In the Guardian, John Crace discusses the British flood of ”celebrities’ insipid memoirs.” The names–Gary Barlow, Victoria Beckham, Pete Bennett, David Blunkett, Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard, Jade Goody, Jordan, Kerry Katona, Peter Kay, Chris Moyles, Gordon Ramsay, Wayne Rooney, Janet Street-Porter, and Terry Wogan–won’t all be familiar to American readers, especially the soccer players. But the problem–that the books are boring, and a lot of them don’t sell very well–is familiar:

What is going on? The obvious answer is that celebrity is being rapidly devalued. Assuming that anyone halfway interesting has already written their memoirs, publishers are left with the choice of either going back to the usual suspects for sloppy seconds or signing up the desperate and the dull. Naturally they do both.

And the effect of the problem is something we’ve been seeing for awhile now:

The real losers in all this are the readers. And not just because they already know everything of any interest before they get to page one. When a publisher hands over a large advance, it earmarks a proportionate amount of its marketing budget to selling the book. Celebs are the ones who are going to end up on chatshows and their memoirs will dominate bookshop displays, crowding out other authors.

My question is this: what can I do to help devalue celebrity even farther? Clearly there ought to be some tipping point at which celebrity memoirs won’t be worth publishing anymore.

So News Corp. is canceling If I Did It–both the book and the TV show. From the AP, via the Washington Post:

NEW YORK — After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and TV special “If I Did It.”

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. “We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

Reporter David Bauder had a hard time finding a precedent, but managed to turn up something, sort of:

For the publishing industry, the cancellation of “If I Did It” was an astonishing end to a story like no other. Numerous books have been withdrawn over the years because of possible plagiarism, most recently Kaavya Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” but a book’s removal simply for objectionable content is virtually unheard of.

Poor Kaavya. Her own ill-considered project has now linked her via Google (753 hits and growing) to someone whose crimes were against more than the English language.

It’s been widely reported that publishers now expect authors to do more and more of the heavy lifting when it comes to promoting their books–up to and including lifting actual boxes of books. Of course, writers aren’t always skilled at publicity, marketing, and sales. Many of them became writers in the first place because their imaginations weren’t captured by the business world. So it’s always interesting to see how they approach the task.

The “Class of 2k7,” a group of first-time children’s and YA authors who are all making their debuts in 2007, have come up with a truly novel approach. I wish them well–may they have town cars sent to their doorsteps by major publishers when their second novels come out.

(By the way, the November 15 issue of Booklist is a Spotlight on First Novels.)

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about what I’m reading, and with the weekend holding out its hand, it’s probably going to be a bit longer still.

(”The weekend holding out its hand”? How do I think of these gems? How about, “With the weekend waiting to take me in its tender embrace”?)

The truth is that I’ve been struggling a little bit to keep up with my reading lately. My wife and I are potty-training our two-year-old, which has led to a certain level of sleepless chaos at home, and I’ve also been buried in data and development projects, which has led to a certain level of sleepy singlemindedness at work. I’ve been too out of it to write about what little I’ve read.

I did finally polish off Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows. It’s a great book, but it’s a big book, the galley so stout that I felt my wrists getting tired as I blinked my dry, scratchy eyes and listened nervously to the baby monitor. But it’s a sign that something’s right with the prose when you keep reading into the night even though your body is telling you that the sensible thing would be to get under the covers immediately.

Right after that I read Marc Lecard’s Vinnie’s Head, a breezy, speedier read that was helped along by my looming review deadline. That book made me think of Quentin Tarantino directing an episode of The Sopranos from a Carl Hiaasen screenplay. Very goofy and violent and funny, although not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny.

Next up I’ve got a few crime novels, including one by John Shannon, one of my favorite writers. When last I heard from him, he was questioning whether he’d continue his superb Jack Liffey series, given his frustrations with his publisher. Fortunately, he’s got a new publisher and the series is continuing.

We usually have two weeks between issues, although now we’re preparing for the big January double-issue, which allows an extra week of reading and writing time. What a relief! Now all I have to do is read all the nominees for this year’s Top of the List. With the awards season in full swing, though, it’s fun to think about which books we’ll be honoring with Top of the List and Editors’ Choice designations. And I’d like to tell you more about the process we use to choose those, but you know what they say: I could tell you, but then I’d have to apologize for boring you to death.

