People of the Book
A Blog about Book Publishing from a Catholic Perspective

Heidi Schlumpf at Publishers Weekly takes a look at Matthew Kelly, the Australian-born author and inspirational speaker whose books occupy four of the top ten spots on the Catholic Bestseller list. Kelly’s message is “deceptively simple,” she writes: “God’s dream for us is to become the best version of ourselves.” The Cincinnati-based Kelly is a traveller; he has spoken to an estimated 2 million people in 13 years. “My ministry is based on the original model,” Kelly says. “Jesus went out to the people, and so I go out to the people.”

Book-summary services are taking a place alongside newspaper and magazine book reviews as important ways for readers to find out about new books, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal (subscriber-only). Christian Book Summaries has been posting free summaries of evangelical books on its website since 2000. Most other reader services charge fees. Business book summaries seem to be thriving, with one service claiming 500,000 subscribers. Publishers generally cooperate with the services, hoping that the summaries will lead to sales. Says one publisher, reader services “level the playing field for a book fighting for space on a table at Barnes & Noble.”

The Washington Post publishes a poignant and amusing piece about bibliomaniacs, “those to whom books are like bottles of whiskey to the inebriate, to whom anything that is between covers has a sort of intoxicating savour,” according to Sir Hugh Walpole. Some of them are running out of living space. One man rented a storage unit for his cookbook collection. Another passionate reader seriously considered buying the house next door when her home became too cluttered with books.

Books, it turns out, inflame a particular kind of passion. They inform, they amuse, they provoke. They keep us company and lull us to sleep. They give manifest evidence of our intellect. They show off our interests and our values. And when we’ve run out of places to put them, they prove extremely difficult to part with.

Slate.com carefully examines the statement that Dan Brown filed in the London court where he is being sued for copyright infringement, and finds that the mega-bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code has revealed the secrets of writing popular pulp fiction. “It requires a few essential elements: some kind of shadowy force, like a secret society or government agency; a ‘big idea’ that contains a moral ‘grey area’; and a treasure.” Writes Bryan Curtis: “When all of Brown’s elements come together, doled out over cliffhanging chapters, with characters that exist to ‘move the plot along,’ it is like mixing the ingredients to make a cake.”

Brown also describes the literary epiphany that started him on his writing career: a reading of Sidney Sheldon’s The Doomsday Conspiracy while on vacation. “Almost all of my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.),” Brown writes. Sheldon was a revelation. “I began to suspect that maybe I could write a ‘thriller’ of this type one day.”

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:

HARDCOVER

1. The Seven Levels of Intimacy
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

2. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

3. Mother Angelica
Raymond Arroyo. Doubleday

4. The Pope’s Army
Robert Royal. Crossroad

5. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

6. The Book of Courage
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

7. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing.

8. My Life with the Saints
James Martin. Loyola Press

9. Psalms: The Saint John’s Bible
Donald Jackson. Liturgical Press

10. The Holy Longing
Ronald Rolheiser. Doubleday

PAPERBACK

1. Not By Bread Alone: Daily Reflections for Lent 2006
Angela Ashwin. Liturgical Press

2. The Da Vinci Deception
Mark Shea, Edward Sri & the Editors of Catholic Exchange. Ascension Press

3. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing

4. God Is Love (Deus Caritas Est)
Pope Benedict XVI. USCCB Publishing

5. Journey to Easter
Pope Benedict XVI. Crossroad

6. Handbook for Today’s Catholic
A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication. Liguori

7. Our Second Birth
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Crossroad

8. Living the Days of Lent 2006
Anita M. Constance. Paulist Press

9. The Lenten Pharmacy
Edward Hays. Ave Maria Press

10. Bread and Wine
Johann Christoph Arnold. Orbis Books

Bestselling author/pastor Joel Osteen has signed a contract for his next book that industry observers say is one of the most lucrative deals for a non-fiction book in publishing history. Osteen, author of Your Best Life Now, could receive more than $10 million for the book, to be published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The only other authors to receive similar amounts for non-fiction books are Pope John Paul II, Bill Clinton, and Alan Greenspan, according to a report in the New York Times.

Blogger Fred K, who seems to be a professor of literature, quotes Flannery O’Connor about the peculiarities of modern fiction, and writes about what’s need to learn how to read well:

Reading permits students to experience a wide range of activities vicariously, and if a student does not judge these experiences, the result will be the same as if the student threw himself or herself into a flurry of activities with no reflection or discernment: emptiness, boredom, despair.

Since contemporary literature minimizes the explicit judgement of the author, stories can appear to the naive reader to be simply an imitation of experience itself. Reading the older novels can be a way to accustom students to the work of discernment necessary to reading literature fruitfully.

He passes along O’Connor’s recommendations: the better English novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and the early James and Crane.

