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Published January 13, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Canadian illustrator and typographer Darren Booth at From The Desks Of…

There’s on more on Darren’s cover for An Object of Beauty on his blog.

Misery — Editor and author Diana Athill profiled at The Telegraph (via PD Smith):

‘I have always been a watcher,’ she says. ‘Of myself in particular. Even at times of acute unhappiness I’ve watched myself being unhappy. I also think I’m one of those people who has never been wholly involved in an emotion, but then I think a lot of writers are like that.’

Is Modernism Boring? — Rhys Tranter at The Spectator Book Blog:

If modernism means anything in Woolf or Joyce, it is the struggle for what it means to be modern. Both present us with an array of fascinatingly complex characters, seeking to question their identity and their place in the modern age. Language becomes a character, too, an all-pervading texture that sets the mood of each story, and playfully subverts the ABC plots of yesteryear. Amid a proliferation of new technologies, of political upheaval and social change, Joyce, Woolf and the literary modernists actively interrogate the way we perceive the world around us, in ways still relevant today. In this way, modernism is not something we leave on our shelves and neglect to pick up. Modernism is that which speaks to modern life.

What’s the Worst that can Happen? — Gary Shteyngart, author of the dystopian Super Sad True Love Story, interviewed at the new and great looking book blog Full Stop:

Most people don’t care anymore because they’re beyond caring. The endless cult of self-expression that makes people stream or write about themselves day in and day out without any kind of filter. If you write a novel, you’re often writing about yourself as well, but you’re clearly filtering it through a bunch of things, not least of which is technique. So it’s not an entirely plausible future, but in some ways it could be. What if all the worst things happen politically, socially, and in terms of our literacy?

Top 10 fonts of 2010 lists from You Work For Them and Fontwerk (Google Translate version here).

And finally…

The 50 best comic book covers of 2010 as chosen by Robot 6

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Published December 31, 2010

Favourite New Books of 2010

Ducking in just under the wire, here is my list of favourite of new books of the year. It’s not meant to represent the “best” of 2010. Rather, it’s a completely unscientific, very subjective list of books (arranged in alphabetical order) that I enjoyed. As I mentioned in my previous post, I found compiling the list a bit of a challenge and yet, for all that, there’s an air of withering predictability about the selections. There are no surprises. But even if this wasn’t a particular stellar year for reading, there were still lots of books I was excited about and that can only be a good thing.

I should also mention, for the sake of disclosure and all that, the top 10 includes one book distributed by Raincoast Books in Canada, and the list of honourable mentions refers to a couple of other titles I have helped promote in some minor capacity. They’re included here because I actually like them, not for any nefarious marketing reasons, but I guess you’ll just have to take my word for that. In any case, all these titles are identified with an asterisk…

And with that out of the way, on to the list!

Born Modern: The Life and Work of Alvin Lustig*
Elaine Cohen Lustig & Steven Heller
Chronicle Books
ISBN 9780811861274

I am a little embarrassed to start this list with a title distributed by Raincoast, but it comes first alphabetically and, I can honestly say tat Born Modern was the book I was most looking forward to this year. And I was not the only person excited about the book. When I tweeted about it from the Raincoast sales conference, the response was immediate. Almost every North American book designer I’ve ever spoken to cites Lustig — who designed covers for New Directions Press in the 1950’s — as an influence. The book designer’s book designer, then… A must-have.

C
Tom McCarthy
Knopf
ISBN 9780307593337

Tom McCarthy’s C was, as mentioned previously, one of the defining books of the year for me, standing — perhaps unfairly — opposite the ubiquitous Freedom. If I am honest though, I liked it less than McCarthy’s previous novel, the starkly compact Remainder (one of my favourite books of the last 10 years). At times, the sprawling, crawling C felt like it was held together with the sticky-tape of McCarthy’s singular intellect (a thought reaffirmed by seeing him in conversation with Douglas Coupland in Toronto). But somehow, in the end,  it still works in some sort of baffling, gorgeous way.

The book was also perfect excuse to finally talk to Knopf cover designer Peter Mendelsund for the blog. The Q & A with Peter and Tom about C is here.


The City and the City
China Miéville
Del Rey
ISBN 9780345497529

I am cheating a little by including The City and the City because it was first published in 2009. It was, however, published in paperback in 2010, and as that’s how a lot of us still buy our fiction, I’m bending the rules to include it.

The novel itself is essentially a detective story, but what lifts out of the ordinary is the imaginary space in which it takes place. Architecture, geography and maps are clearly important to Miéville, but where, for example, Perdido Street Station creates a fantastically baroque city of ghettos and towering alien architecture, The City and the City is only slightly off-kilter — familiar but unsettling — and the book is even better for it.

