Bookish thoughts 26 July: book scanning, snarky reviews, love triangles & more!

RIASS stuff:

Book Review: MacRobertsonland by Jill Robertson'Rating: (a book about the chocolatier who founded my high school!)

Book Review: A Bitter Truth by Charles Todd'Rating:

Giveaway: The Glamour by Christopher Priest

Interview: Shirley Marr on being the 'David Bowie of YA'

Other bookish stuff:

Japanese-style Print-to-E-book Scanning Catching on in the US

My quick thoughts:'Im doing a huge book clean-out at the moment, so this caught my eye. Id love to be able to digitise my collections for a few reasons. First, for back-up and access purposes, and second because I love having the ability to annotate and comment while I readsomething I balk at doing on a print copy. I was interested to note that the reason that the service isnt catching on so much in the US is due to people having larger homes and thus more bookshelf space than in Japan. I live in a teeny tiny flat myself, and shortage of space is one of the reasons why I need to downsize my collections.

Book Riot has launched a cool Kickstart Project called Start Here, which will advise readers where to start with a given authors oeuvre.

Momentum with the best bookish podcasts'A few of my favourites: the Book Show on ABC Radio National, The Bat Segundo Show, Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing, The Agony Column with Rick Kleffel and the Guardian Books Podcast.

The Booker Prize longlist has been announced

Jeet Thayill on his Man Booker long listed novel Narcopolis

Its not easy being green (or selling books)'In the end I'm glad for the sake of the book that the errors were caught before they made it into print. But when readers are misguided and aggressive, I can't help but resent the time it takes to undo their work and justify my own editing to the writer.

The art of fiction with Tom Wolfe'Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor'women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.

Are you up for the Rory Gilmore reading challenge? I am sad that a Gilmore Girls character is better read than I am.

Its not easy being green (or selling books)''There are gradually fewer and fewer outlets,' notes Repas, who has worked in publicity since 1997 and is one of the company's longest-serving employees. 'And they're different, where people cover less books, or they cover different kinds of books, or they cover them in a different way. I feel like when I started there was more space for books coverage.'

My quick thoughts: Promoting a book is a tough task, I think, given that often its unknown whether a book, no matter how good and timely it seems to be or how much money is thrown at it, is going to hit the mark.'I think this Repas comments about the publicity market shrinking is definitely true, given that the books pages in newspapers around the world are withering away to nothing. And where there is coverage, it seems to be changing from a focus on books themselves to something more akin to books in context. There seems to be an increased focus on the author as an individual, and a huge push for sensationalism. (And also Katie Price launching her books on horseback and clad in her underwear.) Weird and wonderful promotions and launches can get people talking, but will they necessarily get people buying? No wonder publicists are increasingly moving online, where a budget can generally be leveraged more readily and widely. Best of all, word of mouth on the internet remains there forever, rather than disappearing the moment a speaker finishes his/her sentence.

Are you a literary leader? Seeking a passionate Festival Director to run the Emerging Writers Festival

James Enge on why people like negative reviews (aka: got snark? Bring it!)

My quick thoughts:'Enge teases out a few reasons why negative reviewsand in particular blistering takedownsseem to be so popular with both reviewers and readers. For the writer these include the notoriety gained from writing such a review and being able to get your angst out over a book thats disappointed you, whereas readers love to watch the train wreck of a mean and nasty review. And having just seen a particularly scathing Goodreads review of Fifty Shades of Grey do the rounds with a virality up there with Ebola, well, yeah, I completely agree with these points.

Theres a reason why snarky celebrity sites and so on seem to do so well: people love to watch others being put in their place. However, though witticisms and quips are worthy of a good chuckle every now and then, I do wonder what this says about where reviewings going. Believe me, its tempting to launch into a full-frontal attack on a book that Ive particularly dislikedhours of my life lost, surely!but its hardly constructive to fill a page with grumpy GIFs and attacks on an author. And honestly being a total tosser about it says more about me than it does about the book in question.

Not to mention that its really easy for the snarkiness to'become a review rather than simply a matter of style. When a review is just an out-and-out attack full of seething anger and epigramsthink Oscar Wilde on methits very easy for the bluster to actually stand in for the review itself. I love seeing a bit of a reviewers personality in a review, and Im happy to get my silly on where a books tone calls for it, but there are only so many car crashes I want to witness before my conscience starts to tug at me.

An interview with author Steven Lochran, a publishing industry insider who works for a different company from the one that picked up his book. When I finished writing the manuscript, I told my boss about it to make sure they had no issue with me pursuing it, and while a few people at work read it and offered some really helpful feedback' I think it's worked out for the best that I was picked up by another publisher. It would have been weird to try and sell my own book, to say the least.

Marie Lu gives us a list of her favourite love triangles in fiction'with the interesting caveat that either you adore love triangles, or you hate em. (You dont want to be on the fence, because thats just as annoying as a love triangle itself)

My quick thoughts: Oh, go on, you know me well enough by know to know that Im a total cynic and that I fall on the love triangles are evil side of things. If reading dozens of young adult paranormal novels has told me anything, its that no teenagers life is complete without a love triangle. This does not quite gel with my own memories of being a teenager (yes, there were teenagers way back then), where it was never,'ever the case that two people had a crush on the one person. Rather, one person had a crush on another, who had a crush on someone else entirely, and so on and so forth. This is more like a love relay, not a love triangle.

So whats with all this love triangle stuff? A few things, Id say. First, its easy tension. Got a book thats all setting and emoness, but not much of a plot to go with it? Add in a second love interest (note the use of the term love interest as opposed to character, and how it implies a role limited to wooing the protagonist), and you have tension galore. Second, it makes your main character seem appealing. If two people are lusting after them, then surely theyre some sort of amazing chosen person, right? Third, and this is related to the second, its to do with authorial/reader insertion. Who doesnt want to live vicariously as the girl whos beloved by everyone and gets to take her pick of whomever she wants with no apparent consequences (why do love interests just hang around while the protag tests them all out before making a final choice?) Fourth: its a great way to set up a sequel. Original love interest appears again (usually having escaped from the fiery depths of hell or similar) on the last page, and WHAM. Insta-tension.

Look, I even made you a little picture:

And finally,'The Life of Pi trailer: