In Canadian Notes & Queries (”Adventures in the Reviewing Trade: A Cultural Primer“), Alex Good offers a lively, if grim, assessment of the state of book reviewing. It’s somewhat more aboot Canada then elsewhere, but the bulk of his observations ring true for the UK and the U.S., too, at least. The long piece took me so long to read that I don’t really have time to do much more than pull a couple of quotes (see the part about blogs as parasites), but let me just say that I think he’s right on the money:

Typically, attacks on reviewing today see it as either being too democratic or too elitist. That these contradict each other should suggest that they are probably both wrong. I would suggest a more accurate understanding of the situation would be to simply call it capitalist. There is really nothing either democratic or elitist about it. It’s simply a case of money talks.

Book reviewers are often loathe to talk about their role as cogs in the economic machine. After all, our love of books has nothing to do with money (see our paychecks) and our often-inflated notion of ourselves as cultural arbiters becomes too quickly demystified when we start talking about the job in too-realistic terms. But the ongoing arguments about what ails the industry can only benefit from this kind of brave look in the mirror.

Though this essay’s length strikes a formidable blow against the very notion of reading online (I had to put in eyedrops twice), it’s well worth the time and exceedingly quotable. And I’m not just saying that because of this:

One has to keep in mind these space restrictions when lining up to bash the reviewers. The ability to speak competently and interestingly on a given book is a rare enough skill. To do it in 300 words is the equivalent of mastering the form of critical haiku.

If only I had the luxury of 300 words!

Also if you love libraries, visit ilovelibraries.org. And I’m not just saying that because ilovelibraries and Booklist Online are dating.

If you’re a fan of both libraries and short stories, you should read Sherman Alexie’s “The Search Engine” (from Ten Little Indians, 2003). I read the first half-dozen stories in the book as I flew to Washington, D.C. for the ALA Annual Conference, and, because I hate the word serendipity, I have to say it was kismet:

In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

And more:

She carried the Atwater and the Auden books to the front desk to check them out. The librarian was a small woman wearing khaki pants and large glasses. Corliss wanted to shout at her: Honey, get yourself some contacts and a pair of leather chaps! Fight your stereotypes!

“Wow,” the librarian said as she scanned the books’ bar codes and entered them into her computer.

“Wow what?” Corliss asked.

“You’re the first person who’s ever checked out this book.” The librarian held up the Atwater.

“Is it new?”

“We’ve had it since 1972.”

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there’s nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

“How many books never get checked out?” Corliss asked the librarian.

“Most of them,” she said.

Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She’d never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.

More pleasure reading! I’d say I’m getting spoiled, but now that I’m back at my desk I’ve got plenty of books to review.

On a related note, read the New York Times (”A Hipper Crowd of Shushers,” by Kara Jesella) for yet another stereotypically headlined story about how the librarian stereotype is changing from gray hair to pink mohawk:

How did such a nerdy profession become cool - aside from the fact that a certain amount of nerdiness is now cool?

Returning from ALA’s Annual Conference, I thought I might do one of those roundups I read in other blogs — what I did, who I saw, and how it went. But just as being at conference keeps me too busy to do “live blogging” (a term I’ll never grow to like), returning from conference seems to preclude the possibility of summing it all up. There’s all the accumulated e-mail, for one. There’s my ability to remember things clearly, for two.

But even if there’s no time for a thoughtful essay, there’s always time for a list.

I did lots of demos for Booklist Online, natch, for what seemed to be a lot of interested parties. Do people say they love your product just to be polite? Well, probably, if they’re not sure how to tell you they wandered into your booth by accident and they really want to go across the way to play Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution. (The photo from the right is actually from Midwinter.) This year we seemed to be talking to a lot of people from major metropolitan libraries, too.

I attended some very nice dinners as the guest of some very nice publishers. (Don’t worry, I escaped with my ethics intact. I’m not afraid to give someone a bad review just because we clinked glasses.)

That said, I really enjoyed reading a book, Heartsick, written by one of the dinner honorees, Chelsea Cain, just for fun. Bill Ott’s review was already in and I read it anyway. So sue me.

And during that dinner’s dessert, a waiter gave me a champagne shower: I got it head, shoulders, jacket, and trousers. He brought me a fresh glass, saying, “This one’s on me.” People around me were fighting to issue the riposte to that one.

At a dinner for Donna Leon (Suffer the Little Children), Sherman Alexie (Flight), and Andrew Ferguson (Land of Lincoln), I sat next to Donna Leon’s cousin, a charming lady who just happened to be a postmaster in a small-town in Pennsylvania. She intimated that she was the holder of a great many of the town’s secrets, and I imagine she is. Maybe she should write a book!

I was also the dinner guest of my own publisher. Let me just say that it was very hard returning to ramen noodles and mac ‘n’ cheese at home.

I gave a short reading from my forthcoming book, My Fellow Americans, at the LIVE! @ your library Reading Stage. It went pretty well, but I think I would have had a better turnout if they would have printed my name correctly on the program. It’s spelled “Nick Hornby.”

I was introduced by a very nice woman named Rochelle who writes the Tinfoil Raccoon blog. I discovered from reading her post-conference post that I look older than my years.

The signing afterward went better. Especially because we were giving away the books for free. But a lot of people did seem genuinely interested in the zingy back-flap description. Toward the end two teenaged boys wandered up, seemingly with the intention of “messing with the author.” Mostly it was a lot of umming on their part while we politely thanked them for stopping by. As a veteran heckler, I almost wanted to give them some tips. Almost.

After closing up shop, I headed over to the National Mall and played tourist. (And I have the blisters to prove it.) I was struck by the grandeur of the monuments, of course, but even more so by the poor condition of the grounds. The grass was yellow, the reflecting pools had trash in them, and there were fences and barricades everywhere. I had hoped to climb the Capitol steps for the view but was deterred by more fencing and, yes, a sniper. Fortunately the Lincoln Memorial is still open for business.

Where are we going next year? Disneyland, of course.

Last week, Publishers Weekly (”Separating Fact and Fiction in the U.S., Europe,” by Rüdiger Wischenbart) examined the European solution to the problem of memoirs: put them in the fiction section. At the risk of being accused yet again of pandering to Europe, I have to say that this is starting to make sense to me. Not least because it allows us to enjoy some wonderfully Gallic explanations:

Nobody had any doubt about the veracity of Grass’s account - that is, Peeling the Onion was clearly not another Grass novel, despite his occasional and seemingly willful blurring of fact and fiction. Yet when the book instantly got on the bestseller list, it was listed as “fiction,” in accord with the general practice in most of Europe. But why is that the case? In France, it is “the literary character and the novelistic dimension which define a work as ‘fiction,’” explained Fabrice Piault, deputy editor-in-chief of the book trade magazine Livres Hebdo.

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel laureate of 2006, had a book out last year about his childhood memories in Istanbul, a particularly delicate and beautifully written book, with private black-and-white photographs by one of his uncles of places that had shaped the author’s mind as a child. Istanbul, as Piault notes, “absolutely has its place on a fiction list as a novel” because it is not the result of learned research but “an intimate vision of a city, hence a work of literature.”

Still, the principle seems a bit stretched when you learn that John Grisham’s The Innocent Man hit the bestseller lists overseas as a work of fiction. Do passion and a point of view mean that nonfiction becomes fiction?

The words of Olivier Nora, head of the French publisher Grasset, make the approach seem both smarter and more arbitrary than the U.S. system of classification. But any time we can inject a bit of highbrow mystique into the increasingly lowest-common-denominator world of publishing, so much the better:

The differences of perception go back to antagonistic traditions in philosophy and cultural history, said Bernhard Fetz, a Vienna-based researcher with the Austrian National Library, specializing in biographies and autobiographies. “While Germany or France have a mostly idealist tradition in culture, Britain, and hence the U.S., have always had a more pragmatic approach.” Essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Goethe always combined factual accounts with personal intuitions and self-reflections of the author, giving autobiographies also a political angle by defining a life story as exemplary for a nation. The Anglo-Saxon tradition was instead much more and much earlier influenced by science, and therefore supposed to rely on facts and less on intentions, Fetz said.