DotCommonweal, a blog by the writers and editors of Commonweal magazine, made its debut last week. The editors of First Things magazine have had a blog for more than a year. It’s called “On the Square,” and it’s incorporated right into the home page of the First Things website. With the editors of two Catholic magazines now blogging away, magazine blogs are officially a trend. This week, dotCommonweal features a discussion of the future of “Commonweal Catholics” (naturally), and, at First Things, Richard John Neuhaus is examining insider Vatican rumors (of course).

My book group is reading Vipers’ Tangle by Francois Mauriac this month, and, while surfing around for some background on it, I ran across a remarkable article. It’s called “Salvation, Damnation, and the Religious Novel” by Richard Gilman, published in 1984 in the New York Times. You can find it here. Gilman was a professor at Yale, a noted theater and literary critic, who caused a stir in the 80s when he became a Catholic. In his essay, Gilman writes about how he was profoundly influenced by the great mid-century Catholic novels, or, as he prefers, by “fiction by Catholics.” Bernanos, Greene, and Mauriac especially moved him. Their novels revealed “the pain of being a Catholic.” This “counteracted the bland assurances of peace and inner harmony that were the central elements of the Catholic evangelism I’d previously encountered.” More importantly, Gilman met God in their novels:

He was there, lurking in all these fictional worlds, more or less a factor in the plots, often an antagonist. His presence had the effect of making Him more human, if I can put it in that bizarre way. Certainly it made Him more distinctive. He could fit into literature, I thought, He wasn’t just a value, even the Supreme one, He wasn’t merely Sublimity or the Good or Truth, none of which was of any use to me at the time. He was someone, a character not wholly unlike all the others.

Sadly, Gilman left the chuch after a time. I hope he has found his way back to the “someone” he once met in great literature.

Sales of religious books slid by 6.1 percent to $876 million in 2005, according to data released by the Association of American Publishers. Trade sales as a whole rose 25 percent to $7.8 billion. Religious book sales were affected by the absence of a new mega-bestseller in 2005, like Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life. However, this week Thomas Nelson launched Billy Graham’s new book The Journey: How to Live by Faith in an Uncertain World with a 600,000-copy first printing.

Pope Benedict XVI received an iPod when he visited the offices of Vatican Radio last week. The 20 meg audio player is “loaded with a sampling of the station’s programming in English, Italian and German, and musical compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, according to a report. The Pope is said to have commented that “computer technology is the future.”

The annual Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year goes to People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What To Do About It. This creepy tome barely prevailed over Rhino Horn Stockpile Management: Minimum Standards and Best Practices from East and Southern Africa and Ancient Starch Research. A new self-help book, Bullying and Sexual Harassment: A Practical Handbook, also received support in this year’s Bookseller.com contest.

Fans of accomplished, morally serious fiction should read Vinita Hampton Wright’s new novel Dwelling Places, a spare, poignant, and moving tale of an Iowa farm family’s struggles with problems both spiritual and temporal. Wright’s fourth novel has been deservedly praised for its well-drawn characters and an authentic story, which conveys an attitude of Christian hope that is not easy or obvious. Read reviews here and here.

The Guardian UK describes how print-on-demand technology is making self-publishing easier and more popular. The column includes one startling factoid: half of all published books sell less than 250 copies. Also in Britain, Random House has launched “Quick Reads,” a series of short paperbacks aimed at “people who struggle with reading or have lost the habit of carrying around a good book.” The books are written by well-known authors. “Language is simple, with short sentences and a limited number of words of three syllables or more.”

Writer Joseph Epstein discovers that he has been plagiarized. He takes it as a mild compliment, but he worries nevertheless — about being accused of plagiarism:

Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow. . . . In my own case, I have written a few books built to a great extent on other writers’ books. Where the blurry line between a paraphrase and a lift is drawn–not always so clear when composing such books–has always been worrisome to me.

I suppose every blogger is a thief too. I’ll make sure my thefts are properly attributed.

Every Ash Wednesday, an old college chum of Fr. Jim Martin’s calls him and tells him what he will be giving up for Lent that year. Fr. Martin tells the story in a delightful commentary on NPR’s All Things Considered. Listen to it here. Ash Wednesday is also the publication day for Fr. Martin’s new book My Life with the Saints.

Publishers Weekly reports the reactions of three Catholic publishers in the U.S. to the recent Vatican decision to charge royalties for publishing the pope’s writings. Sister Donna Giaimo, editorial director of Pauline Books and Media, says “it’s a matter of some concern.” Pauline had to raise the price of its edition of the new encyclical God Is Love to cover the new charge. Two other publishers, Mark Brumly of Ignatius Press and John Jones of Crossroad, say they don’t mind paying royalties. Both said they would continue to publish papal books.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

From “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot