Bookburger

bookburger scoops wall street journal (again)

...but to be fair, we really can't expect those poor necktied WSJ boys to be as light on their feet and fabulously in-the-know as we burger-flippers. Twouldn't be fair!

We just want to note that we filed a Janet Fitch interview a full two days before the Journal boys did. However, they got her on video, which we WOULD have done, were it not for the unfortunate grease fire that destroyed our video studio (maybe it was not so smart to set it up next to the french-fryer). See Janet interviewed by a WSJ editor on video here. But first, sign up for the b-list over there on the right side of this page--you'll be entered to win a SET of Ms. Fitch's novels White Oleander and Paint It Black. And you can bet there ain't no free prizes at the Wall Street Journal!

haiku is happening...

...and we're thinking it may be time for another bookburger haiku contest. In the meantime, our haiku-loving ears perked up when we heard about the upcoming collection Did I Wake You? by Beth Lapides, a comedian, writer, and self-proclaimed Crazy Haiku Chick. There's a bunch of her 5-7-5 poems posted on the site of her publisher, Soft Skull Press...some are quite racy, some are very "showbiz LA person with lots of time and money on her hands" in a way that doesn't really interest us. But we liked these:

Corn or tomatoes?
Can't bear to decide. Nervous
breakdown on aisle nine.

Bad for my skin to
sit in the sun but good to
be kissed by a star.

beware: the hamburglar is eyeing your laptop at this very moment

We at the burger are all about the burger joints, obviously...but we just came across this eye-popping stat from STORES magazine (no, we don't usually read it):

McDonald's hosts approximately 17% of the 41,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the U.S.

We don't really like the clown's cooking, though we do admire his boldly striped socks. If you DO happen to be tuning in to Bookburger from a table at your local Mickey D's, however, we wish you a happy meal (and can we have your Little Mermaid toy?)

word of the day

you know how when you're filling out an online form, a website will sometimes show you a strange letter combination and ask you to retype it to prove that you're actually a human being? Well, the wonderful folks at typepad, the very able company that hosts Bookburger, just asked us to do that...and what we were asked to type was this:

PUTFUE

This deserves to be a word, don't ya think? For the rest of the day, your assignment is to use it in sentences. "Don't you putfue me, girlfriend!" "Gimme some of that putfue, loverboy." "Sit, Putfue, Sit!"

janet fitch..between the buns

Janet Fitch wrote White Oleander first, then Paint It Black, her awesome new novel about a young punk-rock chick in Los Angeles who loses the love of her life.  We have a big crush on her and her work...so we popped our quiz at her. Here's what she tossed back. She's given us enough reading suggestions to keep us busy until we're elderly ladies browsing the large-print section of the bookstore..and what amazing suggestions, from big names to, let's face it, writers we've REALLY, TRULY never heard of...wow! we feel empowered! Thanks Janet.

Who is your favorite writer that most people have never heard of?

Silvia Warner Townsend, Lolly Willowes
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Les Plesko, The Last Bongo Sunset
Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog, The Master and Margarita
Steve Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days
Joy Williams, The Living and the Dead
Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband, a novel in poems
Eve Babitz, L.A. Woman
Ann Nietzke, Windowlight
George Irwin, Exquisite Corpse
Kem Nunn, Pomona Queen
Diane Wakoski, Looking for the King of Spain (poems)
Mary Rakow, The Memory Room
Denise Nicholas, Freshwater Road
Rita Williams, If the Creek Don’t Rise
Donald Rawley, Slow Dance on the Fault Line

What kid or teen books rocked your world growing up?

Kid Books:

King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry
The King Must Die by Mary Renault
Edgar Allan Poe short stories
The Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton
The Sword in the Stone  by TH White
The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
Traditional Haiku

There were very few “teen books” per se when I was growing up, but books that appealed to me were:

The People Yes by Carl Sandburg (first book I bought with my own money)
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg
The Diaries of Anais Nin
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Doestoyevsky
The poetry of Diane Wakoski
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? By Horace McCann
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
The Spy who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carre
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

What one thing do you wish you could say to your 15-year-old self?

Do something that’s brave for you, every day. Just in small ways. Take more chances, dare to be incompetent, look stupid or be rejected.

Your life is a TV series. Name the theme song.

Talk of the Town by the Pretenders.

Burger-flippers want to know: have you ever had a job that required you to wear a geeky uniform? Details, please!

Office worker outfits. I was a Manpower Temp and wore pleated skirts and high heels, nylons. I could get dressed in ten minutes-- I had two skirts and two pairs of heels, which was usually fine because I normally was only on a job for a day or two.   But sometimes I was at a company for a couple of weeks, and people would start dropping hints…

We'd like to name a burger in your honor.  What kind of fixins should it have?

