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I love going to used book stores and just browsing around. And, like the folks at Pod-dy Mouth, I also look for my own books.

I always make sure I check out the section where my book would be, sometimes finding a copy. I am the first to admit it is sad to see it there, buried, ignored, gathering
dust. Sadder still was the copy I found in Arlington, Virginia, where I looked at the binding and it clearly had not been read past page 75. I lost that reader, and with it a sense of accomplishment.

I don’t feel bad when I see my books in a used bookstore. In fact, I like it. What does piss me off is when I find a signed-and-inscribed copy… particularly if the person I signed-and-inscribed it to is also one of the people who blurbed the damn book! Okay, this has only happened to me once, and it was years ago when I was browsing at Mystery Pier in West Hollywood, but I’ve never forgotten it.

The guy liked the book enough to blurb it, but he gave away the signed copy I sent him when the book came out? What gives?

Book Critic Matt Taibbi of the NY Press has great fun trashing Thomas Friedman’s new book  THE WORLD IS FLAT. I’ve never read Friedman, and never will, but I thought the review was hilarious. Here’s an excerpt:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent  passages invite feature-length essays. I’ll give you an example, drawn at random
from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s
absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of
dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every
single time. He never misses.

Taibbi doesn’t just take potshots at Friedman — he also analyzes the substance of Friedman’s thesis, such as it is. But for me, this review will always hold a special place in my heart for this observation:

Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears
malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

Surely, this is the first time Bob Denver and FAR OUT SPACE NUTS have ever been referred to in literary criticism…and I, for one, hope it’s not the last.

A writer-friend of mine was lamenting the fact that, in this
ever-more-competitive publishing world, tie-ins are crowding out
paperback original fiction off the shelves (particularly sf/fantasy novels) in three
ways:

1)publishers are buying less material that doesn’t have a
"pre-sold" audience
2)books that ARE published are being pushed off the
shelf very quickly to make room for new tie-in work that comes out in regular
cycles.
3)backlists of original fiction are crowded out by the back-list of
tie-in work, which are re-issue and re-stocked every time a new tie-in in a series comes out, which can be often as monthly. She cited the hundreds of STAR TREK titles and twenty-five MURDER SHE WROTE
books as examples.

It’s probably true that, in today’s tough market, a publisher is more likely to take a risk on a tie-in — which comes with a pre-sold audience and a ready market — than with an original novel by an unknown author. But I don’t know that its any different than movie makers being more likely to greenlight a sequel to a hit than an original film…or for a network to prefer CSI:SEATTLE to just another cop show. Sure, corporations are risk-adverse and prefer going with proven commodities… but original movies are still getting made, original shows are still getting produced, and original novels are still being published.

That said, I stopped by a Barnes & Noble today and couldn’t help noticing that 75% of the paperbacks on the "New Science Fiction" table were STAR TREK, STAR WARS or other tie-in/licensed books. The LA Times reports today that Pocket Books now puts out 20 books a year in their various STAR TREK lines…and plans to do so through at least 2007.

Since Pocket Books began issuing "Trek" novels in the late ’70s, for example
(Bantam and Ballantine published a handful of originals and adaptations earlier
in the decade), more than 500 "Star Trek" titles have hit the nation’s
bookshelves, selling tens of millions of copies.

Your thoughts?