A shout-out to former Booklister John Green, quoted in Publishers Weekly (”To Blog or Not to Blog?” by Sue Corbett) on the subject of blogging authors:

But just as e-mail and comments have replaced those sacks full of letters popular authors once got, the written blog is already considered very 2006. Green has already cast aside his so-yesterday text entries for “Brotherhood 2.0,” a video blog (a “vlog”) he does with his younger brother, Hank, a Web designer. They take turns posting two-minute videos about a Seinfeld-style smorgasbord of random topics. A recent entry had John stranded at O’Hare in the midst of a tour to promote last fall’s An Abundance of Katherines. He interviewed himself about his flight being canceled.”My whole life I’ve had crazy ideas and stupid projects and some of them have worked out really well,” said Green, who can’t imagine not blogging, but does predict the form will continue to evolve. “I will blog until it’s replaced by something more awesome, by a feed or something. And then I will blog directly inside your head.”

And John, while I’ve got your attention, I have a confession to make. In my review of Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant, I stole a phrase — “consume-or-die worldview” — from your review of Lullaby. I found myself thinking, “couldn’t have said it better myself” — and, well, I didn’t. Thanks, buddy.

The winners of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award were announced last night in New York. As always with the NBCC, there were a few surprises. Those wacky book critics. (Hey, don’t look at me – I’m a book reviewer.) But unpredictability is what makes the NBCC worth watching. How much fun would it be if they just anointed the same books as everyone else?

Congratulations to Donna Seaman, by the way. Even though she’s not on the board of directors this year, her critical acumen proved prescient: she reviewed (and starred) two of six winners. Follow the links below to find out which ones.

Fiction

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly)

General Nonfiction

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, by Simon Schama (Ecco)

Biography

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips (St. Martin’s)

Autobiography

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins)

Criticism

Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, by Lawrence Weschler (McSweeney’s)

Poetry

Tom Thompson in Purgatory, by Troy Jollimore (Margie/Intuit House)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing

Steven G. Kellman

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award 

John Leonard

At least Maggie and I don’t have to prepare any taunts regarding the unworthiness of each other’s favorites. I’m sure we can agree that it’s nice to see a woman writer at the top of the list.

(Although, frankly, Eggers’ book was good enough to win, too.)

I’m a little late on this very interesting New York Times article (”Authors Find Their Voice, and Their Audience, in Podcasts,” by Andrew Adam Newman), but if I’m behind in my reading, maybe you are, too. The short version is that some unpublished authors are narrating their own novels and making them available as podcasts — and some of them are actually getting book deals.

Any snide remark I was planning to make about the kinds of books that are taking this route –

Scott Sigler writes science-fiction horror novels, the kind one fan called "steel-tipped boot on your throat, speed-metal fiction."

– kind of dies in my throat when I see the kind of readership — er, make that “listenership” — some of these authors are getting. Twenty or thirty thousand listeners? So I guess this is one of those cool DIY stories about artists blazing a new trail and finding an audience waiting for them in the middle of the forest.

Of course, there is a dark side to this. Just as many publishers are expecting authors to do more and more of the work when it comes to marketing their work, if we extrapolate on this trend, maybe publishers will start expecting authors to arrive on their doorsteps with a large fan base already following behind.

"It’s a much more attractive package to the publisher if you have a built-in audience," said Mr. Leavell, the agent, who along with Mr. Sigler represents others who have built Internet followings, including Tucker Max, who detailed his drunken exploits on his Web site before publishing the best seller "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell."

Then again, if this does even qualify as a trend, maybe it’s the next books-by-bloggers mini-frenzy, just a blip until the next new thing pops up.

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2007 has announced the winners for the “Europe and South Asia Region” (that covers a bit of ground):

Best Book Award

The Perfect Man, by Naeem Murr (Random)

Best First Book Award

In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar (Dial)

The “Canada and Carribean Region” winners were:

Best Book Award

The Friends of Meager Fortune, by David Adams Richards (MacAdam/Cage)

Best First Book Award

Vandal Love, by D.Y. Béchard (Doubleday)

Winners for two more regions — Africa and “South East Asia and South Pacific” — will be announced March 15. (How’s that for March madness?) The regional winners move on to the finals, where they compete for the 21st Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, which will be announced in Jamaica on May 27.

The shortlists for the 2007 British Book Awards — excuse me, the Galaxy British Book Awards — have been announced. Each category has a different corporate sponsor (unless all the businesses are actually owned by the same goliath conglomerate), making the Whitbread-Costa name change look as quaint as Wrigley Field.

• Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year
  Eight titles, each a good read, but only one will be named Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year
• Borders Book of the Year
  The cream of the crop that brought people flocking into bookshops and libraries
• Reader’s Digest Author of the Year
  Four very different authors who have made a big impact with their books
• WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year
  Siz books that capture the imagination of younger readers
• BCA Crime Thriller of the Year
  A right bunch of chillers, thrillers and killers
• Sainsbury’s Popular Fiction Award
  Four books with wide appeal acros the nation
• Waterstone’s Newcomer of the Year
  Exciting new writers who have attracted alot of attention with their first novels
• Tesco Sports Book of the Year
  Three contrasting careers in football and a cricketing memoir with a difference
• decibel Writer of the Year
  The decibel award goes to the writer of African, Caribbean or Asian origin who has made the greatest contribution to the literary year
• Amazon Biography of the Year
  A national treasure, a mother/daughter relationship, a long-suffering wife and a homeless man vie for the honours
• Play.com TV & Film Book of the Year
  The fashion biz, a brains trust, our habitat and a warning about its future
• The Book People Lifetime Achievement Award
  There is no shortlist for this award. The name of the recipient will be announced at the Galaxy British Book Awards which Channel 4 will broadcast at 8pm on Friday 30th March.

