Whether it’s scrolling through Goodreads, perusing the stacks on the tables at Barnes and Nobles on east 18^thStreet in Manhattan, or trolling the shelves at my local library – books are a common theme in my life.

Finding the next one to read, or the ‘hunt’ as I like to call it, is just as rewarding as the act of reading the book.

Here are a few that got my attention in 2022

Lessons In Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
A searing commentary on the treatment of women in the 1960s, featuring a smart, stop-at-nothing protagonist. All written in a refreshing voice.

The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
Who doesn’t love a love story with a little bit of magic realism? All the elements of a romance, and then some.

Here for the Drama by Kate Bromley
Loved the writing in this delightful rom-com. The images unfold like you’re watching a movie.

Out of the Clear Blue Sky by Kristan Higgins
I’m a fan of this author – but I think this is her best to date. The protagonist’s journey is funny, poignant, and in the end, everything you hope for.

The Bodyguard by Katherine Center
Another go-to author. A rom-com with a heart and twisty ending, and a big satisfied sigh when you close the back cover.

The Summer Seekers by Sarah Morgan
I loved this story. A mother and daughter on different paths find a way to each other. Each learning something. I cried, and I enjoyed every single page.

I believe the difficulty starts with imagery; no two people’s imagination is the same. If an author described a woman as having long flowing red hair with a petite nose – we would both have a different picture in mind.

See – two different images, but both potentially describe what the author has written.

In contrast, the book “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is based on vintage photographs and the author, Ransom Riggs uses them to illustrate his book and his book trailer. Mr. Riggs is a writer and a filmmake who clearly knows a thing or two about production. Using live action in combination with compelling narration and some very unusual photos, he has produced a riveting book trailer.

It’s not often that photos inspire a work of fiction, and in a quote from EW.com he says, ”I was developing the story as I was finding the photos. I’d find a particularly evocative photo and I’d say, ‘I need to work this in somehow.’

The LA Times’ Deborah Netburn, who talked to Riggs, writes, “…really great found photography is hard to come by, so Riggs started contacting the big guns in the found photography world, including Robert E. Jackson, a collector whose photos were featured in a show at the National Gallery. Jackson and others opened up their archives to Riggs and allowed him to borrow whatever images he needed (a list of images and the collections they are from are in the back of his book). After looking at close to a 100,000 photos, he eventually amassed a pool of 300 to 400 usable pictures and whittled that down to the 44 images he used in the book.”

See for yourself – I think this is one of the best book trailers out there, I can only hope the book lives up to the preview.

The point of my previous post was to question whether we were cultivating racism in young readers by not accurately representing a multi-cultural book and instead white washing covers so they sell.  After multiple outcries across the blogosphere Bloomsbury was shamed into changing the cover to more accurately represent  the protagonist Micah. The dust settled, the smoke cleared and publishing went on to sell more books.  Until last week when a similar controversy reared its head – and it came from none other than the publisher that perpetrated the first slur – Bloomsbury.  In their latest publication,”Magic Under Glass” by Jaclyn Dolamore  the protagonist, Nimira is described as having brown skin and considered by others to have ‘exotic’ features – yet the cover portrays a white girl.  Had the publisher learned nothing from the last debacle?  This time, the public outcry was louder and moved swiftly across the internet forcing Bloomsbury to issue the following announcement:

Bloomsbury is ceasing to supply copies of the US edition of “Magic Under Glass”. The jacket design has caused offense and we apologize for our mistake. Copies of the book with a new jacket design will be available shortly.

I am well aware that there are people living in the U S of A who are racist, but does Bloomsbury, a publisher who markets and sells to children and young adults need to support this viewpoint?  What they’re telling children is that it’s okay to write a story about people of color, but it’s not okay to show them on book covers because no one buys non-white entertainment.  Shame on you Bloomsbury.

This blog post is meant as an editorial.  It is my opinion.  But I am curious about what you think?

For example, when Tiger Woods’ infidelity scandal was front page news, everyone weighed in on it including The Huffington Post.  The headline of their article, Susie Ogren: Tiger Woods Took Ecstasy, Hoped To ‘Get Me Into Bed‘  was enough to make anyone click and read – I did.  Once reading I discovered there wasn’t much fact to this supposed fiction.  In fact, the article was written by The National Enquirer.  In fact, Susie Ogren and Tiger Woods didn’t have sex.  In fact, the reporter searched Facebook to find a photo of Susie Ogren and posted the photo in the article.  In fact, they weren’t even sure it was Susie’s Facebook photo they posted.

After posting the photo, they were careful not to ‘mislead’ the reader by saying:

A Facebook search for Susie Ogren, meanwhile, produces a profile that may belong to the woman who says she took ecstasy with Tiger Woods in 1999. According to a Google search, the profile belongs to someone claiming to be in Las Vegas. In addition to sharing the same name and city, the profile picture appears to resemble the photo from the Enquirer, given that the two pictures were presumably taken approximately a decade apart. Again, though, it is not a certainty that the Facebook profile below belongs to the same woman who claims to share a history with Woods.

This is journalism?  We all know NOTHING gets erased from the web ever, ever, never, ever.  So if this photo is really a photo of another woman – it doesn’t matter, because from now until eternity on the indelible web, her photo will be linked to Susie Ogren.

Am I the only one who is shaking my head, and tsk, tsking?  Am I the only one just a tad outraged?

By the way, I purposely didn’t link to the article, because I would be one more person spreading a photo around that was in question.

Amazon’s Kindle used to be the only game in town – now, we have choices, and with choices come questions. What to buy?  Each e-reader offers different options.  If you want to know what’s best for you then Wired.com has the answers.  They’ve created an e-reader guide just in time for the holidays.

The author states in her blog, I never wanted a girl’s face on the cover. Micah’s identity is unstable. She spends the book telling different version of herself. I wanted readers to be free to imagine her as they wanted.

But the art department at Bloomsbury obviously felt differently when they created the US cover. The author explains their reasoning:
The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.

I strongly objected to all of them. I lost.

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?
The book’s Australian cover just contains words. No misrepresentation there.

Certainly the YA genre has exploded – and there’s no doubt there are many, many more books for a young teenager to read then when I was in school. But I put forth the question – are we teaching to segregate from an early age? While people of color read books that feature ‘white’ characters all the time, do ‘white people’ read books that feature multi-cultural characters? It would seem to me, that the publishers don’t think so, why else categorize them so specifically? While publishers are improving in their selections of what they offer African American and Latino young readers, why make the distinction. To me, it’s blatant racism. It’s saying we’re writing books that only represent you and these are the books only ‘your kind’ will read. As a Latina – I read them all, and I am transported by a book regardless of the color of the characters in them.

In ““Myths of Teenage Readers” written in 2000 Marc Aronson he states:
Not very long ago, I would come to the editorial meetings in which new book acquisitions were approved by the higherups and marketing management. There I would hear: “blacks don’t buy books.” This was astonishing. Important people running large companies were living in a myth-suffused haze in which prejudice defined perception. Hearing something like that stops you in your tracks. It is so far from reality, yet it is expressed with complete authority. And these beliefs matter”

It would appear that Bloomsbury hasn’t really changed their views in the 9 years since Mr. Aronson’s book was published.

In a 2008 PW article, Andrea Pinkney, v-p and executive editor at Scholastic was quoted as saying: “We want teens to look at the jacket and say, ‘Yes, that is me,’

Yes, people want to know they’re represented in the world. But when I buy a book, it’s based on the story – does the story speak to me, is there something in this story that I want to know more about, will the story transport me to a place I want to go, or never dreamed of. When I choose a book I want to learn something new, or be inspired, or think about the world or people in a way I hadn’t thought of before. And sometimes I buy a book because an author’s language and pacing is so remarkable, I’m in awe. Do I buy a book because the characters represent me? Hardly ever. In looking over the list of books I’ve read in the last year, not one of them represented me, and yet I enjoyed many of them.

So I ask, are we teaching racism at an early age? Why do we segregate books? Why don’t white readers cross over as often as multi-cultural readers? And why do publishers and booksellers still insist that a black face or a Latino face or an Asian face or any face that isn’t white won’t appeal to white readers? Why not say, this year, there will be no differentiation, we’re just selling books, and they’ll be on the shelf alphabetically by author and in the sub-genre of YA, or romance, or mystery or whatever. In my opinion, let’s start early – no lines, just young adults, who want to read stories about being a teenager and about finding out how other teenagers live – their struggles, their triumphs, their hopes and their dreams.

However, there are a few that peaked my interest –

The Time Traveler’s Wife
Based on: THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a romantic drama about a Chicago librarian with a gene that causes him to involuntarily time travel, and the complications it creates for his marriage.

Based on my love of time travel books, I had to pick this one up – however, I was disappointed. I felt no empathy for the protagonist or his situation. You’ll have to judge for yourself. Will I see the film. Most definitely yes.

Julie & Julia

Based on: JULIE & JULIA: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell

Based on two true stories, Julie & Julia intertwines the lives of two women who, though separated by time and space, are both at loose ends until they discover that with the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible.

I can remember years ago, before the Food Network, there were only two people you could watch cook on television – Julia Child and The Galloping Gourmet. They weren’t called “Chefs” back then but they were delightfully entertaining. They cooked with tons of lard and they prepared dishes only a stay at home wife with an army of servants could prepare. It was great ‘theater’. Will I see it on the big screen- absolutely. Why? Because it stars Meryl Streep – I’d go see her reading the phone book.

You Tube Video

Taking Woodstock
Based on: TAKING WOODSTOCK by Elliott Tiber

A man working at his parents’ motel in the Catskills inadvertently sets in motion the generation-defining concert in the summer of 1969.

Ang Lee directs this one, and I love his work. I’ll most certainly be buyng a ticket to this one. I lived the era and I’m curious to see yet another angle – Woodstock never gets old.

