Book Reviews, Book Talk

Book Review: X Saves the World

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X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking by Jeff Gordinier

This is a book that I want to share with my friends. Gordinier does a FANTASTIC job of capturing the thoughts, discussions, issues and music that I had all throughout my school days.

Gordinier does a good job of outlining the media’s fascination with the tsunami that is the Baby Boomer generation and the lurid news fix on the youngest generation, the Millennials. Sandwiched between these two spotlight hogging masses is Generation X.

If you’re looking for a strong call to action to save the world and a 10 bullet-point plan for starting a movement. This book isn’t it (and you’re probably a Boomer anyway). If you’re looking for a book to outline a strategy to get your cause noticed and bring some media attention your way. This book isn’t it (and you’re probably a Millennial).

This book has all those things, but presents them in a much more REAL way. Not slacker. Not dumb. Not unmotivated. But data driven; experience driven; community driven. Real.

At 179 pages, it reads like a well-informed passionate op-ed piece and not much more. And the beauty of it, is that it doesn’t try to be much more. Sure there are the rants and causes that come into play late in the book, but this is all just to show what’s possible and what Generation X is grappling with now, in 2009.

At a minimum, the book will have you out renting Slacker, Googling Captain Beefheart and surfing eBay for Oblique Strategy Cards.

So if you’re looking for something to help you build you case or start a movement, there are probably better books out there. But if you’re interested in what’s happened over the past 20 years, where it’s all going and who is in charge, then this short cultural history is just the thing.

(Special thanks to Laura whose review made me want to pick up this book)

Birmingham, library, On the Web

Haunted Linn-Henley

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Once you have recovered from the opening title slide (they used Papyrus), you can enjoy some of the legends surrounding the haunted stacks in Birmingham’s own Lynn-Henley library. Bwahahahaaaaaaaaa!

Kudos to the library crew that put this together. You guys should do regular videos featuring historical stories throughout the year.

Authors, Events, News, On the Web

2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners

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For 27 years, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has been urging readers to send along the best of the worst opening lines for fictitious novels. They are always bad… which is good. And the best are really punny, even funny.

David McKenzie won this year’s contest. You can click through to read his entry. But I actually preferred the runner-up, so I include it below, plus a few others. If you do click through to their site, you can read all of the winners and runners-up in all the various categories.

This year’s Runner-Up was by Warren Blair:

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor–the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

Greg Homer’s “Vile Pun” category winner:

Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.

Eric Rice won the “Detective” category with:

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

One of my favorite “Dishonorable Mentions” this year was penned by Dan Blaufuss:

As Lieutenant Baker shrank his lips back to their normal size, he tried desperately to think of a situation in which his new-found power might be useful, as have I, your narrator.

Bookstores

Sears Sells Books?

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Retailers can’t run fast enough down the pricing ladder. Last week’s announcement from WalMart was the opening shot, stating that certain best-seller hardback books can be pre-sold for $10 (so Stephen King’s upcoming $35 book could be ordered for $10). Not to be outdone, Amazon made the same offer, but for the low low price of $9. To which WalMart answered with $8.99.

The next salvo came from Target, when they matched that price for seven upcoming books at $8.99. WalMart then bested the prices for those seven books by a penny, bringing the price down to $8.98.

As the dust was settling from that volley, Sears announced that they can’t/won’t compete on book prices, but they want to be in the game. So….

if you buy one of these upcoming best-seller pre-order type books from Walmart.com, Target.com or Amazon.com, you can email in your receipt and get “up to $9” in Sears store credit. That’s almost a little too complicated isn’t it? I wonder home many book buyers will take advantage of this? I wonder how many book buyers even new Sears sold books?

Let me know if any of you take Sears up on their offer. I’m curious as to how the whole process works out. Though, in the end, I’m thinking we all loose if nothing comes along to balance out this devaluation of books. Don’t get me wrong. I am always the first in line to buy cheap books and I buy from big-box and independents alike. I do have my favorites and price does matter. But the industry as a whole needs to start rolling out new products (not just new titles) faster before we all loose out. In a race to the bottom, everyone looses.

Books, Publishing and Birmingham