For readers who really like to hide in the stacks — a CAVE.

Galleycat had an interesting take on the Laura Albert/JT Leroy verdict last week (”But What If “JT Leroy” Wasn’t a Fraud?“):

Even if one maintains reservations on the appropriateness of the lengths Albert went to in order to ensure “JT” was the public face of her work - and acknowledging the point that signing a contract under a, let’s say, extra-legal name probably isn’t the most kosher of actions - if we’re going to start finding fraud in authors choosing literary personae at odds with their material realities… well, let’s just say it’s not exactly a healthy precedent.

It’s an excellent point. It would be extremely troubling if authors started getting sued en masse because the way they represent themselves isn’t exactly true. (You mean you’re not really a vampire who wears sunglasses and rides motorcycles?!) Remember that this has to do not with James Frey-like inaccuracies in a memoir – the book in question, Sarah, was a novel — but with the fact that the author whose sensational story helped sell the book did not, in fact, exist.

The particulars of this case, however, are so unique that it seems highly unlikely it could be used as a precedent. (Full disclosure: I am not a lawyer.) Probably the judge should have told everyone to go home before it even went to trial, but I find myself in the strange position of sympathizing with the movie producers who thought they were getting a hot property. After all, art and artist seem inextricably entwined these days. And even if Sarah is a good novel on its own merits, would it have gotten the same kind of attention without the mysterious persona of its author? The meta-movie solution proposed by the plaintiff does have kind of a twisted brilliance, acknowledging the true nature of the original deal: what they wanted was a movie based on a book written by a person of note. And Laura Albert is suddenly far more interesting than JT Leroy.

But all those arguments aside, and as Galleycat notes, it could come down simply to the fact that the name on the dotted line wasn’t connected to a real person. Surely that can’t be a legal contract.

But who knows? Maybe Tucker Max will be sued once it’s revealed that he’s actually a 40-year-old virgin.

Which would leave me conflicted. Certainly someone should sue him for something. But then again . . .

An update on the previously discussed BookSwim, which now has “a few hundred” members. (Surely champagne corks are popping in investors’ boardrooms.) It came as news to me that there is an extremely similar company, Booksfree.com (disclaimer: the books are not actually free), that has been in operation for seven years. From Publishers Weekly (”Netflix Book Model Draws Competitors,” by Lynn Andriani):

Burke and Siddiqui said they are looking to bring libraries on as customers, at a reduced rate, to expand libraries’ inventories. The company is working on a pilot program with one of its local libraries, but would not release the library’s name. The founders also want to include publishers in their venture, since as Burke said, “It’s very burdensome for us to have to purchase all our inventory; it’s very costly up front.” He and Siddiqui would like to embark on a revenue-sharing program with publishers, wherein they would pay publishers each time one of their books are rented. However, Burke has not approached any large publishers yet.

Any time you’ve got a company founder complaining in print about his business model, you’ve got to wonder how things are going. Never mind the vague and secretive plans to for major improvements. The idea of turning libraries into customers seems like a page from a self-help guide: find your greatest enemy and make them your friend. Is it a stroke of evil genius? Or a hail-mary pass?

Booksfree.com’s longevity surprises me. And they seem to be doing some business, claiming to have shipped 40,454 packages in April. (I hope that doesn’t include direct-mail solicitations.) But if there is indeed room for one NetBooks, can there possibly be room for two?

I’m back — and what better way to celebrate than with a piece of hot celebliterary news? (Litebrity? Once I get this figured out, I’ll be trademarking the result.) Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi, Britain’s incorrect answer to Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, have called it quits. From Reuters, via the couldn’t-have-named-it-better OMG! (”Author Rushdie and TV host Lakshmi to divorce“):

When the Indian-born Rushdie started his romance with the model more than 20 years his junior, the British tabloids made much of their differences in age and intellectual stature. But Rushdie always defended his wife. “Anyone who’s met Padma knows she’s as intelligent as they come,” he told The Times of London in a 2005 interview. “But, you know, it’s not supposed to be permitted to be gorgeous and really smart and also very nice.”

Can’t he just say that he only reads her for the articles?