Omnivoracious

Amazon Exclusive: A Review of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s El Juego del Ángel (Angel's Game)

      
   (The cover of the Spanish edition and the author.)

This week marks the official release of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's El Juego del Ángel in the United States. It's a follow-up to his international bestseller The Shadow of the Wind. As Amazon reported back in March, the novel had the highest initial printing for any novel published in Spain.

The catch? For now, it's only available in the author's native tongue, Spanish. With an English-language version just barely on the horizon, we turned to Larry Nolen to write a review based on his reading of an advance copy of the Spanish edition. Nolen divides his time between being an English and History teacher, engaging in amateur translations of Latin American authors, and operating a blog devoted to literature--a blog that was one of the first to provide any information about El Juego del Ángel in either language in the months leading up to its publication. Nolen, with both the review and the translation of two paragraphs from the novel, give us limited creatures who don't read Spanish a tantalizing glimpse of the rich treasures to come. Visit Nolen's blog for English translations of two recent interviews with the author.

The Most of the Month, from West to East

We've posted our editors' picks for March on our Best of the Month page, and I'm sure I'll have some things to say about my picks soon (my Significant Seven pick was Richard Price's Lush Life--he's talking to everybody these days, including Dan Menaker on the debut episode of his hour-long book-talk Web show at Titlepage.tv and a three-part interview with Mark Athitakis on Critical Mass (they're up to part two)--and I contributed two to our Seven on the Side list: Dean Wareham's indie-rock memoir, Black Postcards, and Nicholson Baker's not-quite-convincing-but-interesting-nonetheless pacificist history of the runup to WWII, Human Smoke).

But one thing we've just added to the page this month that I think is pretty fun is a regional leaderboard for our bestselling books of the month (scroll down on the Best of the Month page to see it). We have two lists, one including all books and one limited to books published this month, and for each we list the top 10 in the whole country and the top 10 in each of four regions: West, Midwest, South, and East. (By the way: where would you put Texas? I went with the South, but they really should have their own region...) I wasn't sure what we'd see, but in the early March returns a few interesting things pop out: Stephenie Meyer is much more popular in the West and the South. Jodi Picoult and Valerie Bertinelli are popular in the East; Jonah Goldberg is not. Richard Price and Tori Spelling are doing well on the coasts; James Patterson's latest Maximum Ride and Mary Kay Andrews's new cooking mystery are big in the South. And African American bishop E. Bernard Jordan's The Laws of Thinking, not in the top 10 in any other region, is #2 in the South.

That's only based on a limited data set so far, though, since March just started, so I went back and filled in the data for February too, which you can see on our Best of February page. What jumps out there? Well, FairTax: The Truth, by radio host Neal Boortz, is a regional blockbuster: #2 among all books in the South but not in the top 10 for any other region. Among February releases it does make the top 10s in the Midwest and the West (barely), but in the East it wasn't even close: #122! On the other hand, Greg Mortenson's paperback hit about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Three Cups of Tea, and Susan Jacoby's modern jeremiad, The Age of American Unreason, both did much better in the West than anywhere else. Baseball fans (or at least Baseball Prospectus statheads) appear to be grouped, as you might expect, in the East and Midwest, and, even less surprisingly, the only part of the country where the Sports Illustrated New York Giants Super Bowl Commemorative Edition made the top 10 was, yes, the East (it didn't even make the top 500 in the West or the Midwest).

And do Barack Obama's sales tell us anything about his centers of support (or at least interest)? Well, in February he was strongest in the East (#6) and the West (#9). But so far in March he's actually doing best (#7) in the South. Maybe it's those Texans, wanting to study up quick before tomorrow's primary...

I'll be updating these lists once a week, and I'll keep an eye out for more telling details. --Tom

P.S. Well, scratch that theory: I checked and I actually put Texas in the West...

Five Tales, Seven Copies, One Book: J.K. Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard

As you may have heard, J.K. Rowling has created a new book of fairy tales, but unlike her last book, which has reached print runs in the tens of millions, this one has a very limited edition: seven. Handwritten and illustrated by Rowling herself and bound in morocco leather, silver ornaments, and semi-precious stones, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a collection of five wizarding fairy tales. (The tales played a crucial role in the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after Dumbledore left them to Hermione Granger, but only one of them, "The Tale of the Three Brothers," was included in the story.) Of the seven copies, Rowling gave six to "those most intimately involved" with the Potter books (names as yet unknown), and the last was auctioned off this morning at Sotheby's in London, with proceeds going to The Children's Voice, an organization cofounded by Rowling that campaigns for children's rights.

The book, which according to the AP was expected to sell for around $100,000, ended up selling for 1.95 million pounds (or, given the state of the U.S. dollar these days, $3.98 million). The buyer was unknown at the time of purchase, but later today was revealed to be ... Amazon.com. So needless to say, you can now read more about the book on our site, including some lovely photographs, a few of which I've added below. And there's an already-busy discussion board, where we (and our customers) are answering as many questions as we can about the book. --Tom

My Night with the Kindle

Books aren't going anywhere. I expect it will be some time yet before we have to switch out our bookshelf photo at the top of Omnivoracious for a shelf with only an ebook reader on it. The book, as they are right to say, is a very good machine already.

But a few days ago I got to test drive our new vehicle for the book, the Amazon Kindle, which is available to the general public pretty much at this exact moment. Our digital book team lives in a different world (and a different building) from the regular old book team I work on, so this was the first time I had been able to sit down with our new toy. I even got to take it for the night, kind of like a kid getting to bring the class hamster home. (And like that kid, I'm just glad I was able to bring it back alive.)

I'm not going to go all Mossberg with a full review of the user experience, but I had a few initial impressions of this new kind of reading (to be taken, of course, with one giant grain of salt: I work for the company that made this thing):

• When I'd first heard about what the Kindle would be like, I thought the "killer app" would be its ability, which other readers haven't had, not only to read books but to subscribe to newspapers, magazines, and blogs and have them automatically updated. That's still a cool feature, but on first use it doesn't seem as new as I'd expected, since we're pretty used to reading those things in real time online (although not on the bus, which Kindle lets you do).
• What did seem exciting and new, though, was another feature of the built-in wireless: getting a new book as soon as I decided I wanted it. I skimmed through the available titles, considering Nathan McCall's Them, the book I've been carrying around in my backpack as the next-one-to-read, or Allegra Goodman's Intuition, which a friend just recommended to me last week, but settling on another I ran across: Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red. I hadn't read any of the Nobel winner's novels yet, and it seemed especially appropriate to make my first ebook a tale of a 16th-century illustrator of illuminated manuscripts. So I pressed the order button on the machine, and in the 20 or so seconds it took me to navigate back to the main page listing all the books stored in the reader, My Name Is Red was already there among them, ready to read. I couldn't really care less about next-day delivery for shoes, but this is a service that I could get accustomed to.
• Another surprise: it's relaxing. I don't mind reading a lot of things on my computer (and for better or worse I do it all day), but between the glare of the screen and the tiny humming machine overtones that I only notice by my relief when they disappear, I would never describe it as relaxing. But the Kindle makes no whirr or vibration, and its muted E Ink screen sits there patiently like, well, a book. It doesn't make you feel like you have to operate on machine time to read.
• What was it like to read Pamuk on a machine? What struck me was the way the words float free from the solid, designed book they are usually lodged in. There are no hard-coded pages in the reader, and you can adjust the font size to match your eyesight, so the words are no longer tied to a place and a page. And so while I miss some of the many physical pleasures of a book (which sometimes for me overwhelm the story itself)--the next page held half-turned in your fingers while you finish the one before, the black type set down on the grain of dead wood, the whole permanence of it--there's also a sense that on the machine the words must succeed entirely on their own merits. You're stripped down to the story itself, without many of the background cues that steer your reading of a physical book. (As it turns out, Pamuk's gleefully confident storytelling comes across just fine on this bare stage.) I had the thought that all book reviewers should henceforth do their reading only in this format, to provide for a purer assessment of the writing, but then realized taking away the free (and easily resold) review copies would a) deprive reviewers of a stream of income that probably dwarfs their meager reviewing rates, and b) put the Strand out of business.
• Finally, I should note that I put the Kindle through a bit of a stress test by using it during one of my few uninterrupted reading times: on the elliptical trainer. I'm glad to say I didn't drop it (although I guess from the drop test video on the Kindle page, it wouldn't have been a problem), nor did I drip sweat--er, perspire--on it (you're welcome, Molly), but I can also report that it was a big improvement on a regular book: I didn't have to hold the book open, turning to the next page was much easier, and it held my place automatically when I put it down. (Unfortunately, the Atlantic subscription I downloaded to the Kindle didn't include last month's issue, so I couldn't read that brilliant Walter Kirn article on the horrors of multitasking at the same time I was getting my meager exercise.)

