Given a recent Major Motion Picture Event, Philip Pullman’s popular His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, 1996; The Subtle Knife, 1997; The Amber Spyglass, 2000) has enjoyed a resurgence of attention. Well, perhaps “enjoyed” doesn’t tell the full story. But rather than link to the many examples of fear for thought, I’ll just link to this interesting interview in Intelligent Life (”An Interview with Philip Pullman,” by Robert Butler). Pullman addresses his critics…

Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. “They’ll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It’s very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”

How will he respond to those attacks? “A soft answer turneth away wrath, as it says in my favourite book.” (Proverbs 15:1.) So he won’t argue back? “It’s a foolish thing for the teller of a story to answer critics. If you’re putting forward an argument, you can argue back and demonstrate why your argument is better than theirs. But if someone doesn’t like a story you’ve written, what are you going to say? ‘Well, you should’?”

…and trash-talks some children’s classics:

His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia”. Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. “I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn’t touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don’t like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with.”

Pullman’s work, of course, addresses some of the great unanswered questions of existence. However, after reading the interview, I have a new unanswered question: what, exactly, is “whiffy cheese”?

Conrad Black (aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, aka “The Robber Baron”), author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (2003) and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), has been sentenced to 78 months in prison (”Judge cuts Conrad Black a break,” by Abdon M. Pallasch, Chicago Sun-Times). He doesn’t look happy.

If he had stuck to writing ponderous biographies–and left massive fraud to others–he’d still be winging his way to Bora Bora on the corporate jet. But such are the travails of the writing life.

What you’ll miss if you don’t read to the end:

Black’s attorney, Jeffrey Steinback, asked St. Eve to look at testimonial letters from celebrities including Elton John, George Will, William F. Buckley and former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, as well as "a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishment."

"I ask the court to consider all of the work he has done for so many," Steinback said.

A prosecutor said the celebrities don’t have any better handle on Black’s character than the jurors.

"Does Elton John really know Conrad Black?" prosecutor Eric Sussman said.

I’ve seen many mentions of the Espresso Book Machine, usually referenced in discussions of how print-on-demand will revolutionize the publishing industry (although sometimes simply in reference to publishers’ attempts to redefine the words “in print”)–but I’d never seen one in action until just moments ago. (Helpful definition: rasterize.)

Warning: this will only be of interest to people who enjoy factory tours and Kinko’s alumni. Sadly, both of those appellations apply to moi.

(Via artsJournal.)

Because it’s Friday, and you need a larf. Also because I’ll be spending this afternoon at the ALA Winter Event (aka holiday party). Via Bookninja, a lost quarto of Hamlet:

KING            …`Now the king drinks to Hamlet.’ Come, begin,
                And you the judges, bear a wary eye

Trumpets sound.  HAMLET and LAERTES take their stations

HAMLET:         Come on, sir.
LAERTES:        Come, my lord.

Enter FRED, DAPHNE, VELMA, SHAGGY, AND SCOOBY

The Lyrical Terrorist has been sentenced. From the Guardian (”‘Lyrical terrorist’ sentenced over extremist poetry,” by Samina Malik):

A 23-year-old former Heathrow shop assistant who called herself the “lyrical terrorist” and scrawled her extremist thoughts on till receipts has been handed a nine-month suspended jail sentence.

Free samples.

Now the bad news. The Chicago Sun-Times is taking the axe to its book section. From Critical Mass:

Just when it seemed the cutbacks in newspaper book sections had struck bone, they’ve gone deeper yet this month. Starting on December 30th the Chicago Sun-Times’ book section – formerly run by Cheryl L. Reed, now by Teresa Budasi — is being reduced by half, and moved from the Controvesy section of the newspaper to the Show section. All reviews are being reduced by half, as well, to 250 to 300 words.

I like to think this had nothing to do with the fact that I was recently profiled in said publication. If I’m wrong, I’d like to apologize for not selling more papers. (Hey, I bought as many as I could carry!)

The Association of American Publishers will award its AAP Honors prize to the National Book Critics Circle. Hey, we’ve got a couple of NBCC members around here…way to go, Brad and Donna! From the Associated Press (”Publishers to honor critics“):

“As newspapers across the country slashed book review space and fired experienced book editors in the name of belt-tightening, the NBCC decided to fight back,” the AAP said in a statement, noting the NBCC’s “Campaign to Save Book Reviews,” which has included panel discussions, blogs and interviews with book editors “in the trenches.”

Dinaw Mengestu has won the Guardian First Book Award for his novel Children of the Revolution (that’s what they’re calling it in England, anyway–U.S. readers know it as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears). From–where else?–the Guardian (”Ethiopian-American wins Guardian First Book Award,” by Sarah Crown):

Speaking after the award was presented at a ceremony in central London last night, the Guardian’s literary editor and chair of the judging panel Claire Armitstead said that while each of the shortlisted books had their champions, the economy and power with which Mengestu depicted the dead-end lives of his characters saw him emerge as the winner. “Unusually for a first novel, there is no slack in his writing, no authorial vanity to interfere with his evocation of immigrant life in 21st-century America,” she said.

While the googolplexes of articles about Google Book Search often make me goggly-eyed, occasionally I read one in spite of myself. And in Jonathan V. Last’s “Google and Its Enemies” (The Weekly Standard), which is for the most part a reasonable explanation of the brouhaha surrounding Google Book Search, I was rewarded with this gem:

Google has, as they say, all the right enemies. Anytime the ALA, Microsoft, France, a trade guild, and a bunch of trial lawyers are lined up on one side of an argument, the other side is going to look extremely attractive.

I can deal with France and trade guilds–but trial lawyers? Microsoft?!

Fortunately, Last goes on to reject the temptation to choose his position based on the company he’d keep (the enemy of my enemy is now my friend?), but you can tell he was tempted.

From the summation:

In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless. No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view. And a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you’re selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer. And ultimately the content is valued at nothing. And here, finally, is the larger problem posed by Google’s actions. Books are not in any important sense user-centric. Whether or not a book has readers matters little. Books stand on their own, over time, as ideas and creations. In the world of books, it is the ideas and the authors that matter most, not the readers.

Do little-read books matter as much as much-read books? What about unread books? Discuss.

The Washington Post’s Top Ten Books of 2007.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2007.

(In common: The Savage Detectives, Tree of Smoke.)

The National Book Critics Circle launches a new kind of list: the Best Recommended List. (Publishers Weekly called it the Most Recommended List.)

(In common: Tree of Smoke.)

Booklist’s Top of the List? Coming soon.