Pooja Makhijani sends up a link to her annotated bibliography of South Asia and South Asian diaspora in children’s literature. It’s got everything from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book to Chitra Divakaruni’s The Conch Bearer. Definitely worth a look.
Portland-based literary magazine 2 Gyrlz Quarterly is launching its third print issue with a reading at Powell’s.
2GQ Launch Reading
Monday, June 6th
Powell’s Downtown
7:30 pm
NW 10th and Burnside
I won’t be able to attend, but if you do, send me your thoughts.
Thursday is supposed to be a ‘light’ day, as BEA doesn’t officially start until tomorrow. Still, there were plenty of panels to check out and people to meet. I arrived a bit late to the the book bloggers panel, but still enjoyed the second half of it. I was surprised at some of the more novice questions, showing that in fact many people still aren’t familiar with what book blogs are and are a bit mystified as to how to use them.
I did enjoy meeting the panelists in person–the very sharp Michael Cader of Publishers’ Lunch, bookseller-cum-blogger Robert Gray, and the very active M.J. Rose. Mad Max Perkins, who showed up incognito, ran off right after the panel–presumably to take off his sorcerer costume and vanish into nature.
I tried getting into the panel on the “elusive 18-34 year old reader,” which was moderated by Jessa Crispin, but couldn’t at all because it was held in a smallish room and there were no seats left by the time I got there.
Afterwards, I got to meet fellow bloggers Bud Parr (of Chekhov’s Mistress) Ed Champion (of Return of the Reluctant), and Sarah Weinman (of Confessions), and of course Mark. I did spot a few other people, but couldn’t work up the nerve to go up and say hi. (Despite all evidence to the contrary, I can be quite reserved.)
The Observer reports on a study on sex differences in reading habits, which found that, “while women read the works of both sexes, men stick to books written by men.” The article says:
The research was carried out by academics Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of Queen Mary College, London, to mark the 10th year of the Orange Prize for Fiction, a literary honour whose women-only rule provoked righteous indignation when the competition was founded. They asked 100 academics, critics and writers and found virtually all now supported the prize.
But a gender gap remains in what people choose to read, at least among the cultural elite. Four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female. When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer. Women, however, often gave several titles. The report said: ‘Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men.
I think that in a male-controlled world, women have long learned to place themselves in the minds of the dominating gender, and to view the world through its eyes. Men have no incentive to see the world through female eyes, unfortunately. At least some men recognize they have a problem.
The article goes on, perhaps more worryingly:
‘Consequently, fiction by women remains “special interest”, while fiction by men still sets the standard for quality, narrative and style.’
Basically male authors have the advantage of having both male and female readers, which helps them get a greater hold on the literary conversation, and define what constitutes literature. The study concludes:
Jardine said: ‘When pressed, men are likely to say things like: “I believe Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is a really important book – I’m afraid I haven’t read it.” I find it most endearing that in 10 years what male readers of fiction have done is learn to pretend that they’ve read women’s books.’
I missed Anne-Marie O’Connor’s article on Mid-East books when it came out in the Los Angeles Times last month, but here it is, reprised in the Register-Guard. It’s essentially about the current craze in U.S. publishing for all things Middle-Eastern:
Charlotte Abbott, the book news editor at Publishers Weekly, said the demand for [books on the Middle-East] has been driven by a widespread curiosity about Middle Eastern countries in the news since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“Publishers really woke up to the fact that there really weren’t a lot of books that could satisfy that kind of hunger,” Abbott said. “Publishers went out and pursued acquiring those books.”
And so O’Connor briefly rounds up a whole bunch of current titles, including Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning, Mohammed Moulessehoul/Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Roya Hakakian’s Journey From The Land of No, and Afschineh Latifi’s Even After All This Time, among others.
Amid all this hodge-podge of fiction books and memoirs, the only clear point is that “the Mid-East is hot in publishing right now,” a point that I’ll concede easily enough, even if that attention seems myopic to me at times. What troubles me is the tone in the latter end of the article, which seems to intimate that there’s one or two interesting books coming out of a country:
In Saudi Arabia, a male author, Yousef Mohaimeed, has written a book called “The Bottle.”
This is just bloody ridiculous. People in the Arab world have been writing books long before the U.S. publishing industry took an interest in their stories.
Some sad news: Sufi scholar and author Martin Lings has passed on. Read the NY Times obit, which provides some interesting tidbits. (I didn’t know, for instance, that Lings had studied under, and was close friends with, C.S. Lewis.) If you are new to Lings’s work, I highly recommend his biography of the Prophet, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources.