The Times Is ON IT

Elon Musk, CEO of the company that makes Tesla electric cars, has some complaints about a recent NYTimes test-drive of his company's flagship product. The review was severely negative, so that's only to be expected...but Musk and Tesla have the records of the car's actual performance, which paint a very damning picture for the Times and their reporter John Broder.

Here's one particular money quote:

When he first reached our Milford, Connecticut Supercharger, having driven the car hard and after taking an unplanned detour through downtown Manhattan to give his brother a ride, the display said "0 miles remaining." Instead of plugging in the car, he drove in circles for over half a mile in a tiny, 100-space parking lot. When the Model S valiantly refused to die, he eventually plugged it in. On the later legs, it is clear Broder was determined not to be foiled again.

Perhaps Broder will have an explanation for that period of extended parking-lot driving -- I'd love to hear about how very very hard it was to find a legal spot -- but it certainly doesn't look good.

Any car can be driven to the end of its fuel. It's pretty clear that's the only thing Broder has proven here -- and we have to wonder if the Times will stand behind yet another reporter guilty of making up the story first and then creating the facts to suit it.

Go read the whole thing -- there's charts and graphs and lots of actual, damning evidence. Even if you have no axe to grind in the electric-car battle -- and I certainly don't -- Schadenfreude alone makes this a lovely way to spend a few minutes.

A Book? Is It NOTABLE?

The New York Times published their annual year-end list of "Notable Books" last week -- the free-standing Book Review comes out one week, and then appears in the next Sunday's paper (well, Saturday, these days), for reasons that I'm sure someone at the Times could explain if you took the time to track down that person.

And I spent a little time today looking through that list, because other people's rankings of art always have that tar-baby appeal; they're always wrong in one way or another, which is endless fascinating like an itchy scab. (Although, this year, there was an introduction that went out of its way to emphasize that these are not the best books of the year, or the only books of the year, or, really, anything other than one list of a hundred books that a group of Times editors happened to agree on one particular day. Timidity is not an attractive feature in a book review, though.)

The whole list is available here; this year, the Times ditched all of the smaller categories (they may have officially done this some years ago) and simply gave us fifty works of fiction and fifty things that are supposed to be true.

Of interest to genre audiences are:

•  Alif the Unseen, the first novel by comics writer G. Willow Wilson
• Arcadia by Lauren Groff, which includes a future dystopia
• Building Stories, the box of comics from Chris Ware
• City of Bohane by Kevin Barry, set in 2053 Ireland (though I'm sure that its author, publisher, et al. have made repeated ritual denunciations of the mere idea of it being "sci-fi")
• Pure by Julianna Baggott, yet another literary dystopia
• Are You My Mother?, the second major comics memoir from Alison Bechdel
• Saul Steinberg, a biography of the sublime New Yorker cartoonist/cover artist by Deirdre Blair

There is also a list of Notable Children's Books, which is much shorter -- pre-adults only get a total of 25 notable titles (roughly eight each in Young Adult, Middle Grade, and Picture Books). Amazingly, there seems to be only one dystopia on the list. Congrats to sometime SFF writer Elizabeth Wein, whose historical thriller Code Name Verity is in the Young Adult section.

The two books I've read on the Children's list -- by Jasper Fforde and "Lemony Snicket" -- both deserve to be there, which is more than I can say for the one similar book on the adult list, Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth.

Republicans Are All Old White Men, Take Six

This could be spun either as truth or as evidence of media bias -- and I'll leave that to each of you to decide which -- but in the New York Times's story this morning about the current field of potential Republican presidential candidates for 2012, there are quotes from two people.

And those people are: first, "Floyd Petersen, a disabled contractor in Thompson Falls, Mont.," and, second, "John Pollard, a retired deputy sheriff of Tacoma, Wash."

So, based on this sample: Republicans are men, probably Caucasian based on their names, and dependent on other people for their entire income. One hopes that the Times interviewed people outside this segment, and that their quotes were just, somehow, left out of the final reporting.

Crippled God Hits NY Times Bestseller List

There's a particular kind of celebration that you only experience if you work at a publishing company -- it comes in the middle of a week, when you hear from the New York Times (or, back in the day, Publishers Weekly) that a book you published has just hit their list.

