However, there are a number of book blogging topics with which I’m done. So finished, that I’m not even going to tell you why. I’m just going to list out topics that I don’t read. If I realize an entry is about one of these, I go away. If I see a headline for it, I gloss over, never clicking through. Just done.

• Rules for book blogging
• Selling ARCs is evil
• What’s a good book review/reviewer
• Illegal electronic book downloads are evil/good
• Please support writer X who needs money
• Indies book stores vs. chain book stores
• Amazon has done something evil
• Digital rights management is evil
• Splogs are stealing book blog content
• Science fiction gets no respect
• Book blogging isn’t what it used to be
• How to promote your blog

Another few days of watching messages go by on Twitter and I could probably add another five to ten to the list.

I’m not saying these are bad topics. I’ve participated in these discussions and even written a post or two. I’m just done with them now. Said my piece. Won’t be swayed by yet more arguments. Not interested in convincing you. Sometimes didn’t care in the first place.

If they are topics that excite you, by all means post away. I ain’t telling you what to write. I think think people should write about anything that excites them. These topics excite people still. Just not me. It’s your internet; do with it what you want.

Photo by flickr user joshme17, used under a CC-By license.

What are you done with?

However…

This list shows something else that is apparent. To my knowledge, Lou Anders is the only editor at Pyr, so that list comprises the entire Pyr 2010 catalog. According to Lou at the end of the list, that’s 30 novels. A whopping two were by a woman, Kay Kenyon. Another was co-authored by a woman. That’s 8.3% of the output for Pyr for last year (counting the co-authored book as ½).

That seems awfully low. So I checked Lou’s 2009 pimpage post: 28 books, 4 female authors, or 14%.

Total number of books on the Pyr catalog page: 107. Number by women: 13. And 2 that were co-authored by women. That’s 13%. I may have miscounted, and I may be unaware of a pseudonym.

I haven’t met Lou Anders, nor have I interacted at all with him even in blog comments or on Twitter. Despite my limited reading of his online writing, he’s always seemed like a fairly aware and forward looking guy. He was one of just a few people to mention a female author in an SF Signal Mind Meld I criticized a few years ago for similar reasons. Was I wrong? Is it just a blind spot? The parent company has an issue? Women aren’t submitting there? Is there something else I don’t know about? Did I really miscount? Is there a good reason for the number to be that low?

These are books read between Thanksgiving 2009 and Thanksgiving 2010, not books published this year. Since this is a buying guide, I also have the criteria that they must still be in print, so you, my consuming public, can purchase them. These are in no particular order.

There were a bunch of books that almost made this list, but it was important to me to keep this list reasonably short. That forces me to think about what truly was the best reading of the year.

Fiction

Split by Swati Avasthi (my review)

I know I wrote above that these books were in no particular order. I lied. This one goes first because it was so damn good. Easily the best thing I’ve read this year. Don’t let the fact that it’s Y.A. turn you away. Don’t let the fact that it’s about child abuse scare you. Swati Avasthi wrote a great story about the aftermath of child abuse that hits all the right notes. The kids are messed up and broken, but they are human too. Split makes it relatable. Great characters. Great story. It will be a travesty if this doesn’t make best of lists.

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (my review)

This is a boy book. While not every teenage boy will identify with having a summer house near the beach on Long Island, many of us have had similar summer experiences. Staying with grandmother, camps, or in my case at my grandfather’s cabin. The tinge of how did I get to where I am now? that Whitehead added to the book, without ever once telling the reader where the character is now, is the whipped cream on this pie.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (my review)

The Knife of Never Letting Go is one big chase scene, and that’s the only bad part about it. It takes an awesome idea: a virus infects the population so that men’s thoughts can be heard, but women’s cannot. It won the Tiptree Award for exploration of gender roles. It’s also fun to read has the best title of any book I can remember reading.

Interfictions 2 edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak (my review)

I’m hesitant to put an anthology in any best of list because there’s more points of failure. The nature of Interfictions is that the stories cross genres and conventions and thus are not something you’d see every day. It’s also the case that some of these stories really didn’t work for me. But the ones that did, really worked well, and you can’t find them anywhere else. M. Rickert’s The Beautiful Feast is beautifully confusing. And David J. Schwartz’ The 121 gives an explosion a mind of it’s own. Read the review for some of the other great inclusions.

Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon (my review)

I’m going to digress a bit here.

I really liked this book because the protagonist was definitely in senior citizen range. That’s rare in science fiction. I also think Moon did a really good job making alien aliens. I enjoyed reading it. Then Elizabeth Moon went and said something offensive and stupid.

