From Harry Potter-style mega-hits to controversy over banned books to hot competition for literary prizes, there is never a dull moment in the book world. Chapter & Verse keeps readers up-to-date on the latest in literary headlines. Check in with us daily to learn about books and their people - those who write them and those who love them.
The city of Alexandria, Va. took the top spot in Amazon's 2012 list of the most well-read cities in America. (Albert Herring)
Is Virginia really the best-read state in the nation?
Congratulations, Virginia.
Bookselling giant Amazon released its yearly rankings of which cities are the most well-read on Tuesday and the city of Alexandria, Va. took the top spot, with Cambridge, Mass. coming in at number two and Berkeley, Calif. following behind at number three.
According to Amazon’s press release, the company determines which cities have the most bibliophiles by looking at the number of magazines, newspapers and books sold in areas with over 100,000 residents since June 1 of last year. The company includes both paper and Kindle versions of the materials in the number-crunching.
Amazon releases the top 20 cities that made the cut as well as trends that caught the company’s eye.
Other areas that made the top 20 were Ann Arbor, Mich. at number four, Washington, D.C. with its spot at number nine, Pittsburgh, Pa. at number 11, and Orlando, Fla., which came in the fourteenth spot. The state which appeared the most times on the list was also Virginia, with Arlington occupying the seventh spot and Richmond squeaking in at number 20.
The company also found that Alexandria bought more romance novels than any other city and Boulder, Colo., which came in at number five, ordered the most health-related books, among other trends.
Molly Driscoll is a Monitor contributor.
The first word – ever – in the English language? The closest we'll come to knowing, says linguist and author David Crystal, is "roe," a kind of deer.
The strange history of the English language
Thanks to Julie Andrews, we know that a doe is a deer, a female deer. Animal fans might also be aware that roe is a species of deer.
Here's one you haven't heard: "roe" may be the closest that we've ever come to the first English word. That's the verdict of British linguist David Crystal, one of the world's top word experts.
His evidence? The ankle-bone of a roe deer that was discovered decades ago in Norfolk, England. Someone wrote what seems to be the equivalent of the word "roe" on it back around the fifth century or so, possibly to show where it came from. The bone seems to have been used in a game, so maybe the word helped people figure out the role it would play. (I like to imagine that kids back then played "Chutes and Roes" or "Monopo-Cave." But I digress.)
From roe and its kin flowed millions of words. In his lively new book "The Story of English in 100 Words," Crystal begins with the "first word" and works his way through the centuries from "bridegroom" to "skunk" to "Muggle."
In an interview, Crystal talks about our language's promiscuous borrowing of words from other languages, explains why brand-spanking-new words like Twittersphere fascinate him, and tells me I really need to get a life when it comes to being a language cop.
Q: Among languages, what makes English stand apart? What can it do that most other languages can't or don't?
A: Every language expresses a unique vision of the world, and I find them all equally interesting. Having said that, English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages, because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach.
Q: Now to the reverse question: What can most other languages do that English cannot? In what ways is English distinctively limited?
A: There are innumerable differences. One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.
Many Oriental languages, for example, have a complex system of honorifics, identifying the relative status of the participants in an interaction. English is much more egalitarian in this respect.
Another example is the use of a single second-person pronoun form, "you." Most languages make a distinction between a singular and a plural (and sometimes other) forms.
Q: Is English more likely than other languages to accept words from other countries?
A: Yes. It is simply a matter of language contact, and English - because of its political history -- has been in contact with more languages than any other, notably in its period of colonial expansion. Several hundred languages have "loaned" their words into English. And there is a general tolerance of loans which not all languages share.
Q: Despite all the anti-immigrant fervor that America has had back into the 19th century, we haven't gotten to the point where anyone gets upset about foreign words sneaking into the language.
How did we (Americans and more widely, people who speak English) end up not having as much of a purity streak as, say, the French?
A: Difficult to say. Certainly there was never much support for the notion of an Academy in Britain, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Dr. Johnson put his finger on it when he said that there was something stubborn about the British temperament, so that if someone suggested a set of rules, the British would be sure to go out of their way to break them! And I imagine the same temperament exists in America.
But these days the fact that English is a global language, with its remarkable diversity, makes it impossible for any notion of an Academy to exist.
Q: You mention lots of cool word phenomena, like portmanteaus and reduplication. Of all the ones that you mention, what's your favorite? And could you describe what it is for our readers?
A: Linguists don't really have favorites. Or, put it another way, every word to me is a favorite.
But I especially like to see new words, especially those which take the language in new directions and display real ingenuity or playfulness.
The final chapter mentions "twittersphere." I've been hugely impressed by the way that people have developed an extraordinary range of words beginning with "tw" -- an unusual consonant combination in English. Online twictionaries illustrate the range.
Q: Of the 100 words, which one that has the most unusual or unexpected origin?
A: Again, difficult to say, as so many of them have fascinating origins. But if I had to choose, then it would be 'matrix', widely known today for its scientific and science-fictional usage - but originally, from the Bible. The first use of "matrix" is in William Tyndale's translation of the Gospel of St. Luke, where it is used in the sense of "womb."
Q: Every word expert seems to have a usage or two that drives him/her crazy. What are yours?
A: Not every word expert. Only the popular pedants.
No usage drives me crazy. On the contrary: every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.
Q: All right, but some words are so egregious, especially if I believe they are. What do you think of my pet peeve -- the use of "grow" in a sense like "grow the economy"?
A: I think you should worry about more important things!
But to be serious, there's nothing new about the transitive figurative sense of "grow." "Grow knowledge," for example, is found in the early 19th century. "Grow the economy" is simply one of the more recent examples of this construction.
Q: You mention a few words that aren't used much anymore, like "fopdoodle," another name for a fool.
What are some that make people regret they aren't still around when they hear them? And which ones would you like to see make a comeback?
A: People love fopdoodle when they hear of it, presumably because of its appealing sound.
I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity -- they form part of the linguistic color of a period.
But it's always possible for a word to return, if enough people want it to. "Shellacking," for example, meaning a beating or a defeat, arrived in the late nineteenth century, and had quite a popular slang use during the midyears of the twentieth. But then it died away, until Barack Obama used it a few months ago. Whether it will have a long second life remains to be seen.
Randy Dotinga is a Monitor correspondent.
James Patterson published 12 books last year (some with the help of co-writers) and plans on bringing out 13 new ones next year.
How fast can they write? E-books push writer productivity
If you think e-books have changed readers’ lives, consider how they’ve changed the lives of some of your favorite authors – if they haven’t already consumed them entirely.
According to a front-page article in the Sunday New York Times, the advent of e-books, instant downloads, and readers’ increasingly insatiable appetite for content translates into unprecedented productivity for novelists specializing in mysteries, thrillers, and romance, with some authors writing as many as 13 books per year to meet demand. It’s an e-revolution of sorts in which lightning-fast speed has taken over the traditionally snail-paced world of book publishing.
“[T]he e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing,” Julie Bosman writes for the Times. “Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.”
“They are trying to satisfy impatient readers who have become used to downloading any e-book they want at the touch of a button, and the publishers who are nudging them toward greater productivity in the belief that the more their authors’ names are out in public, the bigger stars they will become.”
“It used to be that once a year was a big deal,” Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers, told the Times. “You could saturate the market. But today the culture is a great hungry maw, and you have to feed it.”
According the Times, Ms. Scottoline increased her own output from one book a year to two, “which she accomplishes with a brutal writing schedule: 2,000 words a day, seven days a week, usually ‘starting at 9 a.m. and going until Colbert,’ she said.”
And then there’s James Patterson, a thriller novelist who wrote 12 books last year (aided in some cases by co-writers). This year his publisher expects to publish 13 Patterson thrillers.
Readers, it seems, are happy to consume the titles as fast as the novelists can write them.
But as we read the NYT piece, we couldn’t help but wonder, isn’t this trend concerning to anyone? Should books be produced a dime a dozen, with authors churning them out like widgets from a factory? And should we, as readers, encourage these insta-books?
It took Leo Tolstoy seven years to write "War and Peace" and it shows. There may be room for both Tolstoys and Pattersons on your shelf, but we’d like to encourage more of the former. After all, with an output of 12 or 13 books per year, who’s got space for all those Pattersons?
Husna Haq is a Monitor correspondent.
Broadway Books, an independent bookstore in Portland, Ore., had the best holiday season in its history after the owner's son tweeted that he would buy a burrito for anyone who spent more than $50 at his mother's store. (By Stuart Seeger)
An indie bookstore 'saved by a tweet'
Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon, turns 20 this month, no small feat for an indie bookstore. We don’t usually feature individual booksellers here, but we were so touched by this tale of a local, independently-owned bookstore beating the odds that we had to share it here.
You may remember Broadway Books as the bookstore that was saved by a tweet in 2008. When Broadway was approaching the holiday season back in 2008, the economy crashed and sales slowed so dramatically that owner Roberta Dyer wasn’t sure her bookstore would make it through the winter.