Tor Books had that celebration earlier today, when they learned that The Crippled God, tenth and last in Steven Erikson's massive decadent-epic fantasy series "The Malazan Book of the Fallen," would be #12 on this weekend's fiction bestseller list in the Times. Tor sent out a press release to continue the celebration, and they mentioned the hard work of editor Eric Raab, who shepherded that massive series for Tor for most of the past decade. But its success relied on the hard work of a few dozen other people, too -- Justin Golenbock, Tor's Senior Publicist, Tom Doherty, their Publisher and founder, and a host of sales reps, marketers, and others.

(And I'm personally happy to see Erikson's series hit that peak of success; I bought the first four in the series for the SF Book Club, and I've long been an admirer of the work Erikson is doing.)

But the person I'd like to honor is the editor who first brought Erikson to the US -- after years when every New York publishing house said he was "too British" and "too big" and "too convoluted" -- the editor who read the whole series to date quickly, fell in love with it, and succeeded in an editor's most central job: making his enthusiasm contagious until an entire publishing house goes along with him.

Wherever you are, Jim Minz, take a bow: you were right. And it only took seven years.

New SF Column from the New York Times!

But it's not by my ol' punching bag, David Itzkoff (who, it appears, was quietly relieved of the job sometime over the past two years since his last column).

No, it's by...{drumroll, please}...someone who actually understands SF and Fantasy and writes well about it! Our own Jeff VanderMeer!

VanderMeer is writing under the heading "Science Fiction Chronicle," and his first column -- which went up last weekend [1] -- covers Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo, Ian McDonald's The Dervish House, Karin Lowachee's The Gaslight Dogs, and Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud's A Life on Paper. (That's more books that Itzkoff reviewed in his last calendar year in the same slot, so even if VanderMeer weren't a vastly stronger critic than Itzkoff -- which of course he is -- his work would be preferable purely on the bases of volume and efficiency.)

I hope that VanderMeer gets to do longer reviews, as Itzkoff did -- the current column is very similar in scope and length to one of Marilyn Stasio's mystery columns, or the occasional SF columns that Gerald Jonas did for the Times through the '80s and '90s -- but having dedicated SF coverage back at the Times is wonderful, and having it be Jeff VanderMeer is about as good an outcome as I could have hoped for. Even if we only get back to the Gerald Jonas level of reviews -- one round-up approximately quarterly -- that will be immensely better than Itzkoff's thundering bigfoot of unrealized ignorance and misguided enthusiasm.

So this will, I expect, be the very last Antick Musings post tagged as "Itzkoff," and I couldn't be happier to retire it. I expect to be linking much more appreciatively to VanderMeer's columns in the future. [2]



[1] Yes, I know. I should have linked to it before. But last week I was caught in a confluence of end-of-vacation and back-to-work stuff, leaving very little blogging time. But I certainly hope you're not relying on me for links at this point -- I got out of that game three years ago.

[2] Though I also note that we seriously disagree about Charles Yu's first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I wanted to like it, but it wore out my patience by endlessly circling the same theme (which I found tired and cliched) and stretching a novella's worth of material like butter over too much bread. VanderMeer, on the other hand, thinks it's one of the best books of the year so far. He almost makes me want to re-read it, and describes the book I hoped Live Safely was going to be. But, given that discrepancy, if you like literary-ish SF at all, you should at least take a look at Live Safely. It's definitely ambitious, and clearly readers and reviewers don't at all agree on how well it has achieved that ambition.

Backlist Books Are Never Times Bestsellers...Unless They Are

The prima donna (and I mean that in both senses) of the bestseller lists, The New York Times Book Review, is proudly crowing all over the book media that its upcoming weekly list will feature Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the #1 slot of their odiously and ramblingly titled "Advice, How-to & Miscellaneous" list.

This is very nice for the now-deceased Child, and for Knopf, her publisher. It might even be nice for all of the people who, inspired by the movie Julie & Julia, are going to try to cook French meals that take six hours, a hundred ingredients, a dozen pieces of special equipment, and the patience of a mountain.

But the Times has repeatedly said that "evergreen" books are not included in their lists, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a 1961 book. In what sense is it not "evergreen?"

Or is the real lesson here the one that I've been saying for years: that the Times will, and does, willfully gerrymander their lists all of the time, to keep books that they personally dislike off the lists (or push them to "lesser" lists) and to elevate books that they do like. And until such a time as they clearly explain their rules for "placing" books on the list -- note well that verb they use, and how very active it is -- we should not take it seriously at all.

Is Jack Vance "A Great American Writer"?

The New York Times Magazine was at least willing to consider the question this past Sunday, which is rather nice of them.

Speaking of Sundays and The New York Times, this week marked the 39th week of No Itzkoff. I hope you all celebrated sensibly.

Waiting for Itzkoff

The Book Review arrived with my New York Times this morning, the latest issue not to feature the "Across the Universe" science fiction column by Dave Itzkoff.

This marks the 36th week without Itzkoff, a new record.

I'm confident that Itzkoff can continue his amazing record of not writing reviews for a long time to come, so I'm going to track the lack of Itzkoff in the coming weeks and, maybe -- just maybe! -- we can see the first anniversary of No Itzkoff, which will arrive on October 25.

Of course, to break the streak, all Itzkoff needs to do is read a SF book and write a review of it -- and that shouldn't be too tough, should it?

The Elusive Itzkoff

While poking through the New York Times Book Review this morning -- parenthetically, Josh Beazell's Beat the Reaper looks like a lot of fun; I'll have to read that -- I noticed that Marilyn Stasio, the stalwart mysteries columnist, was back with reviews of another three new books (and three reissues).

And that led me to wonder what happened to Our Man Itzkoff, last seen emitting a review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem in mid-October. So I looked him up: for the year 2008, he appeared in the Book Review six times, twice writing about music and once about Cerwiden Dovey's possibly-fantastic novel Blood Kin.

That left a mere three "Across the Universe" columns -- the aforementioned Anathem review in October, a look at Michael Moorcock's Elric reissues in July, and his famously wrong-footed look at Young Adult novels in February.

I still don't think that NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus reads this blog, but, if anyone out there knows him, please whisper in his ear that this Itzkoff fellow is a serious slacker. He's not even managing to get his column in quarterly, when Stasio has had six since Itzkoff's last column. Either make him work harder -- which would be more entertaining for me, at least -- or just admit that he's a decent music writer but not strong on SFF.

C'mon -- there are at least a dozen bloggers that are better SFF reviewers than Itzy. (And I tactfully leave myself out of the running.) Surely the NYTBR can either make him work or send him home?

The Book Bail-Out

There was a short satirical piece by Julian Gough in the New York Times on Saturday, supposedly from Hank Paulson and concerning the bail-out of the literary industry. (I missed it in the actual paper, and noticed it when Sarah Weinman linked to it.)

Gough's piece feints in the direction of drawing blood -- such as when he writes

The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in creating this crisis. The Pulitzer, Booker and National Book Foundation committees continued to award top ratings to these novels, even as unread copies piled up all over America.

These unreadable novels are clogging up our literary system, and undermining the strength of our otherwise sound literary institutions.

If he actually followed up on that, and made a strong, cutting parallel between literary awards (given to books that only a few people actually enjoy reading) and complicated financial instruments (which only a very few people understand), he could have gone somewhere. Sadly, he doesn't; the end of the essay dribbles out.

The whole point of a piece like that is to throw out some outlandish solutions as if they were obvious, and Gough completely drops the ball there -- he doesn't actually give any details of his supposed book bail-out. It's as if he had the idea, but didn't bother to expand it beyond "Ha Ha! Wouldn't it be funny if there were a federal bail-out for publishing?!"

The Times's Notable Books of 2008

The New York Times has just listed their 100 "Notable" books of the year -- though they note that their year runs from Dec 2, 2007, when they did the list the last time, to November 26, 2008, which sounds like slightly less than a year to me. And, at this rate, the Times will have to have a Leap Notable Books in 2055.

Among their notable fiction books are Victor Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, a new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in verse by Simon Armitage, Robert Bolano's 2666, and John Updike's The Widows of Eastwick.

(That Updike novel, by the way, almost won him the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award for this year, and did get him a special lifetime-achievement citation for passages such as this:
"She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin, God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea." That's how you have to write to be notable to the Times.)

On the nonfiction side, there are actually a couple of books I've read -- Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of and Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic -- along with one I keep thinking I should read, David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague.

But, as usual, nothing published explicitly in a fiction genre made it onto the list -- I'd bet that no books like that were even considered.

Two Notes on the Times

The New York Times deals with the threat to traditional print media from the ever-growing digital age by having a search engine that seems to work, but which is no good at finding anything specific or recent. Thus -- I assume this is their hope -- readers will give up in disgust at trying to find anything useful on the Times's website, and go back to reading the paper the way they're supposed to.

