Something is amiss at the RH paperback design department.

[N.B. The images in this post will likely not be aligned in any sort of pleasing fashion. Sorry in advance.]

I first noticed this back in January but was reminded today with the arrival of Jim Lynch's Border Songs in paperback. Here's the hardcover jacket, followed by the paperback cover:





I know, right? We've got Crazy Seraphim Glob, and...cow. Cow crossing nondescript highway.

Some others, all from Random House, all evocative hardcover above, generic paperback below:







Srsly. What is going on in the Random House paperback design department? These are from two different imprints (Vintage & Anchor), so the problem is spreading. And Vintage puts out some gorgeous classic reprints (cf. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, or the recent line of Nabokov reissues [link goes to my fave, Pale Fire]). Shouldn't they know better? All of these seem to be repackaging the titles downward, from Literary Fiction to quasi-literary book club territory. I seem to recall Cutting for Stone being a Times bestseller in hardcover, though. It's fascinating to me how this works, or attempts to work; without changing the text of a title, you can change the audience.

Two more, non-Random House examples (they're just the worst offenders), the first from Grove/Atlantic (admittedly, the hardcover is no great shakes either), the second--and definitely the most awful downgrade--from Simon & Schuster:

Hat trick!

What I've actually been reading, while pondering the problem of imitation and fretting about my bookstore moves:

Hard at work on my boyfriend-bestowed summer assignment (unlike, as I'm proud to point out, his other "students"), I've read The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg (John Baxter) and up-until-the-Dietrich-Sternberg-split in Blue Angel, a Dietrich biography by Donald Spoto. Waiting on reading a tome about the sadomasochistic aesthetic in their films until I've actually seen them all--Dishonored is coming on VHS from the NYPL, but darned if I can find Shanghai Express anywhere (OK, at the two library systems and the independent video store I've tried). I've got the paper structure outlined in my head--will probably subject you to excerpts here. But first, I've got an actually-paying article to write for my alma mater's alumni mag, The College. (Read my article on the philosophical implications of Facebook here!)

And I'm now on Book 3 of the Georgia Nicoloson series, and still finding it a hoot and a half. I once again made the mistake of looking at the Goodreads reviews (NOTE TO SELF: the only comments that don't angry up your blood are those at the Comics Curmudgeon. The rest of the Internet is dead to you). There were a lot of complaints that Georgia was shallow and mean. Uh, yes? That's the point? A. She's a fourteen-year-old girl, and they are the most judgmental and terrifying creatures on the planet. B. We can see her better than she sees herself--we know that her parents aren't horrible, that her constant school shenanigans are beyond childish, that dating the boy you can't talk to is Bad News (but a mistake we all make). The self-revealing narrator, particularly in a humorous context, goes back to, I don't know, Don Quixote? Even though that's not first person. Lighten up, folks.

On the problem of imitation.

I recently finished the first installment in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, The Lightning Thief, and I liked it. I was a kid who checked out D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths from my elementary school library as often as they'd let me, and I wore out my folks' old copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology further until I got my own copy--both books are important enough to me that I packed them in the two (OK, two and a half) boxes I limited myself to in moving to Brooklyn. So yeah, I loved the creative reimagining of ancient standbys: think my favorite was the "EZ Death" line in Hades. And Mt. Olympus having relocated to the 600th floor of the Empire State Building. (Though I found the explanation that "the gods move to the keepers of Western civilization, and that's America!" a bit over-the-top. And I'm pretty "USA! USA!")

But I couldn't give myself over to the book entirely, as I might have when I was ten or so, because my brain kept noting "Lord, what a Harry Potter ripoff." Kid leads a mostly normal life, discovers he's special, discovers secrets about his parentage, goes to special school for specialness, acquires a smart girl sidekick and goofy guy sidekick who's braver than he appears, discovers he's specialer than all the other specials...yes, a lot of this has been kid-lit standards for a long time, from plucky-orphan-makes-good days, but so much of the book is just straight-up HP echo. Even down to the fast-reading, likeable writing style.

And I'm not sure what to do with this. I mean, I honestly liked the book; it was fun despite being derivative. Is derivative always a bad thing? What if the source material is great, and it's well imitated? I remember responding to a friend who thought all early Lemonheads songs sounded the same, "Well, yes, but I like their one song, so I like all their songs." Is originality necessary for a good story? Part of me says no: there are only a few stories, that we've been telling since we harnessed fire; what keeps me in awe of mankind despite our propensity for cruelty and horror is our ability to keep retelling these stories, that are always old and always new. But then part of me reading Lightning Thief couldn't stop inwardly rolling my eyes: "Oh, Chiron the centaur is Dumbledore, obvs."

Is it just a question of time, and marketing? I also think of Justin Cronin's The Passage, which I (apparently alone among booksellers) just couldn't get into (I found the prose hopelessly leaden, the characters ill-sketched. And it's a flippin' vampire apocalypse novel--takes a lot to make me put one of those down!). I feel so much like it's a cynical ploy on the author's part, since vampires are "so hot right now"; his two previous books have been standard Iowa Writers' Workshop grad fare (there needs to be a word for this. IWW-lit?): still suffering from a fear of modifiers and multi-clause sentences. To my taste, there's no playfulness in this work. No realization and expansion of the possibilities of language and narrative. An embarrassment at the necessity of emotion, a maleness consisting of the worst stereotypes. It just sits there on the page and begs you to take it seriously.

Maybe, in fact, marketing is the central tenet of this problem. I don't get as upset about advertising as a lot of folks in my general demographic: sometimes I think, really, it's a form of public art, and fodder for discussion. (I do, however, rail at sexism in TV commercials. Every time I watch TV. I'm glad the boyfriend thinks it's cute.) But there is a bandwagon effect that worries me, because there's a desperation to it. I thought Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was great, a cultural mash-up that was funny and fresh and self-aware. (Aside: Clive Owen is the only choice to play Mr. Darcy in the movie. Only he can pull off the action star and the period piece. If he's not in it, I'm not watchin' it.) And Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters was great too--I actually liked it even better, because it was so damn weird. But, but, but. Now there's a fleet of imitations: Jane Slayre, Android Karenina, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Undead. I understand the want to get some of that sweet, sweet mash-up money. The publishers need it, and without them, no books for me to read or sell. Still, it's like hearing the one about the Irishman forgetting his wheelchair at the pub (oops, should that have had a spoiler alert?) for the nth time: it's funny, but it's really the memory of hearing it for the first time that's funny.

I know this is a ramble, and I'm not getting anywhere. I'll just end with this question, and hope for your thoughts: is liking a book enough to call it "good"?

KITTY!

On Tuesdays I play D&D in the offices of Vertical, Inc., a publisher specializing in translated Japanese fiction and manga. (And yes, I realize that the geek force emanating from that sentence could power a small city.) So I've been lucky enough to discover Chi's Sweet Home, an impossibly kawaii manga about the life and times of a grey tabby kitten, available in English (translated by my fellow adventurer Ed Chavez!) and full color as of yesterday. Either you read that and think, "How could you write a whole comic book about a kitten? Snoozers" or (like me) "HOLY SHIT!!! A comic book about a kitten!!!! SIGN ME UP!!" It's dead adorable, is what I'm saying. And in one of those things about Japan that just makes you cock your head to one side and say "huh," it's actually serialized there in the premiere manga magazine for adult men. Yup. If your dad were Japanese, he'd be reading kitten adventures on the subway.

Scary stuff, kids!

There comes a time when even the YAP break isn't a far enough retreat from the exigencies of adult reality. Yesterday was such a day: I read two middle-grade ghost stories by the absolute mistress of the genre, Mary Downing Hahn. Started with September's upcoming The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall, which very much echoed The Secret Garden, but with a vengeful spirit bent on murder. And in the dark, I read 2008's All the Lovely Bad Ones, which managed to hit my scare spots--knocking, half-heard whispers, that feeling you sometimes get of a presence where none should be--OK, I'm going to stop that, despite the sunshine. I felt both stories got less frightening once the ghosts manifested in human form, but that's really my only complaint. I remember having the crud scared out of me by Wait Till Helen Comes in my youth, and it warms my heart that the Kids Today (with their Twitter and their Justin Biebers and their I-don't-know-what) still love and consume simple tales of hauntings.

Well lookit that, a regular update.

And I've been getting up around 9 every day, and I've done an hour of yoga for the past four days. Crazy times, folks, crazy times.

LOVED Angus, etc. So many ways a book can be great: this one's all voice, immediately engaging, funny, and unique. Going to have to read the other nine in the series now. Also, will try to use the term "nuddy-pants" as often as possible.

Been a busy reading week: again with the crazy times, my stack o' to-be-reads is perilously low. (I do have a few Dietrich tomes to read, but besides a biography which I'll probably hit next, I'm waiting till I've watched all the flicks, so's I know what's being talked about.) Snapped up a galley of Julia Wertz's upcoming Drinking at the Movies (from Random House! Good on her!); she's the pen behind the immensely amusing not-quite-a-webcomic The Fart Party--this book's about her recent move to Brooklyn (she's currently in Greenpoint, even). How v., v. timely!

& I read an upcoming book of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, having never sampled her (except I think she had a tale in the Gaiman-edited Stories). Book's called Sourland, and really? Ehn. She's got a way with a sentence fragment, but if I want to read pages and pages about widowhood, sexual assault, and unbelievable dialogue, I'll read Thomas Hardy and also get long descriptions of the barren moors. Barren moors FTW!

And right now I'm reading the last non-filmy book on my stack (hoping to remedy that with a trip to the library this afternoon), The Radleys, by Matt Haig, whose previous novels The Labrador Pact and The Possession of Mr. Cave garnered great reviews from yours truly. This one's, surprisingly, a vampire novel, albeit about a family of "abstainers," who have rather a more miserable time of it than the Cullens. It touches on a lot of his previous themes, though: he's very interested in the unraveling of familial bonds, particularly the failures of fathers. And he can write, though the exceptionally short chapters in this one take some getting used to.

Of note, all too briefly.

The single awesomest-sauce book I've read in the past (sigh) six weeks? China Mieville's Kraken, which starts off with the disappearance of a specimen giant squid and unravels (over one momentous page turn) into enough crazily inventive shit for a dozen-novel series. A supervillain condemned to life as a sentient tattoo; a teleporting mage/Star Trek nerd whose spells (unnecessarily) duplicate the look and sound of the Enterprise's transporters; dueling apocalypses, including one hailed by an unexpectedly fearsome ferret cult. Next Tuesday, all!

Other than that, a lot of what I've read recently has been pretty meh. Exceptions: Emily St. John Mandel's Last Night in Montreal, a new biography of Catherine of Siena (my confirmation saint) by Don Brophy, Kevin Cannon's graphic punch-em-up adventure Far Arden, Terry Pratchett's wonderful middle-grade Discworld novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. And I've just started Louise Rennison's "Confessions of Georgia Nicolson" series (first title in a long string of great titles: Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging). V. much a teenage Bridget Jones, which I love. To this day (as in the last sentence) I use/overuse Ms. Jones' "v." abbreviation, one of only two lasting effects a book's had on my spelling--the other is using "uhm" instead of "um," from Peter Hedges' What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

I've a summer assignment from my boyfriend (you'd think this would be a long story, but I just asked) wherein I'm to write a 15-page paper on a film subgenre of my choice; I've chosen the seven films Marlene Dietrich made with Josef von Sternberg in the early 30s. This will mostly entail, you know, watching the movies, but I'm also doing some reading on the subject (so far, Carole Zucker's just-OK The Idea of the Image), interesting so far mostly because I've read very little film criticism, and considerations like length of shot and lighting rarely enter into my thinking. And isn't world-expanding what a good relationship is all about?

Two disappointing reads I'd like to mention. First, this year's Nebula winner The Wind-up Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. There was some good stuff in there, like the titular genetically engineered disposable person, Emiko, who moves like she's always in a strobe light so she can't pass for a "real" human being; and the similarly lab-created "cheshires," chameleon cats who've surplanted their less changeable counterparts. But all the OMG GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FOOD WILL DESTROY THE WORLD (& ALSO IMPERIALISM BOO!) felt woefully on-the-nose, particularly in the dialogue. Maybe I just find political sci-fi boring?

And last night I finished Patrick Ness's YA-dystopic (I know, I should have loved it, right?) The Knife of Never Letting Go, which I've been meaning to read for ages. It had, again, a great setup, the coming of age of a boy on a planet where the thoughts of men can be heard by all and animals (including his totally adorable dog) talk, though they talk like animals, mostly concerned with food and safety. But there are too many chase scenes, and too many BELIEVE IN YOURSELF speeches, and (mouse over for big ol' spoiler). Too, it's the first of a trilogy, and it ends with no closure whatsoever, just a giant cliffhanger--I think there's more to the writing of sequential novels than chopping up one big story into several books. Each entry in the series should have some satisfaction in itself. (Yeah, maybe I'm a hypocrite because I just found the equally NO WHAT HAPPENS ending of Connie Willis' Blackout more exciting than maddening. But I love Connie Willis, so there.)