In the Guardian’s books blog (or, as they’d have it, “theblogbooks“), National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman muses on “an increasing desire of our entertainment industry to deny its writerly roots” (”Everybody needs writers“). Talk about timely–he works in the Writers Guild of America strike and the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

We listen to songs on the radio, but without songwriters they’d be pretty boring; we watch news on the television, but without writers it grinds to a standstill. No matter how many ways the world of the image tries to supersede the word, words and language continually reassert their primacy. One of the most obvious examples of this is in American print publications: as newspapers hollow out their coverage of just about everything, magazines like The New Yorker and The Nation have picked up more and more subscribers because they honour good writing.

Norman Mailer may be gone, but he’s still winning literary awards. Actually, the timing’s pretty unfortunate on this one: he’s won The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for a particularly, um, juicy passage from The Castle in the Forest. From the Associated Press, via the International Herald Tribune (”Late American novelist Norman Mailer wins Bad Sex in Fiction Award“):

The conception of Adolf Hitler was never going to make for easy reading. But late American novelist Norman Mailer’s explicit rendition of the incestuous encounter between the genocidal German dictator’s parents has won the writer one of the world’s most dubious literary prizes.

“We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humor,” said the judges.

They would say that. Other nominees included: David Thewlis (The Late Hector Kipling), Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods), Richard Milward (Apples), Ali Smith (Girl Meets Boy), Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan), Christopher Rush (Will), and Clare Clark (The Nature of Monsters). Actresses um, interpreted, the, er, dogeared pages at a ceremony in London. What I wouldn’t give to have been there.

The various news accounts have been a bit squeamish about quoting any passages at, ah, length, but let us fear no prose! Bloomberg blushes:

a passage so full of what Mailer calls “her most unmentionable part” and “his old battering ram” that we blush to repeat it here.

Reuters is braver:

The winning passage, which leaves little to the imagination, begins: “So Klara turned head to foot and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth and took his old battering ram into her lips.”

But the BBC is boldest:

His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.

The Castle in the Forest isn’t part of Amazon’s Search Inside the Book program, more’s the pity. So hie thee to the library and scan their copy for discreet dogears or, perhaps, forgotten bookmarks.

The Chicago Sun-Times profiles a small-town boy with big-city ideas (”Small-town boy, big-city ideas,” by Mark Eleveld):

Uptown takes a lot of its character from its bars, buildings and the different crowds — the occasional transient looks like he popped out of a dime store novel, and the bouncers are straight out of Raymond Chandler mysteries. Al Capone owned some of these streets. In the winter, there is that sharp Chicago wind whipping off Lake Michigan that all regard with respect. Uptown is a part of Chicago belonging to the likes of Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Mike Royko, Richard Wright, or Sandburg and Dreiser and Farrell. If you don’t know anyone when you first walk these streets, you’ll know someone leaving.

In an extremely brief item in the Scotsman (”JK split fuelled Potter’s anger“), well, it’s too brief to summarize without a quote becoming redundant:

HARRY Potter author JK Rowling has revealed the boy wizard’s anger stems from the break-up of her first marriage.

She said her split from Jorge Arantes in 1993 was a dark period, adding: “A part of Harry’s anger is my own.”

I sure hope she starts writing another bestselling seven-book series soon, so we can go back to hearing about the stories on the pages. I have a feeling that next we’re going to learn that Rowling’s decision to write about a wizard came from her fondness for Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic.”

(Via Sneed.)

The Atlanta Journal Constitution, much-lambasted for having eliminated its book editor (the position, not the person), offers the World’s Worst Book Title: Cooking with Pooh.

Yep.

If it’s any consolation to the runners-up, in my opinion, they were all bad enough to win, too.

Well, folks, we had a squeaker in the vote for World’s Worst Book Title ever. But the Supreme Court was called in for an emergency ruling, and by a 5-4 vote they declared George Bush to be the winner.

No, wait. Wrong vote. The winner was "Cooking With Pooh," which is a real book from Disney. It barely beat out "Letting It Go: a History of American Incontinence," "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification" (which I think maybe some people did not realize is also a real book) and "Everything You’ll Need to Remember About Alzheimer’s."

I wonder if it’s any coincidence that none of these books were selected for review by Booklist. I mean, we don’t judge books by their titles, of course (we reserve snap judgments for covers), but hey, you only get to make a first impression once.

Any other bad book titles on anyone’s mind at the moment?

(Via Quick Study, who has his own vias.)

