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In an exciting announcement, a spokesperson for “Masterpiece” from PBS said that starting next year, the decades-old beloved series will cease covering classic works of literature and instead focus on today’s new classics — graphic novels.

“To tell you the truth, we’re completely bored with the classics,” said Cholmondeley Rodriguez, spokesperson for WHAH, the heretofore unknown PBS station in Poughkeepsie. “All those bonnets, carriages, and British accents? They don’t fit with today’s consumer’s needs.”

What does fit with those needs, Rodriguez says, are graphic novels. “We want to introduce the faster storytelling pace of modern graphic novels. We’re working on a completely authentic version of Watchmen right now. None of that Zack Snyder superficial stuff. We didn’t simply build an Owlmobile; we went back in time to make sure we constructed it only of materials that Alan Moore could have envisioned during the 1980s.”

Projects in development include Hellboy, starring Hugh Laurie; The Dark Tower, starring Colin Firth; and The Sandman, starring Derek Jacoby. All female characters will be portrayed by Helen Mirren. 

There has been much jockeying for the coveted position of “Masterpiece!!! Graphix” host. Rodriguez admits that great consideration was given to Neil Gaiman, but the host will be Michael Palin. “He’s still under contract for an unfinished series about soccer hooliganism and its effects on Cotswolds gardens, so he’s cheap,” says Rodriguez.

Happy April Fool’s Day from Bethanne!

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Apologies for a couple of post-less days; I was in NYC again for another NY1 taping, which has aired, but not yet been added to that web page. 

This morning I’m off to the Library of Congress for its Center for the Book Reading Partners Networking Event (whew!) with my fearless project director and head of WETA.org, Pam McKeta. I proclaimed on Twitter that it’s like a field trip for grownups…how great is it to live within driving distance of the queen of our libraries? (And why do I think the LoC is a queen and not a king?) 

Later this week I’ll be heading back to New York for the annual National Book Critics Circle meeting and Awards ceremony. I’ve not been to one of these before and am really looking forward to it.

So now you know why I’ve been slow on posting…and why this post is going to be short! I’m not used to getting in the a.m. traffic…wish me luck! 

I’ll post a longer entry later today about the meeting, so please stop back. Thanks, as always, for reading.

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I have a bit of a special relationship with the Virginia Festival of the Book, because I earned my master’s degree in English at the University of Virginia and lived in beautiful Charlottesville for five years of my life in all. VA Book is an annual opportunity to head down to “C’Ville” for a few days when it’s not overrun by garden-seeking tourists and hang out with some of the nicest people in the book world (yours truly not necessarily included, but they let me attend, anyway). 

This year I’m not only one of the Official Festival Bloggers — I’m on two different panels. I’ll be on this one as a panelist (although I may not fulfill the title) and this one as moderator (can’t wait; should be very well attended, as usual). 

I’ll be blogging more about the Festival, as well as linking to my fellow bloggers and perhaps even posting some of our Tweets in a Special LitTwits post from time to time…(remember, they’re not the LitTwits; the news posts are!). Are any readers out there planning to attend this year’s VA Book Festival? What local literary festivals, wherever you may be, do you attend?

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As most of us in Washington, DC, know, yesterday was the final print edition of our beloved Washington Post “Book World” review supplement. 

No one can be happy that this section is gone. Or can we?

First of all, let’s not be caught up in the idea that the section’s pages have disappeared due to lack of advertising dollars. As Motoko Rich noted in this NYT piece, advertising dollars were never what kept newspaper specials afloat, anyway. What did keep Book World afloat for many years was the support of Don Graham; perhaps Marcus Brauchle has decided to do the same thing, only in a different form: online.

This may not please folks who preferred to recline with print rather than with a laptop, and I understand that. We’re not yet to the point where e-reading devices mimick the ease and ergonomics of bending, folding, and mashing newsprint pages to our liking. As reader after reader has noted in blog comments and news story comments about the change in Book World, people looked forward to curling up with the section each week and learning about books they wanted to read, books they might never read but needed to know about, and commentary on the literary life.

All of these things will still be available in the new, Web-based universe of Book World. To me, here’s the rub: We all realize it’s easier for us right now to read printed, easily flipped pages. We want our newsprint, and we find it easier to drink coffee while we’re holding a newspaper section in our hand than when we’re tapping away at a keyboard (be that keyboard on a laptop, a Kindle, or an iPhone).

If we really, truly, madly, and deeply care about Book World — or any other book coverage — will we follow it down the cyberpath? Because as far as I’m concerned, nothing will kill off thoughtful, smart, timely, and lively book coverage than everyone abandoning it as soon as its familiar form changes. 

If you love The Washington Post Book World, keep reading it — and other book coverage — online. Who knows? You might even become adept, as I already am, at drinking coffee at the same time, too.

Disagree with me! Tell me I’m crazy. Or describe your own struggle with this transition. We’re all in this together, or we won’t get to hear about books at all — that, my friends, would be the real tragedy.

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We’ve been very, very busy here at Author, Author! — we’re taping interviews in a whole new way and we plan to have a whole new site to go along with them. Quite soon.

You readers were all very kind to vote a few weeks back on proposed new names. We’re in Testing Round #2, now, and so you’ll see the last round’s top pick on this list. Won’t you take this supershort, supereasy poll for us? Many, many thanks!

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Take heart, Washington Post Book World. While some editors there were still in elementary and high school, the Internets were already on the rise, threatening to take over the world of print. You could have done nothing to stop it.

                                            Please watch this video, if only to see the sincerity on the face of the San Francisco Examiner dude when he says “We’re not in this for money.” Haaaaahaha, Hee, hee, hee. Ahhhhhh… Oh, those days of innocence! 