Today's example: I want to note two pieces I read in this morning's print Times -- to send traffic to the paper; to increase, if only very slightly, its visibility. But finding those articles is never easy. Searching by author or by date is nearly always useless; if you want to find something, you need to dig through the recycling bag and get the exact title.

But these minor problems couldn't stop me long, and so:

1) It's been longer than I can remember since I read something by a self-identified Republican and actually agreed with it. But David Frum's "The Vanishing Republican Voter" is smart about economics -- and how economics is actually affecting real people -- in a way that I haven't seen recently. If there was a presidential candidate talking like Frum, I wouldn't be leaning towards a Democrat for the first time in my adult life.

2) But I generally can't manage to finish reading an edition of the Times without wanting to bop someone on the head, and today was no exception. The culprit this time was Gregory Cowles's always-arch "Inside the List" column, which led off with wide-eyed wonder at the #1 placement of a mere tie-in novel, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, along with some snarky comments about the various Star Wars books on other lists. It's no surprise that the Times is once again dismissive of the books that people actually read and like -- they continually gerrymander their lists in fruitless attempts to root out any books like that -- but Cowles also manages to completely misunderstand what gaming has become over the last two decades. It's an impressive bit of complete cultural illiteracy in a few paragraphs, and I recommend it to any fans of mandarin stupidity.

(And, on the other side, congratulations to Sean Williams and the Del Rey/Lucasbooks team for getting a #1 Times bestseller. I know the first Timothy Zahn book hit #1 -- way back when from Bantam -- and I think one or two of the movie novels did as well, but it's an uncommon, impressive feat.)

Itzkoff and the Albino

I'm indebted to John Joseph Adams for first pointing out to me that Our Man Itzkoff was back in The New York Times Book Review -- I was at Readercon over the weekend, while both my Times and my Internet access were back here in New Jersey. So I spent a day and a half in anticipation of the pearls of wisdom and jewels of prose that Itzkoff would bestow on us this time.

As has become his routine, this time Itzkoff takes about twelve hundred words -- one whole page in the NYTBR -- to review a single book. As is also usual, he reviews a reprint of old material that he's already hugely fond of. One might begin to wonder if he's the world's first major book reviewer to hit on a way to practice his craft without actually having to read any books...but that would be unkind, wouldn't it?

The book he's reviewing is The Stealer of Souls, the first of Del Rey's new four-volume reprinting of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories. It's a nice-looking book -- illustrated by John Picacio -- and places the stories in the order Moorcock originally wrote them, which makes as much sense as any other order at this point. (Moorcock went to the ending almost immediately, and then spent nearly forty years interpolating material into different parts of the middle, and his style and concerns changed several times over that period.)

The Stealer of Souls was published in February, which makes this review quite late, but I imagine Itzkoff has been busy dealing with Axl Rose's memoir -- and, besides, the NYTBR has been notably late at covering many, many books this year, so it's probably not even Itzy's fault. (Not noting that the second volume in the series, To Rescue Tanelorn, will be published in nine days is, though, a sloppiness that can only be attributed to Itzkoff.)

By the way, am I the only one to note that "Across the Universe" is now appearing only bi-yearly? The last installment -- which I discussed in this space at the time -- was published in February of this year, covering three YA novels, and the one before that, on Philip K. Dick, was more than a year ago. I will also note without comment that two out of his last three columns are on books he read and loved as a child; Itzkoff appears to be doing very little original reading for this gig.

And so on to the actual review: there's a hideous illustration that manages to give Elric a normal Caucasian skin tone, though I can't fault Itzkoff for that. Itzkoff does realize, about halfway through the review -- but before actually mentioning anything that specifically appears in this volume, in the best Itzkoff fashion -- that he's taking up a whole page to badly review a fantasy book for what is ostensibly a science fiction column, and so he contorts himself to describe one of Moorcock's polemical essays, this one against just about every other SF and fantasy writer at the time. (I suspect this essay, "Starship Stormtroopers," is caught up somehow with the New Wave, but Itzkoff is innocent of all movements and so can't tell us.)