I Love You, Beth Cooper
Based on: I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER by Larry Doyle

I Love You, Beth Cooper chronicles the story of a nerdy valedictorian who proclaims his love for the hottest and most popular girl in school, Beth Cooper, during his graduation speech. Much to his surprise, Beth shows up at his door that very night and decides to show him the best night of his life.

For me, this one is a rental – and that’s only a maybe.

What’s on your summer movie list?

What is Twitterature? Well it’s from the root word Twitter – a micro-blogging site that allows you to speak your mind, discuss your views and give your opinions in 140 characters or less. With such a small window, you’ve got to be brief, to the point, and it helps if you’re clever with the written word. There are thousands of people who are becoming experts at the art of the tweet. But nowhere has the twitter concept been taken to the reductio ad absurdum as when two University of Chicago college freshmen sold their book idea Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less to Penguin. The book, scheduled for release this fall is part of project created by Emmet Rensin and Alex Aciman. According to reports from the LA Times and Galley Cat, the Twitterature website (which now seems to be under construction) stated that it is “a humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format.” Wait did you hear that sound? That was my head hitting the floor as I passed out in total disbelief.

Rensin and Aciman came up with the idea while sitting in their college dorm. They claim it was an ‘epiphany’. It rather sounds more like a brain fart to me. They created this ‘novel’ idea by first asking themselves ‘what was the grandest venture of our or any generation?’ They came up with two things; literature and Twitter. Literature is an obvious one to me. Twitter, they reason, ‘More than any other social networking tool, Twitter has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of info-deluge that is the essence of our contemporary world. As such, it demands our attention – and gotten it. So what could be better than to combine the two? After all, as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?’

Well, Messers Rensin and Aciman – you had my attention for 140 characters, ‘had’ being the operative word. Who has time to read those big, long books anymore? Do I really need to comment on this? Come the fall, I’ll be sitting in my chair, by a nice cozy fire, reading a big long book –

The opening salvo in this digital discussion was aimed at Amazon and their strong arm tactics regarding e-book pricing. Amazon consumers can generally download an e-book for roughly $9.95, but the cost to produce an e-book is the same as manufacturing a hardcover version.  As the largest book retailer on-line, off-line or anywhere, publishers feel they have been backed into a corner and going against their biggest sales outlet could affect their bottom line.

“The danger is having a monopoly,” said Perseus’ Steinberger. However, Brian Murray didn’t see this as a huge concern because e-books comprise only 1-2% of their revenue, “we’ll take a closer once the numbers hit 10-20%,” he offered.

Statistically Amazon owns the market for e-readers and therefore has the biggest e-book revenue share.  My problem with Amazon’s e-reader, The Kindle, is its inability to accept all formats. Once you buy a Kindle at $359.00 you can only download books from Amazon. And legally you can’t share that book with anyone else. At some point e-readers are going to have to be universal, wireless and affordable. I agreed with John Sargent when he said, “The true explosion will happen when you can download all books on any wireless device.”

The panel’s address on the issue of marketing and promotion in the digital environment left me scratching my head and questioning what I’d heard. Carolyn Reidy acknowledged they now incorporate their digital departments in all current promotion and marketing efforts where before they were considered a separate department. In an effort to combine traditional marketing with digital marketing, Simon & Schuster will email promo to their database of retailers and consumers as well as using the author’s data base.  In addition, the authors create videos for YouTube, set up social media accounts and send advance reader copies to niche book bloggers. Based on Ms. Reidy’s description, it seems no different than what most authors have been doing for many years, the burden is on the author to promote, create a ‘buzz’, and ultimately sell their book.  Unless you’re an A List author with several best sellers under your belt, it doesn’t appear there will be a car waiting for you at the airport to take you to the next book signing. There won’t be a publicity director booking you on the Today Show. And there’s isn’t an assistant creating your Facebook page, setting up your Twitter account, or producing a video for your new release. Sorry authors, over to you.

John Sargent emphatically stated that viral marketing doesn’t sell more books, citing an example based on a book trailer they produced, “We had the #1 video on You Tube and only sold an additional 200 books from the video. The key to selling books is through word of mouth or Oprah.” This panel of movers and shakers all agree that national publicity and front store displays is the only route to a best seller.

In the end, this panel of publishing giants didn’t feel that the digital push would really change how they sell and market books. But the moderator, Tina Brown insisted that the publishing industry was in danger of becoming like the music industry. We all know what happened when Napster and iTunes came along – the music industry most definitely had to reinvent themselves – and they did. And music is still selling, for the same reason books will continue to sell. The artist reaches out to people and takes them to places they’ve never been. When we turn the last page on the digital age, writers will still be writing because they have a story to tell, and readers will still be reading, in whatever format, because they want to be told a story.

So is it evolution or revolution?  Publishing consultant Seth Gershel put it simply, “Revolution is what happens overnight with one big change. This is a digital evolution, where things change and continue to grow and evolve. Technology doesn’t drive the content; the content drives the use of technology. Publishers will benefit from the tools.”