“When we were approaching our seventeenth Christmas season, the economy tanked and we were really afraid,” said Dyer in a video about her bookstore.
When Dyer’s son Aaron Durand learned that his mom’s bookstore might not make it, he decided to do something about it. Durand wrote a blog post in a last-ditch effort to save his mom’s bookstore. The post read, “I have a credit card that has $1000 left of credit on it and I want to spend that money helping people get to my mom’s store.” He promised to buy a burrito for anyone who spent more than $50 at Broadway Books.
Once Durand tweeted the plea on Twitter, the story went viral and Durand’s blog, which normally got three or four hits a day, got hundreds of visits. The community rallied around Broadway – they were literally running out of books, remembers Dyer – and business boomed.
“It just exploded and we had the best holiday season we’d ever had,” said Dyer. “That was…years ago and every single year since we’ve done better and I think it all started with that one little tweet.”
Here’s to Broadway Books and 20 years of community support in Portland – and here’s to hoping many more like it can continue to survive and thrive.
Husna Haq is a Monitor correspondent.
Author Anna Quindlen said of her own mother, 'Making my mother laugh was the be-all and end-all of my existence,' (Jennifer Green/Christian Science Monitor)
Anna Quindlen talks about her new memoir 'Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake'
Conducted by Quindlen Krovatin for The Barnes & Noble Review
Anna Quindlen -- whose new memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, was published by Random House last week -- is a woman of many accomplishments. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Beloved novelist. Sought-after public speaker. The only author to ever have books on The New York Times' fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists.
She's also my mother, which she'd tell you is her greatest accomplishment (along with being the mother of my younger siblings, Chris and Maria). I thought, since her new book is filled with reflections on motherhood and family, who better to ask the right questions than someone who's been around for much of the journey her memoir describes?
So I asked if I could interview her about the book and the stories behind it, and she said yes (of course). But as we sat down to talk, she was the one with the first question: "Isn't this so weird for you? I mean, did you ever imagine that someday we'd be sitting here at the dining room table, talking about my life?" In truth, the experience was a little surreal -- and nerve-wracking. We've had plenty of conversations about her work before, but this was different; I felt the pressure any interviewer feels, to ask the right questions to get the interviewee talking. But it turned out to be so much fun that we both quickly forgot about the unusual occasion and the tape recorder between us.
The Barnes & Noble Review: I thought we'd start with the title because I know you had a lot of difficulty arriving at a title for this book. I was hoping you could talk about the different titles you went through prior to Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.
Anna Quindlen: I'm not sure that any one title had traction for more than an hour when I first started writing this memoir. The problem is that the book is about so many different things. About motherhood, about friendship, about how we grow older, about how we care for ourselves and our families while we grow older. There wasn't one title that covered the waterfront. And what I realized at a certain point was that I wanted a title that communicated, for lack of a better word, the joyfulness of the book. The exuberance. I was walking across town to have dinner with my friend, the mystery writer Linda Fairstein, and Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake just popped into my head. Full bore. I immediately e-mailed it to my agent. She loved it. She forwarded it to my editor. She loved it. We all felt that it really captured something about the book. It captured the age aspect, but also the joyfulness. And that was the duality that we really wanted to get front and center.
BNR: But I know at one point you'd been thinking of calling it Later. Something that communicated the period of time in your life that you'd arrived at.
AQ: Right. And at one point there was some sense that we would call it Gray because of what was going on with my hair. But none of those titles seemed to cover all of the book. I mean, the book isn't just about the later years of my life. It's about how the earlier years have informed those later years. I remember at a certain point my agent seized on something in the book and said, "Why don't we call it Is 9:30 Too Early to Go to Bed?" [Laughs]
BNR: [Laughs]
AQ: The answer, of course, being "No!" [Laughs] But that was just before I came up with Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, and we were set.
BNR: Hadn't there been talk about using another line from the book, I'm Too Old to Die Young Now?
AQ: Actually, when I first wrote the proposal for the book, I called it Too Old to Die Young Now, which is what I said to your sister when she was worried about something happening to me. And I really do think that in some ways it's the quote that set me working on this. A tangible, spoken sense that I've crossed a line on the continuum of life. But, while I still think that's a pretty good title, there was a sense that having the word "die" in the title didn't necessarily work.
BNR: But even earlier, when you were first imagining the book, I remember you talking about it as Mistakes Were Made: A Memoir of Motherhood. When did…or how did you decide to move beyond motherhood to a more multi-faceted view of your life?
