NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Wendy Duff is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Information Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research interests are user studies, archival description, and electronic records. We talk here about the difference between Librarians and Archivisits, and ’stuff’.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

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Curt Mathews is CEO of the Independent Publishers Group, a book distributor for independent publishers throughout the USA and worldwide. IPG represents a stable of small publishers, providing them, for a fee, with the clout, presentation and sales force required to sell books to booksellers successfully. We talk here about the IPG business model, growth coming from outside bookstores, special interests and faceless mobs, concern about the brand of the book as a product of considered thought, the publisher as muse, wooden boats and commercializing the creative process.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

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Ramona Dearing lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and is the latest member of the longstanding (and increasingly famous) fiction collective The Burning Rock to publish a collection of short fiction. Dearing works for CBC Radio where she is currently busy putting together a nationally broadcast program featuring young Canadian artists. So Beautiful was published in 2004 by The Porcupine’s Quill Press.

We talk here about her stories, my favourites, and hers, bodies in bags, judging one’s own work, doing the right thing, frustration, Christian brothers at Mount Cashel, dogs, Kafka at the CBC, the importance of radio and the weather to Newfoundlanders, Brad Pitt and parallel plot lines.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

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Jim Roberts is the owner of Books End Bookstore in Syracuse, New York. We talk here among other things about salt, the AB Bookman’s weekly magazine, the emergence and evolution of book-selling on the Internet from Interloc, to Alibris, to Abebooks; collecting General Custer, war books and the histories of American military divisions.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

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Here’s a pleasant article by Bruce McKinney detaling a trip he and his wife Jenny took recently through upstate New York in search of books and book people. Similar to what I did last summer in the maritimes.

Bruce has a website Americana Exchange full of useful information about book auction pricing, and produces a free online publication about rare/antiquarian/collectible books and old prints called AE Monthly, ‘A must read for the rare book collector, bookseller, rare books librarian, Historians and Scholars.’

So THIS is why they’re scratching eachothers’ eyes out in the Middle East.

Here from Michael Gelb’s rockin’ How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci are, by expert consensus, the ten greatest works in the classical canon:

1. Bach: Mass in B Minor
2. Beethoven: Symphony #9
3. Mozart: Requiem
4. Chopin: Nocturnes
5. Brahms: German Requiem
6. Mahler: Symphony #6
7. R. Strauss: Four Last Songs
8 Debussy: Preludes
9. Stravinsky: “The Rite of Spring”
10. (tie) Verdi: Aida and Puccini: La Boheme

And in case you need pointers on how to appreciate: Listen for patterns of tension and release. ‘By using such techniques as rhythmic variation, key change, rests, and harmonic movement, the composer leads the listener along a path of motion, stillness, and melodic highs and lows, all leading to the raising of musical expectations and fulfillment’.

And if this isn’t enough: try cataloging your favourite composers by dominant element: earth, fire, water, air…and wind of course…

Rotten Tomatoes (www.rottentomatoes.com) compiles the reviews of dozens of different ‘respected’ print and online movie critics, puts them into one of two categories fresh (good) and rotten, and calculates the percent of reviews that fall into the former.

Here’s their top fifteen for 2005, and number of reviews .

1. 98% Twilight Samurai 65
2. 98% Moolaade 65
3. 98% Since Otar Left 54
4. 98% Kekexili 45
5. 97% The Incredibles 209
6. 97% Maria Full of Grace 127
7. 97% S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine 29
8. 96% Sideways 197
9. 96% Control Room 104
10. 96% Born Into Brothels 99
11. 96% The Return 73
12. 96% Festival Express 72
13. 96% Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train 28
14. 96% Watermarks 24
15. 95% The Story of the Weeping Camel 98

I’ve only seen three: all of which I’d recommend…so something’s working here.

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1 Leo Tolstoy War and Peace. 1866
2 Honore de Balzac Pere Goriot. 1834
3 Henry Fielding Tom Jones. 1749
4 Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice. 1813
5 Stendahl The Red and Black. 1831
6 Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights. 1848
7 Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary. 1857
8 Charles Dickens David Copperfield. 1849-50
9 Fedor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov. 1851
10 Herman Melville Moby Dick. 1851

I picked up Great Novelists and their Novels. Essays on the ten greatest novels of the world and the men and women who wrote them … Illustrated with pen and ink portraits of the authors by Robert W. Arnold. (Philadelphia, Toronto: John C. Winston Co, 1948), about 20 years ago and read these ten works. My top picks within Somerset’s? #s 1, 5 and 9.

Reading and re-reading them will enrichen your life immeasurably.

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