International book covers are ridiculous

What possible discussions took place in Germany, for instance, when publishers first received the manuscript for Martin Amis's House of Meetings – a novel that describes the misery of life in a Russian gulag – and set to work on a cover that featured six figures body-popping in the windows of a modern apartment block? What prompted Italian book designers to give junior wizard Harry Potter a hat shaped like a mouse, and why did the French opt against the monochrome design that jacketed Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated in the UK and the US, concocting instead a watercolour of somebody fondling a woman's breasts?

These are super fair questions! What is up with some of these international covers?

The bodice rippers of architecture

An awesome new collaboration between romance publisher Mills & Boon and the UK's National Trust has inspired Meredith Blake to consider similar collaborations in the US.

She says it might be a little difficult, but, hello, sweeping plantations of the South! Ranches and stately northern farms! ...Other places! We can do for the Walt Disney Concert Hall what Dan Brown did for the Vatican.

Twitter and grammar, things that make me vomit edition

I have a personal policy, that involves eschewing e-contact with all people who use text speak, can't spell, and abuse emoticons (you get one per conversation. This is a strict rule that is enforced with real-life slaps once we finally meet up). That said, I choose to avoid the bad spellers (Firefox has built in spell check. Use it, please), the terrible grammarians, and emoticon abusers. I don't seek them out or, God forbid, try to fix their mistakes, like these Twitter grammar jerks.

And yes, I realize that someone who has a blog dedicated to commenting and occasionally judging stuff (who, me?) is throwing rocks from a glass house, but seriously, this is like going to visit the monkeys at the zoo and complaining when they throw shit. It's what monkeys do. Sure, there are some non-shit flinging monkeys, and some grammatically correct Twitter-ers, but not many.

Plus, seriously, it's like bailing out the Titanic with a thimble. Smoochy was wrong: you can't change the world, and you also can't make a dent.

Men can't read, or so I hear

At HuffPo we find former editor Jason Pinter talking about why publishers don't think men read. He writes about pitching a book by professional wrestler Chris Jericho to a room full of New York editor:

Needless to say, pitching Jericho's book to my editorial board was like pitching iPads to the Amish. A whole lot of blank stares and a whole lot of people saying 'I don't get it'. Now, this is not the fault of the individuals, but it is the fault of a system in which in a room of 15-20 people, not one of them knew what I was talking about.

I think there is something to be said about the gender disparity in publishing, just like there's something to be said about the geographical and political clustering in the industry. But Chris Jericho? Ech.

Ground black pepper is decidedly not "ground black people"

A misprint in an Australian cookbook (in which "people" was substituted for "pepper" of the "ground black" variety) cost $20k to fix. Now, this super sucks, and is one of the worse possible typos. The publisher's response?

"When it comes to the proofreader, of course they should have picked it up, but proofreading a cook-book is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable."

Of course it's forgivable! It's not like you pay proofreaders to keep you from having to recall for misprints.

Reading and gaming: So happy together

Are you a serious gamer, reader type? If so, you may want to read the 5 best books about video games. Because reading about video games and playing video games go hand in hand.

But don't read and play at the same time, or you will fall off your Wii Fit and develop a sex addiction. You can't make this stuff up, guys.

An anthropological look at vampire lit

The University of Hertfordshire is putting on a conference about vampires in literat...books. And it looks to be a doozy! Potential topics include:

• sexuality and the (living or undead) body  
• Goth culture 
• celluloid vampires: adaptations and incarnations
• teen vampire/zombie fiction 
• blood, money, and circulation 
• the Undead as Other (nationality, class, gender, etc.)

Guys. We are ALL GOING. To quote the cinema: pack your shit! Pack your shit! We gotta get out of here!

And the bans played on

Sometimes society feels a need to band together and say, "Heck no, our chittlins should not be reading!" And when that happens, Mommy kisses Daddy, and the angel tells the stork, and the stork flies down from heaven, and leaves a diamond under a leaf in the cabbage patch, and the diamond turns into a banned book.* Yes, the explanation doesn't make much sense, but the books that get banned also don't make much sense. Little Women? The dictionary? Nice work, America.

*Five imaginary dollars if you can tell me a) what movie that's from and b) why it is the greatest movie of all time.

Shakespeare puts out a new play

Shakespeare may have written an heretofore unknown work, with a dubious and complicated past. Torrid! Shocking! So Shakespearean!

Plus sized must mean any size on the plus side of zero

We all know that fashion does not realistically depict women, in that most women weigh over 80 pounds. It's a good thing that books do not fall prey to this slimmed down version of reality. Oh, wait, never mind.