Joy Division
Kevin Cummins
Rizzoli
ISBN 9780847834815

This was my Christmas present (thank you Mrs C.O.!) and it is — pretty obviously I would think — for fans only. Still, I’m guessing there’s quite a few out there. In any case, the book is a collection of beautiful black and white photographs of Joy Division and the late Ian Curtis by Manchester-born photographer Kevin Cummins. It includes Cummins’ iconic pictures for the NME of the band standing on a snowy bridge in Hulme, Manchester, as well as photographs of live performances and the band back stage. The book was stylishly designed — with more than a whiff of Peter Saville — by London design agency Farrow.

Just Kids
Patti Smith
Ecco
ISBN 9780060936228

Other than owing a copy of Horses,  I can’t say that I’m particularly familiar with the work of Patti Smith, or Robert Mapplethorpe for that matter (other than the sort of stuff must people know about his art, and that he was connected to Sam Wagstaff, no relation). But, it doesn’t really matter. Smith’s memoir about her relationship with Mapplethorpe is a touching and self-deprecating look at their early years together in New York and their adventures in the art/music scene of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

Memories of the Future
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull
NYRB
ISBN 9781590173190

I am definitely cheating by including this in the list as it was published in 2009. That said, it was published late in 2009, I missed it, and it’s too good not to be in this year’s top 10.

The book itself  is a collection of seven short stories written between 1922 and Krzhizhanovsky’s death in 1950,  all of which were suppressed by Soviet censors. The stories are reminiscent of Gogol’s short fiction and Bulgakov’s novellas, and suffice to say, they’re all bonkers. But in a good way. I loved the story Quadraturin about the man who gets lost in his black, ever-expanding apartment, and the strange time travel title story which concludes the book.

Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (the Good, the Bad…)
Paul Buckley
Penguin
ISBN 9780143117629

Seeing as I spend so much time talking about cover design, I would be remiss if I didn’t include Penguin 75 in my top 10. Released to celebrate Penguin’s 75th anniversary, it’s a surprisingly diverse and candid look at the recent cover designs from Penguin’s US outpost in New York.  I talked about Penguin 75 with art director Paul Buckley and book designer Christopher Brand here.

Parker: The Outfit
Darwyn Cooke
IDW
ISBN 9781600107627

The previous book in Darwyn Cooke’s Richard Stark adaptations, The Hunter, was on last year’s list, so perhaps it is hardly surprising that the sequel, which I think is better,  is in this year’s top 10 as well. In new book, the formidable Parker — now with a new face — turns the tables on ‘the Outfit’, who quickly wish that they’d let sleeping dogs lie. Cooke seems in more confident form with this adaptation and the result is a stylish and fast-paced noir that looks incredibly cool. My pithier Advent Book Blog pitch for The Outfit is here.

The Shallows
Nicholas Carr
W.W. Norton & Co.
ISBN 9780393072228

I had a frisson of recognition reading Carr’s description of internet affected attention spans and I doubt I was the only one who thought “oh god, that’s happening to me” while reading The Shallows. The book is too long — a shorter book would’ve been even more effective — but it is still compelling. Carr doesn’t say technology is wrong, but reminds us that for all its benefits, we should be mindful of the consequences and what we might be losing.

Werewolves of Montpelier
Jason
Fantagraphics
ISBN 9781606993590

I wrote about my love for Jason’s comics when Werewolves of Montpellier was about to be released earlier this year, and the book itself didn’t disappoint. Ostensibly the book is about a thief called Sven who disguises himself as werewolf to rob people’s apartments and incurs the wrath of the town’s actual werewolves. It is, however, as much about friendship, identity, loneliness, and, ultimately, Sven’s unrequited love for his neighbour Audrey. In a lovely one-page scene, Audrey stands behind Sven, hugging his shoulders.  “Do women come from another planet?” she asks. “Yes, women come from another planet,” Sven replies. The whole book is achingly brief, but Werewolves of Montpellier is possibly my favourite Jason book to date.

Honourable Mentions

American Trademarks edited by Eric Baker and Tyler Blick*
Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco (December 2009)
I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester (published in the UK as Whoops!)
KENK by Richard Poplak and Nick Marinkovich*
Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960’s and 1970’s by Jonathan Lippincott*
The Lost Rolling Stones Photographs: The Bob Bonis Archive, 1964-1966 by Larry Marrion
The Rocketeer: The Complete Collection by Dave Stevens (December 2009)
Shirley Craven and Hull Traders: Revolutionary Fabrics and Furniture 1957-1980 by Lesley Jackson (October 2009)

So there you go. If  this hasn’t met your requirements, Largehearted Boy is aggregating every online “best of 2010” book list he can find, and Fimoculous is aggregating all of the lists related to 2010 in categories ranging from ‘Advertising’ through to ‘Words’. That should keep you busy…

Happy New Year!

