Crime

A Scottish cop fights Miami crime in Irvine Welsh's Crime

Like many readers my age, I've already read Trainspotting, Welsh's iconic novel on heroin, but I  haven't read any of his other works. This book is a spin-off of another novel, Filth. In Crime (W.W. Norton, 2008), cop, ex-alcoholic, and rough-around-the-edges anti-hero Ray Lennox has just been prescribed a Miami Beach vacation by his boss after nabbing a disturbingly efficient pedophile and murderer back in Scotland. Despite catching the killer, Lennox is guilt-stricken that he was unable to save the last victim, a young girl named Britney who disappeared on her way to school. Depressed and full of self-regret, the world through Lennox's eyes is ugly–his plane sure to plummet, his fiancee, Trudi, an ugly caricature of a wedding-obsessed bitch, and Miami is a sleaze pit. Pre-trip, Lennox decided to only take a few anti-depressants with him, a decision he's now regretting as Britney's death takes over his mind. His anxiety leads to a fight with his fiancee, and sends him sliding into a drinking and cocaine binge with the nightmarish and drugged women he meets, Robyn and Starry. Through his cocaine haze (done off of the cover of Trudi's copy of Perfect Bride!) he manages to save Tianna, Robyn's daughter, from being raped at the party. Tianna becomes a way to succeed where he tragically failed with Britney, and his quest to save her draws him into a disturbing and seedy crime ring.

Crime is a hard book to get into. At first Lennox's depression and anger tints everything, and the thought of reading almost 350 pages about what seem to be truly despicable (and, at first, uninteresting) people seems daunting and frankly, not worth the trouble. I never read Filth, so I have no previous attachment to Ray Lennox, and he seemed to be nothing more than a depressing stereotype: Hardened cop who's seen too much. With the introduction of Tianna, the first person Welsh allows Ray to sympathize for and the true heart of the novel, the other characters begin to soften as well. But, I still found myself almost halfway through the book before I began to really root for Lennox. The ending, when you get there, is a satisfying conclusion to this gritty story of redemption, if not the most surprising.

This book isn't quite new–it came out in 2008–so it's already out in paperback. You can get it here.

You can also check out the book trailer for Crime here.

Pace, Part One: COMPLETE

Okay, so I might have slacked off with the whole “writing thing” for a while. But I’m back! So let’s forget this whole thing even happened, okay?

I just finished up my first year as in Pace University’s M.S. in Publishing program and I’m happy to report it’s been amazing, even if some classes (I’m looking at you, Financial Aspects of Publishing) made me want to give up and pursue something easier, like bricklaying or becoming a surrogate mom. I basically took courses on things like marketing, production, and editing, but what really had me excited were things like guest speakers (some super neat examples—the editor who first published Hitchhiker’s Guide, Susan Katz, publisher of HarperCollins Children's Books, and Michael Healy, who is heading up the Google Book project).

I’ve also made a whole bunch of clever friends who were nice enough to listen to me whine and to not make fun of me for bringing a suitcase to class.

But I’ve really noticed that these classes have really inspired me to put what I’m learning to use right away either by creating something new at work (like a newsletter) or by researching a topic and keeping up with the industry news on my own time, which I’m sure I would never be motivated enough to do otherwise. Oh, and they inspired me to write this. So there’s something!

Annnyway, I’m super excited because I get to go to the Book Expo this year! Free books, I will CONSUME YOU.

Snow day part deux! (Riverside Park)

(all pictures taken with my LG Dare)

Manhattan Snow Day

This is the third huge snowstorm to hit the East Coast this year, and this time New York got hit really hard. Pretty much no one went to work because there was just a LOT of snow to deal with--it felt like a holiday! Everything was really,  really pretty. 

Holy Trinity Church

Lots and lots of snow!

A poor VW Bug got plowed over

The Natural History Museum (the gargoyles looked cold)

A snowball fight!

Just adorable. :)

The downside is a lot of slush and mush, too.