Other things Itzkoff doesn't do:

• mention the illustrations
• point out that this Stealer of Souls is a very different book from the old, slimmer Elric collection of the same name
• talk about any of the new material or the edits to old stories
• list the titles of any of the stories included here

In fact, he never actually mentions that this is a collection of short stories at all -- he does blather about Elric's "adventures," his "quests," and his "tales," but fails to come right out and say what The Stealer of Souls actually is. If I were a cynical, obnoxious bastard -- and don't look at me like that -- I'd say that it's hard to find any evidence from this review that Itzkoff even cracked the covers of this edition of Stealer of Souls, or possibly even saw it. (It may be personal arrogance, but I think I did a better job of mentioning the important points of Stealer of Souls without reading it at the end of this "Reviewing the Mail" post from February.)

So this is another typical Itzkoff performance of a SF review: well-meaning and enthusiastic, but galumphing off in three wrong directions at once. Itzkoff is the book-review equivalent of Beethoven the dog -- though, sadly, he doesn't have a Hollywood plot to redeem him in the third act.

New York Times Book Review, it's time to stop pretending he can review SF. Either give the job to someone else -- anyone else -- or just go back to ignoring us like you ignore romances.

J.K. Rowling Is Wrong

J.K. Rowling is currently in court in New York, trying to assert complete control over all critical or secondary works even vaguely related to her copyrights (and, more importantly, Time Warner's trademarks) in the Harry Potter properties, by suing the publisher of The Harry Potter Lexicon. She's trying to stop publication of the book, which, if I remember my Constitutional Law class from long ago, requires a much stricter test than an action after publication would.

To be blunt, I think she is absolutely wrong in her actions, and must lose the case if there is any justice in the world.

Reasons why Jo Rowling thinks she should get what she wants, in this as in everything:

1) Having someone write non-fiction about her fictional world makes her sad. "It has really decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month," she said in a New York Times article on the trial. Also compare to her sadness last year over early reviews; I'm half-convinced Rowling would outlaw all reviews or criticism of Potter if she could.

2) She is the only one allowed to decide who may profit, in any way, from Harry Potter. From the Times: "She said the book, which would cost $24.95, would compete unfairly with an encyclopedia she had been planning to create since 1998, the profits of which — possibly millions of dollars — she had planned to donate to a British charity."

3) Some of the entries steal her words. "She claims the author has lifted large chunks of her own language without quotation marks," reports the Times.

4) Some of the entries don't steal her words. The Times: "She complained that the entries consisted of words like 'Death' or 'Voldemort' arranged alphabetically, followed by what she considered bare-bones definitions."

5) Some of the entries say things that are original, and she doesn't like those, either. "She also objected to what she called the book’s “facetious asides,” like a comment about whether Hagrid could fit into a booth at McDonald’s," notes the Times.

Those reading carefully will note that only #3 is actionable in a court of law, but all five came up in her testimony yesterday. So what is she really saying? "I'm rich, powerful, and well-liked, with millions of zealous fans, so you have to do what I say"?

The bottom line: Rowling is demanding more power and control over secondary works than any entity should ever have. Judge Robert P. Patterson, who is hearing this case without a jury, should rule strongly and unequivocally against her claims.

[relying heavily on The New York Times's coverage]

Itzkoff Level Now Orange

Dave Itzkoff is a hard man to track down -- he's supposed to be the SF reviewer for the New York Times, but he's more often found doing other things. If he's not reviewing literary fiction, he's interviewing a scientist. If he's not searching for the "new Arthur C. Clarke," he's providing reading suggestions for presidential candidates. Where, oh where will the Itzkoff turn up next?

This week finds Itzkoff on the Times's PaperCuts blog, using Charton Heston's recent death as a springboard to quote the ending of Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room!

It's nice to see that there is another SF novel that he's read -- even if it is one that's thirty-plus years old -- but, in typical PaperCuts style, the post is really just an excuse for a blogger to grab a YouTube clip, retype something out of a book he already owns, and call it journalism. And Make Room!'s trendy dystopian environmentalism is exactly the kind of thing I would have expected the young Itzkoff to have gravitated towards.

So I still stand by my original characterization of Itzkoff: "the guy who read some SF in college, and didn't engage in it terribly deeply." Although, if he comes back with a passioned defense of A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, he may have a chance to convince me otherwise.

It's a Novel, Jim, But Not As We Know It

Since Certain Persons seem to expect this blog to immediately jump on any appearances of the fiend David Itzkoff in a well-known broadsheet published from West 40th Street -- and I am loathe to disappoint anyone -- the following bit is dedicated to you, my dear readers:

Itzkoff reviewed a novel in this week's New York Times Book Review, yclept Blood Kin by Cerwidden Dovey. Don't bother looking it up at Locus; it's not SF or Fantasy. It does seem to have some pomo qualities -- unspecified location, unnamed narrators, written as a "master's thesis in creative writing" -- for those seeking such things.

