Potter Magic for Christmas

Potter mania takes over the Muggle world once again with the launch of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of five short tales ostensibly written by a 15th-century wizard and translated from the original runes by Hermione Grainger.

The footage above from the Telegraph is of the launch at Waterstones in London. Fans queued all night and some even flew in from overseas to be the first to get their hands on this last little bit of magic in the series.

(Bookshops here - brace yourselves!)

Imagination and Failure at Harvard

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Need a little inspiration this morning? Watch this video recording of J.K. Rowling deliverings her Commencement Address entitled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination, at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

The Guardian meanwhile reports that sales of Rowling's books have sold 400m worldwide.

Writing in Cafes

Sci-fi writer Firdaus left a question in the comments to the previous post, and maybe you could answer it for him :

I need some suggestions here about a conducive public place to write. My criteria is it's reachable by public transport (preferably LRT) and have power plug for my laptop.

Usually I write at home but with the school holiday I found my little sisters keep breathing on my neck. Oh, having a door facing your back adds to annoyance as well. (Worse, they keep opening it from time to time). They are sweet, but I'm easily distracted ...

I'm not sure I can answer the question fulfilling Firdaus' criteria, but a very nice place to write is D'lish in Bangsar Village which opens at 10 a.m. It's quiet (until the lunchtime rush), light and airy, and has much better coffee than Starbucks. It's a bit of a walk up from the LRT, but the exercise does you good! Best of all, the management don't look at you oddly when you sit and scribble. (Helen Read and Abby Leong did my creative writing course and know exactly what you're up to!)

If writing in a cafe seems like a strange idea, have a read of novelist Susan Hill's blog, or check out this piece on Rowling. These people don't have little sisters to pester them but find the muse works really well in a public place with good coffee.

Postscript :

I've just remembered (I think Kam's words in the comments nudged me!) this lovely article by Alice Jones on cafe culture from The Independent a couple of years back, and think you cafe scribblers would enjoy it.

The UK Book Biz in 2007

Robert McCrum in the Observer reviews fortunes of the UK publishing world in 2007, and reports that in a year dominated by "HP7":

Rowling's reported wealth would rise this year to £545m, but the reality of literary life was rubbed in when, last March, a survey of some 25,000 authors revealed that the typical British writer earned only about £4,000 a year (significantly less than the £6,300 reported in 2001). Blogging and the internet might have liberated the writer from the garret, but it seems that you still cannot take the garret out of the writer.

He also slips in this, which will no doubt delight many of you:

From some points of view, 'literary fiction' is becoming as much a genre as science fiction.

And I was always snobbish enough to think that it was at the burning sun centre of the universe with everything else in orbit, dreaming of becoming it!

Bezos Buys Beedle the Bard

Eat your hearts out, Potter fans. This book is not for you.

A single handwritten copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard:

... bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones ...

was snapped up by Amazon.com at auction house Sotheby's last week ... for a cool £1.95m (US$3.9)! All proceeds though go to a charity called The Children's Voice which helps vulnerable children in Eastern Europe.

The six other copies of the book have been given to those most closely connected with the Harry Potter books during the past 17 years.

Rowling describes writing the book as a good way to say goodbye to Harry.

You can oggle the pictures and read a synopsis on the Amazon.com website and you can watch the BBC's report here:

Moral Question

Fans ponder Rowling's revelation.

Pic courtesy of ImageGenerator.

Skulduggery Central

The hackers post spoilers ... that's bad enough ... but a New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani review of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows ahead of time?

Lindesay Irvine invites readers to have their say on the Guardian blog.

Rowling is staggered.

I'd call it downright kiasu.

Postscript:

Also horribly kiasu in my opinion, is Tesco which, though it doesn't normally sell books in Malaysia, is undercutting all the bookshops by selling the book at just RM69.90. Will the store make any profit at all? Tesco stores in the UK are apparently making just a few pence a copy and presumably the idea is to tempt you to do the rest of your shopping there at the same time.