The problem is somewhat outside the book. Moon’s bigoted comments told Muslims and foreigners their ways aren’t welcome here, where god-fearing American types get to determine who is and isn’t worthy. On the scale of racist things to say, it wasn’t the worst of possible things. She wasn’t advocating pogroms or internment cams. But what she wrote was offensive, and very public, and then she kept on digging her hole deeper.

So despite that I thought that this was a very good book, I won’t be reading her other books for now. I hate giving publicity and sales to someone who uses that influence and money to push an agenda that offends me. I don’t read Orson Scott Card any more. That was made easier by the fact that he’s turned out crap since the mid 1990s.

Still, the book is excellent, so I’m putting it here. Make your own decision as to whether to read it in good conscience.

Non-Fiction

Despite the fact that I read a fair amount of economics, I’m somewhat surprised that the best non-fiction I’ve read were both economics books. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion might have made the list had he not gone off into minimizing sexual molestation. I still don’t see why he went there.

Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo (my review)

Not exactly the most scintillating of topics, but figuring out how to get Africa on track economically is something that’s very important for the future of the world. I thought Ms. Moyo underestimated how realistic it would be to get her solutions in place, and I question whether they are even good solutions or not. But they aren’t obviously wrong either. She makes a good case for them.

The Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox (my review)

The biggest influence on Republican economic policy over the last few decades has been the efficient markets hypothesis. It gives a nice theoretical cover to letting businesses do whatever the hell they want. Investors are playing a classic of game theory, betting on what they think other people will do, rather than making rational decisions about what’s best for them. In addition, individually best decisions don’t always aggregate to societal good. Fox’s book traces the evolution of the hypothesis from inception to general rejection by economists. This isn’t so much his argument (though perhaps it might be) as a good history of how economists viewed the efficient markets hypothesis.

Bonus Worst Book!

Buy this book for people you hate, or for people you want to piss off. Or for that white elephant gift exchange you really don’t want to go to. Had I my druthers, I would have James Hogan’s Inherit the Stars here, but it’s out of print.

Big Big Sky by Kristyn Dunnion (my review)

This could have been good. A band of lesbian genetic experiments break from the control of their alien overlords, and then get sidetracked in a meandering plot that goes all over the map as well as drops subplots with abandon.

Image Whiteface 11: Top of the Mountain by Tony the Misfit used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Perhaps that explains a curious thing I noticed about the list. Where are the women? Nine men and Trudi Canavan. That seems awfully few.

I’m not the kind of person that gets outraged by this, though I can see why people would. The selection does make me think the list isn’t really all that useful to me. I just don’t see that a list that under-represents such a large group of writers by such a large margin as being really a list of the best.

In 2009, Amazon U.K. picked 7 men and 3 women (and 2 of the books were reprints of stuff first published in previous years) for their science fiction and fantasy list. In 2008, 9 men and 1 woman. If anyone has stats/links for prior years, leave ‘em in the comments. I wasn’t able to find them.

I never really paid that much attention to the Amazon best lists, but Amazon U.K. has made it so I’ll likely not pay attention to their picks in the future either.

Now, as you may recall, last year I had a bit of criticism on this blog about B.B.A.W. I didn’t like that people paid to promote books would be eligible. I’m less critical of B.B.A.W. for that than I am the bloggers themselves who surreptitiously take money. I also criticized B.B.A.W. on twitter for allowing the organizers themselves to be eligible for awards. That really irked me. Particularly on the latter, I was not the only negative Nancy.

It looks like the organizers have taken the criticism to heart. They’ve made some changes for this year. First, their executive committee is not eligible for awards this year. This is excellent! They’ve also disqualified paid bloggers. Also good! And the process is much more transparent this year. Last year, most stuff for the awards part happened behind the scenes, and magically they came out where a large portion of the nominations were to people running the awards. 40% of the blogs on shortlists were run by people on committees running B.B.A.W. I don’t think that was intentional, but there’s a tendency to groupthink when a group does stuff in a cloistered fashion.

The process this year is much more out in the open. Bloggers have to nominate themselves by posting. The longlist is voted publicly.¹ The shortlist is done privately. And the final voting for winners is done publicly. I think there will a lot less of the perception that B.B.A.W. is a mutual appreciation society than last year.