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Published December 24, 2010

A Year in Reading 2010

2010 was a year of losing battles and one of the first casualties was time for personal reading. The moments I did have were snatched on the subway and, if I could keep my eyes open, last thing at night. I often found myself unwittingly rereading chapters I had read the previous day, or worse, that very morning. The difficulty this week of compiling a list of my favourite books of the year — and the predictability of that list (to be posted soon) — made it very clear that not only did I read less than previous years, I rarely strayed off the beaten path.

The year was thus defined, for better or worse, by two big novels that were in some senses polar opposites: C by Tom McCarthy and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. If C was modern experimental novel masquerading as an early 20th century bildungsroman, Freedom was a Victorian drama in modern dress. It felt like “Two Paths for the Novel” all over again.

Someone cleverer than me observed C “was surrounded by the sort of buzz and static which it contained and described.” But while the buzz amplified C to the Booker shortlist, the hype around Freedom and Franzen seemed to diminish the book. It was so ludicrously overpraised, and subsequently criticized and shunned, that it was almost impossible to evaluate fairly.

OTHER FICTION

Like just about everyone else, I started 2010 reading Stieg Larsson, but now, with 2011 just around the corner, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest remains unfinished, my bookmark at Chapter 6.

I loved the architecture and weird psycho-geography at the heart of the mysterious The City and the City (published in paperback this year) and went on to read China Miéville’s earlier, equally architectural, novel Perdido Street Station.

I was also happy to belatedly discover that Phillip Kerr had resurrected his Bernie Gunther Berlin Noir detective series. Better late than never…

Sadly neither The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman nor Zero History by William Gibson really added up to more than the sum of their (occasionally really quite good) parts.

I simply abandoned Justin Cronin’s clunker The Passage.

Better was Canal, Lee Rourke’s L’Étranger in London. I wasn’t entirely convinced by it, but an off-beat novel about urban ennui and existential violence was a welcome change of pace. Rourke is no doubt an author to watch.

Canal had the added virtue of being short, something of  a rare and undervalued quality these days. In fact almost all of the fiction I enjoyed the most this year — the icily beautiful The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, the bonkers Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and the lyrical The Blue Fox by Sjon — were short. And not actually published in 2010.

Colony by Hugo Wilcken, also short and published in 2007, was unquestionably my favourite novel of the year. Drawing its title from Kafka’s The Penal Colony (and, in turn, Joy Division’s song Colony), the book seemed to me more like a post-modern Conrad, or perhaps Camus trying his hand at a Boy’s Own Adventure. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to Wilcken’s next novel…

NONFICTION

I waited too long to read Patti Smith’s wistful and self-depreciating memoir Just Kids, but I was charmed by it nonetheless. I was less enthralled with Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz. I was not, I suspect, the target audience however…

Jared Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows both raised intelligent concerns about development of the internet. I was less convinced by Lanier’s polemic than Carr’s tweedier defense of long-form reading, but neither were as reactionary as they were sometimes characterized, and both offered interesting insights whether one agreed with them or not.

The subjective magazine-style reportage of War by Sebastian Junger and the gossipy Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin were both signals of what we can expect from nonfiction in future.  But both were troubling, especially War, which felt both narcissistic and yet, at the same time, voyeuristic and exploitative. Neither book properly addressed the complications of embedded insider journalism.

Both War and Game Change were, at least, entertaining. That cannot be said of Bob Woodward’s less than electrifying Obama’s Wars. There is something to be said for detailing events in chronological order, but that doesn’t make it any more readable. Worse, perhaps, I didn’t gain any greater insight into what had happened.

COMICS

Even though Dan Clowes is the godfather of the miserable asshole, it is now such a common trope in indie comics that despite his undeniable virtuosity I was somewhat disappointed by the uncompromising Wilson. It was, however, unfair of me to expect Clowes to be anyone other than Clowes, and just about everyone whose opinion I respect tells me I am wrong about this book, so don’t take my word for it.

KENK took up a lot of my professional time this year so I was glad to see it get such a positive critical response and I’m hopeful that it will finally see a US release in 2011.

Having a short attention span, I enjoyed the latest installment of Hellboy, and its gothic spin off Sir Edward Grey Witchfinder, but continued to be underwhelmed by Mignola’s plodding BPRD series.

Like just about every other nerd in Toronto I read the 6th and final installment of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series (now handily available as a box set). I also finally read Jeff Smith’s epic Bone from cover to cover and revisited The Rocketeer stories by the late Dave Stevens, which were collected, at long last, in a slim hardcover edition at the end of last year.

