Books: Shakespeare's Secret

I took two books with me on our recent trip to visit Wendi's parents in North Carolina: the previously chronicled A Northern Light, which I was perhaps three-fourths of the way through when we left, and Elise Broach's Shakespeare's Secret, which I've been meaning to read nigh onto forever. I had no chance to read at the in-laws', so it was with great pleasure that I settled in on the last night of our trip - a brief stopover in Asheville, one of our favorite vacation haunts - to dip into my books. I polished off A Northern Light and decided I'd get a head start on Shakespeare.

I ended up reading the entire book right there.

Shakespeare's Secret is a brisk, middle-grade mystery with a simple premise: a sixth-grade girl learns that the house her family has just moved into may be hiding a million-dollar diamond. That idea alone is worthy of a good kid lit mystery, but the diamond didn't belong to just anybody - it was a de Vere family heirloom - as in Edward de Vere, the man some scholars believe may be the real author behind the works commonly attributed to William Shakespeare.

The Shakespearean mystery is unimportant to the discovery of the diamond, making it feel a bit of a separate academic pursuit. Regardless, it was this part of the mystery that I thought was the strongest and most interesting, and it's a fabulous introduction to a few interesting characters from Elizabethan England. My biggest problem with the story was that none of the characters really had anything at stake; if the diamond went unfound, none of their lives would really be all that different.

Still, it's extraordinarily rare that I read a book in one sitting, which speaks well of Broach's fluid, easy style and swift, action-filled story. This book is often compared favorably to Chasing Vermeer. (It doesn't hurt that both have fabulous covers by Brett Helquist.) Frankly, I found Shakespeare's Secret to be superior.

Books: A Northern Light

One of my purposes in creating a blog was to chronicle my own reading - and perhaps guilt me into keeping up with it better. (Curse you, LEGO Star Wars! And I haven't even OPENED the FIFA Soccer game I also got for Christmas . . .) So, let us begin with a Printz Award-winner, Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light.

Wendi has been on me to read this one forever. There is a certain amount of stress that goes into reading a book a good friend has recommended. How do you get excited about a book that didn't call to you from the shelves? What do you tell your friend if you don't like it? Can you quit reading it if you lose interest, or are you obligated to finish it?

Luckily, none of those was a problem. I really enjoyed A Northern Light. Set against the backdrop of the real-life murder that was the heart of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, A Northern Light is the story of Mattie Gokey, a teenage girl coming of age in the hardscrabble world just beyond the gates of the massive, rich hotels springing up in the Catskills around the turn of the last century. Mattie is a smart girl, a book-lover surrounded by functional illiterates and folks too practical to waste time with a nose buried in a book. Her fate, as you might guess, boils down to staying on to help her widowed father and her younger sisters eke out a living from the earth, or escape to Barnard College in New York and pursue her dreams of becoming a writer. Mattie's entanglement in the real-life murder mystery is really only important to the story in acting as inspiration for Mattie's final decision, and I must confess it feels a bit unnecessary.

But the rest of the story is well-crafted, and there are fantastic passages throughout. Not like Michael Chabon passages, where you can cut out a sentence and post it on your wall completely out of context and it continues to sparkle and glimmer in a way you cannot hope to achieve on your own, but instead passages that are set up so deftly by the story that you find yourself occasionally nodding at the power in the words and tearing up at the meaning behind them. I both love reading books like this and hate it; I simultaneously want to aspire to their greatness, while fearing in the depths of my soul that I can never do so.

Junior Library Guild Picks Samurai

Yesterday I got an interesting e-mail from Dial - the subsidiary rights department has sold Samurai Shortstop to the Junior Library Guild. The e-mail told me this was something of a big deal: "Congratulations! They are very particular about books, and the books they choose are always from the best of the crop."

Okay, cool. But what the heck is the Junior Library Guild? Coming from retail bookselling backgrounds, Wendi and I had heard the name (it's often listed among a book's plaudits) but we had no idea what that really meant. As always, it was off to that great oracle the internet to learn more. From their web site:

JLG works as a review service on your behalf. Our distinguished editorial staff reviews over 1,500 manuscripts before publication—from the lists of the foremost children's book publishers—to make our 252 selections. We offer twenty-one carefully delineated Reading Levels from which to choose, covering preschool through high school.

So I'm one of 252 books they chose? That works out to just sixteen percent of the books they review. That's elite company.

Further reading reveals that the Junior Library Guild prints their own books. So in addition to the 8,000 Dial is printing, JLG will print another few thousand (I don't know the particulars yet) vastly increasing Samurai's exposure. I'm liking this. But wait - doesn't this mean that some libraries will buy the JLG edition, and not the Dial edition? My goal is to sell out the first print run of Samurai. Will this hurt?

My friend Mary Ann Rodman, whose two excellent books Yankee Girl and My Best Friend were both Junior Library Guild picks, says, "JLG sells mainly to smaller libraries who can't afford trade editions of everything . . . . I worked for a small library system in rural Mississippi and some years, the JLG books were just about the only ones they could afford to buy." She also adds that for library exposure, the Junior Library Guild can't be beat.

It also occurs to me that libraries that do their own buying may use JLG recommendations in their decision-making. I'm definitely liking this. Then I read on the Junior Library Guild site that they have a knack for picking award-winners:

As has been true since our inception in 1929, Junior Library Guild offers selections of unsurpassed quality. Nearly 100% of our titles regularly receive favorable reviews from the publications you trust most: Booklist, Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, The Horn Book, The Horn Book Guide, Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal, VOYA, and the H.W. Wilson Catalogs.

Sweet!

Many of our books also receive distinguished awards. Among our recent selections are the winners of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Charlotte Zolotow Award, the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Ezra Jack Keats New Author and Illustrator Awards, the Jefferson Cup Award, the Américas Award, and the Christopher Medal. Our titles have also been named honor books by the Michael L. Printz, Robert F. Sibert, Jane Addams, and Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards.

Double sweet!

Junior Library Guild selection is of course no guarantee of a book's future success, but being chosen is sort of an award in and of itself. It's the sort of thing publishers like to trumpet on dust jackets and other marketing, and I'm thrilled to have been chosen! Perhaps this is a sign of more good things to come . . .

The Luck of the Amish

It had been my absolute best season of fantasy football ever.

After losing opening day on a lackluster performance, the Fighting Amish rattled off five straight wins to challenge the coach's brother and perennial leader, the Phighting Phish. My squad had a mid-season gut-check, losing the next two of three, but then roared back to finish the regular season at 10-4, easily the best year yet for those boys in the black and beards.

But the first round of the playoffs proved to be our Waterloo. The Fighting Amish had a stellar performance, putting up the second highest point total in the league.

Unfortunately, our opponents the Laszlos had the highest point total.

Laszlos 119.85, Fighting Amish 92.77.

Su Doku are the Devil!

Curse you, Count Su Doku! Your insidious tendrils are even now encircling my heart!

It's all my wife's fault. Puzzle-lover that I am, I still had enough self-control to walk past the massive table of su doku puzzle books at the bookstore. But Wendi is weak. Weak, I tell you! Like Eve innocently suggesting a fruit salad for dinner, Wendi brought this su doku book into our house, and now I am a man consumed.

Su doku, for the uninitiated, are yet another Japanese import. (A running theme in this blog - and my life!) Su doku ("numbers singly," or more loosely, "all the numbers must remain unmarried") are logic puzzles in which grids of numbers must be filled in so that each line and each cell contain the numbers one through nine, with no duplications. They fit together with nefarious intricacy in only one configuration, which is solved by testing numbers in different places until one fits, and then another, and then another. The end moves much more quickly than the beginning, but the puzzles can take quite some time, especially since I'm not a pro at this yet.

Worse, when you discover that you've misplaced a number some time ago, you realize to your horror that all your placements since then are most likely wrong, and you've been multiplying your error exponentially with each new number. This happened to me yesterday toward the middle-end of a puzzle I was sure I could finish before the clock struck three . . . in the morning.

Have I mentioned that su doku are the devil?

I have to go. Like those terrible puzzle cubes in Hellraiser, The Big Book of Su Doku #1 sings to me with its irresistible siren call . . .

Manga: Right to Left and Everything in Between

You've seen it at the bookstore, growing like the blob. Shelves and shelves of it, reproducing at an incredible rate. No, I'm not talking about celebrity-written picture books. I'm talking about MANGA.

In Japanese, "manga" literally means "visual entertainment," but the term has come to mean simply "Japanese comics" here in America. True manga is read from right to left on a page, in the traditional Japanese format, though the word bubbles have mercifully been translated into English.

Daunted by the sheer volume of manga available (my local Borders is now devoting FIVE CASES to manga, as opposed to the one and a half required to house American graphic novels), I began by hitting the Decatur Public Library. They carry three series, all from TokyoPop: Fruits Basket, Marmalade Boy, and Samurai Deeper Kyo (SDK).

