seven days.

First, Michelle Kerns updates her Reviewerspeak Awards. For those who don’t remember, Kerns is meticulously following book reviewers so she can catalogue their most overused clichés.

Book reviewers seem to be aware of Kerns because usage of April’s most popular clichés has dwindled. Unfortunately, they have been replaced with others.

“Fascinating” and variations on “vivid” were the most common clichés of May.

In other news, Stan Carey has smacked back at the Queen’s English Society for its nitpickery. The society wants to “set an accepted standard of good English.” In other words, they want to regulate the tenets of the language.

That’s silly for a lot of reasons (and, seemingly, a tad jingoistic), but it’s not necessary for me to recapitulate Carey’s entire argument. Instead, I’ll leave you with a link and a quote:

This plaintive appeal is telling in many ways. It reveals the deep confusion that arises when one tries to reconcile language, in all its mutable complexity, with simplistic dogma and prejudice. It hints at a nostalgic hankering for the halcyon days when grammar education was based more on strict commandments (often imposed by grammarians to reflect mere stylistic preferences). It shows an arrogant presumption that right-thinking people ought to think just like them...

Since English seems to be changing faster than ever, no academy could hope to keep up. This is especially so because of the geographical reach of English and its consequent fracturing into countless overlapping varieties.

Elsewhere, The Millions details the joy of ghostwriting.

“I bristle at the term ‘ghostwriter,’” says [Michael] D’Orso. “It indicates dishonesty. It indicates hiding behind the scenes. I prefer collaborator. I’m not a shill.”

Finally, Minotaurs are the new vampires.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Thank you, Tricia, for keeping the blog warm while I was gone.

Today, I want to revisit some topics.

First, people are still asking if poetry matters. (Yeah, we've done this before.)

Gregory Cowles of The New York Times doesn’t offer any new thoughts — (no, poetry no longer matters; no, it is not the audience’s fault; poetry has become insular and will not matter again until it speaks to the public) — but he answers in such a way as not to make my teeth grate, which is an accomplishment.

Second, remember Michelle Kerns’s book review cliché bingo? Well, Flavorwire created a version for music reviews.

Third, Paul Edwards wrote a book titled How to Rap. I reviewed it.

Now, Edwards has posted an uncut interview with Kool G Rap that he did as research for the book.

I enjoy reading about artists’ creative processes. It doesn’t matter if that artist is G Rap or Victor Hugo.

Fourth, The New Yorker has published the best explanation I’ve seen on the state of the publishing industry thus far. One of the most insightful thoughts comes from Russ Grandinetti, the vice-president in charge of Kindle Content. From The New Yorker:

"In Grandinetti’s view, book publishers—like executives in other media—are making the same mistake the railroad companies made more than a century ago: thinking they were in the train business rather than the transportation business. To thrive, he believes, publishers have to reimagine the book as multimedia entertainment."

But here’s the most telling fact:

"In reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist."

In other words, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling are probably funding some of your favorite, current authors. We should be grateful.

Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Thank you, Seth, for The New Yorker link. Lebron still isn't going to the Knicks.

I was less than my prolific self last week.

I would have written more, but it’s poor form to blog from someone’s murder trial.

But I’m back and so is Michelle Kerns. If you don’t remember Kerns, she is the woman analyzing literary critics’ dependence upon clichés.

Her analysis (and accompanying graphs) are many positive things — fascinating, insightful and accessible. Unfortunately, those words are clichés, so I’ll just post a link instead of trying to describe it.

Of the publications she is following, Entertainment Weekly packs the highest percentage of clichés into their critiques. (Smart money bets EW remain the frontrunner through the entirety of Kerns’s experiment.) They averaged 1.1 cliché per 100 words. Time Out New York and Publishers Weekly trailed at .93 and .92 Kerns, respectively.

Yes, “Kerns” are the metric measurement for clichés per 100 words in a book review.

Kerns — the writer, not the unit of measurement — specifically picks on alliterations in her dissection of April’s reviews. Some of the alliterations, like “parboiled profundities,” I found clever. Some are admittedly pretentious, for example, “craziness crazily” and “This promising premise begins on promising premises.”

Elsewhere, Elisa Bassist asks, Have I Earned these Clichés? She writes about why she writes and comes up with, “It’s the closest definition I have of living.” Yes, she notes that her conclusion is a cliché. That’s why she gives her essay that title.

It’s much better than I’m making it sound, though I disagree with some of Bassist’s points. She describes writing as a “social act.” I would argue that it’s the opposite. Reading might be a social act; but writing, almost always, is done alone and for your own sake. If someone else reads a personal meaning into your own writing — wonderful! — but writing is a selfish process. It’s about you, even when it isn’t. (And, now, I have added my cliché to the stack.)

Bassist seems to acknowledge this when she quotes Jim Harrison.

“A writer [is] a small god who has forty acres as a birthright on which to reinvent the world.”

Two final notes — first, Elisa Gabbert has fun with Venn diagrams.

She says that most people separate “women poets” from “poets.” How can anyone divide the two? Whether right or wrong, I identify femininity with poetry. Most of the women I know are poets. Many just don’t bother to write it down.

Lastly, we finally have an e-reader that I would consider buying. The Kobo reader, from Borders, will cost $149 and come stocked with 100 classics, according to the Associated Post. That’s $1.50 per classic. Sure, I probably have most of these unidentified classics on my bookshelf already. (Whether I’ve read them or not is a different issue.) But it still sells for $100 less than competing e-readers.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Michelle Kerns is my favorite literary columnist right now. (I can be fickle. Susan Schorn was my favorite earlier today.)

Kerns already called out bad book reviewers by creating a bingo board from their clichés. Now, she’s taking the next logical step.

She plans to monitor 20 outlets that review books throughout the year and tabulate how many clichés they use. She will also record their cliché density by graphing how many they use per 100 words.

Then, she’s going to release her results at the beginning of each month; so we, the readers, can see which publications are doing their job and which are cobbling together clichés into a facsimile of an actual review.

In her words:

Clichés are leeches. They drain the blood out of everything a reviewer is trying to say ... Burn those leeches off, baby, and you’ll find you’re left with something worth saying. Or, perhaps, you’ll find you have nothing to say whatsoever. Sometimes, it’s a toss-up as to which scenario is more terrifying.

The best part is Kerns is not afraid to name names, both good and bad. She calls out a Publishers Weekly review that forces 10 clichés into 218 words and a New York Times critic who needs to stop “limning.” (Full disclosure: I have used the word “limn” in a book review. I was young. I didn’t know any better.)

Kerns also compliments reviewers who avoid clichés. She especially praises NYT critics Janet Maslin and Dwight Garner. About Garner, she says, “His reviews are so good — and so cliché-free — I’m not entirely certain that he is mortal. Hey, Mr. Zeus, come on down and give me a visit.”

(I saw Clash of the Titans Tuesday. Everyone who invokes Zeus in that movie either gets god-raped or smited. Kerns may want to rethink her request.)

I will be following (and updating you) on Kerns’s progress. If this gets enough attention from readers and critics, Kerns could change the way people approach literary critiques.

(My only knock on Kerns is she makes an unnecessary reference to the Ides of March in her lede. Isn’t that the same sort of lazy writing she is fighting against?)

Speaking of bad book reviews, amateur critics complain about literary classics on Amazon!

My favorite is an anonymous poster’s take on Jane Eyre:

Endless, pointless description. DESCRIPTION, DESCRIPTION, DESCRIPTION!!!

To be fair, that’s not too different from my take on Moby Dick.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Are you tired of lazy critics calling books “timely,” a “tour de force” or “beautifully written?”

Do you wish reviewers would find a more creative way to express their pleasure or disappointment?

Don’t get mad. Play Bingo.

Michelle Kerns of The Examiner identified the most annoying book-review cliches and put them on bingo boards. Now, instead of rolling your eyes when someone calls a book “thought-provoking,” “powerful” or “readable,” you can cross off a square. After reading Kerns’s column, I found a pair of my old book reviews and saw if I reached Bingo. (Not quite, but I came close.)

I’ll make a deal with you readers. If I ever write a book review and you score a Bingo on any of the eight, supplied game cards. I’ll take you to the local bouquiniste and buy you something. (If you’re reading this from Colorado or Bratislava, I’ll have to mail your reward.)

Moving on, Matthew Simmons of HTMLGIANT uses Old Man and the Sea to teach how to write dialogue.

So, Hemingway wrote a book called The Old Man and the Sea. And in The Old Man and the Sea, an old man goes out to sea. And he fishes. And he hooks himself a big, big fish. And, for quite a lot of the rest of the book, the man and the fish pull at one another. For pages and pages they pull at one another. He—the old man—pulls at the fish. And it—the fish in the sea—pulls at the old man. They pull and pull and they fight and fight.

This is dialogue. This is how to approach dialogue...

When people communicate, they do so to reveal to the listener their wants and needs. I want to get away, says the fish. I want to reel you in and devour you, says the old man. I am pulling to get away, says the fish. You are pulling me further out to sea, and I will give you some line to tire you out, says the old man. Characters communicate with each other like this.

Simmons scores bonus points by attaching the image of an appropriately named Magic card to his column.

I would have appreciated if Simmons would have included examples of actual dialogue that he likes, but his point is still an interesting one.

Finally, I think this is saying the same thing as this.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com