The Places You Will Go

Cover Story

By DAPHNE LEE

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

I'M still trying to come to terms with a fur-covered edition of The Wild Things, the novelization (by Dave Eggers) of the movie script for Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Whatever next! OK, so this isn't the first time publishers have decided to cover a book in faux fur. An edition of Isobelle Carmody's Little Fur was covered in blue fur. And Little Fur Family (note the similarity in titles - I guess the marketing department had no choice, really) by Margaret Wise Brown was published in an edition covered in rabbit skin.

Neither is, in my opinion, looks as nasty as Wild Things. I find the eyes peering out of the mass of fur particularly creepy. Much better would have been a book shaped like one of the wild things. However, I guess that would have meant monster-shaped pages - a headache for the typesetter or layout artist, or whoever it is who arranges text on the pages of books.

AbeBooks.com's page on unusual bindings shows 30 books whose covers are made from various non-paper materials including shark skin, brass, ivory, snake skin, horsehair, silver and turquoise, rubber, asbestos and mother of pearl. The most expensive unsold book listed is a 1611 edition of the King James Bible, bound in copper. Its price - US$119,000 (RM418,817). In light of this, I suppose it's worth investing in the furry Wild Things, just in case. It's US$18.48 (RM65) from Amazon.

Still on the subject of book covers, Justine Larbalestier, author of the brilliant Magic or Madness series, recently succeeded in getting her publishers to agree to a different cover for her latest book, Liar. The book is about a young short-haired black girl, but the advance reading copies showed a long-haired white teen on the jacket. A spokesman for Larbalestier's publisher, Bloomsbury, said, in Publishers Weekly, that this image "was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator's complex psychological makeup" and was not "a calculated decision to mask the character's ethnicity". Really?

Here in Malaysia, "pan-Asian" models are preferred in advertising. Many businesses go the whole hog and choose caucasian models. Most Malaysians prefer European looks, you see, and it stands to reason that they would then be more attracted to products sold by caucasians than models of their own race. I think the Liar cover featuring the white teen would be more popular here than the new, more accurate one.

Finally, has anyone actually bought Wuthering Heights (by Emily Bronte) because it's the favourite book of Bella Swan, the heroine of the Twilight series? Or, has anyone bought it thanks to its new Twilight-inspired cover? Once upon a time, I chose to buy an edition of A Room with a View because its cover featured a movie still of Julian Sands and Helena Bonham Carter. So, I totally understand why a teenager might see (and buy) the new edition Wuthering Heights as Twilight merchandise. However, in my opinion, not even a diamond-encrusted, gold-tooled cover would change the fact that Wuthering Heights is a terrible book. I would buy it if it came with a cover made from a blood-stained window-pane though. Wet earth, a coffin and a severed arm would be a plus. Of course.

Fur Ball

I can't believe there's going to be a fur-covered edition for the novelization of the script for Where the Wild Things Are. It looks disturbing - those eyes! It's like a pervert who wears "cute" bear suits to entice children.

Here's an excerpt from the novelization, by Dave Eggers.

What a Trip

By DAPHNE LEE

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

ALTHOUGH he doesn't write specifically for adolescents, I think Sufian Abas has the sort of weird and wonderful imagination needed to create the sort of romantic fantasies teenagers would be only too eager to lose themselves in. They would most certainly identify with Sufian's love-sick characters, his delusional young men and wide-eyed young women, all wandering through a world lit by fluorescent strips and filled with dusty roads, stuffy LRT coaches and gaudy fast food joints.

It's a world that smells, sweetly and sharply, of rotting garbage and paint-stripper; a world where ceilings leak and the plumbing is jammed with blood and guts and broken hearts. A horrific world, a romantic world, a world swollen with unrequited love and lost dreams. Just the sort of landscape hyper-sensitive, melodramatic young adults like to pretend they inhabit.