SDK is the story of a young boy in Tokugawa Japan who learns he has trapped within him a dark, violent samurai warrior of legend. (It's like The Incredible Hulk, only different.) SDK is filled with androgynous characters, stagey dialogue, and hyperactive battle scenes that begin as quickly as they end. Overall, I was unimpressed.

Fruits Basket and Marmalade Boy win for strangest titles - and premises. In Maramalade Boy, a young girl's parents reveal that they are getting a divorce - so they can swap partners with another divorcing couple they met in Hawaii. It turns out the other family has a boy about the same age as the girl and, well, various hilarious romantic triangles and quadrangles ensue. Fruits Basket is even stranger. Here a young orphan girl is taken in by a peculiar family with a strange secret: whenever they hug a member of the opposite sex, they turn into their Chinese zodiac symbol.

Umm, okay.

Fruits Basket and Marmalade Boy fall into the category of shoujo (or shojo), literally meaning "young woman," which is manga created for a young female audience. These books generally involve love stories and light comedy/drama. Fruits Basket, weird as it sounds, is the number one selling shojo manga in America, with book twelve due out this December. (And more coming!)

Who reads this stuff? Apparently, a ton of teenagers. And American manga publishers are actually trolling for more creators, even artless writers like myself. So, back to the drawing board, er, internet! Since my first three forays into manga didn't exactly float my boat, I decided to get smart and go online to find some that sounded more like my cup of sake.

Somehow the Japanese comics industry didn't fall into the trap that American comics did, where one genre predominates (super heroes). Instead, there is amazing diversity in manga: action, mystery, drama, romance, comedy, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, historical, and there is lots of mixing and matching of genres. Certainly I could find something more suitable to my reading tastes!

After a bit of research, I dove into the sprawling section at Borders and came out with three titles I had hand-selected: Cowboy Bebop, Immortal Rain, and Planetes. I read them in that order, as that was how I had mentally ranked them based on what I had learned. Surprisingly (and delightfully so) I would now rank them in precisely the opposite order.

Cowboy Bebop is apparently something of a manga classic. One of the things to understand about manga is that these books lead double- and triple-lives that you're probably not aware of, as video games and/or animated television shows (anime). Lately, some manga has been introduced to the Japanese market simultaneously with the corresponding video game and animated television series, and many more established manga (like Cowboy Bebop and the aforementioned Fruits Basket) were enormously popular as anime at the same time they were being published as manga.

So, back to Cowboy Bebop. Four bounty hunters hop around a futuristic universe on a ship called the Bebop tracking big ticket criminals. The action is clean and well-drawn, but the stories are often sillier than I'd like. I had also heard rumblings that my favorite TV show, Firefly, was a transparent rip-off of CB, but beyond the fact that they travel on a space ship and have a cutesy, genius mechanic, I don't see it. Then again, I've only read volume one, and there are many, many more books and videos out there.

Next I picked up Immortal Rain, by Kaori Ozaki. Now we're getting to stuff I like. Less silliness, more poetry. Good, clean illustration (oh, those manga girls are so pretty!), action sequences you can actually understand, and a sense of a longer story, rather than an episodic romp. Rain Jewlitt is immortal - perhaps the only one of his kind - and he's being hunted by a fourteen-year-old girl named Machika, who has taken over her grandfather's position as the bounty hunter known as Grim Reaper Zol. (Bounty hunters are big in manga.) Rain is the only quarry the elder Zol failed to bring in, and Machika vows to do what her grandfather couldn't. She ends up sympathizing with Rain (of course!) and actually becoming his friend and traveling companion. I really enjoyed this book, and I'll pick up the next volume.

Ah, and then I read Planetes by Makoto Yukimura. I guarantee you this one doesn't sell well, because I absolutely love it. (That's usually how it works. See Firefly, above.) Planetes almost defies description, but it's nominally about a space debris clean-up crew in the near future who work ceaselessly at clearing away all the now-useless junk we've launched into orbit. It has all the stillness and mystery of 2001: A Space Odyssey, without the detachment and tension. The characters deal with real-life issues of loss, inadequacy and loneliness against the vast backdrop of limitless space, and without bringing out a stick to beat the moral into us, Planetes proves that companionship and purpose make us whole and give meaning to life. Can you tell I love this series? I want to run out and buy all the books. Then I found out there is an anime series, too - released on DVD here in America, with subtitles! I'm giddy with anticipation.

