It's so easy, reading green

NPR has three green-reading recommendations from Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin, books that "remind us what's at stake when we chip away at the landscape." Her choices: the 900-page anthology "American Earth," edited by Bill McKibben, and two more slender volumes, "Where The Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators," by William Stolzenburg, and "The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat," by Eric Roston.

Going local, LAist points out three green books by Angelenos. While "Vintage LA" is a bit of a stretch — is my thrift-store habit really "green"? — the other books are both green and practical. Sophie Uliano's "Gorgeously Green" focuses on green beauty and girly lifestyle, and "The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City," by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, does just what it says. The authors of "The Urban Homestead" continue to blog about their experiences, so when you're done planting your balcony garden, you can catch up on the latest in backyard chicken-tending and rocket stoves.

Also online is the large and lovely worldchanging.org, which hopes to present "the most important and innovative new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future." Its book — Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century — has 600 pages of those ideas. McKibben called it "the Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod generation."

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of Paris' le Jardin de Tuilleries by Brian Pennington via Flickr

Book bits: Saul Bellow, John Holmes and mummies

In "Still Alive!," Herbert Gold's memoir, which we reviewed this week, a chapter is devoted to Gold's impressions of Saul Bellow, left, through all the years of their friendship. Here's a brief, interesting story about their early relationship that goes unmentioned in the review. When the editors at Viking read the manuscript of Gold's first novel, "Birth of a Hero," they were so impressed that they wanted to make sure a first-time novelist had really written it. What did they do? As Gold says:

Since my return address was Paris, some prudent soul thought to ask Saul for an opinion — Had I really written the book? Would I be likely to repay investment by writing another book? — and he gave it a favorable verdict.

I like that the publisher turned to Bellow to confirm whether the book had been plagiarized. It's just a reminder that questions of authenticity didn't begin with James Frey and Margaret Jones. How fortunate to be able to turn to a future Nobel laureate for some assistance.

On bad titles: I made a big deal about a book with the punning title "Abroad for Her Country" a few days ago. Now BearManor Media is publishing a biography of porn star John Holmes.

Yes, that's right, the title is "John Holmes: A Life Measured in Inches." The only bright side to this silly title is knowing that the publishers could have come up with something much worse. Please DO NOT send in suggested alternative titles.

Reading "The Book of the Dead": There it is, glaring at me from the side of a bus: a big, decaying face for the third “Mummy” movie coming next month. Just one further reminder that summer blockbusters have made an increasingly demonic turn — “Mamma Mia!” not included. Likely what you’ll find in this film are an aura of false supernaturalism, plenty of anachronisms and all-around cinematic phoniness -- that’s what Egyptologist Barry Kemp thought about the previous two films in this mummified franchise.

(More after the jump)

Soon I Will Be A Movie

Austin Grossman, author of "Soon I will Be Invincible," is wandering around Comic-Con wearing steampunk goggles and a brown velvet jacket that's got a 19th-century scientist vibe. He's in town because his book is in development for a movie with Strike Entertainment, which produced "Children of Men" (based on P.D. James' novel). Dan Weiss is working on the screenplay. "My agent is kind of a high flyer. He created a shell company and we kinda bought the rights for ourselves using someone else's money," Grossman says with a chuckle.

The book, which deals with a middle-aged supervillain going up against his bickering nemeses, was essentially a comic-book in literary form, yet it's considered literature—"One of the lessons of Joss Whedon's success is that you can do genre stuff, but it needs to have real characters, real feelings behind it, and it needs to be smart."

Grossman is a creative consultant on the film — note the lack of ironic tick-marks here; he appears to be actively involved. "There's a sense of the voice of Dr. Impossible I think that it's really crucial to get right. That's my major role."

Also much of the characters' background information ("backstory" for comics buffs) will be indicated through scene settings, newspapers lying around. "It's plotted more simply [than the book]," says Grossman. "What I like is that they kept the off-kilter rhythm of the scenes. A lot of the scenes end oddly in the novel, and we kept that."

As he leaves, Grossman says, "You know, I just realized, but Baron Ether (one of Grossman's characters) is kind of steampunk. Grossman is a recent steampunk convert, inspired by Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Ironically, Whedon has admitted that this YouTube short was inspired by seeing the title of Grossman's book. "Yeah, the goggles on the forehead-thing I'm wearing—that's Dr. Horrible's signature."

Laurel Maury

Doh! Sorry about that, Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, 109 years ago this week. In 1926, he published his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises."

It was a warm spring night and I sat at a table on the terrace of the Napolitain after Robert had gone, watching it get dark and the electric signs come on, and the red and green stop-and-go-traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clippety-clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic, and the poules going by, singly and in pairs, looking for the evening meal. I watched a good-looking girl walk past the table and watched her go up the street and lost sight of her, and watched another, and then saw the first one coming back again. She went by once more and I caught her eye, and she came over and sat down at the table. The waiter came up.
    "Well, what will you drink?" I asked.
    "Pernod."
    "That's not good for little girls."
    "Little girl yourself. Dites garçon, un pernod."
    "A pernod for me, too."
    "What's the matter?" she asked. "Going to a party?"

It's not too late to celebrate Papa Hemingway and his work — I understand, not everyone is so inclined — and I bet there's no place swankier than the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Or if you want to stay in, you could throw yourself a Pernod party.

Or you could go out to a Hemingway bar — there seems to be no end to them. Are there any other authors who've so fully saturated our popular (drinking) culture?

Carolyn Kellogg

What Mad Men read and more book news

photo: AMC

New York Magazine's Culture Vulture parses the books "Mad Men" character Don Draper has been reading and suggests some others he might enjoy. Apparently today's men don't read on TV (but the women do!)

Charles Bock and Richard Price will read at Central Park's Summerstage in New York July 31, and they've got a rock-show style poster to prove it.

Is How Fiction Works, the new book by literary critic James Wood, prescriptive? Yes, everyone agrees. But there's some debate about how devoted he is to realism -- and Wood has jumped in to clarify.

Things'll be getting hot in San Francisco next weekend, with Stephen Elliott, Daniel Handler and more reading at Dirty Words: Litquake's Tribute to Smut -- the event also promises burlesque dancers and a corset fashion show. It's a benefit for Litquake, the week-long festival of literariness coming in October.

Feeling hot already? The Barnes & Noble Review has a capsule selection of five books on swimming to help you cool down.

And finally: "In writing, I am not my face." - Debra Winger writes on writing in the Washington Post.

Carolyn Kellogg

Comic-Con kicks off

Photo by Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

San Diego is overflowing with comic fans as Comic-Con begins today: Tickets have sold out. Our new Hero Complex blog is in the door, keeping up on the movie previews and author signings and conference ephemera, including which branded bag is the hot property on the floor this year.

And of course there are photographers ready to take photos of all the Slave Leias and other costumed fans. Christa Miesner, above, dressed as another Star Wars character — Twi'Lek — at Comic-Con 2007.

Carolyn Kellogg

Narrative Magazine's big prize

There are so many literary journals that listing them all takes a huge database (Duotrope) or a really big website (Newpages). If you can navigate them, literary magazines are great places to find new fiction — and for new writers, they're a great way to get published.

Not that it's easy. Journals are so overwhelmed with submissions that sometimes they take two years to send out a simple rejection. One way to winnow the pack — and generate some cash — is to launch a contest. Often the contests have a moderate entry fee, 10 or 20 bucks, and some kind of cash prize. Usually the prize isn't all that much, sadly. But Narrative Magazine's got a lucrative pot for its current first-person story contest: $3,000 for the winner, $1,750 for second place and $1,000 for third. Spreading the money love around, the magazine will give 10 runners-up $125 each.

Submissions can be fiction or nonfiction, and the call for entries is clear:

We are looking for authors whose use of the first person demonstrates a sense of proportion and perspective, an engagement with the world beyond the self, for authors whose gifts of thought or feeling and of insight enhance a reader’s sense of connection and possibility. And, as always, we are looking for manuscripts with a strong narrative, in which the effects of language are intense and total. Reading the first-person narrator — the I of the story — we hope to find the most necessary, most intimate, most personal stories made universal.

The contest closes on July 31.

Carolyn Kellogg

Get 'em while they're free

Science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor is launching Tor.com, an online site with stories and art, authors blogging and facebook-like community features, all with a focus on otherworldly fiction. i09 editor Annalee Nuwitz writes, "Reading Tor.com is like jumping into a room where a lot of my favorite scifi writers and bloggers are chatting. Can't wait for more!"

This week - until Sunday - Tor.com is giving away books and digital versions of original art. You can download html, PDF or mobile versions of 24 titles, including John Scalzi's "Old Man War" and "Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson. Just like the text, the art comes in cell phone, laptop and big screen sizes.

For people who already know the books, it's not a big deal, but for someone like me -- who has an abiding affection for science fiction but has fallen woefully behind -- it's a wonderful invitation to get back in the slipstream.

Carolyn Kellogg

cover art for "Zoe's Tale" by John Scalzi copyright John Harris / Tor.com

Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler, an oil exec who lost his job for drinking and carrying on with a secretary, cleaned up to become one of the most enduring writers of detective fiction. The hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe and Chandler's take on Los Angeles have influenced generations of writers. To celebrate his birthday today, we asked some fans what they'd give him, or say to him, for his 120th.

Judith Freeman, author of the Chandler biography "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved":  "A night with Cissy. And of course red roses."

Tod Goldberg, author of "Simplify" and contributor to "Las Vegas Noir": "I like to give people presents they can use, so I'd probably give Chandler a shovel and a pick-axe, which would be useful in getting out of the grave and for beating to death all the people — including this one — who've ripped him off over the years. I suspect Chandler would also find it very odd to go into a Barnes & Noble and find that every mid-list crime novelist is being compared to him, and usually favorably, in their jacket copy. In fact, I don't know a single crime writer (including members of my family!) who've not been called Chandleresque, which makes me think most people haven't really read much Raymond Chandler."

many more presents after the jump.

Behind those books - a secret door!

I don't know if it was Nancy Drew or the board game Clue or Scooby Doo, but at some point I imprinted on secret doors. Particularly secret doors hidden behind bookshelves. Pull a book and - surprise! - the shelf swings open, revealing a hidden room (or secret passage, or steps going down, or something grisly).

Nowadays homeowners can get bookshelf-disguising doors of their own. There are multiple retail versions and at least one custom designer. What the bookshelves hide varies, from saferooms to unsightly laundry rooms to rooms that become wine cellars. Sadly, the products seem too major to try to install in a rental, unless you have a landlord with a sense of intrigue.

One Australian with DIY skills built the shelves above, which, in the spirit of hidden doors, open when you pull on a Sherlock Holmes book. While his shelves conceal nothing more than a broom closet, with his talents I bet he could construct a secret passageway -- maybe to a conservatory.

To see one bookshelf do its thing, check out the video after the jump.