Interconnected book blogging

My posting of my Case Histories review at the Metaxucafe "litblog network" (the quotes are because I can’t think of myself as being a "litblogger", sounds too important) has resulted in a comment from David Thayer, who says: "Maxine, if your found CASE HISTORIES disappointing at the end ONE GOOD TURN may disappoint sooner. There is plenty of marvelous prose, some great scenes but not much narrative drive."

And wouldn’t you know, a review of One Good Turn has just popped up — on The Millions blog.  "Where Case Histories was dark and brooding, ………One Good Turn is antic and madcap", writes C. Max Magee. I’ve already put One Good Turn on my Christmas list and sent said list off up the chimney to Santa Claus (sorry, Debra),  I can’t do a product recall, so I’ll just have to grin and enjoy the "confection" if it appears under the tree.

While on the topic of Metaxucafe, by the way, the best comment on the tedious OJ book saga is there, by the irrepressible Steve of Sand Storm, whose laconic yet spot-on humour is often to be found in blog comments wherever you go . Thanks for the smile, Steve.

Kimbofo at Reading Matters reviews Christine Falls and gives it 4 stars. She writes of author Benjamin Black (aka John Banville): "he has toned down his usual feats of literary flamboyance: the writing is very immediate and easy to comprehend, so there’s no need to keep a dictionary at hand." (I’ve just discovered that Kimbofo has another blog, Kimbofo, whose template is the very same black template that I applied to Petrona for about 24 hours, until I was forced by reader demand to return to white. I can therefore pop over to Kimbofo every now and again when I am feeling nostalgic — and those of you who missed Petrona in black can see what you are missing by visiting there too.)

One thing about this lovely big type is that it makes posts very long, so I will stop here and return later to write more in another post if I have the time and energy before I fall asleep.

Design dithering

Thanks to everyone who commented during the 24-hour period in which Petrona was black (Clare, you made your comment after I’d switched back, your eyes weren’t deceiving you). As this move was overwhelmingly unpopular, I’ve customised the design a bit by upgrading into a sort of "nervous nellie" Typepad user — not a basic user and not a "pro", but somewhere in the middle, for a "somewhere in the middle" price.

Susan Barr and I can’t read Typepad’s "medium" font size, so I have set the current design’s default at "large".

Please let me know what you think. I am no designer, but have tried to achieve a readable, clear look.

For those who like dark backgrounds, you can see what you think of greeny turquoise at Loopholes of Retreat, or of blue at the Refreshing Tree.

Cool biologists

I like this post "Juicy back stories on famous biologists"  at a blog that’s new to me but which I think is called Neatorama.

"In most textbooks it seems like scientists just waltz into their labs, fiddle around for a bit, then wait for the Nobel Committee to call. Sadly, the road to discovery is rarely that simple, and speed bumps pop up constantly. Call it historical context or call it dirt; there’s always more to the story."

Featured biologists are Mendel ("Give peas a chance", groan), Darwin, Rosalind Franklin, Albert Hofmann and Leonard Hayflick (father of "biogerontology", the study of how cells age).

From Petrona Noir to Swedish Noir

Thanks to Norm alias Uriah Robinson of Crime Scraps, I have just finished Roseanna, the first of the Martin Beck series of books by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, written in 1965. The book is readable and compelling. A murdered girl’s body is dredged up from a canal at the start of the book. Over the ensuing year or more, policeman Martin Beck and his colleagues tenaciously investigate until the girl’s identity, and then that of her killer, are found. The book is spare and focused, and utterly compelling in an unglamorous, uncompromising way.

I’ve read a great deal of crime fiction in my time, and although the "mystery" element is almost absent in this book, I found it completely absorbing. Beck is unromantic but realistic, both in his personal/family life and in his work. It is also educational to be reminded what it was like for us before straightforward international phone calls, faxing, emailing and the internet.

Highly recommended — and as Norm predicted, I’ll now have to read the next nine books in the series (one of which, The Locked Room, is reviewed at Crime Scraps). Norm has also written a succinct analysis of all ten books here.

Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum and Lisa Marklund are all superb present-day Swedish crime-fiction authors who write in the tradition established by Sjowall and Wahloo — plot-driven books that convey plenty of sociopolitical comment along the way. For me, the combination of police procedural with "placeism" — the details of everyday life that create an authentic and true voice  — is what makes reading all these authors such a rewarding experience.