One Disaffected Bookseller

As promised. You can listen here to a BBC World Service special on the launch of Harry Potter 7, and a certain "disaffected" bookseller from Bangsar telling it as it is!

Rowling apparently has a great deal of gratitude for independent booksellers. What a pity the marketing behemoth now excludes the very people who stood by her books in the early days.

Rich List

We all know who the UK's richest writer is - Joanne Rowling, worth a cool £545m.

But would you like to lay bets as to which other authors top the list according to a survey conducted by the Times? And then there was, of course, that Forbes piece about top-earning authors last year which gives a more transatlantic perspective ...

Comparative Literature

Here are a couple of nice things to amuse you this Monday morning.

There are all kinds of wacky facts about books in this PDF downloadable from the New York Times. (Or you can just click on the pic left if you're lazy.)

What are the best selling books internationally at the moment? Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, yes, you'd expect their works on the list. But Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies is in there too, and I'm also fascinated to learn that while Auster's book sold 70,000 copies in the US in 2006, it sold 165,00 copies in France!

There are also a couple of internationally best selling authors I'd never heard of (and I bet you haven't either) - Ildefonso Falcones de Sierra and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who both of course write in Spanish.

And the titles of some of the Harry Potter rip-offs around the world made me smile: my favourite is Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon (China)!

Statistic after statistic on the page shows just how much work in translation is one way traffic, with far more American titles being translated into foreign languages than the other way round.

You might also like to take a look at the list of 100 top favourite books compiled by British bookchain, Waterstones and reproduced in the Telegraph. The company asked its 5,000 staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982, the date Waterstones opened its first store.

(And yes, unbelievable as it sounds, the kind of people who work in bookshops in the UK do read, unlike too many of their counterparts here!)

The number of male authors on the list outweighs the number of female authors - this could be because (as my own small scale research bore out too) while women tend to read books by both men and women, men tend to read mostly books by men. (I'd love to know how many of those employees are blokes.)

Still, we do love to compare ourselves against lists and this one provides a very useful starting point for anyone who isn't too sure about what they might like to read.

Anyway, Happy World Book Day! Don't forget to stop off at a bookshop to buy yourself (and your loved one) a gift.

Dickensville

In an aptly titled piece in the Guardian, Simon Swift asks What the Dickens?, referring to the £62m Dickens World theme park which is due to open in Chatham, Kent at the end of May.

It is described as:

... an exciting indoor visitor complex themed around the life, books and times of one of Britain’s best loved authors, Charles Dickens. It will take visitors on a fascinating journey through Dickens’ lifetime as they step back into Dickensian England and are immersed in the urban streets, sounds and smells of the 19th century.

And it boasts the following attractions:

... one of Europe’s largest dark boat rides, the Haunted house of Ebenezer Scrooge, a state-of-the art animatronic show, Victorian School Room, 4D high definition show and Fagin’s Den.

Is this an exciting way of bringing literature alive or just another great British monument to tackiness? (I confess a deep affection for all things tacky, and I firmly believe that Malaysia does tacky with a great deal more style than the Brits. Look no further than Sunway Pyramid!)

And on behalf of Britain's Tourist Board, if you were in UK on your hols, would you make a special journey to go and see Dickens World?

Meanwhile, on the Guardian blog Judith Flanders worries that the social issues that Dickens cared so much about could be trivialised, while Lindesay Irvine runs away with the idea of the turning other writers' works into theme park material. (Any one up for a nice family day out at Kafka's Castle?) Flanders has invited readers to say what authors they think should get the theme park treatment, and one commenter could well have a workable proposal for Harry Potter Land! (Oops, too late, dear!)

The closest I've come to proposing the tacky and materialistic exploitation of any author's work is this though.

(While writing this post I was haunted by the memory of an article I read, but not unfortunately blogged, last year about the rebuilding of Hardy's Wessex in China. Would be grateful for help in tracking it down.)