I loved The Outfit, the latest installment of Darwyn Cooke’s adaptations of Richard Stark’s Parker stories (my Advent Book Blog recommendation this year), and Jason’s strange and delightful Werewolves of Montpelier.

Footnotes In Gaza (published late in 2009) left me depressed, but thoroughly in awe of Joe Sacco.

THE ONES I DIDN’T GET TO (BUT MEANT TO)

The list of new books that I had every intention of reading this year but didn’t is far, far, too long. Here, however, are a few of the books (in no particular order) that I intend to get to sooner rather than later: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Sheyngart, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada,  Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman, Kraken by China Miéville, What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici, The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund Dewaal, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield, Set to Sea by Drew Weing and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness adapted by Ian Culbard. There are no doubt many, many more… I would love to hear what you read and enjoyed this year and what I should add to the list of books for 2011…

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Published January 8, 2010

Predictions

I really don’t know why smart people make predictions.

Surely one of the lessons of the last couple of years is that experts are actually very, very bad at making predictions — or rather, they are good at making predictions, just not very good at making accurate ones, which is, perhaps, even worse.

And didn’t we learn that experience doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the future?

In fact, someone even wrote a bestselling (if very irritating) book about it.

Nevertheless, it seems the smart book people — like moths to a flame — are undeterred. Here are some predictions from people in and around the industry:

Book Business Faces ‘Tectonic’ Shift: 2010 and Beyond (Part One) — Gail Roebuck (Random House), Peter Field (Penguin) and Victoria Barnsley (HarperCollins) in The Bookseller. Victoria Barnsley:

I think 50% of books will be read online by 2020. There will be far more variety for consumers across different formats with enhanced e-books for example. The business model will become much more complicated. The day when we sold only hardbacks and paperbacks will be looked backed at with wonder.

‘Decade of the people’: 2010 and Beyond (Part Two) — Tim Godfray (Booksellers Association), Michael Neil (Bertrams), Tim Coates (library campaigner), Roy Clare (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council), George Walkley (Hachette) in The Bookseller. Tim Godfray:

The big booksellers will develop online presence and independent booksellers will get increased offers of support from publishers, but as ever it will be consumer led and the winners will be the ones that please the consumer…

$64,000 question—where will the book be purchased and on which platform will it lie?

Predictions 2010: Cloudy with a Chance of Alarm — Michael Cairns, Information Media Partners and Personanondata:

[T]here have been few bright spots… during 2009, and after having taken the pulse of views on the near-term future in publishing by speaking to a number of senior publishing executives, my belief is we will not see any appreciable improvements during 2010. While some of their collective views can be attributed to ‘hedging,’ external trends support the lack of optimism whether they be reductions in education funding and library budgets or the increasing reliance on “blockbuster” authors or pricing issues.

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times — Bob Miller, president and publisher of HarperStudio:

[F]or every trend there will be a counter trend

Book Publishing 10 Years in the Future — Richard Nash, former publisher, at GalleyCat:

In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.

A baker’s dozen predictions for 2010 — Mike Shatzkin, The Idea Logical Company:

By the end of 2010, the experiment with “windowing” ebooks — withholding them from release when the hardcover comes out — will end as increasing evidence persuades publishers and agents that ebook sales (at any price) spur print book sales (at any price), not cannibalize or discourage them and, furthermore, that this withholding effort does nothing to restrain Amazon’s proclivity for discounting.

2010 Predictions — Joe Wikert, general manager and publisher at O’Reilly Media:

Let’s face it. The e-future of this industry is not quick-and-dirty p-to-e conversions.  Pricing pressures and  value propositions mean these will be nothing more than revenue rounding errors for the foreseeable future.  2010 will be the year where we’ll see more investment in richer e-content products.

Ten Things You Can Comfortably Ignore in 2010 — David Worlock, publishing analyst and advisor, Thoughts from the bottom of my garden…:

Anyone who proclaims the arrival of a new age and names it web 3.0 , 4.2 or X marks the spot.  We are working within a new continuum, every technology we will use in the next 15 years has already been invented and patented, and what remains to be seen is only the way in which consumers react to which combinations of hardware/software/content to solve which problems in what contexts. And nothing is lost by experimentation.

OK, for the record, I do genuinely believe these are all smart people who should have some idea what they’re talking about. But I do think it’s important to ask the following questions:

  • Who is writing the prediction?
  • Why are they making predictions about the book industry?
  • What do they have to gain (or lose) from their predictions coming to pass?

And, remember kids, while predictions are fun, they’re really no more reliable than tea leaves…

Book business faces ‘tectonic’ shift: 2010 and beyond, part oneBook business faces ‘tectonic’ shift: 2010 and beyond, (part one)

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