‘Librarians Need Two Book Reviews to Justify Book Purchases for Libraries’ (Quote of the Day / Jane Ciabattari)

Media coverage of the decline of book-review sections has focused on the effect of the trend on authors, readers, and publishers. Jane Ciabattari, president of the National Book Critics Circle www.bookcritics.org, raises a frequently overlooked issue in the Winter 2008 issue of the Authors Guild Bulletin (“Book Reviews: In Print, Online, and In Decline?”) when she says that “librarians need two reviews to justify book purchases for libraries.”

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Does ‘The Secret’ Work? Day 10 of 30-Day Test

Day 10
No closer to getting a seven-figure advance for my next book than I was on Day 1 of this test. So why, you might wonder, didn’t I ask for something more reasonable? Why not one of the Caribbean vacations that my favorite radio station here in New Jersey is giving away when it’s not playing “Little Deuce Coupe” or “Here Comes the Sun?” Or – to make it even easier for the Universe – one of those great Alice Roi purses (only $250) shown on the fashion page of yesterday’s New York Times?

Answer: The Secret says that the mysterious “law of attraction” will “manifest” what you want, regardless of its value if you just “ask, believe, and receive.” Or, as Rhonda Byrne puts it on page 63: “It is as easy to manifest one dollar as it is to manifest one dollar.” So why shouldn’t I give the Universe a chance to show what it can do?

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

A Review of ‘Acceptance,’ Susan Coll’s Satire of the College Admissions Race, Coming Next Week on One-Minute Book Reviews

One of the books I’ll be reviewing next week is Susan Coll’s Acceptance, a send-up of the college admissions race, which I’ve just started. My favorite line so far? A mother named Nina boasts to a neighbor, Grace, that her daughter got straight A’s. Grace flinches: “Didn’t grades fall into the zone of private information, along with age and weight and financial net worth?”

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Does ‘The Secret’ Work? Day 9 of 30-Day Test

Day 8
A miracle. No e-mails today from Nigerian letter-fraud scammers trying to con me out of my bank account numbers. Did the Hot Mail spam-blockers finally kick in … or was it The Secret?

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Does ‘The Secret’ Work? Day 8 of 30-Day Test

Day 8

Is the Universe mocking me? Two more e-mail messages from peddlers of variations on Nigerian-letter scams. They include another from “Adams Smith” of the “African Development Bank” who offered me a third of $15 million in exchange for my bank account numbers. (Question: Do all these con artists wink at you — while they’re trying to scam you – by using names that play off those of authors of famous books like Wealth of Nations?) I blocked messages from “Adams Smith” yesterday but he seems to have crashed the barrier.

The Secret says that you should envision what you want, not what you don’t. So maybe I made a mistake by blocking Smith’s e-mail and mentally writing outraged letter to appropriate authorities? Today I’m planning instead to visualize opening my e-mail tomorrow and finding only messages from a) friends, b) visitors to One-Minute Book Reviews, or c) movie producers wishing to option novels for sum equal to cost of Gulfstream V. Hope that no producer is named “Adams Smith” (in case e-mail block has taken effect).

Requested from Universe on May 1: $1,000,000
Received so far: $825 (hard labor) + $58 (lottery) = $883
Universe owes me (according to The Secret): $999,117 (at a minimum)

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Enid Shomer’s ‘Tourist Season,’ Short Stories About Women in Unfamiliar Territory

Female characters explore places that include Tibet, Florida and Las Vegas in a collection by a winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award

Tourist Season: Stories. By Enid Shomer. Random House, 256 pp., $13.95, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

Enid Shomer is a thoughtful and intelligent writer whose Tourist Season is nonetheless hard to love. One problem is that Shomer lacks a strong voice. You might recognize her stories as hers only because she tends to write about current or former residents of Florida. This isn’t enough when so many other writers, like Carl Hiaasen, work the state with voices you’d know anywhere.

