Friday, Bloody Friday

Brace yourselves, faithful PMN round-up readers: there has been a spike in Amish romance. No, that's not the shocking part. But, ok, shock: this intelligence comes, suspiciously, mere weeks after the PMN Amish vampire contest. Clearly this is not the culmination of slowly growing interest, word of mouth, or some continuation of the trend that inspired the article that inspired the contest. Nay, this is pure plagiarism, and I won't stand for it. This must be how Jesus feels about Phillip Pullman's new book rewriting the Gospels. Or how the Nazis felt about Hemmingway lobbing grenades at U-boats. Or how Dickens would feel if he realized that people question why we should actually read his work. Or how every writer ever feels about James Patterson's 17 book, 3 year deal with Hachette, which will be completed with the help of small Indonesian children in a sweatshop.

Yea, he'll put out a lot of books. Yea, he'll make a mint doing it (probably like the money of one Dan Brown novel!). But will it be quality? Apparently nothing new is quality anymore. And maybe that's true. Spell-check has ruined us, and turned us into blobs of poar speeling edeyots. The Simpsons has trumped PhDs in English (and how!). The c-word is no longer shocking. And the Harry Potter books are the most popular books at Guantanamo.

On the other hand, people are reading on the subway (eruditely), you can start a WASP book club, and I am seriously considering adopting the word "ovablastic" (it means exactly what it sounds like it means). So maybe the quality isn't so low--something good better come out of the shame huts that are writing workshops. What else would Neil Gaiman put on his shelves? Please wipe up your book-lust drool--it's very unattractive, and may carry zombie virus. Quick, take this quiz and see how fast you could start showing zombie symptoms, so you know how much time you have left to read!

Before the zombie venom seeps into your veins, order your Christmas books and save the industry. And now that indie publishers are competing with big publishers in terms of salaries, they need your hard earned cash more than ever for "breaking even" purposes.

Order your embargoed books early for the winter season, so you can be the first kid on your block to read them. Well, first besides the New York Times, who nabbed an early copy of the Kennedy memoir. A very angry Hachette has hired a private detective to track down the leak (this is also the plot for Patterson's 13th book of 17). A great post explains what it means to embargo a book, because I had no idea what that technically "means."

For more terms that you may use but don't know, check out this vocab list. It can help you write your lit papers, in case you can't take this great model for avoiding writing a paper on The Time Machine. A time machine could also maybe help you avoid ever becoming older than your favorite novel characters--a depressing prospect. And it might stem the depression that comes from realizing that the managing editor of the New Yorker is 26, and the new books editor for the Daily Beast is 24. That's right: you. Are. Old.

Oh well. Make yourself feel better with the knowledge that The Hobbit is slowly wending its way into your movie theater. Finally. And before I leave, I pose a question for you: weekly contests, yay or nay? Let me know in the comments!