books

Wednesday various

  • There’s an interesting — albeit pretty spoiler-filled — post on gossip and character in the writing of Stephen King over at Fantasy Magazine‘s blog.

  • I can’t say I’m surprised the centerpiece of the George W. Bush Library will be a handgun…

  • New Zealand has some weird ideas about advertising. First, there were New Zealand Air flight attendants and pilots in nothing but body paint, and now a bleeding billboard to promote traffic safety.

  • Toonlet seems like a neat idea, but I’m not so sure about the “you hereby grant to Toonlet a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty free, worldwide license” clause in their terms of service. [via]

  • And finally — “It’s made of pure plotdevicinum.” I really enjoyed this Bad Transcript of Star Trek, more so than the actual film, I think. [via]

Losing one’s sense of shelf

“Ruined? They’re fine, sitting right there on the shelf.” – James M. Cain

It’s often argued that a movie adaptation, however awful, doesn’t do anything to the original book. But what about to its sales? Mike Sterling reports on a recent drop-off in the Watchmen trade paperback sales:

Oh God, I hope you’re the only person calling it that. Anyway, Tom’s referring to my constant experience with comics sales as tied to their movie tie-ins…in particular, that if there’s a sales bump, it’s almost always before the film’s release, to be followed by a paucity of sales following the release. In my case, Watchmen, formerly a consistent seller, peaked prior to the film coming out, and then stopped selling at all since then.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Other bookstores carrying the book (though it doesn’t look like they’re selling any either), interest dropped off after overexposure in mass media, the local potential audience is saturated, or whatever, and it takes time for demand to build up again. And I’ve been in contact with stores in other parts of the country where Watchmen is still selling, so maybe it simply varies region by region.

I don’t have numbers or even chart rankings right in front of me, unfortunately…the “archive” section of Diamond’s website doesn’t seem to be working at the moment…but for May 2009, the Watchmen TP is near the bottom of the Top 300 Graphic Novels sales list. Again, it’s probably just oversaturation…a ton of copies entered the marketplace over the last few months…so a dip in orders is to be expected. If things are still the same in a year or so, and we still haven’t moved many copies, then that may be a point where worry should set in a bit.

Has bad publicity on the film — it received mixed critical reviews, even from fans, and was overall a box-office disappointment — hurt the original book? It would be interesting to take a look at unsuccessful movie adaptations and their subsequent effect, if any, on book sales. I suspect there are a lot of factors to consider, like the age of the book and how well it was selling beforehand, as well as the many factors Sterling mentions above. Maybe successful adaptations result in a similar drop-off. Maybe there is no correlation at all. But it would be interesting to see some actual figures.

What I’m reading

I just started The Gathering by Anne Enright this morning on the train, and so far I’m enjoying it. In particular, I really liked this passage:

There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.

The Perils of Picoult

There’s an interesting profile of author Jodi Picoult in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine — albeit one focused more on the type of books she writes than on the author herself, and one in which Picoult emerges as sometimes almost strangely non-present even when the focus of the piece switches back to the biographical:

Asked at the time to recall her adolescence, she found herself agreeing with the idea that the things we remember from those years are often the most vivid occasions of melancholy and humiliation. Picoult can summon up the memory of having her fingers smashed into a locker by a hallway bully but little else of her younger life in any great detail, she told me.

It must be said, I have never read any of Picoult’s books, and I was only vaguely familiar with her name before I saw the trailer for My Sister’s Keeper. But, as the Times notes, she “has found enormous commercial success as the most visible and dedicated practitioner of a subcategory of contemporary genre fiction that might best be described as the literature of children in peril.”

Or, as Michael Schaub of Bookslut puts it, “Jodi Picoult wants you to know your child is probably dying right now.”

From the trailer for the film, and my basic understanding of the plot — “Anna Fitzgerald looks to earn medical emancipation from her parents who until now have relied on their youngest child to help their leukemia-stricken daughter Kate remain alive,” says the IMDB — that definitely seems to be the case. More than anything, the basic story seems to force one into taking an ethical stand on something that is unlikely and contrived, spelled out in what the Times calls “tidy ironies and florid prose.” Well yes, I do think raising a daughter solely as donor stock for her older, cancer-stricken sibling is probably a bad thing. Morally dubious at the least. So thank you for telling that me I’m right in thinking so. If anything like that should ever actually, you know, happen, I’ll be sure to know that it’s a very bad thing.

However, as the Times points out, “[w]hile Picoult’s notion of what constitutes domestic incident may stretch ideas of plausibility, it rests on a level of forensic detail that requires wide-ranging research.”

Which makes me wonder: if the story wasn’t set in the real world, would its being unrealistic bug me? If Picoult’s novels were, that is, science fiction, would suspension of disbelief take me the distance I need to go in order not to smirk at their implausibility? Isn’t this the “what if?” we expect, or even demand, from genre fiction — this extrapolation of real-world ideas and research that takes us beyond the possible and to the extremes, in order to see just where those extremes lie? Science fiction is by no means exempt from the requirements of believability, but there’s a big difference between asking readers to imagine a “what if” scenario (and the ethical quandries such a scenario implies) and asking them to believe that it does exist, in the here and now, and ooh, isn’t that scary?

And yet Picoult isn’t envisioning a near future in which genetic planning is commonplace; she isn’t writing science fiction. As the Times notes:

Tellingly, Picoult does not see herself as a genre writer but rather as a purveyor of social commentary (as if the categories were mutually exclusive) and of what we might call service fiction. “Maybe the average reader is not facing the daily challenges­ of a mom whose child is dying of cancer, for example, but she probably had an argument with her teenager that morning about something inconsequential that left her feeling frustrated and certain there’s no middle ground between them,” she told me. Picoult said she hoped in some sense that her books were the way to that middle ground.

We shall see. I don’t expect to run out and read the book anytime soon, but it does look like I’ll be dragged into seeing the movie this weekend. Neither looks especially bad — despite some pretty mixed reviews of the book and the Times‘ warning that the ending is “so insistent in its shock value that it may inspire the reader to deposit the book under the wheels of a minivan.” — but clearly I have some reservations.