From the Independent, a story of perseverance rewarded–and possibly awarded (”Novel shortlisted for top award was rejected by 15 publishers,” by Arifa Akbar). Sounds like an interesting book, too.

The frustrated efforts of Catherine O’Flynn, a former postwoman who tried and failed 15 times to get her work published, were finally rewarded yesterday when her first book was shortlisted for the £25,000 Costa Book Awards.

O’Flynn, 37, whose novel, What Was Lost, was turned down repeatedly before it secured a publishing deal, began writing while working long hours at a shopping centre. The plot revolves around a security guard with a sleep disorder who goes on a quest for the truth after seeing a child who had disappeared 20 years ago on a CCTV camera.

View the rest of the Costa shortlists here.

Almost out the door. But I did read a few good things today. Here’s one of them, a peek inside the little-known craft of writing reader’s reports. Think book reviews, but for a really small audience (and with a sometimes larger impact). From the Guardian (”Literature’s invisible arbiters,” by Esther Allen):

Worse, the power of a reader’s report is almost entirely negative. Barbara Epler of New Directions famously decided to publish the great WG Sebald on the strength of a negative reader’s report, but in general a bad report guarantees that a book won’t be published. A good report, however, is likely to be ignored. Worst of all, even when a good report does lead to publication - and the publisher finds a translator who’s up to the task - the translated book will probably be left to its own devices in the marketplace, with little or no publicity, and will therefore ultimately be deemed a failure. All of which leaves those of us who write reader’s reports in a rather ambiguous position.

A compelling excerpt from an unpublished book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong with Washington, by Scott McClellan (PublicAffairs):

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.

Halfway through an article about the tech-savvy new CEO of HarperCollins UK, (”Victoria Barnsley: Bringing books to your mobile phone,” by Ciar Byrne, The Independent) comes the news that they’re taking the slush pile public:

With this in mind, HarperCollins is about to launch a new website, Authonomy.co.uk, which will allow unpublished authors to upload their manuscripts for others to read and comment on. The website will provide an opportunity to spot promising new work, but also, more importantly from the publisher’s point of view, will create an online community of readers and writers.

“Our whole business model will change,” says Barnsley. “Up until now we have received unsolicited manuscripts. This is about encouraging people to build a community where they will judge each other’s content.”

“My view is more people want to write a book than read a book. It is unbelievable how many people out there have a book in them. I think people will love it. Only one of the purposes of this site is that eventually we’d find stuff to publish. The main interest is building a community. We see this as experimenting to learn.”

This was sent to me by Frank Sennett, who asks:

Isn’t the real value proposition of sites like this the opportunity for publishers to offload their slush piles? If they spot one extra publishable novel out of a scheme like this, whatever. What they really want is to get unsolicited writers to leave them alone, and “building a community” is just a polite way to say that, right? Too cynical?

Doesn’t sound too cynical to me–that is, Frank’s question doesn’t. More and more publishers seem to abandoning the over-the-transom route for authors. It’s hard to blame them, in a way, given how inundated they are with unsolicited manuscripts (and how they’re faced with declining reading habits). But a contradiction within Barnsley’s remarks seems to verify Frank’s suspicions: if people would rather write a book than read one, how does HarperCollins expect a “community of readers” to grow around a site where all writers, regardless of ability, are welcome to upload their manuscripts?

If reading is truly on the wane, publishers can best encourage it through the time-honored process of finding and championing the best books–not by adding to the already vast number of possibilities vying for our time. Separating the wheat from the chaff should be a paid position, not a volunteer one.

If politicians save bad news for Fridays (so we’ll ignore it), then I guess reading advocates wait for Mondays (so we can think about it all week). From the Washington Post (”A Troubling Case of Readers’ Block,” by Bob Thompson):

Americans are reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at troubling rates, according to a report that the National Endowment for the Arts will issue today. The trend is particularly strong among older teens and young adults, and if it is not reversed, the NEA report suggests, it will have a profound negative effect on the nation’s economic and civic future.

The last such study drew criticism because it focused on literary reading. This one, says NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, is different:

“This is not a study about literary reading,” Gioia said. It’s a study about reading of any sort and “what the consequences of doing it well or doing it badly are.”

The article still cites some dissenting voices anyway. And while I have often wondered whether literary reading is really that much less common than it used to be, I guess I’d be surprised if general reading habits and writing ability aren’t in serious decline.

A few different quotes in the New York Times (”Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading,” by Motoko Rich), including:

"It’s no longer reasonable to debate whether the problem exists," said Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis for the endowment. "Let’s not nitpick or wrangle over to what extent is reading in decline."