Publisher’s Weekly (”The Year’s Best Read-Alouds“) has announced the winners of the 2007 E. B. White Read-Aloud Awards:

Picture Books

Houndsley and Catina, by James Howe, illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay (Candlewick)

Older Readers

Alabama Moon, by Watt Key (Farrar)

The contenders for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize have been announced:

Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Peter Carey
Don DeLillo
Carlos Fuentes
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Michel Tournier   

I love the criteria for this one: “The Man Booker International Prize recognises one writer for their achievement in fiction.” Couldn’t they narrow it down just a tiny bit? 

The winner will be announced in early June.

From Publishers Weekly (”How ‘The Pesthouse’ Became ‘Useless America’,” by Dick Donahue):

Did you hear the one about how one book turned into another book - and that the second book didn’t really exist?

Yes, that is hilarious. Almost as funny as a man, dressed up to party on Saturday night, falling into a 55-gallon drum filled with human excrement and urine.

Okay, I’ll stop now.

From the New York Times (”Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies“):

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat’s Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island. 

His death was reported by his wife, the author and photographer Jill Krementz, who said he had been hospitalized after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago. 

I know some people think of Vonnegut as a literary lightweight, and it’s true that his work was somewhat uneven. But reading Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions was an essential part of my early development as a young reader and writer. He was one of the great originals of our time, and – if I may make a joke of which I think he would have approved — we need more like him.

On Slate (”Defenders“), Jack Shafer defends Alex Heard against all those people who are defending David Sedaris. Shafer especially takes issue with the notion that sometimes fiction makes facts funnier:

Jon Carroll thinks humorists require “latitude” to make things funny, a notion I find bogus. I find stories that are absolutely true - like the time one of my neighbors, dressed up to party on Saturday night, fell into a 55-gallon drum filled with human excrement and urine - the funniest.

I’m guessing Shafer’s neighbors think of him with equal fondness. Now, I don’t always find Sedaris as sidesplitting as do his fans, but I’ll take his brand of humor over America’s Funniest Home Videos any day.

(Shafer would probably laugh at the obligatory comedy-movie scene where everyone jumps into the pool wearing their prom clothes — if only that weren’t made-up, too.)

Oh, and way down at the bottom of the page — the ideal spot for one of those “full disclosure” phrases — Shafer notes that Heard is a friend of his. Nothing wrong with having your buddy’s back, of course.

This doesn’t really have anything to do with books, but it is tangentially related to libraries, and it’s definitely related to plagiarism, so I’m going to go ahead. From the Associated Press (”CBS News Fires Producer for Plagiarism“):

NEW YORK (AP) - A CBS News producer was fired and the network apologized after a Katie Couric video essay on libraries was found to be plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal. The essay was removed from the CBS Web site and an editor’s note was posted saying the item should have credited Jeffrey Zaslow of the Journal, the network said Tuesday.

The essays are carried regularly on “Couric & Co.,” the anchor’s blog on the CBS News Web site. Couric and producers meet once a week to decide on topics and the producers write them for Couric to read on camera.

An editor for The Wall Street Journal called CBS News to point out the similarities of the April 4 notebook item to Zaslow’s article, headlined “Of the Places You’ll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?” The pieces talk about how libraries are seen differently by children from their parents. 

I’m not one to engage in knee-jerk bashing of the mainstream media, but — wow! Maybe the guilty producer thought that journalistic ethics didn’t apply to blogging? Or, more likely, they thought that no one was bothering to read — I mean watch — the Couric and Co. blog?

I’ll bet the producer paid for notes and term papers in J-school, too.

Dan Rhodes calls Thomas Pynchon a mass murderer. Well, he may as well have.  From The Guardian (”Dan Rhodes’s top 10 short books“):

“I was reading a new novel the other day when it struck me that the author might as well be a murderer. It wasn’t a bad novel, it was just too long. Passages that could and should have been lopped out had been left in, but I felt I had to plough through them in case they had any bearing on the story. It might have been a really good read if the author had had the gumption, or the balls, to shave off a hundred pages. And here’s where the murder comes in. Say it takes the average reader an extra two hours (two hours they will never get back) to read all the filler. And what if the book does well and finds 250,000 readers? By my calculations this author will have wasted a total of 57 waking years - the equivalent of a long human life. And what if this monster continues to publish such books? Surely that would make them a serial killer? 

I don’t mind a long book if the going’s worth it, but there are definitely too many authors who equate the physical weight of their books with intellectual gravity. And I do subscribe to the theory that it takes more time to write less, which is why I am sometimes so longwinded in this blog.

(Alas, I don’t have time to chase down the provenance of that great quote from Mark Twain/Samuel Johnson/Blaise Pascal about not having enough time to write a shorter letter. Or the accurate version of William Faulkner quote about killing your babies/darlings.)

I also like movies that are 100 minutes or less, pop songs that are 3 minutes or less (on albums of fewer than 12 songs) — and very short walks in the rain.

From Galleycat (”Cussler Ripped on Stand by Screenwriter“):

The LA Times’ Glenn Bunting continues to report the juiciest news from the longrunning, torturous saga that is the Clive Cussler/Philip Anschutz civil trial. Today’s tidbit? That screenwriter Robert McKee (who had his moment in the sun in ADAPTATION berating Nicolas Cage’s character for a crappy script) erupted on the stand while talking about Cussler’s screenwriting attempts. “I mean, I cannot overstate how terrible the writing is,” McKee testified. “It is flawed in every way writing can be flawed.”

Of course, despite his insane success as a screenwriting teacher, McKee’s own talent as a writer can easily be called into question, as Ian Parker did so diplomatically in The New Yorker (”The Real McKee“).

I’m glad that we in the bookblogosphere are more civil than those in the techblogosphere and other online neighborhoods. From the Guardian (”Howls of protest as web gurus attempt to banish bad behavior from the blogosphere,” by Ed Pilkington):

Perhaps it was inevitable. When two leading internet pioneers came together this week to propose a set of guidelines that would filter out offensive and abusive comments from blogs, they were met by a torrent of offensive and abusive comments.

While I agree that discourse should be civil, I don’t think there’s any need to adopt a code and display yet another icon (reading “civility enforced” or “anything goes”). Let’s let common sense be our guide here. While I welcome contradictory opinion here at Likely Stories, if anyone crosses the line into abuse or obscenity — or threats – I’ll delete it.

Monitoring content on your own blog is not the same as censorship. It’s the equivalent of being an editor who decides which letters to the editor deserve to be published, which is a perfectly acceptable practice for newspapers and magazines and thus perfectly acceptable to me.

Anyone who feels left out can start their own blog. Where I can attempt to leave abusive comments.

I’m kidding, people. Only kidding.

I love independent bookstores as much as anybody. (Maybe I should say, “more than many people,” given the news that follows.) And so this story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (”Independent bookstores finding it tough,” by Tammy Joyner), just another in a near-daily litany of bad news for indie booksellers, brings me no joy.

But surely the founders of the small Chapter 11 chain of bookstores could have thought a bit more positively when selecting a name. They’re not in Chapter 11 yet, but they are closing two of their remaining three stores.

(Their blog, which hasn’t been updated since last October, says they have four locations. Time to update!)