Book reviewing is sort of a hamster-wheel lifestyle. I mean, I’ve read some fantastic books lately, and I’m always grateful for that, but I also always harbor this illusion that at some point I’ll “get ahead.” But there is no getting ahead. I finish some books, I get some more books. The wheel keeps on turning. Fortunately, there are compensations, like fresh water, sturdy food pellets, and all the cardboard I can eat.

Have a good weekend, everybody.

As reported last night by our New York correspondent, John Green, Richard Powers has won the National Book Award for fiction. Well deserved, in this humble blogger’s opinion. The full list:

• Fiction: Richard Powers for The Echo Maker (Farrar)
• Nonfiction: Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton)
• Young People’s Literature: M.T. Anderson for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (Candlewick)
• Poetry: Nathaniel Mackey for Splay Anthem (New Directions)

A little more detail in the Washington Post. Quoth Powers:

“I’ve got to say, that does a number on your brain chemistry.”

Really, could he have said anything else? (Read the book!)

So O. J. Simpson did it. No, not that. Obviously he didn’t do that–he was acquitted. I’m referring to the fact that, as previously posited, O. J. Simpson has indeed written a memoir (or had someone write one for him) in which he will explain how he would have killed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, had he actually been the person who killed them. The New York Times reports that ReganBooks will release the book, If I Did It, on November 30.

Even better, there will be two one-hour TV specials, titled, “O. J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened,” broadcast on Fox (what, PBS has better things to do?) on November 27 and 29. Judith Regan herself conducted the interviews and produced the TV specials. In the Washington Post, in “The TV Column,” Lisa de Moraes quotes an anonymous Hollywood executive who calls Judith Regan a “sick genius.”

Personally, I think that all these imagination exercises are likely to help O. J. on his continued quest to find the real killer. After all, to catch a killer, you have to think like one.

Publishers Lunch reports the sale of a new celebrity memoir:

Rock star and scratch golfer Alice Cooper’s ALICE COOPER, GOLF MONSTER: My 12 Steps to Becoming a Golf Addict, a golf and recovery memoir that chronicles Cooper’s devotion to a game that helped him battle his demons and overcome alcoholism, promising to be “completely candid about his career, his drinking, and his recovery,” to Luke Dempsey at Crown, for publication in May 2007, by Scott Waxman at the Waxman Literary Agency.

There’s more detail in the New York Post, in Keith J. Kelly’s “Media Ink” column:

He’s now a syndicated DJ on classic rock stations, and in 1994 became a born-again Christian.

He still plays about 100 gigs a year, and the shock-rock routine still rules. But he also manages to play golf nearly every day and is said to be one of the better celebrity golfers at the Bob Hope Classic. Golf, more than anything, is what helped him stay more or less straight, he said.

I’m happy that Cooper’s got his drinking under control, and, obviously, it’s difficult for rockers to make graceful transitions to maturity–but damn it, this really taints my memories of teaching myself guitar by playing along with “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” Golf and rock don’t belong in the same sentence–and if you would have told the young Alice Cooper that he would one day play in the Bob Hope Classic, he would have laughed until tears ruined his makeup. Once you’ve written (or dictated) a “golf and recovery memoir,” it’s time to hang up the leopard-spotted boots.

My recent post about McGoorty Day made me think about my other favorite books about pool and billiards. I’ll save the how-to books for another list, but this mix of narrative nonfiction, biography, and fiction should satisfy anyone who wants to steep in the seedy milieu of poolrooms.

The Bank Shot and Other Great Robberies, by Minnesota Fats and Tom Fox. 1966; 2006. Globe Pequot, $14.95 (1-59228-701-8).

Every purported fact in this book should be regarded with a gimlet eye–Minnesota Fats regarded truth as an amusing inconvenience–but the hefty hustler’s as-told-to biography is still terrifically entertaining.

Billiards: Hustlers & Heroes, Legends & Lies, and the Search for Higher Truth on the Green Felt, by John Grissim. 1979. St. Martin’s, o.p.

Somewhat hard to find (I first read it in the Harold Washington Library), this mix of history, memoir, and legend is a fun portrait of the game and the men who played it–and also 1970s sensibilities and collars.

