News of Karl Rove’s imminent departure and book-writing plans prompted the Associated Press to ask publishers to share their opinions on a potential memoir from the controversial White House adviser referred to by President George W. Bush variously as “the architect,” “boy genius,” and, perhaps most poignantly, ”turd blossom.” Highlights:

“‘If he’s ready to talk about what he’s been doing, to lay out how he developed his architectural plans and then implemented them and what his vision is, I think that book would have significant readership,’ says Steve Ross, publisher of the Collins division at HarperCollins…

“‘He’s clearly one of the most controversial, notorious and elusive figures in politics, and I think that people would be interested in looking behind the curtain and seeing what the Wizard of Oz is actually saying,’ says Jonathan Karp, publisher of the Twelve Imprint at Grand Central Publishing.

“But, cautions Karp, he wonders how much Rove would reveal.

“‘He said the president has encouraged him to write a book, so one would not expect complete candor. Rove’s historical value would be in a candid rendering of the Bush presidency,’ says Karp…”

In other words: If Rove won’t testify before Congress about the inner workings of the White House, why would he do so in print? I predict something more Gingrichian, a set of ostensibly forward-looking policy prescriptions for his party couched in a lot of reputation-burnishing, revisionist-history claptrap.

In other Rove-related book news, the Wall Street Journal reported this morsel:

“The president calls him to chat about politics on Sunday mornings, and they have a contest to see who can read the most books. (Mr. Rove is winning.)”

Implication: The leader of the free world is intellectually incurious and implicitly rejects the notion of book larnin’. Har!

In its continuing quest to squeeze every last drop of schadenfreude from the legal woes of the media mogul formerly in charge of its cross-town rival, the Chicago Tribune delivers a long preview of Conrad Black’s upcoming Richard Nixon bio. Reporter Susan Chandler uses one of the Trib’s trademark moves to great effect–couching a snarky takedown in a piece reporting on the snarky reaction of others to the situation. And that situation is worthy of a raised eyebrow or two:

“It’s an awkward time to launch a book — a few weeks before being sentenced for fraud and obstruction of justice.Yet it may also be a welcome distraction for Conrad Black, the disgraced former media magnate who has written a nearly 1,200-page biography of Richard M. Nixon, one of America’s most vilified presidents. Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full is set to hit U.S. bookstores in October, a date picked by his American publisher [PublicAffairs Books] because it fell after the July 13 verdict in Black’s criminal trial. …

“… Black’s choice of subject may have been prescient. Nixon’s ruthless qualities and the up-and-down nature of his career make Black a fitting interpreter for him.”

Sara Nelson, editor of Booklist’s cross-country rival, Publishers Weekly, played along by providing the money quote:

“‘The coincidence of [Black’s trial] having to do with payoffs and secrecy and losing your temper, and the guy coming out with a book about Nixon, the poster child for all those things, is kind of delicious. I think it might actually help the book.’”

Former Sun-Timesman Black clearly hopes so, too. He even agreed to be interviewed for the Trib story. Lemonade from lemons, that sort of thing. Here’s my favorite quote from him. Putting together the first, third and fourth sentences in the following paragraph displays either an incredibly subtle wit or an extreme lack of self-awareness:

“You don’t have much to do when you’re being persecuted by prosecutors. You take calls from lawyers and discuss how to respond to certain things, but it doesn’t take that much time. Brooding is a fundamentally unproductive activity. It was a strong temptation, but I rose above it and took on the project.”

How wonderful that he decided to rise above brooding.

Black’s kinship to Nixon apparently knows few bounds. As the BBC News has reported, “Conrad Black asserts his innocence ‘without qualification.’” No word on whether he flashed the double peace sign when he made that statement.

Anyhoo, Black’s first presidential doorstop study, 2003’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, received a less-than-stellar notice from Booklist, which called it a “massive, comprehensive, but frequently ponderous biography of the great FDR.” The review continued, ”Black spends an inordinate amount of time describing Roosevelt’s personal life, often in mind-numbing detail. Does the fact that a young Franklin tried to conceal an accidental gash to his forehead really help to understand the man?”

With any luck, we soon will be asking similar questions about Nixonian bunions.  

We’ll end with a fun fact: Black charged Hollinger International “$90,000 to refurbish a Rolls-Royce; $40,000 to throw a birthday party for his wife; and $8 million to buy memorabilia of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” according to the Washington Post.

I wonder if he had enough room left on the corporate credit card to buy 18.5 minutes of audio tape relevant to his latest project… 

The two sources I trust the most have finally weighed in on the Harry Potter phenomenon.

On the front page of the Book Review, The New York Times printed a review that revealed no major spoilers (although if you’re not aware of the ending by now, it’s time to sublet that granite subterranean flat you’ve been living in). Reviewer Christopher Hitchens takes a few high brow swipes at the series as a whole and the final volume in particular, but I expected nothing less.

