Package, re-package, satiate the need
Book Notes often wonders how stupid publishers think we are. Then we see illustrated copies of The Da Vinci Code on all our shelves or Jordan's second autobiography topping the charts and it all becomes clear – they think we're as bloody stupid as they are lazy.
Every time we see the arrival of a new seemingly foolhardy scheme, we laugh at the marketer's sheer gall. And then you, the guileless public, lap up the new wheeze without protest and Book Notes is left scratching his head, bemused. Harry Potter with an adult-friendly cover? Bring it on! Boxed set collections of books you already own? Yes please!
2006 is to be the year of selling you something you didn't know you wanted. All of Jane Austen's books are being reissued with new glossy covers of the fluorescent type that signifies chick-lit. Still the same books, mind you, but now no longer boring. The royalties on long-dead authors are nil so the publishers figure you'll drop all sensibility and subvert your prejudices against the classics like Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. As long as the books look like they have been written by Bridget Jones. Reader, you have been underestimated. Penguin has also jumped on the same train as it pulls into cheap scheme station with their Penguin Reds collection. Your favourites like Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby, not with amended text or literary extras but all with new covers. Most of us can rediscover the books that warmed our childhoods by taking well-thumbed copies from our own shelves. Book Notes likes the old, familiar Penguin covers – orange for classic, green for mystery, broken spine for easy reading.
March 02, World Book Day
World Book Day is back and due to be celebrated on 2 March. The focus this year, as before, is to be on getting children back to reading, with most events centred on schools and libraries. Many are holding sponsored "readathons" with children encouraged to attend classes dressed as their favourite literary characters. We're expecting a lot of bespectacled Harry Potters around town that afternoon. Vouchers for €1.50 are available to all children via schools, redeemable against six similarly priced books or in part-payment against other titles. There are also promises of live fairy-tale stories on Grafton Street on 2 March – details at worldbookday.com. Events for adults are disappointingly conspicuous by their absence – barring suggestions to start your own book club, there is little to imitate last year's innovative "recommend a book" postcard campaign. Have they given up on the over 12s? Are we adults irredeemable?
To Make the Mockingbird Sing
Noticed a trend for revisiting old literary friends during the week? No sooner had we heard that we were going to revisit Paula Spencer from The Woman Who Walked Into Doors in September, than we found ourselves back with Brightness Falls' Crash and Corrine Calloway in Jay McInerney's The Good Life. It brought us to wondering what other characters we would like to revisit, just to see what had happened as life took its toll on them over the years. Would the remaining members of The Secret History's clique kill again? Did Holden Caufield become a pot-bellied banker? Were there ever to be more Tales of The City? One of which everyone would have liked to read more was Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which has crossed generations and beliefs unbloodied since its publication in 1960. Lee never wrote another book and emulated JD Sallinger by leading a reclusive existence, refusing all interviews. She now appears in the Oscar nominated Capote (Lee was a neighbour of Truman's and carried out secretarial work on In Cold Blood) portrayed by the wonderful Catherine Keener. She also has just given her first interview in years to the New York Times. In this, Lee deals only with the annual essay competition run by the University of Alabama on Mockingbird. So, little chance of the 80 year old Lee breaking a silence of 45 years to tell us what happened to Scout and Jem Finch. Maybe Scout would have wound up alone and reclusive like her creator, proof that most lives only have one act, one story to be told.
Holy War!
America is sending out their big guns in the ongoing War on Terror, albeit in very different guises. In the blue, anti-republican corner comes Kurt Vonnegurt, driven from retirement to publish his first book in five years, A Man without a Country. The 83 year old author, best known for Slaughterhouse Five makes his general thesis clearer in the book's subtitle, A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America. The book is a collection of essays and lectures which he launched by telling the BBC he had drawn energy from his contempt for his president. In the red opposing corner we find Frank Miller's Dark Knight Batman, which is set to disregard standard foes like the Joker to take on al Qaida in a fight against the terrorism being waged against Gotham City. Miller is most famous for modernising Batman and for the even bleaker Sin City series which was successfully adapted for the cinema in 2005.