Byrne’s Book of Great Pool Stories, by Robert Byrne. 1995. Harcourt, paper, $20 (0-15-600223-X).

Among its many treasures, contains an absolutely brilliant short story by Wallace Stegner, “The Blue-Winged Teal.” And who knew Tolstoy wrote about billiards?

The Hustler, by Walter Tevis. 1959. Four Walls Eight Windows, paper, $13.95 (1-56025-473-4).

Okay, I confess: I haven’t actually read this book. But I have read the original short story that it was based on, which was published in the January 1957 Playboy. (”But honey, I only read Playboy for the short stories!”) The story is good, not great, but its influence–in inspiring a novel and then the classic film–is undeniable.

Hustler Days: Minnesota Fats, Wimpy Lassiter, Jersey Red, and America’s Great Age of Pool, by R. A. Dyer. 2003. Lyons, $22.95 (1-59228-104-4).

Dyer’s prose tends to be overwritten, but his research into a thinly documented scene and era is extremely valuable, especially his portait of the shambling, hypochondriacal, shot-making genius Luther Lassister. I never miss Dyer’s column, “Untold Stories,” in Billiards Digest, either.

Hustlers, Beats, and Others, by Ned Polsky. 1967. Aldine Transaction, paper, $24.95 (0-202-30887-1).

The main sociological essay of this book is a fascinating look at the byegone world of poolrooms and pool hustlers. Pool’s image has changed so much since the book’s publication that many of the observations aren’t valid today, but no matter. The blend of keen observation and original thought is why the book is still in print today. 

McGoorty: The Story of a Billiard Bum, by Robert Byrne. 1972. Broadway, paper, $19 (0-7679-1631-X).

Danny McGoorty was a hard-drinking, unreconstructed billiards player, and his story is a rollicking and completely unexpurgated journey through a byegone place and time. If anyone is ever fooled by sepia-toned photographs into thinking that the past was a more innocent time, they’ll change their minds after they read this.

Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler’s Journey, by David McCumber. 1996. Harper, paper, $13.95 (0-380-72923-7).

In this modern-day look at life on the road, writer David McCumber plays stakehorse for pool player Tony Annigoni as they travel the highways, byways, and railways looking for action. This book’s accomplishment is in its ability to strip away the myths about pool hustlers while still making long nights in dingy poolrooms look appealing.

Vincent Lam, a Chinese-Canadian emergency-room doctor, has won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his short-story collection, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. (The book has not  been published in the U.S.) Over 515,000 people watched on television (this is Canada, after all), as he received the $40,000 prize (that’s about $35,450 U.S.).

And it pays to have a mentor:

Lam’s career received a significant boost about three years ago when he met acclaimed author Atwood while working as a doctor on a ship. He worked up the courage to ask her to read his manuscript and she agreed.

“Since then she has continued to be very supportive and is a great friend,” he said.

Bloodletting’s 12 interconnected stories are about a group of medical students and young doctors. One of the stories, “Contact Tracing,” was inspired by his experience on the front lines of the SARS epidemic. Lam offered this interesting quote about being a doctor who writes:

“The link between doctors and writers is narrative,” Lam said at home yesterday, taking time to savour his prize before getting back to the workaday gore of the emergency ward.

“What happens is, someone tells me the start of a story, and much of what I’m supposed to do is tell them the ending. The other thing I’m supposed to do is make the ending of the story better.”

“Workaday gore”? If you ask me, that would have been a better title for the book. Then again, I’m American.

Alan Zweibel (The Other Shulman) has beat out Kinky Friedman (Texas Hold ‘Em) and Bill Scheft (Time Won’t Let Me) to win the Thurber Prize.

The results aren’t on the Thurber House site yet, though, so here’s the Washington Post article.

Writing humor has got to be the toughest kind of writing there is. If an author writes serious literary fiction and readers don’t understand it, the readers are just as likely to wonder what’s wrong with them (”Am I missing something?”) as they are to wonder what’s wrong with the author (”Why does he confound longwindedness with profundity?”). But if an alleged comedy doesn’t make readers laugh, readers never question their own sense of humor. They just think the writer isn’t funny. A response to a joke is immediate and inarguable–reflex, not reason. You can’t puzzle through something and decide it’s funny later. Well, you can, but you’re not likely to laugh out loud once you do.