I have two concerns though. First relates back to my criticisms last year. The official response was that there was nothing B.B.A.W. could do since they hadn’t originally specified no paid flacks in the rules, so they couldn’t do anything at that point. At this point, B.B.A.W. has taken into account past criticisms, but I don’t see that they’ve looked ahead as much. The Executive Committee, to my knowledge, doesn’t have anyone on it that has experience running a decent sized award, which would give them insight on how to deal with unforeseen issues. So if something else comes up, I’m worried that they won’t do the right thing because they feel constrained by a lack of a rule to deal with the issue. For instance, nothing in the rules prohibits ballot-stuffing using automated scripts. If someone were to attempt that, I would hope that the organizers don’t feel they aren’t allowed by their own rules to disallow this.

The second concern is more philosophical. The blogging world of books has many loci. B.B.A.W. (overall, not just the awards) really only covers one locus. I see all sorts of different styles of blogging about books out there, many of which are extremely awesome. But they will never get recognized in B.B.A.W. because their communities do not intersect with B.B.A.W. For examples of things that won’t get recognition, I’m thinking places like Three Percent, Conversational Reading, Asking the Wrong Questions, The Mumpsimus, S.F. Signal, Feminist S.F. The Blog!, and many others. I don’t foresee the new process helping matters in that respect. It requires too much opt-in to get past people’s inertia. Voting requires registration. Eligibility requires a public blog post nominating one’s self. For people already part of the group, this is a no-brainer. People not part of this have a barrier to entry.

As kind of an example of what I mean by this, the book blog year in review post on the B.B.A.W. blog failed to mention RaceFail. That’s no fault of Raych, who wrote the post and is generally awesome. It’s not something that I would expect her to notice. But in science fiction land, that was huge! B.B.A.W. is currently by, for, and about only a segment of book blogging.

I sometimes get the feeling that the organizers want to involve all book blogs. And sometimes I get the feeling that they are content with the more narrow community-oriented² book blog. I’m not sure which way they really want to go. There’s no requirement that this group involve the whole wide world of book blogs. Lots of organizations are more about serving their own members than going big. S.F.W.A. doesn’t promote crime fiction writers, for instance.

But I really would like to see some group step up and advocate for all literary blogs. I think the democratization of literary opinion via blogs has the possibility of doing something amazing. I’d love to see a Literary New World Order! It’s going to happen regardless, but I’d love to see it advocated. Something that recognizes both the commonality and the differences that entails.

Maybe I’ll be proved wrong and the big wide book blogging world will embrace B.B.A.W. as it is. For the moment, I’m going to sit it out. That is because I want to see a track record of success first, after the fail that surrounded last year’s edition. I want to see a successful awards. But more importantly, I want to see that it includes and recognizes (not just with the awards) a much broader book blogging ideal. If it does, I’ll be in next year. (And by that, I do not mean the awards. Any group that thinks this blog deserves an award is crazy! Even in a most grumpy kind of category, Ed Champion oughta kick my ass.)

• Most authors seem to be coming down on the side of Macmillan on this. A lot of readers seem surprised in their comments that this would be so. I roll my eyes at this. Macmillan is asking for higher prices on their behalf for stuff. And Amazon has cut off money for them. People respond to incentives, and they generally vote with their pocketbook. Readers should not assume that an author’s interests are equal to their own interests.
• Many readers (though I have no idea what the percentage is) seem to be siding with Amazon. A lot of authors seem surprised that this would be so. I roll my eyes at this. Amazon is selling items to them at lower prices. Macmillan is asking them to either pay more money or wait longer. People respond to incentives, and they generally vote with their pocketbook. The increased money they might get comes out of the readers wallets, even if a billion people along the supply chain take their cut.
• Capitalism does not mean you sell at the cost of production plus a fair markup. I read an ostensible economist assert that readers who say they should get books at a price they are willing to pay is not capitalism. No, that’s exactly what capitalism is, if you add in that the seller has to agree to the price too. Cost of production has an impact on whether the producer agrees to the price, but even then it’s not determinative. If I spent $10 to make something but can only get $5, I may sell it at $5 just because it’s better than not selling it and getting $0.
• Because of the latter, I tend to skip all the scribblings about how much it costs to produce an ebook. I’m not basing whether I will pay $X for a book based on whether someone else makes a profit. I’m basing it on the utility to me.

