Books: April 2006 Archive Page

In graduate school, I ransacked the library in my quest for inspiration: it was a kind of archaeological excavation. Today, because of online catalogs and specialty Web sites, information can be targeted with pinpoint accuracy and accessed with stunning speed. Hence I doubt whether that kind of untidy, often grimy engagement with neglected old books will ever appeal again to young scholars. But it was through the laborious handling of concrete books that I learned how to survey material, weigh evidence, and spot innovative categorizations or nuggets of brilliant insight. Many times, the biggest surprises revealed themselves off-topic on neighboring shelves. --Camille Paglia --Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother (Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics)

Paglia is always stimulating, if not always comprehensible. (This is actually one of her more accessible essays.)

Alloy's team craft the proposal, shape the plot and create characters. Even the writing of the book is often farmed out to a team of authors. The process is more similar to television writing than most readers' idea of the creation of a novel and the packaging closer to creating a boy band than promoting a new literary star.

Among Alloy's hit series are The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recently made into a film, and the Sweet Valley High books, which became a TV series. This weekend Alloy had three books in the New York Times children's paperback bestseller list. It did not return calls for comment.

After Alloy's input, Opal was picked up by Little Brown, a division of media giant Time Warner. Little Brown, too, was unavailable for comment. --'Lit chick' debacle that damns the publishers (Times Online)

If this is true, then it may be true that Kaavya Viswanathan really didn't intend to plagiarize from Megan McCafferty's novels, since it's theoretically possible that a ghostwriter did the plagiarizing for her.

A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan '08, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty -- the 2001 novel "Sloppy Firsts" and the 2003 novel "Second Helpings."

[...]

Little, Brown signed Viswanathan to a two-book, $500,000 contract while she was in high school. This is the first book that the Harvard sophomore has produced for the publisher under that deal, and it reached 32nd on the New York Times? hardcover fiction bestseller list this week. --David Zhou --Student's Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy (The Harvard Crimson)

Michael Smith, professor in Temple University's College of Education and coauthor of Reading Don't Fix No Chevys, said the language of crisis was overblown but noted that the facts are plain: Boys read later than girls and lag them in both reading and writing across grades. They read fewer books, and value reading less.

"If you go to your local high school, the basic-track classes are dominated by boys, and the AP courses are dominated by girls," Smith said.

It's not that boys aren't reading, he said. It's just that the things they are reading - comic books, video game manuals, sports magazines - aren't valued by schools.

"We have to create the conditions that support the boys' areas of strengths," Smith said. --Gender Gap Greater in Reading (Philly.com)

"We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," said Prof Jardine. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals." Women readers used much-loved books to support them through difficult times and emotional turbulence, and tended to employ them as metaphorical guides to behaviour, or as support and inspiration.

"The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books.

The researchers also found that women preferred old, well-thumbed paperbacks, whereas men had a slight fixation with the stiff covers of hardback books.

"We were completely taken aback by the results," said Prof Jardine, who admitted that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle. --Charlotte Higgins --A tale of two genders: men choose novels of alienation, while women go for passion (Guardian)

Not exactly a scientific study, but still interesting.

This list of Best Geek Novels Written in English certainly fits the stereotype of male literature, though I wonder how that list would change if you separated it into male geeks and female geeks.