Something like an American version of Apostrophes will show up at Titlepage beginning March 3.  

The Pope-rah has chosen.

Her choice for Oprah’s Book Club is A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle.

I don’t like these kinds of self-help books in general — they’re just repackaged versions of the texts of most major religions, with a heavy emphasis on Zen Buddhism.

I’ll probably never understand how Oprah makes the decision about which books she’ll use her unparalleled platform to legitimize/promote. As a member of the reality-based community, I was a little embarrassed for her when she was shilling The Secret, so I hope she was careful about this one.

Because her audience deserves better.

What is reading, anyway?

 After all, you can use a Kindle to read Brontë, but you can also use it to skim BoingBoing (Kindle has deals with some 250 blogs). If you’re not devouring “serious” literature or old-school A-list publications, are you not technically reading? Are you effectively nonliterate? Clearly, [Steve] Jobs thinks so.  

More here. 

Also, Bethanne Patrick, Publishers Weekly‘s Book Maven, is enjoying the Kindle, and black-owned Brownstone Books is taking over the bookstore space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Karibu Books, the black-owned bookstore chain in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area, is closing.  

Details here. 

I’ve already written about the troubled business model for smaller bookstores (especially black-owned ones), but this one does make me sad because I used to spend time and money at Karibu when I was in college in the D.C. area. 

And it’s one less place that is receptive to black authors on tour. 

In this week’s issue of The New York Times Book Review:

There’s a review of Slash’s…uh…Slash, which also is on the best sellers list for the 7th week in a row.

I did not know that Slash’s mom had also dated David Bowie. I guess Iman wasn’t Bowie’s first chocolate love.

Reviewer Alan Light does wonder idly why Slash doesn’t explore his working relationship with Axl Rose more in-depth, and also notes that the the book doesn’t mention the controversy about Axl using racist slurs in “One in a Million.”

There’s sordid exploration of Guns N’ Roses’ alcohol and drug use, of course. Light says this book and another one by Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx are “pretty much All Good Part.”

That’s good enough for me. It’s on my library request list. I’m hopeful that it’s as fun to read as Tommy Lee’s The Dirt.  

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Ishmael Beah has come out strong against claims in the Australian press that he James Frey-d his memoir, A Long Way Gone.  

Details here. 

Getting Some of Her Own
Gwynne Forster 
Dafina Books/Kensington Publishing Corp.
2007

Infertility among black women is a secret plague. Even though there’s some research indicating that our infertility rates are rising, you’d never think so if you looked at popular culture. The story is that we get pregnant quickly — even, or especially, when we’re not ready — and we have lots of kids. Anecdotally, I know far more black women who’ve become pregnant unexpectedly than I know women who have had trouble trying to conceive.

That’s not the case for all of us, though.

I’m not terribly vocal about my own infertility.  Part of that is because on the rare occasions when I have opened up about the continuing battle Mr. WriteBlack and I are fighting to conceive, people respond poorly (here‘s a list of things you should and shouldn’t say to women who are trying to conceive and a list of myths about infertility). Plus, any mention of the some of the futuristic sci-fi shit I’ve done and had done to my body tends to squick most people right on out. It’s not any better when I do find people who’ve experienced infertility; white women who are infertile can at times be insensitive when talking about what they think we share in common — the stereotype in the infertility blogosphere about fertile welfare-abusing crack-addict mothers sometimes seems tinged with racial disdain. 

But I know we’re out there. I see black women (who seem to avoid catching my eye when I try to greet them, as if our common “shame” won’t exist if we just don’t acknowledge each other) and their husbands at my reproductive endocrinologist’s office. And there even are a few black women among the kajillions of women blogging about infertility and their desire to become parents. 

Which brings me to Gwynne Forster’s Getting Some of Her Own. 

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The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Walter Mosley about his unusual publishing deals; Diablerie, his (a little creepy, y’all) latest book;  the state of the literary mystery world and his experiences with Hollywood.

Because the WSJ still is a paid site (although He Who Shall Not Be Named has said he plans to change that in the near future), some excerpts:

The Wall Street Journal: Mysteries have grown increasingly dark in recent years, both bleaker and more fatalistic. What’s driving this?

Walter Mosley: The mystery genre is there to help us deal with what’s going on in our world socially and politically. We’re in a time where Americans feel that the world they know is falling apart. The atmosphere is in trouble, the euro is worth more than a dollar, we’re fighting a war where we don’t want to be. Americans feel very pressed. Literature helps in many ways by talking about this. Also, mysteries tie up everything neatly at the end: the lost girl is saved, the stolen bullion is returned.

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Of interest in this week’s New York Times Book Review:
 
Jacob Heilbrunn reviews Elisabeth Bumiller’s Condoleezza Rice: An American Life.  

Revelations include the fact that Condi Rice doesn’t read for pleasure (I can’t knock her for this; as Secretary of State, I hope she doesn’t have time for it), and the provocative notion that she courted or wooed (deliberate phrasing, there) George W. Bush’s friendship. 

Not bloody likely to end the rampant speculation about the nature of their working and personal relationship. 

Exploring Rice’s interior life or lack thereof is something of a cottage industry these days, because I can think of at least three other recent bios of her on the market, including Marcus Mabry’s Twice As Good, which is the only one I know of by a black biographer.  

Maybe she’ll silence the noise by writing an autobiography when she’s out of politics.   

 
There’s also a review of Lawrence Hill’s Someone Knows My Name, the fictional memoir of Aminata Diallo, a formerly enslaved woman, who writes about the marks slavery left on her body and soul. 

The slave owner marks the bodies of those he owns, but when the enslaved take possession of words, spoken and — especially — written, they move toward freedom. The young Frederick Douglass’s master knew this, admonishing his wife that if she taught Douglass how to read, “there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

Nancy Kline’s review hits on the way Hill uses language — from the title, which echoes James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name — to the power of, yes, names themselves.

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Steve Jobs of Apple took a swipe at the Kindle earlier this week at MacWorld. 

His argument is that most people don’t read books, so books themselves are a dying market and a device created to facilitate book-reading ultimately won’t be successful. 

Strange for a man who’s built his career appealing to a small subset of design- and techno-geeks to say that a niche product for literate types won’t work.  He may be right, but I hope not.  

Also, I’m guessing that’s a “no” on that Apple e-book reader I’d hoped to see.