Oprah relaunches book club, saying 'I still believe in books'

Just in time for the summer reading season, Oprah Winfrey announced Friday that she's bringing back her book club. In a video posted on the website of her OWN network, Winfrey said, "This time, it's an interactive, online book club for our digital world. That's why we're calling it Book Club 2.0."

Her book club reboot is designed to take advantage of the new technologies available to readers. The e-book editions of her selections will be enhanced especially for the Oprah Book Club, with sharing capacities and notations from Winfrey herself. She also promises to use social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to conduct the discussion about the book.

In the online video [see after the jump], Winfrey said was so enthusiastic about a book that she had to revive her book club in order to share it. That book is Cheryl Strayed's "Wild," a memoir about her 1,110-mile hike down the Pacific Crest Trail.

Holding up a hardcover edition of "Wild" to the camera, Winfrey said, "I still believe in books." She urged readers in her book club to go and purchase the book from a neighborhood bookstore, if that was how they liked to read. Book Club 2.0 is not leaving print books behind.

Founded in 1996, Oprah's Book Club became a fast track to fame and bestsellerdom. Sometimes she picked new novels, like Janet Fitch's "White Oleander," or an older book, like Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye." After picking Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" in 2001, a controversy erupted over comments he made, and Winfrey suspended the Book Club. When she brought it back, it was less frequent, and initially stuck to classic works. In 2010, in a grand gesture of reconciliation and forgiveness, she selected Franzen's next novel, "Freedom," and he appeared on her show. She officially retired the book club later that year.

Details about Oprah's Book Club 2.0 will be available in the forthcoming issue of "O Magazine," which hits shelves next week.

What Patti Smith and Neil Young won't be doing at BEA

The nation's biggest publishing conference, Book Expo America, announced Monday that it had scored a rock 'n' roll coup: On its second day, Patti Smith will interview Neil Young on stage. That's far more rock power than the annual conference, taking place June 5-7 in Manhattan, usually has in-house.

Publishers have come to see that Smith, a legendary rocker since the release of her 1975 album "Horses," and longtime poet, is a literary asset. Her recent memoir "Just Kids," in which she wrote of her early years in New York with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, was a runaway bestseller. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize, one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 books of 2010, and won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Maybe some of that literary fortune will rub off on Young, who enters the publishing marketplace with his own memoir "Waging Heavy Peace" in October. The book, publisher Blue Rider Press promises, chronicles his youth in Canada, playing in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and his years with the band Crazy Horse. It will include, among other things, stories of "the LSD-laden boulevards of 1966 Los Angeles."

The conversation at Book Expo between Smith and Young promises to be a highlight of the conference, for 2012 and over its long history. The two will have a lot to talk about, and who knows, maybe they'll even hum a few bars.

But no matter what creative sparks fly between them, nothing can compare to the performance above. Despite the low-quality video, the performance of Neil Young's song "Helpless" is stunning. When Patti Smith comes in, around the 4:29 mark, she is a majestic, commanding force, and her additional lyrics give the song a whole new dimension. Keep watching: she and Neil Young share a mic for the chorus at about 6:40.

The performance was in 1996, at one of Young's annual Bridge School Benefits. Pearl Jam was also on the bill that year. They won't, as far as I know, be joining them at BEA.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

 

'Fox Mole' scores six-figure book deal

Joe Muto, better known as "The Fox Mole," has landed a six-figure book deal. He will publish the memoir, tentatively titled "An Atheist in the Fox Hole," with Dutton.

Muto rose to fame in April when he began blogging anonymously for the website Gawker from inside the Fox newsroom as the "Fox Mole." Less than two days went by before his superiors had figured out that Muto was behind the Mole, and he was shown the door.

His Mole-dom didn't last long.

Muto's tenure at Fox had been much longer -- eight years. He started out as a production assistant and made his way up to an associate producer position on Bill O'Reilly's show.

The Observer, which got a look at the proposal, described what to expect from Muto's book.

Mr. Muto’s book is pitched as a How to Lose Friends and Alienate People-style industry memoir in a Dave Barry/David Sedaris tone. The proposal outlines chapters devoted to the “cheapness and stinginess” of Fox News (“cannot be overstated”), Mr. O’Reilly’s morning ritual (“lots of yelling”) and — “in what’s certain to be the most talked about chapter of the book” — the 2004 sexual harassment suit filed against Mr. O’Reilly.

“I’ll go through the lawsuit line by line, offering my own interpretation and commentary, and will definitively answer the question Did He Do It?,” Mr. Muto wrote.

Things tend to move fast for Muto -- the book deal was announced a day after The Observer posted the story of it being shopped around.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Screenshot of Gawker.com's Fox Mole

Whitney Houston's mom, Cissy, planning book about her daughter

Cissy Houston, the commanding gospel singer and mother of Whitney Houston, is said to be shopping a book about her daughter to publishers. Pop star Whitney Houston was 48 when she died in February in Beverly Hills.

The New York Times reports that Cissy Houston met with publishers this week in New York.

Affectionately calling her daughter “Nippy,” her childhood nickname, and appearing emotionally and physically drained, Ms. Houston met with publishers in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel, said the people, who declined to be identified because the negotiations were still going on.

Ms. Houston, 78, described the book in meetings as the real and definitive story of her daughter, the pop legend who died on Feb. 11 in Beverly Hills at the age of 48.

“It’s going to be the bad, it’s going to be the good,” she told one publisher.

Cissy Houston is said to be planning to work with a ghostwriter on the project, which may -- or may not -- deal frankly with Whitney Houston's drug use. The L.A. County coroner determined Houston's cause of death to have been drowning, along with heart disease and cocaine use.

Whitney Houston's career included a reality television show, the film "The Bodyguard," millions of record sales and six Grammy awards.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Whitney Houston and Cissy Houston in 1995 at the taping of the "Soul Train 25th Anniversary of Hall of Fame" special. Credit: Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press

Rodney King and the L.A. riots: When 20 years can seem like yesterday

One aspect of Los Angeles hasn't changed in the 20 years since the 1992 riots: Traffic tie-ups. Rodney King, whose March 1991 beating by L.A. police officers was the first link in the chain of events that culminated in the 1992 riots, was a half-hour late Saturday for his interview with Times columnist Patt Morrison.

So, in a sense, the session ran in reverse. With Morrison, who also anchors a radio show on KPCC, as the moderator, Angelenos spent a half-hour talking about their own experiences during and after the riots as they awaited King's arrival. The general consensus: The LAPD has changed for the better, but the socio-economic conditions that set the stage for the riots have worsened. And the racial divides are still chasms.

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"I'm surprised at how white we are here," said one white woman, looking around at the crowd of more than 500 people in a basement auditorium at USC's Ronald Tutor Campus Center, about four miles north of where the riots began near South Central's Normandie and Florence Avenues. The woman said she lived in South Central, in a neighborhood in which she is the rare white resident. "The riots can certainly start again, until we have socio-economic changes, and in how we view other people."

King, for his part, arrived out of breath, and spoke of forgiveness for the officers involved in his videotaped beating after a high-speed chase. With his history of substance abuse, he said, he has been in need of some forgiveness. "I am a forgiving man," he said. "That's how I was raised, to be in a forgiving state of mind. I have been forgiven many times. I am only human. Who am I not to forgive someone?"

In Sunday books: On Patti Smith, Tolstoy and life in the marginalia

What's in a book? Ideas and language, of course, and, remarkably, Lynell George has been able to trace her mother's life in the marginalia she left in many of her books. As George notes in her essay, "A Life in the Marginalia," that starts on the cover of this Sunday's Arts & Books section, to open her mother's books was "to reveal all manner of ephemera -- from transit passes to cards to notes in her mother's elegant English teacher cursive -- and all marking chapters in a rich, full life. And, in a way, a gentle guidance." Just as her mother's books and love of reading were a gift to her, George's memoir reminds us of the gift of books in enhancing the fabric of a home.  

Also Sunday,  David Ulin checks in on Patti Smith's "Woolgathering," a collection of prose poems that Ulin says speaks volumes about the broad diversity that makes up the life of Smith as a rocker, mother, poet, artist.

You can also listen here to an excerpt of Smith reading from her award-winning memoir "Just Kids," which has just been released as an audio book: Pattismithexcerpt

Daniel Handler, known more familiarly to some as Lemony Snicket, is back with his YA-debut "Why We Broke Up," which Susan Carpenter describes as "a brief but intense teen relationship gone wrong." Carpenter says that few of these "tragic trajectories have been written about as poignantly" as in this book, which is illustrated by Maira Kalman.

Then there's Tolstoy. Yes, the life of the count is detailed in Rosamund Bartlett's "Tolstoy: A Russian Life." Reviewer Martin Rubin notes that Tolstoy was "a loner, a quintessential outsider and a generally awful and quarrelsome individual." So how was he able to "understand and evoke the glittering social whirl and intricacies of fashionable salons" that made up much of his fiction?

Shari Roan reviews Mary Johnson's "An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service and an Authentic Life," a memoir that will "fascinate not only Catholics but anyone who has wondered about the human capacity to vow lifelong celibacy, poverty and charity" and gives us a fascinating portrait of Mother Teresa. Online at The Siren's Call, Nick Owchar talks to novelist Richard Zimler about his recent visit to Poland to discuss the novel "The Warsaw Anagrams" with Polish audiences.

And, of course, we have our Best-Sellers lists of what's hot at Southern California stores.

Again, thanks for reading (and for listening).

-- Jon Thurber, book editor 

Photo: One of several books that were part of writer Lynell George's mother's collection. George's mother imprinted the book with a hand and footprint of her daughter when she was a baby. Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times