I haven't read it, or even heard of it before today, so I can't speak to Itzkoff's critical judgment. And only a weaker man than I would note that he wrote 800 words, and got paid for them, for reading a 183-page novel by an unknown. I will also not be so bold as to suggest that he is, once again, shirking his primary job of reviewing SF for The Times.

No, no. Perish the thought.

On Moving Targets, and On Those Moving Them

The New York Times's Book Review has an "Inside the List" column every week, delving a molecule or two down into some aspect of the bestseller list that the editors find mildly amusing that week. (The Times, being an august, serious Newspaper of Record, is never more enthusiastic than "mildly amused.")

This week's entry is by Dwight Garner, who is also the primary writer for the Times's PaperCuts blog, and could thus be assumed to be slightly less old-fashioned and dry-stickish than his compatriots.

However, Garner takes this space to look back at the bestseller lists of 25 years ago -- February 20th, 1983 -- and look down his nose at them. He notes that the NYTBR invented the "Advice, How-To, & Miscellaneous" lists in early 1984, so this particular list was before that watershed -- and thus "advice bestsellers were placed on the general nonfiction list, where they crowded out almost everything else."

Note carefully that "were placed." The Times is not reporting on the actual sales of books, it is placing those books on its hallowed list.

Garner has drunk the NYTBR Kool-aid; he clearly believes that when a bestseller list contains the books that real people are actually buying in large quantities, those books are "crowding out" "everything else." Yes, Dwight, that's what bestseller lists do: they "crowd out" the books that are not selling as well. Surely someone smart enough to get a job at the Times could realize that.

Garner also reprints the fiction list from that same week, and sniffs that he's "struck by the number of narratives about space and other worlds -- also struck by how few of these books I'd particularly want to imbibe today."

On his first point, the list of ten books includes Michener's Space, Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, Auel's The Valley of Horses (not really germaine to his point, but I thought I should mention it), Asimov's Foundation's Edge, Straub's Floating Dragon, Adams's Life, the Universe, and Everything, and Kotzwinkle's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Storybook (which would be gerrymandered off the main list and into the kids-books ghetto, these days). Seven of the ten bestselling hardcover fiction books that week were at least mildly speculative. The '80s were quite good for SpecFic.

As to the question of what books Mr. Garner particularly wants to imbibe, I doubt that any writer worth her salt tries to write something that will appeal to a middle-level book review functionary a quarter-century in the future. She's writing for the people who buy and read books now. And hitting a major bestseller list is a good sign that she's succeeded.

So, if Mr. Garner's successor in 2033 looks back at 7th Heaven and Sizzle and Burn and Plum Lucky, sniffs in his turn, and mentions that 2008 was during the times when the Times "placed" romances and thrillers on the general fiction list, where they crowded out almost everything else...well, then, it won't come as any surprise, will it?

Double Shot of the Times

There are two articles in the august New York Times this weekend that I wanted to comment on, so I'll just shove them together into one post:

First, Rachel Donadio had the back-page essay in the Book Review this week, writing about why books take so long to be published. It's reasonable as far as it goes, but it's also utterly blindered by its own preconceptions. To be blunt, it's not an essay about books being published, but about major "literary" fiction from big New York houses. (Some of the points also apply to similar non-fiction, but not to genre publishing in fiction or non-fiction. It's about "big books" aimed at bestseller lists.) It doesn't take a year to publish a book; not at all. If you want everyone up to the executive suite to be behind this particular book, and to pour huge sums of money into it, and to be aiming at Oprah and The Daily Show and major literary prizes, then, yes, it does take that long. But 95% of books published aren't like that; a majority of the books published by the houses whose representatives are quoted in this essay aren't published like that. Assuming my employer is typical, right now books from September are being presented to sales reps all across publishing. (In some categories, like the one I mostly work in, it's a shorter lead-time, so we're talking about June books.) My house's fall list just closed this past week, and a few stragglers will probably drop into that season -- August through November -- in the next few weeks.