AQ: It was a combination of speaking that sentence to Maria -- I'm too old to die young now -- and then once I'd done the research that showed that in the year I was born, 1952, average life expectancy was 68. Every time I say that, even to people who pride themselves on being well informed, there's an audible gasp. Are you sure about that? Did you double-check that? The answer is, I am absolutely sure. I triple-checked. But the idea that that was how long you got to live then, and that you get to live twelve years on average longer now, made me think about the differences in the lives of people my age from those of the generations that came before. And that seemed to me to be broader and deeper than motherhood, although clearly that's a pivotal part of this book. It seemed to me to cry out for an explanation and an exploration of what we're doing with this time and how our lives are defined by the fact that we're going to live longer than any generation previously in history.
BNR: You may even live forever.
AQ: Not forever. Please, no.
BNR: Back to the title Mistakes Were Made. If you reflect on your time as a mother, what mistakes were you thinking of when you conceived of that title?
AQ: I can't even begin to count all of the stupid, ham-handed things that I did. I mean, there was the time when your first Easter came around, and I put soaps and washcloths folded in the shape of bunnies in a basket because I didn't want you to have chocolate.
BNR: Were you worried about my teeth?
AQ: It was a purist kind of thing. There you go. Purism often got in my way. I banned you all from watching The Simpsons for a number of years, which was clearly an error in judgment. There was the time your sister came running up to me and said she'd gotten a 98 on her test, and my response was, "Which one did you get wrong?" There was the time I ordered the food at the McDonald's drive-thru window and then drove through without it. And there were serious times when you all got older when I responded in stereotypical ways to situations. I think that's the biggest danger in being a mother: The impulse to massage your kids into some kind of homogenized, universally accepted form, which, if you're smart, you know intuitively will result in nothing much down the road. But in the moment it somehow seems easier than individuating, than giving them their head, than getting out of their way.
BNR: I forget which author we were talking about, but it was an author who said that all of the books she writes are really about one theme.
AQ: Amy Bloom.
BNR: Right. Of course. I actually forget what the theme was.
AQ: I think she said love.
BNR: And you said that yours was motherhood. I think that's absolutely true. I was going back through that box you assembled for each of us of the first editions of all of your books, and I was struck by how it's always motherhood troubled by violence, or illness, or even just circumstance like in Blessings.
AQ: I actually think my theme is a combination of motherhood and loss, and clearly anybody who knows anything about my personal history knows where that comes from. My mother died when I was 19. In novel after novel, that emerges as a theme, most dramatically in Every Last One. It's actually not a theme of the novel I'm working on now.
BNR: Is the protagonist a mother?
AQ: She is. But it's not as important a part of her character as it is for most of the women I've written about in the past.
BNR: Because I was thinking about how even in Rise and Shine, which is one of your more lighthearted novels, Meghan Fitzmaurice's relationship with her son, Leo, is fraught.
AQ: It's not so true in my first novel, Object Lessons, which is more of a young person's novel. But then once you get to One True Thing, it clearly takes hold, this dual theme of motherhood and loss. I think it was something I had to explore until I felt like I'd explored it to its fullest. And if you look at my novels, Every Last One, the most recent one, is about as far as I could go in exploring that, which is why the new one doesn't need to be about motherhood as much.
BNR: That makes a lot of sense. How do you think having your Mom die when you were as young as you were affected how you approached being a mother?
AQ: I think it made me bound and determined to be there as much as possible. It had a lot to do with why I quit my job at the New York Times when I did, when you and Christopher were small. Which turned out to be an opportunity in disguise because that's when I started to write my column, Life in the 30s. And it's why I quit that column when Maria was born and took a year off with the three of you before I started the Op-Ed page column [Public and Private]. I just felt like life was short and I needed to be there. And I was haunted by the fact that my sister, your Aunt Theresa, was nine when our mother died, and she literally remembers nothing about her. And so I would look at you three, who were so central to my life, and think, I'm not even written on their DNA yet. I've got to be there as much as possible. I think it made me a very engaged and attentive mother.
BNR: Did your Mom's style of being a mother, her approach to motherhood, inform how you raised us? Did you try to emulate her?
AQ: I did, but that was an interesting challenge. In terms of our characters and what was going on in our lives, my Mother and I were vastly different. Which was something that I struggled with because I loved her so much, and the idea of being different from her made me feel a little less in her eyes when I was younger. She was not a particularly educated woman. She wasn't intellectual. She was just really good at making all five of us feel like we'd hung the moon. And that was the thing that I tried to emulate. That sense of each of your kids at various times thinking that they're the favorite.