However, given the demise of print book reviews sections and the quotes about their demise being driven by lack of advertising, maybe we’re all really not in this for money. Hmmm, things are getting interesting. 

(Thanks, Gabe Goldberg!)

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I started asking this question nearly five years ago. In the blogosphere, that’s roughly equivalent to a century. But I never get tired of hearing the answers. 

So what is on your nightstand? Is it one of the books you’ve snagged from an Author Author giveaway? The next book in a favorite series? A stack of never-read nonfiction books (I’m talking to you, Mr. Bethanne!)? Many avid readers keep several books going simultaneously, and theirs are the best nightstands (yours truly’s included, thankyouverymuch). 

Right now, I’m reading:

The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman

Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg

Hmmmmmm…I hadn’t realized before how closely these titles mirror my current mindset…

But enough about me. What’s on your nightstand? Can’t wait to see your answers!

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Via this morning’s Jezebel comes a post based on this New Scientist article. Scientists analyzed the results of a questionnaire about 200 nineteenth-century novels and found that the good-guy/bad-guy dynamic in nearly all of them closely mirrored the values of a hunter-gatherer society, in which heroes emphasize the good of the group and villains are out for themselves alone. The scientists thus concluded that the purpose of novels may be evolutionary.

Evolutionary, but hardly revolutionary: Weren’t there any literary scholars available to talk to these scientists about the role of storytelling throughout human history? Oh, wait: They “believe novels have the same effect as the cautionary tales told in older societies. ‘Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that the bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues…They have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life.’”

Does this mean that those of us who listen to stories and take in their lessons are more likely to evolve and survive? If you ask me, this is an argument for strengthening reading as an activity. I don’t think I want today’s video-game fanatics to be the “group life” that evolves and survives from contemporary storytelling. 

There’s also quite an interesting corollary in here about reading-as-solitary-activity versus storytelling-as-group-activity. The most bookish among us (present company definitely included) tend to read alone, and the authors of these value-reinforcing novels tend to write alone. Could it be that the novels are meant less to help the group — and more to help the individual understand and become part of that group? And what about (as Anna discussed over at Jezebel) the subversive ideas in these novels? What about Heathcliff?

What do you think? 

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No, this is not going to be a post about clever ways to stack books in order to make side tables. (That is a women’s-magazine staple, isn’t it? I just saw the latest version of it in a mag at the hair salon the otherday: Designer Shows Budget-Strapped Career Girl How to Use Her Coffee-Table Books to Create a Nightstand.) No, this post is about how books influence our lives even when we’re not reading them.

Yesterday I noted that overall book reading by adults is down. I think this is sad, because I can’t imagine not reading — and because reading allows us to process information differently than watching or listening or doing does.

But (what a surprise!) I digress. Today I want to talk about how books enter into our lives aside from reading for pleasure. I was inspired by too many hours spent playing the educational games on Freerice.com (Danger danger Dr. Smith; site can cause timewasting as well as increased geekiness). Now besides English vocabulary, there are geography challenges, art history (famous paintings), and foreign-language vocab, too. As I clicked around in the art history section, I realized that my guesses were often informed by knowledge that had to do with more than the painting itself, or my memory — I connected details with where the names came from, or with historical eras, etc.

In other words, all of that “book learning” came into play. We use books for more than hammock reading. We use them to study, we use them for information, we use them for instruction — we even use them for art. Even when we think we’re “not reading,” we’re getting information fed to us that comes from…books. Film and television scripts are adapted from novels and stories, television segments are based on cookbooks and travel guides, educational materials are built around information pulled and culled from books.

If you’ve read this far, you deserve a reward, but I need something from you, first. I’ll provide a two-book grab-bag giveaway (two brand-new hardcover books!) to each of the first ten people to respond with a way books touch their lives when they’re not reading. Be specific, please! Thanks for visiting, reading, and commenting.

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Before I get to today’s entry, a note on the subject line: Many people have asked me and other journalist friends why we spell “lead” as “lede” (not to mention “head” as “hed” and “deck” as “dek”).

Based on what I know – which, admittedly, is limited — this is because when laying out a page, a dummy line of text with a proper word like “lead” in it might be left as is, whereas the deliberately misspelled “lede” will jump out at an editor, who will then replace it with proper text.

If I am rong pleez let mee no.

Anycrazybloggerhow, “burying the lede,” of course, refers to what we’re not supposed to do as journalists. We’re supposed to put the big news up front (evidently, these days we’re also supposed to put the big ads up front, and as far as I’m concerned, that interferes with the news). 

However, lede-burying doesn’t always happen because a journalist writes poorly. Sometimes it happens because a source deliberately skims over the important stuff. Sometimes it happens simply because a reader thinks that the later information is more compelling — and that’s my point today.

The Washington Post ran a piece about reading in its Style section today. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, prose-fiction reading is on the rise, showing a leap from 46.7% to 50.2% from 2002 to 2008.  That is terrific, although alas — that increase isn’t from people sitting around musing over Albee or Waugh. It’s from young people reading books like Harry Potter and Twilight. 

That’s fine as it goes; I’d never discourage any person, especially a young person, from reading anything. Unfortunately, IMHO, the real lede of this article is here:

“The percentage of American adults who report reading any book not required for work or school during the previous year is still declining. It fell from 56.6 percent in 2002 to 54.3 percent in 2008.”

Now, if those “young people” grow up and keep reading, maybe they’ll close this gap. But the reason this is the lede, to me, is that if the current crop of adults continues to shun books in favor of reality shows, Internet activity, and running errands (life is complicated), I’m afraid that the loss in book sales will further weaken the already weak publishing industry.

What do you think?

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