Long Lost Links:

What you missed while you were working:

• Writer Lynn Kelly Hoenig's quest for a book agent, told in photographs. (via GalleyCat)
• Amanda Seyfriend to star in a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, aka the best thing to ever come out of the Twlight phenomenon. (Tor.com)
• A former American turned-British schoolboy talks about boarding schools in Harry Potter in "'A Fantasy Matters' Follow Up: How 'Real' is Hogwarts?" (Tor.com)
• Adam Silverman's article about magic and Orientalism in the Middle East (OUPBlog)
• My favorite edition of Alice's Adventures was featured on Lost and the sales skyrocketed. (via GalleyCat)

Happy weekend!

Bookmark and Jacket

This beautiful bookmark and jacket series by Igor "Rogix" Udushlivy has already been all over the place, but it's so neat I can't help but spread it around a bit more. I'll take the Sherlock Holmes and the Alice in Wonderland, please. 

Sadly, they're not for sale yet, but I love the idea of buying book jackets--instead of buying fifty million copies of the same book because I'm a sucker for cover art, I could just update the same one! See the full collection here.

(via DesignSponge)

Cell phones are the new ebooks are the new books

Last night Michael Healy gave a guest lecture for the Pace Publishing students. Healy is the Executive Director of the Books Rights Registry, which basically means he's in the middle of the rights battles between Google Books, publishers, and authors. You can follow him on Twitter here and read some blog posts by him here. He's also British (no, really!). Last year he gave a lecture about the Google Books settlement (something I knew little to nothing about at the time), but this time around his speech, "The Google Book Contact in Context" focused mostly on speculating where the book industry was going...and he had some thought-provoking (and saddening, and frightening, and hopeful...) notions of where we're headed.

1. There's going to be an even bigger shift towards mobile phones: By 2014 there will be 6.5 million mobile connections and 90% of the world's population will have access to a mobile phone (my very nuanced and intellectual reaction: whoa like that's kinda a LOT). Basically Healy thinks that ereaders are going to seem like very silly and useless devices when our cell phone are going to be like the most bad-ass digital Swiss Army knife you can imagine. Considering Apple's awesome iPhone eReader application that lets you flip the pages is pretty much my ideal ereader (being tactile and intuitive), and using the Kindle's navigation was like my worst fears and nightmares realized, this makes complete sense to me. I also really liked the idea of buying books as Apps, but with open-source software this could get very crowded with duplicate books and general junk (like 6 million Pride and Prejudice apps). I wonder what the filtration system, if any, will be?

2. Netflix is the model of the Future!!!: Libraries and bookstores are going to go the way of the video and record store. Healy suggested that Netflix would be a great model for books, and that the future is in paying for subscriptions instead of content (i.e. like how you pay for cable, not for a TV show, you pay for Netflix for a month, not an individual movie...). I'm actually renting some books right now from Chegg, and although it's not quite the same idea (Chegg isn't a subscription service, and it's mostly for saving money on textbooks) I've loved it so far--books came on time and clean. There's already some sites that are trying to be like this: BookSwim and BooksFree both have subscription-based services but haven't really caught on yet (probably because, you know, libraries still exist).

3. Bookstores will be like vinyl record stores: for hipsters and middle aged nostalgic people. Hopefully this will happen way after I become a middle aged nostalgic person and am far away from hipster territory. Since all the books will be digital or print on demand, there won't be any bookstores anymore! There's going to be a shift in the production part of publishing from creating the digital book as the afterthought to creating the digital book as the main product. I would really like for publishers to start treating the digital book as--if not the main product--than an equally important one. One thing that really disappointed me about using ebooks for textbooks last semester was the lack of care and thought put into them, leading to so many missed opportunities. Right now most ebooks are just text copy/pasted into xml programs so that there's very little formatting, making them hard to read (for example, in one of my textbooks all the sidebars just got pasted right into the middle of the text). In the meantime, there were opportunities to link to outside sites and sources but no one had bothered to.

Healy obviously had tons of other stuff to say, but this was what stuck out to me and penetrated my migraine-fog (the same fog that rendered my quick-draw hand-raising skills useless). But! Here was the one worry that I really came away with. It goes like this:

1. If all of the textbooks will be digital
2. And all of the platforms for ebooks will be on mobile devices
3. Seriously, how will anyone ever learn anything ever again?

Our nation is doomed!