Such was my night with the Kindle. I don't know where (or whether) it will fit into your gadget-filled life, and I'm not sure how it will fit into mine, if I decide to take this hamster home for good sometime. But at the very least, I got to read the first chapters of My Name Is Red, and now I'm going to have to figure a way to borrow this machine back so I can finish the story. --Tom

P.S. I wrote this before I saw Newsweek's gigantic cover story on the Kindle today, so any resemblance between my opening paragraph and Steven Levy's can only be credited to the obviousness of my ideas.

Call Me Jim...

One of the highlights of my career as an Amazon book buyer was getting to hold court with that charming raconteur Mr. James Lipton, on the occasion of the imminent publication of his delightful memoir, Inside Inside. Mr. Lipton ("please, my name is Jim") was kind enough to invite me and some colleagues to his tony Manhattan townhouse for cocktails prior to dinner at his favorite restaurant, Elaine's (where he has his own table, natch).  There's really no way to describe walking up the stairs to someone's living room and suddenly finding yourself directly in front of an original Hirschfeld drawing of your host (the only one ever done with color--for the blue index cards), a wall of Tony nominations on your left, and a lifetime achievement Emmy centering the mantle on your right.  Lord, how I wanted to touch that Emmy!  It was shining like a beacon, but it was fingerprint-free, so I resisted (but now I know how the Wicked Witch of the West felt when she was compelled to reach for those ruby slippers).

Mr. Lipton (alright, I'll use Jim from here on out, but it just seems somehow wrong) was sitting at his desk (and yes, he really does have stacks of blue index cards everywhere--he even let me hold the Halle Berry cards) working on his next show.  Throughout his townhouse there is something to remind you that almost nothing happened in show business in the last half century that he didn't have a hand in.  Really, the man is like Forrest Gump with a Mensa membership.  Personalized note cards in Lucite display cases fill a whole table and every wall is covered with pictures of Jim with every famous person you can imagine--from Lucille Ball to Eminem.  I really wasn't aware how extensive his resume was; he's so much more than a TV host.  He's a director, choreographer, writer, producer, and actor--and he's got the Playbills, photos, posters, and awards to prove it. 

We were then joined by his lovely wife Kedakai, a former fashion model and current real estate mogul (and, fun fact, the model for Ms. Scarlet in the board game Clue), and were whisked away to Elaine's.  Elaine herself (brassy, colorful, larger than life yet down to earth), resplendent in a set of massive earrings she had custom made from two World Series Rings (a gift from George Steinbrenner) made her way to our table.  Jim regaled us with stories about his past, his friends, his show, his successes and failures.  I even shared with him my horrifyingly embarrassing story of my failed tenure as a student of the Lee Strasberg Acting Studio back in the 70's.

All too soon it was time to leave.  We said our goodbyes, and Jim went back to his townhouse filled with a lifetime of show business triumphs--and that Emmy!  He gave me his contact info and told me to look him up the next time I'm in town. That poor man doesn't know what he's in for.  I'll touch that Emmy yet!

--Terry Goodman, as told to BTP