• An ebook’s utility is very different than a regular book’s utility. I get the same story. I think, I’ve never compared any of the ebooks I’ve acquired with the paper copies. I get space saving and portability. But there’s a lot I don’t get: the ability to loan, sell or give away the book. I don’t get protection from book loss, computer problems being much more common than fires, floods. I don’t get the ability to signal like a paper book gives me. When you step into my apartment, you know I am a reader as well as whatever you can glean from my collection. There’s no equivalent with ebooks. I also don’t get to be a collector. I’m not as much a books as fetish object kind of guy as many, but I still like to have a few signed copies and I keep a few books around just for their artwork. What I’m willing to pay depends on what priorities I give to each of these utilities, not how much it cost someone else to make the damn thing.
• I give a lot more importance to the change in retailing models than most others do. I don’t know a single retailer that has achieved dominance in a market when they are unable to set their own prices, unless they’ve done it through means that are unavailable to Amazon. Tobias Buckell countered with Apple is an agent in their iPhone app market, where they are dominant. But that’s because they are a true monopoly there at the moment. Amazon can’t do that with ebooks.
• A lot of people, including myself, have been reading tea leaves inappropriately. So far, we have a couple of statements from Macmillan and a buried post from Amazon. Both of these entities have strong incentives to lie to us.
• Amazon is a recognized place for books. Every other place plays second fiddle to them. I include Powells links in my reviews, but I’ve seen less than 5 clicks and no sales from them. People reading my backwater blog click through to Amazon on the order of one or two hundred every month, and I usually see one or two purchases from every month.
• The user experience and blogging tools for Amazon put every other site to shame. For book information, really only LibraryThing even comes close. Only Amazon offers product previews for bloggers (if you don’t have Adblock, hover over an Amazon link on my site to see). Only Amazon offers detailed reporting. Only Amazon offers Site Stripe for bloggers. Only Amazon offers quality recommendations for users.
• Authors and anti-Amazon people pushing alternative sites to link to should coalesce around one alternative. Places I’ve seen pushed include The Book Depository, bn.com, Indiebound, and Powells as well as a slew of local bookstores. The promotion is too spread out to get any of them critical mass to be a viable alternative for bloggers linking.
• Why the hell hasn’t any of these sites or others offered extra incentives to sign up as affiliates right now? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to me.
• A lot of author commentary comes across like celebrities who work all their lives to be famous and well recognized and then complain about how they don’t have any privacy. Authors work hard to get Amazon to sell lots of their books, and now complain that Amazon is so dominant.
• Amazon is not a monopoly. They have no more than 43% of the book market. They are dominant.
• To tea leaf this, I wonder if the solution will result in something along the lines of Macmillan’s pricing model but Amazon’s retailing model. Merchant model is kept so Amazon can price as they want generally. But they also agree to limitations on pricing items, particularly a time-based price lowering.

• I’m not so sure that cheap ebooks will cannibalize physical copy sales early on. The price conscious already have the option of waiting and getting the books used or in paperback. The price conscious folks aren’t generally buying the expensive early editions.
• The primary value to a reader from a publisher is in signalling. The publisher communicates to the reader that this book is worth reading because they’ve sunk money into it. I seriously doubt a self-publishing model will be generally workable even in a world of cheaper production for everyone. If nothing else, the publisher of quality work will command bigger prices for their time, and won’t work for less. So their books will cost more.
• In an ebook world, I wonder if a stock exchange marketplace model would work or is where the agency model would end up. Purchasers won’t want to go to different destinations for each publisher for their books. They want to go to one place to purchase multiple books. The retailer and their web site acts much like a broker does for stocks. The retailer places orders for their customers on ebook exchanges, of which there really are only a handful. People can sell their used ebooks there too. And publishers can control the price by releasing copies into the market at the going rate. (i.e., the distribution right in copyright law becomes the right to release new copies into the exchange) Just musing…
• Really only tangentially related to all of this but I’m gonna throw this out there too in this post. I don’t owe independent stores my money just because they are local or independent. I shop at stores that provide services that are of value to me. Either they have good prices, or good selection (broad or focused both are possibilities), or other amenities to make it worth my time, money and effort. I don’t owe an author, publisher, or retailer money or allegiance either.

I’m not really siding with Amazon in the whole matter, though I have taken somewhat of an anti-Macmillan tone. Basically in my mind, it’s all a business dispute and not really about morals or fairness so much as a negotiation about who gets what. Authors took risks by getting into the business, and there’s no guarantee that they succeed. There’s not even a promise that their work not be held hostage to outside interests. That’s just the way business works. On the other hand I think they should rail against Amazon for business reasons (even using the language of fairness). It would be dumb not to. It would be dumb to send traffic to Amazon when Amazon ain’t selling the authors’ product. Amazon has no right to continue to make money either, or to continue to be a dominant player. I’ll shed no tears for Amazon should they lose this battle. Nor does Macmillan have any hold on me either. There’s no right or wrong, just the market. Now I sound like a goddamn libertarian.

Here’s the quote from the Macmillan letter:

I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March.