I think where Jezebel is particularly on the money is that the covers highlighted (at the link above) are not supposed to represent just any women; they're meant to represent large ladies as protagonists. Like the Bloomsbury cover whitewashing debacle(s), this shows that publishers think that no one will pick up a title with a big girl on the front (even if the title is "Big Boned").

One day soon, reader types, we will not be treated like idiots. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

Reasons to be depressed

1. Karl Rove is writing a memoir.
2. Lindsay Lohan is writing a memoir.
3. Sarah Palin is writing a second memoir.

...Happy Friday?

DRM? Don't Rely, Mostly.

Does DRM work? Some people say no.

Yes, I do love webcomics. Why do you ask?

Girls are better readers, also cooler in general

A survey of students aged 5 to 16 showed that, while boys and girls read the same number of books, girls choose more difficult titles than boys. Ladies: always awesomer. What I found interesting was this:

High-achieving children - defined as reading two years above their age - are not challenging themselves enough when it comes to reading as they tend to opt for easier books than their reading ability warrants, the report suggests.

[...]

"If they [children] are reading books that are below their independent reading level it may give them enjoyment but it won't extend their reading ability and literacy rates are at risk of continuing to decline," [Professor Topping] said.

I have trouble believing that, considering the difficulty getting kids to read in the first place, the article judges children who read for fun. Also, content often dictates reading level to some degree, and you know what you're getting into, more or less, when reading YA fiction versus adult fiction--something pretty obvious when you consider the large number of adults reading the Twilight novels.

Mon dieu, racist Gerard Depardieu!

Given our previous Alexandre Dumas news, it should come as no surprise that the man is a drama storm. Gerard Depardieu was cast to play Dumas in a biopic, in which he darkens his skin and changes his hair to play the biracial author, a la Ben Kingsley as Ghandi.

Non-white celebrities, some Dumas experts and black organisations are angry because they say that the producers missed a chance to celebrate ethnic diversity in France and remind the world of the writer’s origins. “There is a mechanism of permanent discrimination by silence,” Jacques Martial, a black actor, said.

France has a pretty terrible record when it comes to not being racist (and religiously tolerant), so I am not surprised that people are mad.

Climate changing smut

You heard it first here: climate scientists made up global warming to up the sex factor in their novels. Dum dum duummmmmm. This is like Peter Parker level scientist gossip.

Thank you CKHB for the link (which she tells me is via Sierra Godfrey)! Your assiduous and meticulous coverage science will not go unrewarded. ...This is your reward.

Watch out for steampunkers

Because they now have working guns. Boing Boing highlights these functional blunderbusses. I am officially frightened, and will be more careful around the steampunk inclined in the future.

Zombies versus unicorns

Who will win???

Zombies, biyatches.

Cat fight: Faulkner and Twain edition

Writers are filled with haterade, reader types. Example?

[Mark] Twain himself took it on the chin from fellow Southerner William Faulkner, who called him a “hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

Ha!

Getting down the Goethe

Clancy Martin writes about a friend who gives Goethe to the ladies and they, in return, have sex with him. No, seriously, that's what the guy says. Martin writes:

I have a friend who, after a date or two, would give the woman he was trying to seduce a copy of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” “It’s like feckin’ magic, Clancy,” he told me, in his churning Irish brogue (which helped him, I suspect, more than the book). “It’s short enough they kin read it in a night. Da next day they’re straight into the sack, I’m tellin’ ya.” The ploy here is to convince a woman that you believe in a certain kind of love–the desperate, romantic sort–and that even if she’s currently with a man, that man is the everyday, sensible, dull “Albert” sort (like Lotte is condemned to marry in the book), while my friend is the desperate romantic willing to die for love, like Werther.

This proves either one of two things. One: ladies are easily bamboozled. Two: this guy is handsome, and has completely deluded himself into thinking that the ladies are interested in him for his suave smarts as opposed to his looks. I vote option two. What a sap.

What's in a name? A lot of stress

Nigel Farndale writes about the difficulty of naming books (and also children). And, while sometimes publishers will change a title between the hard cover and the paperback, and people will occasionally rename children, for the most part, yea, I can see that being a stressful decision, that you will live with for the rest of your life.

Farndale cites the title changes for Lord of the Flies (nee Strangers From Within and A Cry From Children) and The Name of the Rose (nee The Abbey of the Crime and Adso of Melk). Given how "eh" some of the alternate titles were, does it make that much of a difference to sales and title longevity? Potentially!