Books in the News. Big Ambition gets Bigger
I started thinking quite a while back about reading Blind Ambition
again by John Dean, having heard him wax long about our national political conscience on some late night Olbermann show. Being a college student in the seventies and remembering later buying and wearing a t-shirt that said “Don’t buy a book from a crook!” I’m a little perplexed at our homage to John Dean, even though he has jumped ship and gone to the other side.
So when I saw the National Archives folks had asked him to speak at the Richard Nixon Library, I thought if anything it was a bit tacky. Sorta like asking Ken Starr to speak at the Clinton Library. And I’m not sure what I think of John Dean, yet again he seems to be making a huge amount of money and getting a lot of attention for his past bad behavior.
Am I jealous of this “expert” or still jaded against this opportunist? I guess I’ll just have to read it again, maybe a few new books by him and see what the fuss is still about. 
Good Reading News
For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a survey by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEA survey has been conducted five times since 1982, and in 2008 there were 16.6 million more adult readers of literature. Nice to see big figures that have nothing to do with our economy.
This means slightly more than half of all American adults read literature (113 million) or books (119 million). I guess that could be the glass half empty or half full depending on your perspective. The largest increases are reported among young adults ages 18-24, and Hispanic Americans.
Photo on Flickr erix’s photostream.
I’m sharing this information with a colleague who was haranguing me the other day about people not reading especially teens. Hah!
Book Wars, or the one who sells the most wins, and the Re-mix is on
I like listening for book news on the television, it always surprises me what comes up. Apparently Ann Coulter and Bill O’ Reilly got into an argument about who sells the most books. It was a sibling type disagreement more along the lines, “Mom likes me better”, ”NO she likes me better”.
Ann is hitting the talk circuit with her new book, Guilty. She told O’ Reilly when he suggested she take some advice from another conservative, Bernie Goldberg, ”my general policy is to take advice from people who sell more books than me not fewer books…”. Then O’ Reilly said something along the line of you should take my advice since I sell more than you. Then the following: no you don’t; yes I do; no you don’t ; yes I do, etc.
Interesting, since if that were true she’d be taking most of her advice from J. K. Rowling.
My take on this whole silly political book business, that make the rounds on the talk show circuit, both conservative and liberal, is that it results in additional money in the pockets of the bookseller and publisher. If this is what it takes to support an industry to keep us in books worth reading then I’m fine with it. Keep selling, keep publishing, keep arguing about who sells the most and keep giving me the choice of what I want to read.
Then on the Colbert Report, Lawrence Lessig, was interviewed (or harassed) by Colbert about his new book, Remix. Since copyright issues are something that drive librarians up the wall, this is a particularly sore subject with me as well. Of course all talk of copyright is best left our of social dialogue or you will not be asked back to any parties. 
But if you go to Lessig’s Blog, you can hear a fascinating remix of his interview. It’s on the January 9th entry.