There are far more manga series than I will ever read, but I'm beginning to get a feel for general pacing, plot and character in these books. I've already co-opted two or three ideas I've been kicking around but never found the right home for, and I'm going to whip them into proposals for TokyoPop, who announced in the last SCBWI newsletter that they are actively seeking submissions. Perhaps I can sell one - that way I'll still have a book on the shelves when the manga section grows so big it swallows everything else . . .

Tales of the Insomniac

It was a cold night for Atlanta, and a cold night means the criminal element like to stay home and warm their criminal toes by stolen space heaters. My toes were just going numb when I caught a lowlife trying to snatch a purse from a lady near the King Memorial stop. That got the blood pumping.

The rest of the night was cold, dark, and uneventful, but I was there, awake and watching.

Amazon Samurai

Yes, yes, I know. The Samurai Shortstop page at Amazon.com is wonky. For some reason, they have confused my book with a very different tome about the Golden Age of comics - The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer. While I'm all about the history of comics, I'd rather that book's information be confined to that book's page.

I've read that online book sales only account for about 4% of all book sales, and I'm not so foolish to think Samurai Shortstop is going to sell like hotcakes on Amazon. Still, I use Amazon as a reference site for books, then go and buy them elsewhere. (Preferrably at a local independent bookstore I like.) I know a few other people who do this as well. Since the information is out there, I'd prefer that it be correct. Amazon also doesn't have a cover scan, and since it thinks my book is some kind of weird amalgamation of Samurai Shortstop and The Great Comic Book Heroes, the "look inside," "Listmania!" and "Other customers who bought this bought . . ." features are all about comic books.

I've e-mailed Amazon twice about this, always trying to remain professional and respectful. They are, after all, a business, and they presumably want their sales information to be correct. I'm sure they get thousands of such quibbles a day, and I still have a fair amount of time before the book comes out. I just wanted to be able to go to Amazon and look myself up!

Here's the really odd thing: I already have a sales rank in the 1.2 million range, which is different from the 300,000 range of The Great Comic Book Heroes, and isn't nearly the lowest rank (somewhere around 4 million, I think). Is someone actually pre-ordering Samurai Shortstop?

Hmmm. Maybe they think they're getting a Jules Ffeiffer book . . .

The Mayor Leaves Town

I'm heartbroken. Today, my favorite baseball player of all time was traded away from my favorite team. Sean Casey, the Cincinnati Reds' All-Star first baseman, has been dealt to the Pittsburgh Pirates for left-handed pitcher Dave Williams. Casey was so friendly and chatty with fans, teammates and opponents - especially when opposing players stood with him at first - that he earned the nickname "The Mayor."

A career .305 hitter, Casey had perhaps his best year as a Red in 1999, the year Wendi and I moved to Cincinnati. That season, The Mayor hit 25 home runs, knocked in 99 RBIs, and batted .332 to lead the Reds into a one-game playoff with the Mets for the Wild Card. New York won that game, but it was a thrilling finish to a fantastic year in which we got to see Casey and Co. play many times at the old Riverfront stadium.

While I can't say that I'll become a Buccs fan now, I'll always be a Sean Casey fan. And though he's actually going to a worse team (if that's possible) he'll at least be heading home - Casey grew up in Pittsburgh, watching Pirates games with his dad.

So long, mighty Casey - it was fun while it lasted.

That Thumping Sound

For the record, there is nothing quite like that thumping sound outside your door that heralds the arrival of a box of books you wrote.

All right, so these are just the bound galleys - the cheaply printed paperbacks publishers send out in advance of a book's publication to generate buzz, sales, and reviews. But still, it's a special thing to see that big stack of paper you've been red-lining and revising and rewriting ad nauseam transformed into something resembling a real book. It's got my name right there on the bottom, plus a really cool font for the title with a samurai sword running through it, and my name and the book's title written in Japanese at the top left. And did I mention it's got my name on it? In all caps?

It really is silly, but it's been something of a lifelong dream to see my name on the spine of a book. I wrote my first book - Real Kids Don't Eat Spinach, a knock off of a popular humor book of the day - in the second grade. Before that, I had published a newspaper for my street, called The Blue Spring Lane News, on my grandfather's old Underwood typewriter. (I had to hand-draw the puzzle page though.) I kept writing short stories and aborted novels all the way through high school, and finally finished a novel in college. (It was terrible; we shan't discuss it.)

Now I've made it. Here in my hot little hands is the first physical proof that this hasn't all been a dream. Samurai Shortstop - and my dreams of becoming a professional writer - are finally a reality.

Did I mention it has my name on it?