Donadio's general point would seem to be that it takes longer to publish a book than it does to print it -- which is absolutely true, and is what a lot of people outside the publishing industry don't understand -- but she's taking the extreme case to be the norm. It takes a while to publish a book, but six to nine months is reasonable in a lot of cases. (Faster than that is generally a "crash," for which there needs to be a compelling reason.) Over a year's delay, though, and my cynical heart expects that means we're talking about a "wonderful" book -- one that people at the house love, but have no idea how to sell.

And then there's Charles McGrath in today's paper, commenting on the Joan Brady case (in which a British writer received a 150,000 pound out-of-court settlement for, essentially, an environmental condition that she claimed made her too dumb to write her previous literary novels and reduced her to thrillers). I haven't seen much about that case yet online, though it's a very striking claim -- that writing genre fiction is inherently less difficult and taxing on the brain than literature is. McGrath examines the history of the literary/genre divide and has a very even-handed end -- though he quotes Updike to the effect that genre works are "formulaic." (Updike has written a number of genre works, not always well, and I find his thinking on the subject equally mixed.)

(Parenthetically, the Times's online search engine stinks -- I wasn't able to find either of these by author's name, and had to go into the specific section and poke around until I could find it. Typical of the Times to be so old-school.)

A Momentous Occasion

Rejoice! For we now know of another category of books on which Dave Itzkoff will pontificate without any real knowledge!

This week's New York Times Book Review sees the belated return of Itzkoff's "Across the Universe Column" -- last seen in the December 16th issue with a puff piece about presidential candidates -- with his first actual review in that space since July 24th. And what has he been doing with his reading time since then? Surely he's embarked on some major project -- perhaps reading the entire "Wheel of Time" saga or preparing to weigh in on the recent reissue of Dhalgren? No, sadly, this is not the case.

Itzkoff has read two short and breezy Young Adult novels, both of which were actually published before he filed that July 24th column. (Un Lun Dun, China Mievile's flawed but interesting first YA novel, was published in February of 2007 and has just been released in paperback, and InterWorld, a basically generic entertainment by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, was published in late June.)

But wait! Not content to read YA books, Itzkoff feels the need to trash the entire idea of writing for young readers in his first paragraph:

As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an “Evil Dead” movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies who have had all traces of their humanity sucked out of them by a sinister book — not the “Necronomicon,” but “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and — finally — genuine grown-up readers. But where’s the artistic satisfaction? Where’s the dignity?

I'm sure one of the many fine writers of books for people not yet adult -- perhaps Justine Larbalestier or Tamora Pierce, to name only two who are also bloggers -- will heap the appropriate load of scorn on Itzkoff's utterly wrong and bizarre premise, so I'm content just to point and laugh. Look at the funny monkey! He thinks he has a clue what he's talking about! Caper, funny little monkey!

It's disappointing, after such a promising start, to find that Itzkoff's actual critical points are thinner and less incendiary. He liked Un Lun Dun, as I did, and so gives it mild praise. (Along the way, he's completely forgotten his lede, because he approvingly mentions Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl -- two fine writers now entirely remembered for their great books for young readers. Typical of Itzkoff to overlook the fact that he slagged them, and their entire field of literature, at the top of his review.)

He's less positive towards Interworld, which is a lesser book. (It was originally planned as a screenplay, and that origin is apparent -- it's an entertaining adventure story for boys with some subtext about identity, but not much more.)

Perhaps the problem is that Itzkoff has a whole page to fill, and, given that he's only read two fairly short books in six months, he doesn't have much actual content to fill that space with. So once again I will suggest a tightening of Itzkoff's assigned space. One word every decade would about do it.

In Which I Note The Times Has a Good Horror Reviewer and Twist That Fact To My Own Ends

There's a long column on horror in this weekend's New York Times Book Review by Terrence Rafferty. Rafferty has nice things to say about Joe Hill's superb collection 20th Century Ghosts, and also covers a few books I haven't read myself. (Plus Marilyn Stasio's very regular mystery column, though that's substantially shorter. Stasio, among other things, covers the new book by the great Loren Estelman.)

And our man Itzkoff? Not seen since his December 16th column about what vaguely-remembered SF books the various presidential candidates should be reading. His last review was of William Gibson's Spook Country on August 26th.

There's no reason to believe Sam Tanenhaus reads my blog, but, if he happens to be ego-surfing and comes here -- Sam, get rid of Itzkoff. He's not doing anything at all for you. And, at this point, who could tell the difference if you canned him?