So I’m almost done reading Andrea Barrett’s The Air We Breathe (Norton). And I’ve got a big complaint. That doesn’t have anything to do with the writing.

The design is too busy.

I’m not, obviously, a book designer. I know the difference between serif and sanserif, but that’s about it. When art department types starting talking fonts, I mentally retreat to my happy place with a cheeseburger, a beer, and a good crime novel. But I feel completely qualified to comment on this because of the “I know what I like” clause.

(Disclaimer: Because I am reviewing an advance reading copy, not an uncorrected proof, it’s my belief that this design is intended for the final product. However, the publisher may still make some changes. Which, as you’ll see, would be a good idea.)

My beefs:

• The chapter numbers, which are in a drippy font and enclosed by horizontal rules, are set against a halftone piece of line art showing a leafy tree dropping fruit.
• The drop caps that start the chapters are boxed, shaded and set against a similar but difference piece of art.
• The symbol indicating a section break within a chapter is fine — it’s just an elegant squiggle — but when it shares the page with anything else, it’s too much.
• The header on the left-hand pages, “Andrea Barrett” is in an overdone font with curlicues that just make you want to get out the scissors.
• The header on the right-hand pages, “The Air We Breath” is in an all-cap, outline font.
• The page numbers are bookended by cute little leaf dingbats.

Taken together, it’s like trying to read a novel through a doily. I don’t want to sound like one of those “women are from venus” types, but are they trying to ensure that only women will read this book? Or do they think that the men who will read it are partial to doilies?

Barrett’s historical setting and somewhat old-fashioned prose set the tone just fine. There’s no need to clutter up the page with things that pull our eyes away from the words. And if there has to be a doily, let her describe it.

In London, a customer’s outrage has caused Borders to pull Tintin in the Congo from the children’s section of its UK stores. (That the customer was a human-rights lawyer is probably incidental.) From the Associated Press (”Borders stores in UK shelve Tintin book,” by Raphael G. Satter):

David Enright, a London-based human-rights lawyer, was shopping at Borders with his family when he came upon the book, first published in 1931, and opened it to find what he characterized as racist abuse.

“The material suggests to (children) that Africans are subhuman, that they are imbeciles, that they’re half savage,” Enright said in a telephone interview.

“My black wife, who actually comes from Africa originally, is sitting there with my boys and I’m about to hand this book to them…. What message am I sending to them? That my wife is a monkey, that they are monkeys?

The book will now be sold in the graphic-novel section. Enright would prefer that it not be sold at all, but instead displayed in a museum under the heading “old fashioned, racist claptrap.”

I haven’t read the Tintin in question, but I do have a big stack of them from when I was a kid. And even the non-Congo books are full of racist stereotypes, the least of which is that the bad guy always seems to be swarthy. Now that I’m a father, I’ve wondered from time to time how or if I should present them to my kids. Do I hand them over with a disclaimer (”enjoy the adventures, but be advised that this is chock-full of harmful racist stereotypes”) or do I just keep them in their box, figuring that there are plenty of good books that don’t need disclaimers — and the less attention we pay to them the sooner they’ll leave the cultural imagination?

But then of course there’s the Peter Jackson movie, so I guess we can probably look forward to Tintin Happy Meals. Although Tintin may have a multicultural team of helpers by then, too.

It’s tough to argue against book censorship when an offensive book is the test case. But it seems that an appropriate solution has been reached here: sell it to people who are old enough to understand the issues. (This is different from taking, for example, gay-themed books out of the kids’ section.) Pulling books from the shelves entirely has always been a very dangerous act.

NPR had a somewhat entertaining story about fake Harry Potter books in China (”Rush on for Knockoff Harry Potter in China,” by Louisa Lim).

Frankly, I suspect I might enjoy Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk Up to Dragon even more than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

But I’m hoping something got lost in translation for the woman who says “Harry Potter is my belief” and that she wouldn’t want to read the fake books because they would “pollute” her belief.

Other books have been faked, too, including Bill Clinton’s autobiography, which revealed that his secret nickname is “Big Watermelon.” I think I might prefer that one, too.

Whenever the role of James Bond is up for grabs, the tabs kill a small forest in speculation. When a new author is given the role of Ian Fleming — which, ironically, leads to a bit of forest-killing, too — there’s a lot less hype.

Still, how much fun to learn that Sebastian Faulks (Human Traces, 2006) has penned the latest one, Devil May Care, which will be published next year. Perhaps not surprisingly, his writing method contrasts with that of Kristin Gore. From the Guardian (”The name’s Faulks, Sebastian Faulks … bestselling author writes new James Bond,” by John Ezard and Esther Addley):

As for his method of writing, Faulks said he had adopted a suitably devil-may-care attitude. “In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.”

My favorite part of the article is Jim Crace’s (The Pesthouse, 2007) speculative passage:

“So, Jaws,” he barked. “What have you done with Moneypenny?”

“I’ve warned you before not to call me that,” Amis replied, flashing a row of perfect tungsten.

(There’s more.)

