Making a List (of Books)...

We're leaving on vacation soon, and I can't decide which books to bring with me. Here's what I've got on my shelf:

1) The Rosie Project
2) Lookaway, Lookaway (this one's definitely coming along)
3) I Heart New York
4) A Tale for the Time Being
5) The Golem and the Jinni
6) I-Mary, a Biography of Mary Austin (This is for work, and I probably won't open it the whole time. At least it will get to do some traveling, though.)

What should I bring...? 

Best Reads of 2013

For me, this was the year of getting back into contemporary fiction, as opposed to sticking to the all-Victorian, all the time reading diet I've been on for the last 20 years. Although the reading that I do for my scholarship is still important and interesting to me, this has also been the year where I rediscovered pleasure reading.

Here are my favorite reads from 2013:

1) Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. Written in a delightfully snarky tone--especially in sections from the mother's point of view--this book draws on emails, journal entries, and straight narration to bring you into the over-the-top world of its characters.

2) Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw. Aw's novel, which was longlisted for the Man Booker, tells the interconnected stories of a group of outsiders trying to find their social and professional place in Shanghai. The thematic core of the novel is whether authenticity exists (or matters) in a world of self fashioning. The ending is a little disappointing, but otherwise it's a richly tapestried and satisfying novel.

3) I've Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella. I read *a lot* of Sophie Kinsella this year, but this one was definitely my favorite. Kinsella has created a well-crafted update of the epistolary novel using text messaging and emails. As Nina Garcia would say, it feels very fresh and current.

On a separate note, my second favorite Kinsella novel is Can You Keep a Secret?

4) Longbourn by Jo Baker. Baker's re-writing of Austen's Pride and Prejudice tells the story from the servants' point of view. The strength of this novel is that she doesn't try too hard to mimic Austen's style. Instead, the novel has its own story to tell and its own voice. As I wrote in my blogpost on this novel, I'll never see Lizzie's walk to Netherfield as quite such an independent and courageous act again.

5) The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp. This is one of those novels where the scenario is completely depressing, but you don't mind because the narrative voice is likeable and utterly compelling. I started this novel out of idle curiosity and was drawn in almost at once.

6) The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan. I'm still a little on the fence about this one since it is really difficult to read from an emotional point of view. But, like the Spectacular Now, the narrator is so brilliantly drawn and engaging that I couldn't put it down.

A Longer-Term View of Kindle Publishing

Just the other day, a patron asked me to purchase a copy of Leslie Marmon Silko's Oceanstory for our library. Oceanstory, it turns out, is a Kindle exclusive, which means that it is not available in print, at least not for now. While the library where I work regularly purchases e-books, we're unable to purchase Kindle-only titles because we have no way of hosting and sharing them.

Odyssey editions, which published Oceanstory, specializes in ebooks on the Kindle platform. The books listed on their website are all "classic" 20th-century works, available in print, so the Kindle-only policy isn't an issue in those cases. This blogpost by Chad Post explains Odyssey Editions' business model as exploiting loopholes in publishing contracts that specify the rights to publish an author's work in book form.

Oceanstory, however, seems to be working on a different model, where the book is available Kindle only without a print edition. It may be the case that the print is yet to come, but this case has made me wonder about the benefits of Kindle-only publishing from an author's point of view--not so much in terms of short-term revenue, but in terms of long-term reputation.

Here's what I mean: I understand the attraction of e-only publishing on a platform like the Kindle. Authors have access to publishing in entirely new ways and can by-pass the gatekeeping of publishing houses, many of which are primarily interested in finding the next big blockbuster. For authors who are willing to work their social media networks, they can find an audience on their own. This has obvious attractions.

Likewise, a Kindle-only book can't circulate in libraries, and some might see that as better for revenue. That, at least, is the case against "militant librarians who see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to 'lend' our e-books without restriction" that Richard Russo makes in the widely circulated letter that he wrote encouraging authors to join the Authors Guild. That is, as long as the e-book in question is not part of an e-book package, like the Midwest  Collaborative for Library Services, through which public libraries loan kindles.

I'm not going to comment on whether or not restricting library circulation helps or hurts authors' revenues, but I do think that e-only books that are not available to libraries pose a risk to their authors in a way that doesn't get much press, and that's the threat to their future reputation. Simply, if authors' books aren't available for sale to libraries, that means that libraries cannot collect and archive them. And that's what large research libraries are interested in doing: only 20% of the books that we collect ever circulate, but we are also interested in preserving the cultural record for the future.

That might not seem important in the short term of building a reputation, an audience, and a writing career through robust Kindle sales. But I worry about whether those works will be available for scholars to study, write about, and teach in their classrooms--much less available to anyone who's interested in reading and talking about them in the future for whatever reason. By relying on Kindle, we essentially rely on Amazon to archive these materials. I'm not inclined to trust them.

A Shortlist of Cozies

When I started this blog, I thought that I would be spending as much time writing about cozies as about chick lit and other current fiction, but somehow I've lost track of the cozies. For those of you who aren't mystery fans--or maybe not fans of cozies--the simplest definition of a cozy is a mystery that isn't gory. Think of Miss Marple. Cozies generally take place in a closed-off setting, like a country house or small town, and they're generally solved by an amateur sleuth. The emphasis in these stories is often as much on character development and the unraveling of a puzzle as anything else.

Here are some of my all-time favorites:

• Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries. Miss Silver is an aged spinster who runs her own detective agency and generally gets her information by infiltrating the family circle where a crime has happened or is about to take place. The suspects always underestimate her because they dismiss her as a flighty old lady, but she has an uncanny ability to understand the psychology of everyone she meets.

• Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes. I *love* this mystery, and I tend to re-read it every few years just for the pleasure of it. Miss Pym is a writer who solves a mystery at an all-girls physical education school in England. The characterization is extremely well done and the solution is an absolute surprise. Sarah Waters wrote a brilliant piece in the Guardian on another Tey novel, The Franchise Affair, that made me start thinking about all the class issues in Miss Pym Disposes, but I would rank this one as one of my favorite mysteries.

• Agatha Christie (of course), especially Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, and Murder on the Orient Express.

• The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart.  This is a very Edwardian mystery with an old maid as protagonist. 

• P.D. James's Shroud for a Nightingale and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. I'll forgive James for the lifeless Death Comes to Pemberley, but only because her earlier novels are so good.

• The Vicky Bliss mysteries by Elizabeth Peters. Most readers are more familiar with the Amelia Peabody stories, but I return to the Vicky Bliss novels as a kind of comfort read. If you're into audiobooks, Barbara Rosenblat does the best version.

I'm know there are others that I'll think of as soon as I post this, but this is the list that immediately comes to mind. Which ones have I missed?