The edition of Roseanna I read is published by Harper Perennial. This edition has an excellent introduction by Henning Mankell (author of the Wallender series) about his love of the Sjowall/Wahloo books; and at the end are interviews with the authors and another analysis of the books, as well as a list of all the books in the series, all for £6.99. I was very impressed and wish that one found these additional items in books more often, to provide context for interested readers.

As clear as black

I’ve applied a new design to Petrona, partly because I find these Typepad white backgrounds hard to read and partly in response to this comment from Shameless.

Please let me know what you think — is this more legible? Are the links clearer?

If you are a ‘basic’ Typepad user like me, the design options for your blog are limited, unless you pay them more money each month. My current design options are more limited than the free service offered by Google’s Blogger Beta, which is ironic as I moved over here from Google in the first place to be able to "tag". Now you can do more on Google than you can on Typepad where you have to pay.

Oh well, I’m assured by a lovely Typepad expert I happen to know that Typepad will upgrade fairly soon. Hope so.

Metaxucafe and brainiads

From an email I received yesterday evening:

"MetaxuCafe announces the launch of brainiads, an ad network for culturally
oriented Websites.

Brainiads emerged from three blogger’s [sic] dissatisfaction with many of the
current options for placing ads on our sites. We want to earn money for all
the effort we put into our writing, but we want to do it on our own terms.
Our focus at brainiads is on aesthetics and personal attention. We want ads
that are complimentary and unobtrusive and we want only to deal with
advertisers that we think are relevant to our collective readership.

Brainiads also acts as a firewall between you and advertisers, eliminating
any conflicts of interests you may feel arise about writing about products
like books or music. We at brainiads are bloggers ourselves and believe we
understand your concerns and wishes and we want to represent you so you can
concentrate on your site’s content and not worry about business details.

Please stop by the brianiads site ( http://brainiads.com ) for more
information. We have 26 sites as of today and will be capping membership at
various levels, so join up as soon as you can.

While we’ve been talking to potential advertisers for some time we expect it
to take a few months to get a critical mass of ads on our sites. Don’t let
that stop you from signing up, though. The stronger the network, the more
attractive we will be to the high-caliber advertisers we are targeting.

Join up and be a brainiad today: http://brainiads.com

Bud Parr,
MetaxuCafe
Chekhov’s Mistress

Max Magee,
The Millions (a blog about books)

Scott Esposito,
Conversational Reading"

Metaxucafe (or "meataxe" as spell-checker would have it) is a network for literary blogs and bloggers. Here is its mission statement:

"MetaxuCafé is devoted to highlighting the best content from the community of bloggers who write about books. We serve both the writers and readers and intend to drive traffic to member’s sites and create context around and give permanence to their original writing."

I can recommend joining if you have a relevant blog and haven’t already joined. I’m not sure I will be applying to brainiads, not out of principle but because putting ads on my site is not a high priority among my many other priorities — I calculate I would make a dollar in about 50 years.

Staggering around and about

I’m flagging tonight, so will just feebly (lazily) link to a few posts that I’ve enjoyed, around and about.

It’s a Crime! (not to be confused with CrimeFicReader’s blog It’s a Crime…or a mystery!) is a crime fiction blog by "Karen down under" a.k.a. "Karen C" (i.e. not Karen M from Eurocrime).

With me so far? Well, Giles Blunt has a new book out in his John Cardinal series called The Fields of Grief, which Karen C reviews here. Can’t wait – it is an excellent series, of which this latest installment is book 3. However, for regular readers there is a big shock at the beginning of the review. I suspect that it would be impossible to review this book without giving away this event, so you’ll probably read it in other places too, but don’t say you weren’t warned.

While I am at Karen C’s blog, she’s also reviewed a promising debut novel called The Walker, by Jane Goodall. It seems to have nothing to do with chimpanzees and everything to do with being a good crime-fiction read, having won the Ned Kelly award for Best Crime Novel.

I love these two Scott Adams posts, Welcome to the Club (women are off the protected list) and Atheists, the new Gays (when Bill Gates will be president). They are such miniatures of layered perfection that I can’t do justice to them by encapsulating a quote from either: do go and read them.

While we are on humour, does anyone know how parts of a spaceship can have got into a kitchen in Aberdeen, or "more worryingly", why? Suggestions are desperately required by a confused Pundy.

Lynne Scanlon provides a truly terrifying Christmas book list.

And here is a less terrifying list: all the e-books that have been entered into Paperback Writer’s challenge. They are all free, and include works by blogger supremos Bill Liversidge (Pundy), Carla Nayland, Bill Peschel and PBW herself, Lynn Viehl.

Finally, is Frank going to review Christine Falls? Or have I missed it? (Link features a lovely picture.)

That’s all I’ve got energy for tonight, will hope to be back on better form tomorrow.

Order of the Phoenix movie

Link: bookshelves of doom: A few HP5 links..

Bookshelves of Doom links to the official website of the new Harry Potter movie (book 5) and to the trailers.

As usual the UK press is full of articles about Daniel Radcliffe — " is he too old to play Harry?" , they ask, as they have done for each movie.

Answer: no. Harry is a year older with each book. I don’t know how old Daniel Radcliffe now is compared with Harry Potter’s age in book 5 (15 or 16 if memory serves) but he can’t be out by more than a few years.

When I was younger, children in movies were often played by adults — can anyone remember the boy in the Lionel Jeffries/Jenny Agutter version of the Railway Children?

Power to the people

Link: info NeoGnostic: Two new sites.

Chris at info NeoGnostic, who doesn’t seem to have posted for a while (although that could just be Bloglines) writes about the Open Rights Group. He adds: "They also have a blog, which pointed me to website I never expected to visit, let alone recommend(!) – 10 Downing Street. It has a new petition site that mySociety has built for it, which allows anyone to set up a petition and collect signatures."

Two petitions that Chris found there are one to scrap the proposed introduction of identity cards; and another to allow an exception to copyright law to give individuals the right to create a private copy for their own personal use. But there are 238 petitions there, so plenty to vote for or against.

Gift books and bestsellers

In the Saturday Books supplement (18 November), The Times gets going on its recommendations for gift books for the upcoming holiday season, a.k.a. Christmas for the unreconstructed. As the blogs have already been doing this for a while now, including my fairly regular recommendations on Petrona (here’s a link to my most recent selection), I won’t highlight The Times’ selections here. (But if you want to check them out, here is a link to their fiction suggestions, and from there you can navigate to other book category recommendations.)

Apologies for the preamble — what I am going to mention here are the UK fiction "bestsellers" for 2006, and then highlight a few from last week. For 2006 (not clear whether they mean "so far" or Nov 05 to Nov 06), the top five paperbacks are:

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (826,343)
"Centuries-spanning grail adventure endorsed by Richard and Judy pips Dan Brown to the top spot."
Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (566,446)
"Whole forests have been felled to feed our continuing obsession with this book."
The Island by Victoria Hislop (543,966)
"War, lepers and family secrets in Crete."
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (541,678)
Harvard symbologist on the trail of an ancient, murderous brotherhood."
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (516,722)
"Refugees discover their past."

Of course, this isn’t the first year that the Dan Browns have been on sale. And for some reason the Times does not mention that Hislop’s The Island was also a Richard&Judy selection. Although "Tractors" wasn’t, it was one of the BBC’s equivalents (Page Turners) and won the Richard&Judy- sponsored newcomer category of the British Book Awards earlier this year. John Self of Waterstones here describes why he chose this book for one of the shop’s "3 for 2" offers.

Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand, it seems.

Finally, from last week’s bestseller lists (top sellers for the week ending 11 November), a few entries:

1. Guinness World Records (42,858)

5. That Extra Half Inch (26,475) (I’m speechless– it is "by" Victoria Beckham – who is buying it?)

6. The Devil Wears Prada (23,254) (Lauren Weisberger, first fiction entry)

20. The End (12,045) (Lemony Snicket’s "Series of Unfortunate Events" 13)

25. Lisey’s Story (10,268) (Stephen King)

46. The God Delusion (7,732) (Richard Dawkins)

47. Disney’s Princesses Annual (7,547)

The independent booksellers also have a top 10 listing, but don’t provide quantities sold.

1. The Dangerous Book for Boys (21 on the mainstream chart)

2. Why don’t Penguin’s Feet Freeze? (3) (New Scientist magazine’s follow-up to last year’s surprise top seller, Does Anything Eat Wasps?)

3. The God Delusion (46)