Here are the first lines of “Chosen,” the first story in Tourist Season: “It was a Tuesday afternoon in early June. School had been out for a week.” You can begin a story with writing that flat – sometimes – if you move on right away to more promising material. But “Chosen” is about a 59-year-old Jewish speech therapist who gets an unexpected visit from two monks who say that she is a reincarnated Buddhist lama, and who not only invites them into her home while she is alone but follows them from Florida to Tibet. The story is so implausible that it throws the pedestrian beginning into higher relief. And that implausibility has less to do with plot than with Shomer’s lack of a distinctive voice. The plot of “Chosen” is much less bizarre than some that have worked brilliantly in stories by writers with stronger voices, such as Flannery O’Connor and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

A related problem is that Shomer often gives you Cliffs Notes to characters instead of development. She writes of a Florida sheriff in “Sweethearts”: “A star high school quarterback who’d married a cheerleader and gone to Vanderbilt on a football scholarship, he had always been something of a local celebrity.” Change the name of the school (or “cheerleader” to “Homecoming Queen”) and those words could apply to anybody from Archie Manning to the most successful insurance agent in your hometown.

Shomer started out as a poet, turned to short stories and is writing on a historical novel. And there’s nothing wrong with working in several genres. But in Tourist Season, she doesn’t seem to know who she wants to be. She deals in realism in one story, semi-realism in another and magical realism in a third and with characters who range from a high school student to retirees. If the women in her collection resemble tourists in their own lives, Shomer comes across a tourist in literature, carefully mapping out journeys but still casting about for her ideal destination.

Best line: From “The Hottest Spot on Earth,” a story set in Las Vegas: “She regarded the pastel haze of downtown Las Vegas. A pyramid-shaped hotel prodded the sky. Beyond it the suburbs twinkled in a grid, like a busy switchboard.”

Worst line: From the title story, whose characters live in a condo building on Florida’s Gold Coast: “The directors were a bunch of bullies who couldn’t pass for businesspeople if they had ticker tape coming out of their butts.” I can’t quite see this one, can you?

Editor: Anika Streitfeld

Published: March 2007

Caveat lector: This review was based on the advance readers’ edition. Some material in the finished book may differ.

Furthermore: Shomer won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for her first collection or stories Imaginary Men (University of Iowa Press, 1993). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and other publications.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Janice Harayda is an award-winning critic who has been the book columnist for Glamour, book editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. At least 50 percent of her reviews deal with books by women. Reviews of books by female authors typically appear on Mondays and Wednesdays and books by male authors on Tuesdays and Thursdays with the sexes up for grabs at other times.

Does ‘The Secret’ Work? Day 7 of 30-Day Test

Day 7
I think my messages to the Universe are being intercepted. Since starting my test of The Secret, I seem to be getting more e-mail from con artists peddling variations on the famous Nigerian letter-fraud scam, though it’s coming from Burkina Faso: Somebody tells you that you can have millions of dollars in unclaimed funds if you provide your own bank account number so the cash can be deposited.

I try not to open these. But my e-mail from One-Minute Book Reviews goes to the address these people use, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the con artists from visitors to the site. Today I got an e-mail message with the heading: FROM THE DESK OF ADAMS SMITH. A fan of my review of For One More Day, noting that Mitch Albom is writing at a third-grade level? No, “Adams Smith” is the “Bill and Exchange Manager” of the “African Development Bank.” He has $15 million in unclaimed funds and will give me a third of it if I send him the number of my checking account so he can deposit the money in my name.

There is a serious chance that if this test of The Secret continues, my bank account will end up in the negative numbers. Is it possible that hackers could break into your messages to the Universe and redirect them to people being investigated by Interpol?

Requested from Universe on May 1: $1,000,000
Received so far: $825 (hard labor) + $58 (lottery) = $883
Universe owes me (according to The Secret): $999,117 (at a minimum)

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Does ‘The Secret Work’? Day 3 of 30-Day Test

Day 3
Have just recovered from a flirtation with madness. Went to the UPS store to get my mail and see if the Universe had sent more of the $1,000,000+ requested on Day 1 of 30-Day test of advice in The Secret. (Had to agree with comment on this site by P that $825 check yesterday was hardly encouraging, especially since it covered freelance work I did before starting the test.) Got to the store too late and was locked out.