The most anticipated analysis came from my Uncle Stevie over at the Bible of Popular Culture, commonly known as Entertainment Weekly. Stephen King has been the most loyal reader and defender of Harry Potter , J.K. Rowling and their combined exploits. He is also one of the most astute commentators on the state of today’s popular culture.

I’m still mulling over Hitchens’ piece and his perceptive parallels drawn between Orwell, Dickens, Kipling and Conan Doyle and Rowling. Your thoughts?

It is hot here and thunderstorms are brewing - which makes it the perfect time to escape into a story.

The Religion by Tim Willocks is a nice way to disappear for a while. The first of an expected trilogy, The Religion chronicles the escapades of Mattias Tannhauser, a truly resourceful man. He is set loose in sixteenth-century Malta, caught between two women, loyal friends, an Inquisitor, the Knights of Saint John the Baptist, an almost endless army of Turks, and a truly horrific stream of battles.

The pace of the story and its epic but uncomplicated plot suits the lazy feel of August very nicely - when almost all of us just want to watch the summer wind down. The story itself, a mix of historic romp and adventure, is flat-out hard-core battle re-imagined with a gloss of romantic vision, the stuff of Errol Flynn movies and the background material that makes the The Princess Bride possible. Despite the vivid descriptions of war and methods of the Inquisition, readers who enjoy titles that are big and juicy and like to retreat into a fully realized world should find that the wartime saga has much to offer.

If you enjoy it, try a read-alike suggestion and dip into the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon which shares the same weight of language and pacing but which offers more romance, the Richard Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell which also recount in vivid detail the wartime adventures of a resourceful man, or Napoleon’s Pyramids by William Dietrich, a glorious historical adventure.

Another good August book to consider, and off on a different path than The Religion, is Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin. A fabulously told historic thriller, it offers a lovely counterbalance to Willocks as it mixes early CSI methods with well wrought characters and a story that is pitch perfect (and features a fabulous trial and cameo by a disgruntled king).

I think we’ve been outed.

Pierre Bayard has blatantly stated what we librarians only whisper to each other in dark corners of conferences, confess in encrypted emails to our closest pals, grudgingly admit over the fourth or fifth bookardi and cola at Librarian’s Anonymous meetings.

We haven’t read everything.

In his soon-to-be published treatise, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Bayard not only condones not reading everything (and logically points out the impossibility of this endeavor), he encourages the practice.

“Being culturally literate means being able to get your bearings quickly in a book, which does not require reading the book in its entirety–quite the opposite, in fact. One might even argue that the greater your abilities in this area, the less it will be necessary to read any book in particular.”

In the first section of his book, Bayard is not dismissing reading altogether, merely pointing out that choosing what to read also means choosing what not to read. These are choices readers must make with every book plucked off a shelf. For Readers’ Advisors, who are already well aware of all the choices available, this is an agonizing truth. The proficiency of a Readers’ Advisor lies in the ability to glean as much as possible from as many books as possible, place them in cultural context, and maintain perspective regarding the relationship of one book to another. In this way “anyone who truly cares about books…masters all of them at once.” 

  Interesting theories to chew on.

Di Herald’s kick-ass readalike on Kick Ass Heroines reminded me of why I wanted to play striker for Manchester United and use a meter maid for goal practice this morning. I wasn’t parked more than ten minutes! It wasn’t even 8 a.m.! And she saw me coming to move my car!

But the more I think about it, the more I realized I’m not really in the mood to mess up someone’s day. I’m in the mood to mess with someone’s world. Which probably explains my recent fascination with insomnia-inducing, adrenaline-riddled, conspiracy theorist novels.

Derek Armstrong’s The Game had me up all night trying to figure out who was killing all the contestants locked in a remote haunted mansion serving as the latest setting for a trendy reality television show. Enter the world’s most gleefully abhorrent detective, equipped with misanthropic ripostes, claustrophobia and a pill-popping habit. Anyone who loathes reality television will wish that Top Chef had their very own Detective Alban Bane wielding a knife in the kitchen.

 I turned next to Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff. This futuristic conspiracy-twisted thriller takes off like a rocket. Jane works for “Bad Monkeys” a division of “The Organization” that takes directives from the “Cost Benefits” division. Their mission? Take out those humans who are deemed a drain on society while alive and less so when, well, terminated. Unfortunately, an untimely termination leads to Jane’s arrest, and she is now telling her wildly unbelievable, but oh-so-realistic, tale to a prison shrink as she calmly acknowledges that, yes, she killed a man, but no, he probably didn’t “need” it, not like the other bad monkeys.

Of course, if you really have time to kill between the hours of 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., then you need Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Think Da Vinci Code on hallucinogens with a strong dose of Advanced Placement American History and you will be traveling the underground railroad of the “secondary” Constitution with Mike McGill and punky academic Trix.

These books won’t soothe the insomnia or the agita. But they will make you glad you stayed up for it and you’ll be ready to kick more than your caffeine in morning.