And then later a couple more paragraphs:

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

The agency model would allow Amazon to make more money selling our books, not less. We would make less money in our dealings with Amazon under the new model. Our disagreement is not about short-term profitability but rather about the long-term viability and stability of the digital book market.

What do you see in that letter? Almost everyone commenting on this seems to be focusing in on the pricing. And while it’s ultimately about pricing, there’s something very important in there. The term agency model. That’s very important.

Currently most booksellers operate under a merchant model. Macmillan’s letter rhetorically leaves this little bit out while extolling how great the agency model is for a retailer. As a retailer, the agency model could be very very ugly. Macmillan has left that part out. (Not surprising, they are interested in their own P.R., not providing accurate analysis and facts. Amazon won’t do any better.)

Under the agency model, the manufacturer (in this case Macmillan) owns the inventory that a retailer sells. It determines the pricing, as well as a whole lot of other things like which items will be sold by which retailers. The retailer makes money get getting a percentage of sales. Perhaps it has some complications like higher percentages with higher sales, but that’s the basic idea.

With the merchant model, the retailer owns what they have and gets to make the decisions, particularly the pricing decisions. The retailer pays the manufacturer whatever price the two parties can agree on. In some industries, this is a standard price (wholesale) but in Amazon’s case they are pretty big so they have a lot of influence in dictating what prices they want to pay. After paying wholesale and receiving their merchandise, it’s the merchant who sets the prices. They can sell at a retail price that is more or less than the wholesale price, and they do not have to price uniformly with respect to other retailers.

The agency model would be horrible for a large retailer like Amazon. Horrible. Let me give you some scenarios:

It’s summer time. There’s a new blockbuster movie out starring some pretty young Hollywood star (think Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston). That celebrity wrote a memoir several years ago that Amazon has in stock. They could use the opportunity to offer those books at a discount in order to move them or as an incentive to sell the official movie novelization and other movie crap (“three for the price of two!”). Except under the agency model, they can’t do this. They would have to sell at the price set by the publisher.

Or try this. An Amazon competitor has a book selling at $1 less than theirs. They cannot price match under the agency model.

Or even the example that’s at the heart of the current dispute: publisher wants to sell at $15.99 and reduce the price over three years from that price to $5.99. After Christmas, the hardcover version (sold under the merchant model) of the book goes into the bargain bins and is selling for $7, but the publisher is stuck on their three year schedule for the ebook version (under the agency model). Amazon is now selling the ebook for more than the hardcover.

Basically, the problem is who controls the pricing, not the specific prices. It’s not that the pricing under agency would be monolithic exactly. Agency model eliminates loss leaders. It’s all about different interests. As a seller of books from different publishers, as well as millions of other products, Amazon’s interests differ from the publishers’ interests. The agency model means that Amazon’s interests would be lower than the publisher interests. All the commentary touches on this part a bit. Amazon is interested in establishing the Kindle as the dominant ereader platform. Macmillan is not. Amazon want the flexibility to set prices for that, irrespective of whatever wholesale price they negotiated.

If it was specific prices, Amazon would never have used their nuclear option. I’m pretty sure of that. They’d just haggle away until they came to an agreement. But to switch to agency model? They have to nip that in the bud. If they’d agreed to the agency model, publishers would have pushed to switch everything to agency model, killing Amazon’s business.

Why am I sure of that? Way back when, I used to work at Expedia as a developer. I didn’t make the business decisions, but I had to understand them pretty well to implement the web site to carry those decisions out. Some of the things that Expedia sells are agency model (a lot of flights, but not all), and some are merchant model (a lot of hotels, but not all). Agency model is why all the online travel agents started charging $5 to book a flight in the early 2000s. The manufacturers, the airlines, cut the commission down to nothing in a lot of cases. Since Expedia couldn’t be flexible on price, they tacked their own charge on top so they could cover costs. That’s also why customers didn’t pay the $5 booking fee when they bought a flight in conjunction with a hotel. Expedia bought hotel room-nights up in bulk and then set their own prices. The company set their own prices and it didn’t need the booking fee to make money.

I spent my entire time at Expedia watching the business side try to switch from the agency model to the merchant model. Travel was dominated by the agency model for its entire existence. Expedia was trying (and sometimes failing) to convert to a merchant model, because that’s where the money would be for them. It allowed them to create packages that airlines and hotels couldn’t or wouldn’t at prices that weren’t available under agency rules.