It didn’t seem fair to blame the Universe for not coming up with the $999,175 it still owes me when, if I’d arrived earlier, it might have paid in full. So I decided to pick up $10 worth of scratch-off lottery tickets on the way home from the UPS store. I don’t usually buy these and realized, when I found a shop that sold them, that I had no idea which to get. There are 24 instant games, all displayed on rolls like shiny toilet paper, with incomprehensible names like “The Duke.” (Why did the New Jersey put John Wayne lottery ticket? Why not Bon Jovi or – for those of us with literary inclinations – Edmund Wilson?) I asked a clerk which game he would suggest. He said that a lot of people seemed to be winning modest amounts — $50 to $100 – on one called Big Money Spectacular. I handed over $10 for five $2 tickets and won $25 instantly.

I wondered if Big Money game was “hot,” so I pocketed a $15 profit and reinvested my original $10. I won $17, $50, $22 before I got a set of cards that had no winner. From five games I won $25 + $17 + $50 + $22 + $0, or $114, minus the initial investment of $50, for a $64 profit. I played once more to make sure my streak had ended, lost $6, then quit with a $58 profit. This doesn’t count the dry cleaner’s bill for getting the blizzard of silvery specks from all the scratch-offs off my clothes. So now the tally is:

Requested from Universe on May 1: $1,000,000
Received so far: $825 (hard labor) + $58 (lottery) = $883
Universe owes me (according to The Secret): $999,175 (at a minimum)

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Does ‘The Secret’ Work? Day 2 of 30-Day Test

“You do not have to ask over and over again. Just ask once. It is exactly like placing an order from a catalogue.”
– Rhonda Byrne in The Secret, the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller

Day 2
Just realized I may have made a mistake yesterday in asking the Universe for seven-figure advance for my next book. Forgot to say that I would also accept a) seven-figure movie deal or b) seven-figure paperback deal for one of earlier novels or other writing project. But The Secret says you’re supposed to ask only once for what you want. Should I revise my original request? Or should I assume the Universe knows I would accept a check from DreamWorks or a paperback house? Could not find an answer to this anywhere in The Secret.

But I did get an $825 check for a freelance project that I completed before I read the book. Hooray! Maybe it’s a sign from the Universe that DreamWorks will kick in the other $999,975 during the 30-day test?

Requested from Universe on May 1: $1,000,000
Received so far: $825
Universe owes me: $999,175 (at a minimum)

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Does ‘The Secret’ Work? Day 1 of 30-Day Test

“We have received thousand of accounts of The Secret being used to bring about large sums of money and checks in the mail.”
– Rhonda Byrne in The Secret, the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller

Day 1
Oh, joy! I’ve just received a seven-figure advance for my next book. I am so happy and grateful that the check arrived. Now I can afford to live in one of those fantastic condos going up down the street instead of a modified garret in building also inhabited by black-and-white psycho ferret owned by downstairs tenant. Can also keep posting on One-Minute Book Reviews because advance has more than replaced all income lost since starting blog. The Delete Key Awards live!

Actually, I don’t have the advance yet. Or even a contract. Or even a finished book. [Note to literary agent: Only kidding, Carol! I don't owe you a minimum of $150,000.] But The Secret says you create your own reality through your thoughts, a process it calls “the law of attraction.” This includes acting as though you already have what you want. The Secret suggests that you start by writing, “I am so happy and grateful now that … ,” then fill in the blank. This sends “a powerful signal to the Universe” that you’ve received what you want “because you are feeling gratitude for it now.” You’re supposed to turn yourself into a kind of human radio transmitter beaming messages to the Universe.

I wrote this post last night and haven’t heard from the Universe yet. Maybe it was busy, or had to be taken to the emergency room? Would like to ask Universe to stop psycho ferret from going postal again, or at least giving tenants rabies, but this is a “negative thought” not allowed by The Secret.

[Note: Today's usual post appears directly below this one. Jan]

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.