Stay tuned to Brunswick Billiards Likely Stories. I’ll be linking winning titles to their Johnnie Walker Booklist reviews, when such reviews exist (sometimes U.K. books aren’t published in the U.S. until after they’ve collected their awards; sometimes we have our own reasons for not reviewing them).

She’s a passionate writer with a story to tell. And kudos to HarperCollins for spotting her talent and plucking this first-time author from slush-pile obscurity! From Radar (”HarperCollins Books Jenna Bush,” by Jeff Bercovici):

First daughter Jenna Bush has landed the book deal she was fishing for, with HarperCollins announcing this morning plans to publish Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope this fall. (We reported in January that the News Corp.-owned publishing house was pursuing the deal in spite of a $300,000 price tag that had given other suitors pause.)

Ana’s Story, according to the press release, will be a work of “young-adult, narrative non-fiction” based on Bush’s experience working as an intern for UNICEF in Central America. (The Ana of the title is an orphaned, teenage single mother with HIV. We’re not sure where the “hope” part comes in.)

When I started working at Booklist, my mind was blown when I saw this book come in:

And now my mind is blown again:

But in a good way. I mean, if you spend your working days both championing intellectual freedom and trying to track down the parents of those kids who plugged up the drinking fountain, you’ve gotta blow off steam somehow.

I’m inspired to pimp my office chair. First, the rich, Corinthian leather….

First there was fear of the scrotum. Now there is fear of the vagina. In Cross River, NY, three high-school students were suspended for using the word “vagina” while reading from…wait for it…The Vagina Monologues. From the Chicago Tribune (”Girls suspended for V-word“):

The excerpt from “Monologues” was read Friday night, among various readings at an event sponsored by the literary magazine at John Jay High School in Cross River, a New York City suburb. Among the other readings was a student’s original work and the football coach quoting Shakespeare.

I sure wish the article would have told us which lines of Shakespeare were quoted by the coach (does he do the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V before he sends his team onto the field?) but that’s beside the point. The way the teens delivered this shocking word is worthy of a made-for-TV movie:

The girls took turns reading the excerpt until they came to the word, then said it together.

I have neither seen nor read The Vagina Monologues. It’s entirely possible that it’s not appropriate for a high-school literary salon. But to allow students to read The Vagina Monologues without saying “vagina” is the worst kind of Orwellian Bowdlerism.

(Can I get away with that? “Orwellian Bowdlerism”? Is there a better kind of Orwellian Bowdlerism?)

Best of all is the principal’s rationale for the suspensions:

But Principal Richard Leprine said Tuesday that the girls were punished because they disobeyed orders, not because of what they said.

Not that’s Orwellian!

Anyway, the dictionaries of slang I’ve consulted inform me that there are hundreds of other possible words that can stand in for “vagina.” If there’s a better one, perhaps the principal can identify it. Or is it the very existence of vaginas that troubles him so?

(Total vagina count in this post: nine.)

The scale of the misery in Baghdad is almost beyond comprehension. The daily death tolls don’t often register with me an any meaningful way — and I suspect I’m not alone. But for all of us, there are moments when a particular detail makes it easier to identify with the horror. From The New York Times (”Baghdad Car Bomb Kills 20 on Booksellers’ Row,” by Edward Wong and Wissam A. Habeeb):

BAGHDAD, March 5 - The book market along Mutanabi Street was a throwback to the Baghdad of old, the days of students browsing for texts, turbaned clerics hunting down religious tomes and cafe intellectuals debating politics over backgammon.

Somehow it survived the war, until Monday, when a powerful suicide car bomb hit the market, slicing through the heart of the capital’s intellectual scene. It killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 65.

In the hours after the noontime explosion, books and stationery, some tied in charred bundles, littered the block. Plumes of black smoke billowed above ornate buildings dating to the Ottoman Empire. The storied Shahbandar cafe, where elderly writers puffed away the afternoon on water pipes, lay in ruins.

I’m not sure we have an equivalent to the Baghdad book market, but imagine a car bomb going off in Charing Cross Road, or outside the Strand.

"There are no Americans or Iraqi politicians here - there are only Iraqi intellectuals who represent themselves and their homeland, plus stationery and book dealers," said Abdul Baqi Faidhullah, 61, a poet who frequently visits the street. "Those who did this are like savage machines intent on harvesting souls and killing all bright minds."

After meeting a bunch of deadlines on Thursday, I was looking forward to a low-key day in the office on Friday, maybe even a slightly-longer-than-usual lunch. Instead I spent the day at home with my feverish 11-month-old. His criteria for good books are radically different from mine — texture and taste – as are his methods for evaluating them. For the former, he likes good, stiff paper, the kind that produces a crisp, ripping sound. For the latter, I have no idea what makes one book taste better than another. Organic glue?

Anyway, on Thursday I filed my reviews for Shakespeare’s Kitchen, by Lore Segal; Depths, by Henning Mankell; and Writing in an Age of Silence, by Sara Paretsky. No stars this time – but all three are extremely strong works. Sometimes the difference between a starred review and an unstarred review is awfully slight, just a nagging doubt or reservation that keeps me from recommending something unreservedly. And while stars are definitely a mark of quality, they’re nothing like a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’ve withheld stars from some very strong books. It’s the words in the review that are your best guide to quality and affinity.

I did reject one book for review, an Italian crime novel that was gunning for a hyperkinetic effect but instead left me feeling disoriented. I couldn’t imagine many readers giving it more of a shot than I did. (I give all books at least 50 pages before I give up on them, often more. Once I read an entire book before deciding that, yes, I really did hate it, and no, I really couldn’t recommend it to anyone.) I’d say “there goes my streak,” but given the amazing run of great books I’ve had lately, it’s almost a relief to not like something.