Now, whether this is good for the consumer (the reader in the case of books), remains to be seen. In some ways it’s two behemoths on one end of the supply chain duking it out over who gets to pillage the consumer. But I am pretty sure I don’t want my neighborhood bookseller to work under the agency model. So if this keeps publishers from adopting that way of selling universally, then I have to side with Amazon. Saving the neighborhood bookstore is not their goal, but as a side effect it helps.

Edited to add: Charles Stross’ take on Amazon vs. Macmillan covers a lot of the same ground as my post. So I’m not the only one focusing on agency model. He doesn’t talk about packaging and price matching that a merchant could do, but covers some other things.

Before I jump into my entry, I want to highlight something this year: SantaThing. LibraryThing is hosting an Secret Santa for people who read. I never was fond of Secret Santa things at work. A lotta rigmarole and anxiety for very little enjoyment by anyone. But SantaThing takes care of that for you. You pay $25, and someone picks out up to $25 worth of books for you based on stuff in your catalog and a few blurbs you write about yourself. In return, you pick out some books for someone else. LibraryThing handles all the ordering even! In other words, books, books and more books. No silly gag gifts, no bottles of wine, and no pretending you liked what the department head gave you! I am participating.

So, now on to my selections for best reads of 2009. Again, these are books read between Thanksgiving 2008 and Thanksgiving 2009, not books published this year. Though for the first time, some of the books were actually published in 2009. Over the last few years I’ve started reading more recently published books rather than waiting to hear the buzz before picking them up. The lists are in no particular order, though I do separate fiction from non-fiction.

Fiction

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union / Michael Chabon (my review)

Michael Chabon is a master of language. I knew that after reading The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay the year before. But it turns out Chabon is also a master of mood and plot as well. Set in an alternative history where Sitka Alaska became the homeland for Jews instead of Israel, Chabon spins a murder mystery that becomes much much more. This is something the lit-geek can love, as well as the science fiction and crime fiction types. Chabon better be winning a Nobel Prize for Literature some day. He’s young, but already has a number of classic books written.

The Taqwacores / Michael Muhammad Knight (my review)

I’ve heard The Taqwacores referred to as The Catcher in the Rye for American Muslims. I don’t have the foggiest idea how Muslim kids are actually reacting to the book, and I’m a little skeptical about the buzz the book has received, particularly for it’s effect. But it’s a great story following a houseful of characters in a then-fictional Muslim punk scene. Trying to hold the ideas of rebellion (punk) and submission (Islam) at the same time is tough, but Knight manages to create interesting characters, not just shocking ones.

9tail Fox / Jon Courtenay Grimwood (my review)

I’ve seen mixed reviews of this book, but I just loved it. San Francisco policeman wakes up in someone else’s body with memories of being murdered. Now he has to go solve his own murder. Nothing deep here, but an excellent story. I’ve not often liked person must solve their own murder plots, but I like this one.

Delhi Noir / Hirsh Sawhney ed. (my review)

I wrote in my review that Delhi is a perfect setting for noir. First world noir often falls flat for me because of the inherent unbelievability of danger generally in society. Noir must impart a sense of a dangerous atmosphere. The writers in this story collection wrote stories in a mix of social strata in Delhi, where bandits and graft are rampant in real life, not just in the stories. I liked every single story.

Liar / Justine Larbalestier (my review)

I wasn’t sure if I would recommend Liar or not. To put it bluntly, this book fucks with your head. Larbalestier writes the ultimate in unreliable narrators with her character Micah. Micah lies to her classmates. She lies to her teachers. She lies to random people on the street. She lies to the reader. It’s very unsettling, but good. I don’t like being unsettled like this, but I think it made for an excellent book.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian / Sherman Alexie (my review)

I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything that made me cry quite so easily as this did. Parts sad, and parts courageous. Alexie knows how to make his characters poignant. I think that might be the first time I’ve ever used that word on Rat’s Reading, and it’ll be a long time before I do so again. I listened to the audiobook version, read by Alexie himself. I highly recommend doing so. Oh yeah, Indian kid goes to school off the reservation where he deals both with the reaction of the white kids at his new school and the rejection of his friends on the rez.

Boneshaker / Cherie Priest (my review)

200 foot high wall around downtown Seattle holding inside a deadly gas and zombies. Steampunk level technology that finds a use for those gas masks and goggles that the goth/industrial/neo-steampunk kids wear. And a fun plot around the kid who heads into the forbidden zone to rehabilitate the reputation of his father, the man who released the gas, and his mother who follows him inside to rescue him. It’s a dirty, gritty vision, and I loved it.

Non-Fiction

My non-fiction reading seems to have dropped off this year, but there were still a couple of books I highly recommend.

