Booklist editors will be busy, busy, busy this weekend. If you’re going to ALA’s Annual Conference in Anaheim, here’s where you’ll find us. Or drop by and see us at booth 2340.

Friday, June 27, 8-10 p.m.
Booklist Books for Youth Program: Presenting the Odyssey Award
Hilton Anaheim California, Pavilion A

This year’s Books for Youth program will be devoted to the new Odyssey Award, given for excellence in audiobook production. The award will be presented to Arnie Cardillo of Live Oak Media, for production of Walter Dean Myers’ Jazz. Five honorees will also be recognized. Speakers include Arnie Cardillo and author-audiobook producer Bruce Coville. There will be plenty of entertaining clips from the winners, as well. The award, selected by a joint committee representing ALSC and YALSA, is sponsored by Booklist.

Saturday, June 28, 1:30 p.m.
Author Interview: Keir Graff
Ingram Library Services, Booth 800

I’ll be interviewed live for a podcast later.

Sunday, 1:30–3:30 p.m.
Booklist Adult Books Readers’ Advisory Forum: The Post-9/11 Novel
Anaheim Convention Center 304 A/B

Will post-9/11 fiction be recognized as a distinct body of American literature? Moderated by Booklist Online senior editor Keir Graff, a panel of four fiction writers—Ellen Gilchrist (A Dangerous Age), Janette Turner Hospital (Orpheus Lost), Carolyn See (There Will Never Be Another You), and Graff himself (My Fellow Americans)—will grapple with this question. The authors will also discuss the ways in which 9/11 informed the writing of their latest novels.

Sunday, June 29, 3:30-4:30 p.m.
Author Signing: Ilene Cooper
Penguin, Booth 2617

Children’s Books Editor–and prolific children’s book author–Ilene Cooper will be signing her latest, Jake’s Best Thumb, illustrated by Claudia Muñoz. How good is it? A rival publication, Publishers Weekly, gave it a starred review!

Monday, June 30, 10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
Reference Books Bulletin Editorial Board Program: The Future of Electronic Reference Publishing: A View from the Top
Room 204B

What do top executives in reference publishing have to say about their industry? Find out when Reference Books Bulletin Editorial Board Chair Sue Polanka moderates an informal discussion with John Barnes, Exec. V.P., Marketing and Strategic Planning, Gale/Cengage; Casper Grathwohl, V.P. and Publisher, Oxford University Press; Rolf Janke, V.P. and Publisher, Sage Reference; and Michael Ross, Senior V.P., Technology and Development, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Monday, June 30, 1-1:30 p.m.
LIVE! @ your library Reading Stage: Keir Graff
Aisle 2500

I’ll be reading from and signing my forthcoming book, One Nation, Under God–a limited quantity of which will be given away FREE. See you there, I hope!

The nominees for the 2008 Macavity Awards have been announced. The winners will be revealed at Bouchercon in October. I sure wouldn’t want to handicap Best First Mystery–some tough compeition there.

Best Mystery Novel

Soul Patch, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Bleak House)
The Unquiet, by John Connolly (Atria)
Blood of Paradise, by David Corbett (Ballantine)
Water Like a Stone, by Deborah Crombie (Morrow)
What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)

Best First Mystery

In the Woods, by Tana French (Viking)
Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill (HarperCollins)
The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz (Simon & Schuster)
Stealing the Dragon, by Tim Maleeny (Midnight Ink)
The Collaborator of Bethlehem, by Matt Beynon Rees (Soho)

Best Mystery Short Story

“A Rat’s Tale,” by Donna Andrews (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2007)
“Please Watch Your Step,” by Rhys Bowen (The Strand Magazine, Spring 2007)
“The Missing Elevator Puzzle,” by Jon L. Breen (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Feb. 2007)
“Brimstone P.I.” by Beverle Graves Myers (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, May 2007)
“The Old Wife’s Tale,” by Gillian Roberts (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mar.-Apr. 2007)