Matanya Teleskop, Hatinya Kapal Dalam Botol Kaca (The Eye is a Telescope, the Heart a Ship in a Glass Bottle) (Sang Freud Press, 82 pages) is the intriguing, irresistible title of Sufian's new collection of urban tales. The mind boggles and at the same time is filled with images rare and various.

James Tait Black Winners

Sir Michael Holyrod has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families.

Holyrod is married to novelist Margaret Drabble who won the fiction prize in 1967 for Jerusalem the Golden.

2009's fiction prize has been awarded to Sebastian Barry for The Secret Scripture.

Three Times the Pleasure

These are the top selling trilogies on AbeBooks.co.uk, BUT they have their own rules as to what qualifies as a trilogy. For example, they've left out The Lord of the Rings as Tolkien intended to publish them in one volume.

Most of my favourite trilogies (what I can recall anyway) seem to be of the fantasy genre:

The Juniper Trilogy by Monica Furlong

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman

The Old Kingdom Trilogy by Garth Nix

The Tales of the Otari Trilogy by Lian Hearne

The Assassin Trilogy by Robin Hobb

The Cazalet Family Trilogy by Elizabeth Jane Howard

The Cathedral Trilogy by Elizabeth Goudge

Land of Myths and Legends

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

I’VE just read a fabulous adventure fantasy called Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (Publisher: Arthur A. Levine, ISBN: 978-0545005425). It’s the first book, in a series of 10, about Balsa, professional bodyguard who was trained in combat from childhood.

Balsa was compelled to leave her home in the land of Kanbal at the age of six. Her father, Karuna Ronsa, was the king’s personal physician and the king’s brother, Rogsam, threatened to kill Balsa unless Karuna agreed to poison the king. Knowing that he and his daughter would be put to death anyway, Karuna begged his friend, martial arts master Jirguro, to take Balsa far away and out of danger. Jiguro eventually trained Balsa to fight so that she would be able to defend herself if anything happened to him.

Monster Classics

First, the Bennets had to deal with zombies. Now the Dashwoods have to deal with sea monsters.

That's Colonel Brandon on the cover - looking very like Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Carribean movies.

And if you agree Austen's novels need to be livened up with the undead and other beasties, the new sequel to Pride and Prejudice, My Darcy, Vampyre, reveals that Lizzie's dashing new husband has an aversion to garlic and crucifixes.

Liar!

The ARC cover of Justine Larbalestier's new book, Liar, showed a white girl although the novel's main character is black. In the past, Ursula Le Guin has also faced this problem of whitewashing.

However, following protests from librarians, bloggers and Larbalestier herself, Bloomsbury changed the final cover.

Read all about it here.

A few weeks ago, I touched on the issue of how "white" covers sell better in Malaysia and recommended some books about characters of colour. Read the column here.

Books to Film

By Daphne Lee

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

AS Maurice Sendak fans know, Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are is scheduled for release in October this year. The trailer looks quite promising as far as the wild things go. They are actors in furry suits - like Bird Bird from Sesame Street - but their expressively monstrous faces are, so it's been reported, the work of computer graphics. As far as I can tell from the official trailer (watch it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--N9klJXbjQ), they look just like the originals in the picture book.

Picture Book of the Month: We're Going on a Bear Hunt

August 2009
WE'RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT
By Michael Rosen
Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury
Publisher: Walker Books, 40 pages

This is one of my favourite books for storytelling sessions. The repetition in every verse -  "We're going on a bear hunt, we're going to catch a big one! What a beautiful day - we're not scared!" and then "We can't go over it, we can't go under it, we've got to go through it!" - encourages children to join in, and it's even better if you put the book aside and act the whole thing out.

Of course, Oxenbury's pictures are always worth sharing too. At a conference in Australia, she pointed out that she added a postscript to the story by drawing the bear walking away, rather despondently, at the end of the book. Read what you will into that picture. I wonder if the bear really just wanted a chat and not to eat the children.