Ghosttown, the third novel in Mercedes Lambert’s trilogy featuring L.A. attorney Whitney Logan, comes out from Five Star this month. Lambert was the pen name of Douglas Anne Munson, who died of cancer in 2003. The first two Logan books, Dogtown and Soultown, will be reissued by Stark House next spring. All three were written in the 1990s.

The L.A. Times this week profiled Munson, who apparently came across as “a tough chick” until one noticed that “she was painfully soft-spoken and so fragile her hands would tremble”:

“Like a lot of noir novels, the career of Douglas Anne Munson, a hard-boiled Los Angeles writer who once seemed like one of the city’s bright new lights, just gets murkier and more confusing the closer you look. …

“…despite her early success that included rave reviews and anchoring a sizable magazine article on L.A.’s then-nascent noir revival, she never quite arrived as a writer.

“In fact, after some early success, she spiraled downward when the conclusion to her trilogy was rejected by her publisher. Health problems, severe depression, a stint of homelessness in Santa Monica, an escape to Prague and death by cancer in 2003 followed. …

“Her advocates describe her as a potentially major figure, ahead of her time for her hard-bitten female protagonists and her portrayal of multicultural L.A. in love and squalor.  …

“…her key inspiration was probably Raymond Chandler, and Munson was acutely conscious of dressing Chandler’s work in drag: Each of the detective novels includes an epigraph from his work…”

As LA Observed noted, Munson “has champions in Michael Connelly, Carolyn See, John Rechy and Jonathan Kellerman. Also in Denise Hamilton, the editor of L.A. Noir…”

Here’s an excerpt from the hot-off-the-presses Booklist review of Ghosttown:

“Much of Ghosttown is superb, diamond-hard noir, but mimicking the late author’s life, it devolves into surreal meanderings.”

Sounds like one of those books that’s better if you’re immersed in the back story. And reading that back story is enough to have any mystery author reaching for a stiff drink.

There must be something in the water. Like Katie, I have been thinking about book jackets, prompted by the work of Joyce Saricks.

Joyce is Booklist’s readers’ advisory (RA) columnist (see At Leisure with Joyce Saricks). She recently wrote a column on book jackets which outlines how useful jacket art and text can be when conducting quick, on the fly RA work.

In addition to all the useful points Joyce makes about series, author popularity, genre, and tone, she prompted me to think about how covers change to reflect societal shifts. Oddly enough, romance titles and Harry Potter perfectly illustrate this.

Romance has moved from covers that looked like this:

To covers that look like this:

and finally, sort of back at least half way to covers that look like this:

While in England at least, Harry Potter gets both adult and children’s covers. The adult version of the last Harry Potter book is gorgeous:

but if you just landed on the planet, you could be forgiven thinking that it was an odd title for a classic reissue:

All this makes me wonder - in addition to what the book jacket and text can tell us about the inside of a book, what does it tell us about society as a whole and what we will and will not read on the subway - in front of an apparently judgmental audience? If the first rule of RA, never to apologize for your reading tastes, is alive and well in libraries, it seems to have a long way to go in publisher’s marketing.

Scootch OVER, Frank! I want a turn.

Frank, you amaze me. I cannot fathom how you are able to keep up with all the breaking news in the book biz. And provide pithy commentary. You get my brain buzzing about reading and writing. Now I have something to mull over in staff meetings. I appear to be paying attention to the agenda but secretly I’m pondering what will Hollywood do next to torture that poor Jane Austen?

You go great with morning coffee. I’m more of an afternoon candy break kind of blogger. That’s the time for biblio-silliness such as this, Judge a Book by Its Cover blog. Which prompted howls of laughter as my coworkers and I all counted the hands on a romance cover’s heroine. Giggles and snorts soon gave way to an insightful discussion of book covers, what they are trying to tell readers, what they tell librarians, and why doesn’t Harlan Coben just earflick the person who designs his covers?

And then there are covers that induce the universal statement, “Hmmmmm?” Such as this one, The Psychic Sasquatch, which set off all the readers’ advisors in my department on a spirited debate over genre-blending. You might need a cup of coffee and two pieces of Ghiradelli Dark for this one.

In a big transaction after the waiver deadline, literary critic James Wood has been called up from his longtime Triple A team, the New Republic, to the New Yorker’s major-league club, the New York Times reports:

“In some literary circles, Mr. Wood has been described as a brutal critic who has debunked many of the country’s most admired writers, including Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon. Others regard him as one of the most respected critics of his generation.

“He famously coined a phrase to describe what he abhors in modern fiction: ‘hysterical realism,’ which refers to a style of writing that features rampant caricature, absurd plots and prose and hyper references to popular culture combined with didactic social commentary.”

I suspect he will not soon be providing any cover blurbs for Jason Starr.

The story includes a wry sendoff to Wood from Leon Wieseltier, New Republic literary editor:

“The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.”

And here I thought Booklist was the first step on that path to greatness. Drop me a line, Leon. We should talk.