The Persephone Burger.  It should have a hole in the middle, filled with something dark, like olives. There's always a certain darkness at the center of my books.

PS... GIVEAWAY SPECTACULAR: We'll be giving away a copy of Paint It Black to a member of our B-List---and a SET of Paint It Black and White Oleander to a new member (everyone who signs up anytime between today and October 31 will be eligible). Just check out the "we deliver" box on the right side of this page to join...

bad boys live on stage

Tanya Lee Stone, author of A Bad Boy Can Be Good For a Girl and upcoming burger interviewee, did something ultra cool: she adapted her own novel for the stage. You can read a review of the play here...in which the reviewer calls it a vagina monologues for teens. Zoinks! Decide for yourself which body part you're hearing from when the play is performed in Austin, TX, in October or Rochester, NY in November. Exact dates will be announced on Tanya's website...

we like things of beauty

so we ordered this book, called A Year in Japan. It's a travel journal-slash-sketchbook by Kate T Williamson. We can't wait til it shows up at bookburger hq! We know it will be gorgeous because we found out about it on Love Made Visible, our favorite blog about things of beauty.
 

we've been talking to janet fitch...

...and we'll be posting the interview this week, just as her new book, Paint It Black, hits the shelves. (Keep an eye out for it--it's the one with the pre-mommy Gwen Stefani clone on the cover.) The novel, her first since White Oleander, rocks in a sad and very poetic way. If you've ever wanted to be a penniless punk-rock grrl living in LA, but you know deep down that you could never abide the greasy tacos, unwashed hair, and the smell of ashtrays in the morning, you should read this book.

a big box arrived at burger hq...

...over the summer, and in it there were four novels from a new publisher of YA fiction called Flux. So far, we've read Simone Ekeles' How to Ruin a Summer Vacation, in which the romantic hero is a hunky Israeli soldier boy—which both intrigued us and made us feel a little weird, since right when we were reading this book, hunky Israeli soldier boys were all over the news in a not very fictional way. Anyhow...we are rooting for this new Flux publishing house because they seem to have great taste and they're really devoting lots of loving attention to the world of YA. They have a blog on which their authors will be posting—right now, it's Terie Garrison, author of the upcoming novel AutumnQuest.

you could already be a winner!

We have a fine list of book-giveaway winners and will be mailing out the b-list blast tomorrow a.m....we'll announce the book winners there, so check your email inbox...that is all.

the clock is ticking, babe

..if you want to win one of the many amazing signed books we're giving away, or a copy of Stephenie Meyer's New Moon...you still have two days to sign up for the b-list! Sometime on Sunday evening, we'll be firing up the random-winner-picking machine (shown here), feeding it all the names on our list, and POOF!--out will come a golden ticket inscribed with the names of the chosen. You want to be one of those names! So sign up on the right side of the page now.....(where it says "we deliver").

covergirl's fall (book) fashion report

Yes, it's me, Covergirl, bookburger's bare-it-all book-cover reviewer, and now that I'm done shopping for strappy boots and adorable tweed waistcoats and other key elements of my autumn look, I'm ready to hit the books. As you know if you've been paying attention, I judge all books by their covers, and right now, this is one I'm not liking one bit:

It's called Angels Fall by Nora Roberts. Sorry, i mean NORA ROBERTS. I can only guess that nora's loyal readers have a tendency to forget their glasses when they go to the bookstore, and that nora knows this, and that this is why she thoughtfully made her name SO VERY LARGE on this cover.


Now here's a book I love. It's River Secrets by Shannon Hale. I haven't read it, but maybe I will someday, because it has an antique-ish sort of painting on its cover, complete with a patina of age and a faux-crackle finish. It's very old school, a tad melancholy, and if it were peeking out of your metallic leather tote, it would make you look quite brainy. It's an ideal accessory for the Euro-fabulous trench I'm ordering in my other browser window right now!


Must run and fetch credit-card, burgerpeople. Stay beautiful!
skin-deeply yrs,
Covergirl

blingburger

Amazon and Michael Stadther, the author of the best-selling fantasy novel Treasure Trove, are pimping it up to publicize Stadther's forthcoming release, Secrets of the Alchemist Dar. If you win their "online treasure hunt," you get a big flashy ring from Aaron Basha, best known for making those diamond-encrusted baby shoes that we've never really liked so much. Ok, whatever moves books is good by us. But here's the outrage. The American winner gets this dangling teardop thing:

The British winner, meanwhile, gets to blind innocent bystanders with a big fat sapphire:

We're thinking of changing our name to Book-and-Kidney-Pie and renting a PO box in Squatney, UK.

randomness rules

We love "jennifer, aka litericat," not just because she masterminds not your mother's bookclub--but also for her response to our recent post in which we called for somebody to create a random title generator for YA/chick lit novels. She just went out and did it, and you can find it at  Rum and Monkey's Name Generator site.