What Spencer Morgan really wanted to ask Kristin Gore (Sammy’s House, 2007; Sammy’s Hill, 2004) about was her brother’s drug bust last week. But instead he heeded the publicist’s command. Fascinating, simply fascinating. From The New York Observer (”More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about Kristin Gore’s Writing Process“):

How, with all of these, erhm, outside distractions, does Ms. Gore find the focus to write? "It’s all discipline and schedule for me," she said. Sammy’s House is a sequel to her 2004 comedic novel Sammy’s Hill. "I mean, it’s very easy to get distracted by the real world and things that intrude constantly and it takes dedication to live totally in your head and be tuned out. So for me, it’s also tempting in a creative profession to start feeling like, ‘I’m just not feeling the creative juices today, I can’t do this.’ And I’ve learned that that’s a huge trap, too, because it can stretch into a longer block."

Summer is a slow time for literary awards. Fortunately, yesterday brought the news that Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko has won the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story, ”Jambula Tree.” Called the “African Booker,” the Caine judges short stories in English by African writers and reflecting African sensibilities. Arac de Nyeko will receive a £10,000 cash award and a month as a writer in residence at Georgetown University. From the Guardian (”Love story wins ‘African Booker’,” by Michelle Pauli):

Set in Uganda, where Arac de Nyeko was born and brought up, it tells of a taboo love between two teenagers, and the consequences of its discovery. While the emotions are described with a delicate touch, the tale is given ballast through its rich portrayal of the protagonists’ community, the Nakawa Housing Estates - a crowded acre of “planned slums, with people with broken dreams and unplanned families for neighbours”.

In the New York Observer (”Kurt Vonnegut’s Final Interview(s)“), Leon Neyfakh asks who can lay claim to having had the last interview with Kurt Vonnegut.

To the disappointment of the many who held Kurt Vonnegut in similar esteem, the writer was robbed of any significant last words when he lay unconscious after a sudden fall until his death on April 11, 2007.

For newspapers and magazines of a certain stripe, Last Interviews are the next-best thing.The Chicago-based political magazine In These Times, to which Vonnegut was a frequent contributor, published one of them; another was printed in the June issue of an in-flight magazine published by US Airways. A public radio show called The Infinite Mind presented a third in the virtual-reality world of Second Life.

Which of these is the real last interview? None of them, as it turns out.

Kind of a sad and trivial footnote, but he no doubt would have had something funny to say about it.

Despite the Guardian’s headline (”Has the novel been murdered by the mob?“) National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman isn’t pondering who killed the novel as much as he is pondering what killed the audience. The answer? Good TV shows. He makes some valid points, although it seems that only a few years ago, BookPeople ™ were always complaining about how bad TV shows were. Now that there are a bunch of good shows, we’re supposed to wish they were bad again so that people will turn once more to reading? Too late for that. If TV shows get bad again, people will just play more video games.

I agree with him more when he’s talking about the multiple factors that have collaborated to keep people from reading for fun. The TV/PC screen may be the most obvious rival for the eye’s attention, but at root the problem is lifestyle changes that, I think, stem from the ascendancy of the corporation as a world power.

As he puts it:

In truth, the novel has been whacked by a number of things, starting with the decline of public education, where standardised tests stand in for cultural (and actual) literacy. Also in America, to a far greater degree than in Britain, the corporation and the language of advertising reigns supreme. To buy or not to buy, that is the question that defines these people’s outlook on the world, and so far only George Saunders and David Foster Wallace have adequately described the way this framework is murdering our language. It is a syntax, as Wallace put it in his 1996 Infinite Jest, geared around what “all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase”.

Finally, there is the larger issue of the screen in its many incarnations. More and more Americans spend their day waking up, checking their email, travelling to work, clicking through their Blackberries, sitting at cubicles, staring into a monitor, and the coming home, to look - once again - at a screen: the television. The eye has been trained to scan, and to receive, and less and less to read.

…but the flesh is weak. I’m just not strong-minded enough to ignore this link. From the Barre Montpelier Times Argus (”Author to hold ‘clothing-optional’ book signing,” by Susan Allen):

James Cunningham’s book signing at a Waitsfield book store on Tuesday night promises to be as unlikely as the topic of the book itself, “Nudity & Christianity.”

Cunningham is inviting customers to disrobe at the door.

“The reason for this is to ‘put our bodies where our mouths are,’ living what we preach,” Cunningham said. “The public are invited to express their solidarity with our message by also donning their birthday suits upon entering the book store.”

The Chicago Tribune’s Julia Keller offers this year’s thoughts on the Great American Novel (”The Great American Novel was written by:“).

And chooses American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis.

I’m thinking she was swayed by the fact that the word American is in the title.

Last year, Bill Ott asked us to vote for the Best American Fiction from the Last 25 Years — not exactly the Great American Novel, but at least it encompasses the Ellis Era. Strangely, American Psycho didn’t get a single vote.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with having a weird opinion. I’m just saying.)

I voted for Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros. I might have a different opinion this year, but I always find these decisions a struggle. It’s more fun to pick on other people’s picks than to pick your own.

Any other nominees, whether knee-jerk or carefully considered?