BNR: [Laughs]
AQ: Not that there was no favorite. But that they were the favorite. I think I tried to be as patient as I could. On sort of a cursory level, there were things I clearly tried to emulate. Having what, for my time, is considered a large family. Cooking constantly. The laughter. As I've written before, making my mother laugh was the be-all and end-all of my existence. You guys have cracked me up so much over the years that I feel like that's a pay-it-forward kind of thing.
BNR: When we were growing up, she was an almost beatific figure, smiling out of black and white photos. Obviously, I never knew her, but she felt like a powerful force in our lives.
AQ: But that's actually an unfortunate thing that we do to the dead. We turn them into plaster saint versions of themselves. We almost take away their individuality in our quest to make them perfect. So instead you get Saint Prudence of Spaghetti and Meatballs. [Laughs]
BNR: [Laughs] That's so funny because the other day you had those old pictures out, and I don't think I'd ever seen a picture of Grandma Prudence old before. With glasses. Because the pictures around the house are of her at her wedding. Or her holding you when you're an infant. So seeing her as an older woman was very strange.
AQ: Well, that's one of the interesting things about our attitudes towards aging because my mother was 41 when she died. And at the time I was both hugely bereaved but also conscious of the fact that she had lived a rich, full life. And only when I got older did I realize that she had died incredibly young. Now that I'm almost 60, I just feel like it's tragic. I say in the book that ever since I was 19 I felt, at some level, like I was living for two. That I had to embrace every day of life because I knew that my mother would have killed to have it. And so I think my attitude about aging has been different from some of my friends because I knew the alternative.
BNR: And now that you're beyond the age that she died, who do you turn to as a model for motherhood.
AQ: Honestly, the people who teach you how to be a good mother are your children. And one of the biggest challenges of being a good mother is to listen to them. The trick is, you can't listen to their words. You have to read between the lines of how they're behaving, what they're saying, what they're doing.
BNR: One thing I remembered in my reading of the book was that when we were growing up you would bake these incredible cakes for our birthdays. And I wanted to talk a little about the most challenging of those cakes.
AQ: [Laughs]
BNR: Was it from year one that it was important to you to make such a big deal out of our birthdays, or did that come about later.
AQ: Actually, the cakes were much more baroque when you were babies.
BNR: Like scalloped edges or…
AQ: Not the decoration. More the baking. Cakes with hazelnut mocha frosting. Very very complex cakes. Totally unnecessary.
BNR: And lost on the individuals eating them.
AQ: Although there always was that moment, because you know I was never a junk food mother, there was always that moment when one of you would dig into your cake, put a fistful in your mouth, and give me a look like, you've been holding out on me.
BNR: [Laughs]
AQ: It was kind of magical. But I think the birthday parties were emblematic of something else. My birthday is July 8th, which meant that I didn't have much of a birthday celebration. If you can't take a box of cupcakes to school, it's almost like your birthday doesn't exist. And the irony is, my birthday cakes were almost always presented at a restaurant down the Shore where we used to spend the summers, and they always had a sparkler in them because it was right after July 4th, which is why the sparkler on the cover of the book is really apropos. So at some point I decided that you guys would have wonderful birthdays. And as I say in the book, I took it to the limit, far past the point where the people involved were enjoying it. There were those parties with the hayrides and the clowns. There was the party I threw for Maria where I took her and her friends to the beauty salon. And the cakes only became cakes again, and not art projects, when you guys finally said, "That's enough."
BNR: Which was harder to decorate, the Jurassic Park cake or the Ghostbusters cake?
AQ: [Laughs] Definitely the Ghostbusters cake. Because I had to get Slimer in there in addition to the logo with that ghost in the red circle.
BNR: But who first asked not to have an elaborate cake?
AQ: You did. I remember one year I asked what you wanted on your cake. And I would always ask with trepidation because Maria would say something like, I want Belle dancing with the Beast in a ballroom with Lumiere holding a candelabra, and my heart would sink. But I asked you what you wanted on your cake, and you said you didn't want anything, and that felt like the beginning of maturity.
BNR: How tough is that as a mother, those kind of moments? Is it bittersweet or a feeling of relief or…
AQ: It's hard. Less hard when you have more than one child. Knowing that Christopher was still going to ask for vampires on his cake was some solace. Also, if you don't get mired in the moment, there's this incredible kick you get when you realize that your kid is becoming an adult. That they have really interesting opinions about books you've both read. That they have interesting insights into human behavior, even your own behavior, that hadn't occurred to you before. Unless you get too invested in power and control, that notion that your son or daughter is becoming an adult is thrilling.
BNR: Now Mother's Day is coming up soon...
