More free-book madness. For the next month, you can read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free–as long as you don’t mind sitting at a computer with a live internet connection. On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow (Overclocked) gives it a bad review (the interface, not the book). Gaiman responds to that and another charge, as well:

I was surprised by a few emails coming in from people accusing me of doing bad things for other authors by giving anything away — the idea being, I think, that by handing out a bestselling book for nothing I’m devaluing what a book is and so forth, which I think is silly.

…

This is how people found new authors for more than a century. Someone says, “I’ve read this. It’s good. I think you’d like it. Here, you can borrow it.” Someone takes the book away, reads it, and goes, Ah, I have a new author.

Libraries are good things: you shouldn’t have to pay for every book you read.

(Read Booklist’s review of American Gods.)

Nicholson Baker, a print guy if there ever was one (Double Fold, 2001), falls in love with something that only lives on servers (”The Charms of Wikipedia,” TNYRB).

Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals - up to a point - the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. If Wikipedia were rendered entirely chaotic and obscene, there would be no joy in, for example, replacing some of the article on Archimedes with this:

Archimedes is dead.

He died.

Other people will also die.

All hail chickens.

The Power Rangers say “Hi”

The End.

The electronic world, it turns out, abets his love of all things archival.

I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, having seen it mentioned in Broughton’s manual: the ARS is a small group that opposes “extremist deletion.” And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for “WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling”) in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that shouldn’t be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming, but some editors (for instance a patient librarian whose username is DGG) seem to be able to do it steadily week in and week out and stay sane. I, on the other hand, was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me - for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

I just can’t say enough about the novels of Richard Price. I really enjoyed Charles McGrath’s profile in the New York Times (”Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium“). Talking about his new novel, Lush Life, Price sounds almost as good in person as he is on the page:

He added that he originally thought of writing a historical novel, one that would dramatize the experience of the immigrant Jews who thronged the Lower East Side a hundred years ago. "But then I realized that’s probably the most well-documented immigrant movement in history," he said. "A guy comes over here, and his first job is working in a sweatshop. His second job is writing a novel about a guy working in a sweatshop. How am I going to do this better than Henry Roth did?"

And, for writers, some rich food for thought:

Another reason the book took so long is that Mr. Price felt obligated to the neighborhood - he wanted to get it right, all the chaos, all the texture - and wound up writing far too much. "I threw out 300 pages," he said. "Not voluntarily."

When he finally, reluctantly, showed the manuscript to his editor, he explained, it felt less like a submission than an intervention. "There was just so much here," he said, "and I fell in love with everything. I had two novels. It was as if my novel had had a novel. Congratulations, you’ve just had a nine-and-a-half-pound novel!" He shook his head and added, "You never really learn how to write a book, because every one is different."

From the New York Times, a brief note telling us that Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years (1997) is not a memoir but a novel. Her story still sounds sad enough.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Ms. Defonseca said: "The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost." Ms. Defonseca, who gave her real name as Monique De Wael, said her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis for Belgian resistance activities when she was 4; she was cared for by her grandfather and uncle.

Is it more depressing when fake memoirs deal with the heavy subjects than trivial matters? Certainly. Though there are exceptions, most people aren’t as angry at an author when they learn his wacky family wasn’t quite as wacky as depicted as they are when they learn that his empathy-earning tale of woe was manufactured.

Then again, the truth behind the lies is often murky. Defonseca may not have been raised by wolves, but if her parents really were killed by the Nazis, that could have caused a lifetime of psychic damage, and her fake memoir can be viewed partly in light of that. (Just as Ishmael Beah’s inaccuracies, whether great or small, don’t negate the larger circumstances of his story.)

But for calculating personalities–those who want to tell a big lie and reap some big rewards–the big tragedies have got to be the most tempting.

Update: More details in the Boston Globe (”Author admits making up memoir of surviving holocaust,” by David Mehegan).