Best Mystery Non-Fiction

Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, by Barry Forshaw (Penguin)
Chester Gould: A Daughter’s Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy, by Jean Gould O’Connell (McFarland)
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower & Charles Foley, editors:  (Penguin)
Police Procedure and Investigation: A Guide for Writers, by Lee Lofland (Writers Digest)
The Essential Mystery Lists: For Readers, Collectors, and Librarians, by Roger Sobin (Poisoned Pen)

Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery

Her Royal Spyness, by Rhys Bowen (Berkley/Prime Crime)
Mistress of the Art of Death, by Ariana Franklin (Putnam)
The Snake Stone, by Jason Goodwin (Farrar/Sarah Crichton)
Consequences of Sin, by Clare Langley-Hawthorne (Viking)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

News flash: James Frey has canceled his appearance at ALA’s Annual Conference in Anaheim. He was to have appeared (with American Libraries‘ Leonard Kniffel) from 1:30-2:30 on Sunday, June 29.

Fortunately, I can offer an alternative: the Booklist Adult Books Readers’ Advisory Forum: Post-9/11 Fiction, from 1:30–3:30 p.m. at the Anaheim Convention Center, Room 304 A/B. I’ll be speaking with Ellen Gilchrist (A Dangerous Age), Janette Turner Hospital (Orpheus Lost), and Carolyn See (There Will Never Be Another You).

I’ve been meaning to take a look at BookLamp for awhile, a site that describes itself as being like Pandora for books. Where LibraryThing helps readers find books based on similarity of taste, BookLamp takes a more technical approach, scanning the books and, well, here it is in their words:

So the first thing that we did was that we scanned a book. We built a program that automatically breaks that book up into scenes. From there, we had the program go through and identify all the different words in the scene. So adjectives, nouns, adverbs, comma usage, things of that sort. Then we sat down and we searched that information for patterns. English is a very self-descriptive language. Adjectives describe things. Verbs are action. And I believed, that by looking at the types of words that made up a scene, you could make some educated guesses about what kind of content was in the scene, without a human ever actually reading it.

BookLamp analyzes text for the ways that density, pacing, action, dialog, and description can be mathematically expressed, then creates charts for the books and looks for books with similar charts. Despite the claim that “there is no doubt that we’re tracking stylistic consistencies between authors,” I have to wonder if it would be possible to game the system by adding the works of authors who use prose in truly unconventional ways, like Beckett, Burroughs, and Borges.

To be fair, even human readers’ advisors can struggle with unconventional works. But the skeptic in me imagines that a computer program that focuses on formulas might miss some of the harder-to-express nuances that make recommendations good. And what is the ultimate goal? To give readers books that deliver the exact same reading experience each time? Or to broaden readers’ experience by giving them books that have some elements they like and some that are new to them? Although, again, that might happen with BookLamp, too: two books with the same arcs of action might have completely different characters and settings.

Right now, BookLamp is still in the beta stage. It has only analyzed 179 books, all of them sf or fantasy, so it’s hard to get a sense of how well this will work on a wider scale. It would be fun to see what non-sf recommendations it might make for a sf title, or vice versa, or to see what read-alikes it suggests for Beckett, Burroughs, and Borges.

What do you think? Would this be a fun thing to play with, like Pandora? Or does the phrase “without a human ever actually reading it” chill your bones?

Watch this video for an overview:

In New York (”A Warming Trend“), Christopher Bonanos noticed a sweet new book-jacket trend:

I love this stuff, although I usually find out about it second-hand: most of the books that I review have plain paper covers. Seen a good trend lately? Let me know!

And, whether you’re hunting for trends or just like to look at interesting book jackets, take a look at The Book Design Review.

On Galleycat, Ron Hogan expresses his surprise that the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg (”Amazon Shows Its Clout“) didn’t mention an important detail about David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle–that it

happens to be to Hamlet what Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres was to King Lear.

Good point, and one worth mentioning. Furthermore, Trachtenberg didn’t mention this summer’s other Hamlet homage, Lin Enger’s Undiscovered Country. (Booklist reviewers Ian Chipman and Jennifer Mattson, needless to say, have got it covered–Mattson makes the Smiley connection, too.)