AQ: What day is Mother's Day?
BNR: [Pause]
AQ: You have no idea!
BNR: No, no. I do. I think I do. May 12th?
AQ: May 13th. I actually have to fly to Traverse City, Michigan that day to do a gig for this book tour. And I'm trying to get them to change the travel itinerary so we can at least have brunch that morning.
BNR: Because it's one of the definitive Public and Private columns, right? "The Days of Gilded Rigatoni". When you were away for Mother's Day.
AQ: Exactly.
BNR: Now, just a little background, you were on book tour?
AQ: I was on book tour, and it didn't occur to me until the schedule was locked in that I would be spending Mother's Day in a hotel room in Seattle.
BNR: And it was upsetting for you.
AQ: Very upsetting. No mother should be eating a room service breakfast on Mother's Day.
BNR: Well, at least you got to eat all of the breakfast.
AQ: I got to eat all of the breakfast, and I got a column out of it. But I would have preferred to spend it with you guys. Even if that meant you ate all of the bacon before I even picked up my fork.
Quindlen Krovatin is an editor at The Barnes & Noble Review. He previously worked as a reporter in the Beijing Bureau of Newsweek Magazine. He loves his Mom and promises to get her something nice for Mother's Day.
The Harry Potter books will be available in multiple languages through the Kindle lending library.
Harry Potter comes to Kindle
Boys and girls, power up your Kindles; Harry Potter is coming to the Kindle lending library near you.
That’s right, starting June 19, all seven of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books will be available – for free – to Amazon Prime members, Amazon announced Thursday morning.
“We’re absolutely delighted to have reached this agreement with Pottermore. This is the kind of significant investment in the Kindle ecosystem that we’ll continue to make on behalf of Kindle owners,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement.
There are restrictions. Pottermore remains the only place to purchase Harry Potter e-books. The Potter books can only be borrowed through the Kindle lending library, and only by Amazon Prime members who own a Kindle. Amazon announced that the deal was made through an “exclusive license” with Pottermore that allows Prime members to borrow one e-book free each month.
“Over a year, borrowing the Harry Potter books, plus a handful of additional titles, can alone be worth more than the $79 cost of Prime or a Kindle,” Bezos said in a statement. “The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library also has an innovative feature that’s of great benefit for popular titles like ‘Harry Potter’ – unlimited supply of each title – you never get put on a waiting list.”
The e-books will be available in many different languages, including English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
One more big reveal: Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne told the Guardian that he would be announcing new partners and new platforms for the Pottermore site “in the next few weeks.” We don’t yet know who those partners will be, but Apple won’t be among them.
“We’re not live with Apple,” Redmayne told the Guardian. “We’re having conversations with Apple, but there is no date, no agreement.”
In the Harry Potter Quidditch race that’s Amazon 1, Apple 0.
Husna Haq is a Monitor correspondent.
In 'Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman,' Morris points to doctor's wife Lizzie Williams as the most likely suspect in the killings.
New book claims that Jack the Ripper was – a woman?
A new book offers an alternate interpretation on the historical mystery of the identity of Jack the Ripper: writer John Morris says “Jack” was a woman.
In “Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman,” Morris posits that the famous serial killer was in fact a woman named Lizzie Williams, the wife of a doctor named Sir John Williams, who himself is often pointed to as a suspect in the case.
“The case for a woman murderer is overwhelming,” Morris told the Birmingham Mail. “There’s absolutely no doubt that the Ripper was a woman. But because everyone believes that the murderer was a man, all the evidence that points to a woman has always been ignored.”
In his book, Morris cites the fact that three of the victims were missing their wombs as a clue pointing to Williams, who was said to be infertile. Morris also claims that one of the victims, Mary Jane Kelly, was having an affair with Sir John Williams, whom Morris says was in charge of abortion clinics in the Whitechapel area where the murders took place. Items of women’s clothing that were discovered in the fireplace of Kelly later, but did not belong to Kelly, also point to a female murderer, says Morris.
Morris also mentions three buttons of the kind that would be on a woman’s boot that were found near Catherine Eddowes, a victim, as evidence.
The murders of five women in 1888 in Whitechapel are commonly ascribed to Jack the Ripper, though many claim that other murdered women were victims of his (or hers) as well.
Molly Driscoll is a Monitor contributor.
Library director of materials management Deborah George, who works in Gwinett County, Ga., was one of the library staff members who chose not to stock the erotic trilogy by E L James. (Ron Harris/AP)
'50 Shades of Grey' won't be coming to some libraries
The erotic novels by E L James, a trilogy collectively titled “Fifty Shades of Grey,” may be topping bestseller lists, but you won't necessarily be able to find them at your local library.
