Orange Prize

The Orange Prize for Fiction Long List: http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/show/feature/orange-2010-longlist

Forever and a day

I was struck by the note in this New York Times article that written material stored electronically on "floppy disks, CDs and hard drives . . . degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper." The article deals with the challenges of preserving authors' archives for university libraries--e.g. Rushdie, Updike. But what about all the other writers, published or not, who slave over something on their computers, and put it away for a few years, thinking they can always pick it up again later, only to find the 1s and 0s have gotten all mixed up? How many masterpieces will be lost for want of a print-out?

A Hornet by Any Other Name

Have I mentioned how many times I have thought of changing the name of my blog? I think the first time was the day after I started it. I woke up to the fact that it is a very sappy name. Why did I not see that from the very beginning? I guess I was blinded by the sheer excitement of starting a blog that I could not see the obvious, i.e. that the name sucks. Also, I started exploring the blogosphere more, and came across so many great names for blogs that I was put to shame. "Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind" comes to mind immediately, then "The Elegant Variation." Many more are out there; to name just a couple I like: "Mason Fiction," "The Second Pass," "Bookslut," "House of Mirth," and "With This I Think I'm Officially a Yuppie." (Actually, I must point out two things about that last example, which is a music blog: one, the real name is lacking the apostrophe in "I'm," and two, it uses the same template that my blog does! Check it out! I need to post longer posts, as that blogger does, to keep from having the problem on my blog where my lefthand sidebar extends below the, the, thingy, the inner frame, whatever you call it.) These are just the first ones off the top of my head; I could go on forever, almost literally, naming all the blogs with names better than mine; I'll stop with one more, a personal favorite: "Chiu on This."

(Should the titles of blogs appear in quotation marks, like a magazine article, or in italics like a book or periodical? Or just caps? Has this been decided out there in blogland?)

Of course, the best name in the world is wasted if the blog itself is no good. But I would like to have a better name; quite some time ago I started a list of alternate names: Literata (i.e. the feminine singular of literati), The Screen Door, The Cess Pool. OK, the latter might not be the greatest idea, but it harkens back to my college yearbook quote, when I was in what passes for a radical phase for me. I tried changing it to "Literata," but it did not work; apparently there was a Spanish-language blog on blogspot with that word in the name, as it is also the Spanish for a female author. So for now, I'm sticking with the old sappy name, which leads me to the reason I started writing about it in the first place: this list of Books for the Word Lover. Maybe the name will stick because, after all, I am a sappy, nerdy sort of person, the kind of person who gets excited to see the new edition of Latin for All Occasions, a book I remember from high school, when I took four years of Latin from my mother. Yes, that's right, my mom was the Latin teacher at my high school, and I was in her class all four years. We got along fine. So what super-cool, ultra-witty, iconoclastic name could a person like that have for a blog? I better face it, "Notes for Word Lovers" might be as cool as it gets for me. But maybe it should be "Notes of a Word Lover," so that the nerdiness is more about me than about the reader; still pondering that.

More random notes: Of course movies are on the way for the Millenium trilogy, aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc. The first Swedish installment was already released in Sweden, under the title "Men Who Hate Women," which is the real title of the first book. When I was reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest on the subway, a woman who works for Knopf struck up a conversation with me, and mentioned that she heard American movie versions were in the works.

After checking that "hornets" is plural in the title of said book, and correcting it everywhere in my blog, I then spotted today's Amazon Omnivoracious blog entry, with a shot of the American version's cover, and it says "hornet"! Singular! What's up? It really makes more sense to say hornets, as usually there is more than one hornet in a nest. I assume the head hornet is Lisbeth's father, but he was the leader of a criminal gang, so together they would be the hornets whose nest Lisbeth kicks. So why was it made singular? The British version is plural. Is it because most Americans are so clueless about the use of the apostrohpe to form a possessive that it just doesn't matter where it is placed? Just wondering. By the way, the Amazon reviewer liked the book as much as I did, for whatever that's worth.

Also, I think Jonathan Galassi's article about the importance of the role of the publisher in making a book a success would have had a little more oomph if he had gotten the publication history of Lie Down in Darkness correct.

Goodbye, Girl

Luftslottet som sprängdes by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars Oh, life is bleak and dull and meaningless, now that I have finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, and therefore the trilogy. There is the super-finality of the author being dead adding to the letdown, knowing that I will never again encounter Lisbeth and Mikael, and all their Swedish amigos. All the Erlanders, Ekstroms and Erikssons do get a bit hard to keep track of after a while, but it's a small price to pay to enjoy the expert plotting and suspense on the way to finding out if Lisbeth ever gets justice. After a book like this, I have to read non-fiction: I've picked My Lobotomy by Howard Dully. I'm not joking. View all my reviews >>

Kicking Knopf

Booksellers are importing The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest for resale, and I can't blame them. Luckily for me, my personal import service, i.e. hubby, is currently in London and should return Thursday with my copy. Can't wait!