Cartographia / Vincent Virga (my review)

I wouldn’t call this book an unmitigated success, as the writing alongside the maps in Cartographia overreaches in its search for the meanings of maps. But ZOMG! the maps are gorgeous! If you salivate over maps like I do, this will tease your taste buds! It includes maps from all areas of history, including maps in forms you never would expect. Map porn at it’s best!

Micromotives and Macrobehavior / Thomas C. Schelling (my review)

It’s somewhat dry and dense, but it’s one of the few times I haven’t wanted to throw an economics book. Supposedly concerned with the way the world is, not how they want it to be, publicly economists only very rarely can stand to not stamp their worldview on everything they touch. Schelling’s book provides lots and lots of insight into why things are as they are. The best chapter is on how even mild preferences for living near someone of one’s own race can lead to massive self-segregation when those attitudes are aggregated across the population.

Bonus Worst Book(s)

This year I have two books to put in this category. Buy these books for people you hate, or for people you want to piss off. Basically, if you get one of these it won’t be because they will enjoy it or become a better person for having read it. These books are still in print, and I exclude self-published books from consideration.

Casino Royale / Ian Fleming (my review)

Fleming’s writing fell far short of even my low expectations for how it would treat women. Ugh ugh ugh. Here’s a way to feel dirty.

The Bible of Clay / Julia Navarro (my review)

And for sheer plot senselessness, flat characterization, unexciting conspiracies, and no action whatsoever (at least in the part I was able to stomach), pick up The Bible of Clay. It follows the Dan Brown model of having the characters chase after a priceless relic from the past, but doesn’t have Brown’s knack for anything. When you compare unfavorably against Dan Brown…

Image Presents by Stuart Caie used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

I’ve been to a couple of Northwest Bookfests. I enjoyed them. The primary feature for them was the large number of vendors, and occasionally a decent author doing a reading.

Cue up the new Bookfest. It seemed well attended. They had a decent showing from local small publishers and bookstores. Hopefully they got a good enough start that they can put one on next year with improvements. They’ve managed to pull of a book festival in Seattle for the first time in over five years, so they did something right.

On the other hand, Seattle Bookfest had all the drawbacks of the old Northwest Bookfest and added a few of it’s own. Finding the place took me 30 minutes once I got to Columbia City. Parking was atrocious. The signage looked like it was done by middle-schoolers. The vendor list was pretty small. Worse, most of the vendors simply set up their tables and did little else to make me interested in their books. Local authors who have lately been reading everywhere pushing the same stuff they’ve been pushing at all the local bookstores for months. The other major theme for panels was all about getting published. Never mind that the universe of readers is much bigger than the universe of unpublished authors.

This was one of the more professional signs at Seattle Bookfest

I made one circuit of the venue, checking out all the vendor tables, and then left. I bought one book., I didn’t think the event was that interesting.

So, to whoever is running Seattle Bookfest, here are my suggestions on what you can do differently:

First, plan ahead on the promotion. Announcing the festival only three months before opening hurt publicity tons. Not enough time for authors and publishers and bookstores to really get on board. The programming wasn’t announced until a couple of weeks ago. Start the promotion early, say January. Pushing the event through the Times and P-I and a couple of local bookstores isn’t enough. Their audiences are aging and dwindling. Start a blog and use it, and not just for ads and announcements. Get some authors and vendors to write posts that are near and dear to their hearts. Talk to the folks at Capitol Hill Seattle, West Seattle Blog, etc and get them excited about the event. Get flyers up around town. I know here were some out there this time, but I never saw any of them. Maybe even splurge for a billboard or two or bus advertisements. Get Columbia City businesses to put it on their marquees.

Second, improve logistics. If you use the Columbia City Event Center again, get some signs up with directions. Figure out some better options for parking. The signs at the event itself should look better than high school pep rally butcher paper signs. Consider holding the event earlier in the year. Then the asphalt play lot can be used for the event too (put up some tents/awnings). That would also put something outside instead of the empty expanse that made everything look dead. Create a program flyer to hand out at the entrance. Have a display (such as a whiteboard) up with the days programming so folks can see what’s happening without looking at small 8″x11″ sheets tacked on the door of each panel room.