We're proud to announce that, thanks to this nifty tool, we have a title for our soon-to-be-best-selling young adult novel:  Secret Diary of a Somewhat Underage Vampire

So look out, Steph Meyer...we're breathing down your neck!

Stephenie Meyer...between the buns

We had an eerie feeling a few months ago that fangs would be a must-have accessory this fall...and golly, we hate to brag, but our fashion sense is as sharp as ever, burgerpeople. Stephenie Meyer's New Moon, a follow up to the uber-popular Twilight, is number one on the NYT bestseller list this week. So we channeled Buffy and hunted down our favorite vampire-novelist....and when we finally found her, we asked her these impertinent questions:

Who are your favorite writers that most people have never heard of?

Eva Ibbotson, Polly Shulman, and Shannon Hale (though she’s better known than the other two).

What kid or teen books rocked your world growing up?

The Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, A Little Princess by Frances Burnett… (I mostly read adult books growing up—the thicker the book the better.  I think of Pride and Prejudice and Gone with the Wind as YA, but they probably don’t really count.)

Your life is a TV series. Name the theme song.

Hysteria by Muse.

Burger-flippers want to know: have you ever had a job that required you to wear a geeky uniform? Details, please!

I’ve only had one job that required a uniform.  I was working in the business center of a resort, and I had to wear a skirt and blazer in “eggplant” purple with a horrible kaleidoscope-print acetate blouse underneath.   Not flattering.

We'd like to name a burger in your honor. What kind of fixins should it have?

The “Stephenie” should be the name for the plainest burger you have.  I’m anti-condiments.

And finally, vampires have been around for so long. In your opinion, why are they (as a subject for books and movies) so totally undead?

  I think there are two reasons.  First, people love monsters and horror stories in general.  There’s nothing like being frightened in a controlled situation to get the adrenalin pumping.  Second, of all the monsters that we have to choose from, vampires are hands-down the sexiest.  Who can resist both adrenalin and pheromones combined?

 

Looking for Alaska

I was really excited to read this book. Winner of this year’s Printz Award and a few others, the buzz has been that Looking for Alaska is beautifully written and funny throughout. Here’s the setup: Former loner Miles Halter goes to boarding school and makes friends with quirky smart kids, including a girl named Alaska. Alaska is intelligent, beautiful and tragic, susceptible to mood swings and eager to have lots of sex. She’s every smart, skinny boy’s wet dream, basically. Miles develops an immediate crush on her, but Alaska is living with a heavy reality that outweighs anything Miles has ever before dealt with. Let us just say that tragedy ensues.

I really really really wanted to like this book, because everyone else does and I’m a hopeless hanger-on that way. But I couldn’t even finish it. I just skimmed it, and when things happened more or less the way I predicted, I set it aside. Look, it was well-written, and the characters were interesting—they just weren’t as interesting as they thought they were. There was a self-congratulatory streak that ran through each one that really rubbed me the wrong way. Anyhoo, B-listers, let’s hear it! Is anyone out there with me? Anyone? Anyone? Or did you all love Alaska as much as the Printz committee?

we hate to say 'we told you so'...

but we told you so...remember how we predicted that there'd be literary brawl between the dueling collections This Is Chick Lit and This Is Not Chick Lit? Well, it seems like most of the scratching and spitting is happening over in the Not Chicks camp, where they've been lobbing accusations that chick lit is sucking up all the air (and shelf space) and leaving the gals who write high-minded stuff high and dry...

Uh, sorry, Elizabeth Merrick and other lionesses of literature, but we just don't buy this argument. We at the burger graze from all parts of the market--the chick lit department, the lit fic department, and everyplace in between. And look around you, girl---popular fiction has always sucked up most of the air and space and slots on the bestseller lists, and it always will...um, it's called POPULAR because more people seem to buy it. Literary fiction will always have its small but hallowed place in our culture...which is pretty much what artists have always had in every culture.

The trend toward shopping-and-sex obsessed chick lit is hardly a new and nefarious trend either...go to the back of the stacks of your local library and refresh your memory with a little review of Judith Krantz's ouevre, circa 1980s...panties that cost 200 a pair! Jewels the size of walnuts! (but only if you're over 18...this vintage chick lit is really raunchy!)

PS...as of this post, here are the Amazon rankings for these books:

This is Chick Lit: #142,556

This is Not Chick Lit: #66,775

So quit yer bellyaching, lit-fiction-writing females! Get out there and start crowing about how you're kicking ass--like a guy would do.

PPS. Thanks, galleycat, for keeping us current on this kerfuffle.