Libraries in a few states in the US are choosing not to stock the books or pulling them from shelves, with many citing what they say is inappropriate content.
“We do not collect erotica at Gwinnett County Public Library,” the library director of materials management Deborah George told the Associated Press of the policy at the Gwinnett, Ga. library. “That’s part of our materials management collection policy.”
The libraries that have decided against stocking the books so far are in Georgia, Florida, and Wisconsin.
Random House spokesperson Paul Bogaards told the AP that he objected strongly to Brevard County, Fla.’s decision to take the trilogy off their shelves.
“We believe the Brevard County Public Library System is indulging in an act of censorship, and essentially is saying to library patrons: ‘We will judge what you can read,’” Bogaards said in an e-mail.
Some libraries that are not stocking the book cite financial reasons or bad reviews for the trilogy.
“It has not received what we would consider good reviews,” Cay Hohmeister, the director of libraries in Florida’s Leon County, said in an interview with the AP. “It doesn’t meet our selection criteria.”
In other areas, the demand for the trilogy has only increased. In Florida’s Pinellas County library system, there are 30 copies available but more than 650 people on the waiting list for them.
Molly Driscoll is a Monitor contributor.
Bob Woodward (r., with fellow reporter Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post newsroom in the 1970s) called the excerpt of Jeff Himmelman's biography of Ben Bradlee which appeared on New York magazine's website "a total dishonest distortion of our discussions, Jeff’s and mine.” (AP)
Did Ben Bradlee have lingering doubts about Watergate?
Bob Woodward and his “All the President’s Men,” which outlined the revelation of the Watergate scandal, had its share of critics, many of whom doubted the existence of Woodward’s secret source “Deep Throat.”
According to a new book, they weren’t alone: even Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post executive editor, questioned whether Bob Woodward was completely “straight” in recounting elements of the landmark scandal in his best-selling book “All the President’s Men."
For “Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee,” Jeff Himmelman (an associate of both Bradlee and Woodward) was given full access to Bradlee’s files and embarked on a fruitful exploration of the legendary editor’s misgivings.
Himmelman’s account does not call into question the veracity of Woodward’s reporting, but it does suggest “that even a relationship as close as that of Woodward and Bradlee was not immune to moments of doubt,” writes the Washington Post.
New York Magazine website ran an excerpt of the book Sunday that’s been drawing ire from readers, pundits, and even Woodward himself.
“You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Bradlee told journalist Barbara Feinman in an unpublished 1990 interview, according to Himmelman’s account. “Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen?.... And meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage.... There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
(In “All the President’s Men” Woodward and co-author Carl Bernstein wrote they would move a potted plant marked by a flag to the rear of Woodward’s balcony to signal to his source, “Deep Throat,” that he needed to meet immediately. He and “Deep Throat” met in a garage, later revealed to be located in Northern Virginia.)
Woodward said of the excerpt, “It is a total dishonest distortion of our discussions, Jeff’s and mine.”
After reading the excerpt, Woodward went further, providing The Post with a transcript of a 2010 interview of Bradlee by Himmelman. In the interview Himmelman asked Bradlee whether he doubted any parts of Woodward’s reporting.
“Well, I mean, if you would ask me, do I think that he embellished, I would say no,” Bradlee replied, according to the transcript. (Himmelman told the Post this exchange is also included in his book.)
And although critics have questioned Woodward’s reporting and the very existence of Deep Throat, decades of investigation after the scandal and its coverage have confirmed Woodward’s reporting, notes the Post, most notably with the 2005 disclosure that “Deep Throat” was W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 official at the FBI at the time.
Bradlee’s take on the book centering on his own doubts about his star reporter?
“I love Bob, and I love Jeff, and I trust them both, and let’s move on,” he said Sunday night in a comment relayed through his wife journalist Sally Quinn.
Husna Haq is a Monitor correspondent.
"Each of these women had dreams about Paris before they went there," says author Alice Kaplan of Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. "Their families had dreams about Paris."
Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis: their Paris years
Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis could hardly be more different. Yet, as young women, each of these 20th-century icons spent a seminal year in Paris. In Dreaming in French, Yale University French professor and National Book Award finalist Alice Kaplan follows the three through their days in the French capital and considers the ways in which Paris left its mark on the rest of their lives. I recently had a chance to talk with Kaplan about the relationship of these three women to Paris, the magic of the city itself, and the ongoing importance of the "junior year abroad" experience. Here are excerpts from our conversation:
Q: You follow Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis through the year each spent in France. Which young woman was most profoundly impacted by her Parisian sojourn?
They were impacted in so many different ways that it’s hard for me to choose. [But] Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy got the intellectual sense of self that she would call on more in her life.
Susan Sontag got freedom. She got freedom from a marriage she never should have made. Paris was a place that gave her permission to live out her sexuality. She got a model of how to be an intellectual without being in a university. That was really key for her. What she had was like a model of a way of life.
Then Angela Davis, her case is very different than the other two. I would say that France had a profound impact on her in that she learned in France that racism is not confined to Birmingham, Ala. That it was an international phenomenon, that the French were extremely racist toward the Algerians. That opened her up to all sorts of analysis. She’s been very important in the American scene for having really had a very broad and nonparochial perspective on issues of race. That was important to her. But I would say that in general she was more important to France than France was to her.
Q: Could these young women have had an equally profound experience in Rome or Madrid?
Paris was then and remains the world capital of literature. Each of these women had dreams about Paris before they went there. Their families had dreams about Paris. Jacqueline Bouvier’s grandfather gave [his family] all a genealogy showing that they were descended from [French] royalty. Susan Sontag imagined herself as a European when she was a child at North Hollywood High. Her imagination wasn’t any European. I do believe she imagined herself a French European. She was reading about Marie Curie at school. She was reading André Gide at school.
There were so many layers for Americans of French mythology. You see it in the Woody Allen movie “Midnight in Paris.” You see how deep that romantic love affair is with French culture. Of course Angela Davis was reading Camus before she went to France. She was an existentialist on the Brandeis campus.
Q: Study abroad is more and more a part of the US college experience today. How different is it from what the young women in your book experienced?
It is very different today. There have been so many debates about various [American] schools exporting themselves to other places – to Dubai, to Singapore, exporting brand as it were. The theory behind these new exported American schools is that we have something wonderful to offer to the rest of the world. The American university system is really one of the things the United States does best.
The other thing I’d say is that most people agree that there’s less difference now between Europe and the US. France has been Americanized in many ways. Not in all ways. The other thing that’s happened is a remarkable form of connection among countries because of the Internet and various technologies. And I wouldn’t completely bash those new technologies. I’ve had students who’ve entered into relationships, very interesting correspondences in French with students, you know, having fun on Facebook in French. It’s really nice to be able to stay in touch that way with friends in a different language.
On the other hand, when you look back at the 1949-1950 group [of Smith College students who studied in Paris with Jacqueline Bouvier, some of whom Kaplan interviewed for her book], for example, they would go for months without talking to their parents. And this is almost inconceivable to us. They would go for months and as for being out of touch, there’s something good about it. Going to a new country, just being away, not being in the expectations of the American social life or whatever their parents may have expected, they could try out new ways of being and that was very freeing for them.
Q. Another difference is that not all of today’s students strive for total foreign language mastery the way these students did. Does that make a difference?
You’re asking the wrong person. You are so totally asking the wrong person! My life’s work has been to insist that language is key and to value France because it is the place that takes language seriously as the essence of the human experience and so what I want to do most in my work is to help escort young people into another language, into the French language particularly. So I do think it’s key.
One of the reasons I wanted to write my book was to remind people that there was a time when Americans were so eager to learn something from the rest of the world. And learning another language is part of that. It’s giving yourself up to another system of thought and another way of doing things. And that is what I would call an endangered experience. And I wanted to remind people how valuable that could be, even if the experience is tough or horrible.
Q: Two of these women (Jackie Kennedy and Angela Davis) were in Paris on academic programs. Susan Sontag was not. Did it matter?
People go to Paris for all different reasons but I would say that the story of Susan Sontag is very poignant because she didn’t have enough money to go on a study-abroad program. The huge advantages Jacqueline Bouvier and Angela Davis had in the abroad programs was having directors that organized activities and put them in touch with all sorts of people living and working in France who arranged for them to take courses. Susan Sontag would sit in cafes, she was surrounded by other Americans. She didn’t have French friends. She would sit in cafes and open her notebooks and listen and make list after list of French words. And that’s really beautiful but it’s just much harder for her. That’s the beauty of these study abroad programs. They give students such opportunities.
Q: Did you have a junior year abroad experience of your own?
I went to the University of Bordeaux in the 1973-74 school year. The book is dedicated to my group of women friends from that year. We call one another l’équipe. It’s also dedicated to [my French host family]. I’m still in touch with all of them. There are things that happen to students on their junior year abroad that might not seem important at the time, but they grow through memory and take on new meaning through subsequent study and living.
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's books editor.
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