Hogan also wonders whether there’s more Hamlet the offing:

Today, I’m just wondering if there’s another writer in, say, Montana tinkering with a similar idea who’s going to walk into a bookstore and then look for a wall to bang his forehead against.

There’s been a bit of discussion lately about writers whose publishers pressure them to write a new book each and every year (”Top writers feel heat from publishers’ presses,” by David Mehegan, Boston Globe). And, no doubt about it, the author-as-brand-name is a growing trend. In some instances, it feels like we’re seeing a new book each and every month.

But, in the Guardian’s theblogbooks (”The Great American Pause“), John Freeman reminds us that Americans, despite the widely predicted imminent death of our attention spans, still have a soft spot for books whose gestation periods are in the double digits: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Of course, once Marilynne Robinson’s publisher learns about James Patterson, he’s going to demand that she step up her productivity–to one book per decade at least.

Reporting the latest developments in the 2004 plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea, Lydia Polgreen writes that the details are “too outlandish even for Graham Greene” and that “fact has proved as strange as fiction, if not stranger.” The events “loosely mirror the plot of Frederick Forsyth’s 1974 book, ‘The Dogs of War’,” et cetera and so forth (”Fact Mirrors Fiction in African Coup Trial,” New York Times).

Personally, I think she’s flogging it pretty hard, but at least she seems to be in the fiction-is-stranger-than-truth camp. I always scrunch my eyebrows when I hear people respond to strange tales by saying, “You couldn’t make that up!”

Oh, really? Ever read Edgar Allan Poe? Or Carl Hiaasen? Or Kurt Vonnegut? Or . . . .

How this book cover:

. . . . turned into this one:

From Publishers Weekly (”Little, Brown’s After the Fire Jacket, Before and After,” by Lynn Andriani):

Editor Geoff Shandler explained: “We had a good response to the type jacket, but there was thought that was it too abstract in some way. When the story is so hopeful in the end, was it too dark—literally?” The new jacket shows the book’s central characters, Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, victims of the fire, walking side by side. One has a friendly hand on the other’s shoulder, and they seem relaxed and happy. “It’s cliché,” said Shandler, “but a picture can help tell a story. The emotional bond between those boys, which is so strong, wasn’t necessarily coming across in the original jacket. Now it does. You have a sense of friendship, of journey. You see them there and see that they have made it.”

(From Dan Kraus, who was correct that I get a kick out of this stuff.)

Trying to catch up on my reading. In an examination of David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague and Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends, Michael Saler declares that the War between the States (of fiction, that is, literary and genrefied), is over. Almost over. Well, the end is in sight. (”The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture,” The Times Literary Supplement):

Genre films and books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and popularity polls: we are all geeks now. The establishment’s disdain for genre, and the populists’ suspicion of experimental techniques, are largely things of the past. Generations weaned on cultures “high” and “low” have become the producers and arbiters of the arts, enabled by the expansion of the internet since the early 1990s.

In the Guardian, sf writer Charles Stross (Halting State, 2007) tells general fiction to get with the program, already (”Tomorrow’s everyday,” by Damian G. Walter):

“I think that if there’s one key insight science can bring to fiction,” he says, “it’s that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn’t immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we’d still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they’re wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that’s an unforgivably short-sighted position to take.”

I agree with Stross that fiction can’t afford to be solipsistic–that mainstream, “literary,” or whatever-you-want-to-call-it fiction should engage with the issues of the day, whether political, scientific, cultural, or some combination of the three. But this goes against what many budding writers are taught. In writing workshops, teachers will caution against topical references that will “date” the material. And young writers are especially liable to be trying to create the timeless work that will ensure their immortality. A common assumption, I think, is that the human condition is timeless, and that writing about human beings will never age. The irony is that writing about humans who aren’t engaged with the modern world ends up having a trapped-in-amber quality that is more antique than ageless.

It’s not easy for writers to engage the ever-changing world without putting a sell-by date on the writing, but it’s not impossible. Focus on the big issues, avoid brand names, keep the characters real–and above all, don’t be too literal–and it should all work out.