Third, theme your event and make the programming exciting. Something un-bland. Make some of the panels discuss controversial topics. The most controversial topic at this Bookfest was Is Seattle hostile to literary innovation?. Mostly because, if the premise is that it is hostile, it insults the very people you are trying to get to go to the festival. (If the premise is the opposite, then it’s back-patting and boring.) There’s a whole wealth of more provocative and interesting topics. Get a local comedian (think Yoram Bauman, Seattle’s standup economist) to MC the main panel room instead of a frumpy bookseller. For author readings, get people to read who haven’t been pushing their book all over town the last few months. Have some authors read previously unpublished works, works in progress, or stuff that’s been written specifically for Bookfest. Have an exclusive work printed in the program, something that people will have to wait six months to see in print in Ye Olde Literary Quarterly. Get the Salon of Shame to do an event. Have a Poet-Off between all the poetry presses set up as vendors. Start some sort of small annual literary award to be announced/presented at the Bookfest. Whatever! Something exciting, new, that can’t be had at every book store in Seattle all year round.

Fourth, get the vendors to spruce up their tables. The Columbia City Event center has an advantage in this regard over the Seahawk stadium event center, a Magnuson Park hangar, or the Convention Center. The Columbia City Event Center has small rooms that wall off sounds! This is awesome because the 3 or 4 vendors in each room can trade off doing things that make some noise without interfering with vendors in other rooms. Scott Westerfeld’s presentation for Leviathan (not at Bookfest though) was awesome because he had a slideshow of artwork for the book. Small presses can easily do stuff like that. The Scrabble guys sorta had the right idea, but they could do better even. Have a beat the champion get a prize thing. Put up a giant refrigerator magnet-like word thingy. Anything but have people sitting behind card tables with books laid out over them, never talking to people unless they accidentally make eye contact.

All of these things can be done without a ton of money and without giant sized commitments from national publishers. Not all of my suggestions individually are great ideas. I’m mostly trying to illustrate the basic themes. I realize that this was the first time the event was held. You got the basics under your belt, now make it something special. Please. I’m dying to have a literary festival I can love.

Image Welcome to the Northwest by Daniel Spils used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Kim Stanley Robinson, a pre-eminent science fiction writer, recently editorialized in New Scientist that the Booker Prize doesn’t consider science fiction to the extent that it should. The Booker administrators, to their credit, didn’t respond with the twaddle that science fiction can’t be literary. Instead, they put the blame on publishers for nominating books other than science fiction.

Some people don’t want science fiction considered at all.

Genres have built-in audiences; it’s hard enough to draw attention to lit fic without naysayers saying it doesn’t deserve the attention. … If science fiction, or chick lit, or religious fiction, or whatever is important to you, advocate for an award or support the ones already out there- like the Nebula, the Hugo, the Sami Rohr Prize, and others. But let us lit fic nerds have our Booker Prize.

Mind you, I might be a little sympathetic to this argument if it weren’t for the fact that the awards and promotion given to literary fiction didn’t already dwarf that given to genre awards.

Results on searching Google News for various awards covering mentions within the last month:

• Results 1 – 10 of about 39 for pen-faulkner.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 466 for booker-prize.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 33 for pulitzer-prize for-fiction.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 107 for Prix-Goncourt.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 239 for national-book-award.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 169 for nobel-prize for-literature.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 18 for hugo-award
• Results 1 – 4 of about 4 for Nebula-award.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 21 for world-fantasy-award.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 30 for Edgar-award.
• Results 1 – 3 of about 3 for hammett-prize.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 13 for gold-dagger.
• Results 1 – 2 of about 2 for anthony-award.

Notice anything there? See any literary prizes not getting their comparative due? Me neither.

Here’s the other thing: science fiction quite often is literary. Let me repeat this. Science fiction is often literary. So long as the definition of literary (which is extremely fuzzy to begin with) doesn’t include not science fiction, at least. Take a look at books that have been ensconced in the recent literary canon: George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and dozens of others. All science fiction.

Never mind the repeated defense of such works: But those are good! (or the less often stated but equally misguided But those are literary!) The Venn diagram below should explain this quite adequately.

On an odd note, it does appear that to be considered literary, science fiction books for the most part have to be written by authors who disclaim their science fiction nature. So, to all the science fiction authors out there who want to be considered for the prestigious literary prizes: lie! My book has no superheroes in it whatsoever! I don’t write fantasy! I write about dreams! Apparently this is good enough to fake out the judges. Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem need not follow this advice apparently.

Readers will notice that Rat’s Reading has quite the eclectic reading material (despite someone nominating this blog as a Science Fiction blog for Book Blogger Apprecation Week). I try to make my reading material pretty diverse within the constraints of time. Why get pigeonholed? When someone does that, they just miss out on good material.

And that’s the crux of the issue for the Booker, the Pulitzer, or other folks who just won’t read science fiction. They deny themselves really good literature. If that’s your wont, by all means have at it. If your award consistently misses out on good literature, eventually people will stop caring about your award. Or at least I will.