Buzz Worthy News

Jane Austen makes the ten pound note, sparks a shitstorm, Fight Club is getting a sequel, the Manbooker Prize is branching out from its usual candidates at an impressive rate this year, diversity in YA sucks and there has been a buttload of scandals this week.

Buzz Worthy News is Cuddlebuggery’s weekly news post bringing you all the best information about the book and blogging world, particularly for the venn diagram of people who overlap between the two.  For new releases and cover reveals of all the best Young Adult fiction, check out our Sunday post: How New Titles.

Books

Chuck Palahniuk is Writing a Sequel to Fight Club

I’m not even sure why this is something he feels he has to do now.  I am not sure how I feel about this.  Palahniuk’s work is a little up and down for me.  Since the movie is still a cult hit for disaffected youth the world over, I can’t help but think a sequel is only going to interfere with that.

Here’s the basic plot for the second book:

Nowadays, Tyler is telling the story, lurking inside Jack, and ready to launch a come-back. Jack is oblivious. Marla is bored. Their marriage has run aground on the rocky coastline of middle-aged suburban boredom. It’s only when their little boy disappears, kidnapped by Tyler, that Jack is dragged back into the world of Mayhem.

Dude.  Step away from the pen.

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Publishing

Manbooker Prize is Diverse this Year

The diversity of this year’s Manbooker prize is a flaming relief.  But I must say, I wish it wasn’t so shocking.  A shortlist that actually contains an amazing group of writers from different backgrounds.  I just guess I wish that in 2013, this wasn’t so surprising and amazing to behold.  It seems like we should beyond all that by now.

The Full List:

Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)
The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton (Granta)
Harvest, Jim Crace (Picador)
The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris (Sandstone Press)
The Kills, Richard House (Picador)
The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury)
Unexploded, Alison MacLeod ( Hamish Hamilton)
TransAtlantic, Colum McCann (Bloomsbury)
Almost English, Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle)
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)
The Spinning Heart, Donal Ryan (Doubleday Ireland)
The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín (Viking)

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Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job – but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn’t exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family’s real-estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harboured a crush on Yinghui, who has reinvented herself from a poetry-loving, left-wing activist to a successful Shanghai businesswoman. She is about to make a deal with the shadowy figure of Walter Chao, the five-star billionaire of the novel, who – with his secrets and his schemes – has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel’s characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants. Five Star Billionaire, the dazzling kaleidoscopic new novel by the award-winning writer Tash Aw, offers rare insight into China today, with its constant transformations and its promise of possibility.

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Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo’s belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.
But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America’s famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her–from Zadie Smith to Monica Ali to J.M. Coetzee–while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.

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Growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them. It is the 1960s, and Udayan-charismatic and impulsive-finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty: he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother’s political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America. But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family’s home, he comes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind-including those seared in the heart of his brother’s wife.
Suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland expands the range of one of our most dazzling storytellers, seamlessly interweaving the historical and the personal across generations and geographies. This masterly novel of fate and will, exile and return, is a tour de force and an instant classic.

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“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

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Children’s Books are Still Woefully Lacking in Diversity

We all knew the statistics were going to be bad, but the length of badness is rather shocking when looking at this illustrated representation:

There really is no excuse for this complete inequality of representation.  I doubt it’s much better in YA novels.

I am very pleased that the first picture book I am illustrating, The Change Your Name Store by Leanne Shirtliffe, has an Asian-American main character. I hope to see these numbers shift in the children’s book industry. I grew up going to pow wows and reading picture books by Gerald McDermott and Byrd Baylor. (The little girl in my illustration is a Jingle Dancer.) My grandmother, the primary picture book buyer in the family, grew up on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin. She taught art at the first Indian Community School in Milwaukee, where her sister, my Great Aunt Dorothy, was principal. I would LOVE to see more Native American picture books!

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Jane Austen is Going to be a Tenner

The Bank of England has decided to put Jane Austen on the ten pound note.  Yey!  Caroline Criado-Perez campaigned for Jane Austen to make the note and succeeded this week, though her success has been met with violent protest.  Criado-Perez received an average of 50 rape and death threats an hour for her efforts.  One man was arrested in conjunction with the threats and Twitter is currently reviewing it’s report abuse feature.  Her home address and personal information was also doxxed.

Jane Austen is one of the most widely read authors in English literature and her sharp commentary on social life in the 19th century has helped her remain a widely popular and renowned author.  She helped usher in an era of realism, being critical of the themes of sensibility that were prevalent in novels of the day.

“Making her [Austen] the third woman to ever appear on British currency (other than a member of the royal family, naturally), behind Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry. She’s also the third artist (unless Wikipedia is steering me wrong), behind composer Edward Elgar and the Bard himself. This comes after protests that with the replacement of Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill, the only woman depicted on British banknotes would be the Queen. The bill also includes a quote from Pride and Prejudice, but I can imagine that it was difficult to resist making it “money is the best recipe for happiness.”

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Goodreads Counts over 20 Million Users

Goodreads, Goodreads, Goodreads.  What are we going to do with you?  The site that everyone loves to hate right now.  It has 20 million users now, having grown exponentially in the last year.

We now have 20 million members, up from 10 million members just eleven months ago … Your love of reading shines through everywhere on Goodreads, from group discussions to ratings and reviews to reading updates. You’ve written more than 25 million reviews and added more than 620 million books.

Goodreads was founded in 2007. In March, Amazon acquired Goodreads. The company is now headquartered in San Francisco.

It sent out a letter this week to advise those readers who are the most popular.  This 1% of Goodreads now rules over all with its iron fist of strength and magnitude.  The 99% were left with nothing to do but quake in fear as they were ruled over by the mighty one percent.  The epicness was epic.

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Entertainment

New Catching Fire Trailer Out

Ready for The Hunger Games Sequel, Catching Fire already?  The trailer was released this week.

There’s been pretty widespread criticism of the actor chosen to be Finnick Odair. A campaign for Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy fame began a while ago, gaining a lot of traction.  I happen to be team Jesse simply because that gorgeous specimen of a human being happens to be almost exactly as I imagined Finnick to be.  The same racist assholes who protested the casting of Rue came out in force to protest Williams, even though this was a fancasting movement and Williams hadn’t even been offered the job or officially considered.

I’m sorry but unless I read the wrong book, isn’t Finnick Caucasian? By tanned skin Collins meant his skin was darkened from the sun (swimming/fishing) not that he is of a darker skin ethnicity… Don’t get me wrong, this guy is great just completely wrong for this role.

I think that Jesse Wiliams just won’t work. Finnick Odair in my eyes is Tall, young, disheveled medium long luscious Golden blonde hair, ocean blue colored eyes, he has a glowing tan, washboard abs, and wears almost no clothes, at the same times carries a trident. That is the guy i wan’t to see as Finnick. For example PERFECT GUY is Ian Somerhalder. Color him blonde and throw in some contacts and wala you have Finnick Odair!

For all those playing at home, Finnick Odair is supposed to have tanned or golden skin, bronze coloured hair and green eyes.  So this total dickwad thinks it’s okay to take an actor that’s pale, with black hair and crazy eyes (okay, blue, but they’re still crazy eyes!) and turn that into Finnick.  But you can’t give Williams contacts and have him otherwise fit the bill perfectly.  That would just be weird according to the asshole.

In the end, Sam Claflin ended up playing Finnick Odair in the much anticipated sequel to The Hunger Games.  But some people aren’t so enthusiastic of his casting.  However, he does seem very invested in interacting with fans and his fitness regime!  So, end result equals unabashed enthusiasm from me.

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Flowers in the Attic is Going to be a Movie

I never read this book, but I’ve been assured it is a veritable deluge of incestuous teenage angst.

“Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn have both signed on to star in Lifetime’s TV movie adaptation of V.C. Andrews’ bestselling novel that familiarized countless of adolescent girls with the beauty of “cerulean blue eyes” and fucking your brother…Flowers in the Attic—the story about four children who are locked away in their rich grandparents’ and abused because of a deep, dark family secret, leading two of the kids to start having sex—will star Graham as the children’s mother and Burstyn as their evil grandmother.”

I am kind of disappointed that I never read this, since it seems like some kind of right of passage for adolescence.

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Controversy

There was a whole bunch of drama this week. Unfortunately, Cuddlebuggery is all dramaed out.  I don’t think we could take another drop of it.  So unlike our usual rundown, we’re just going to sum up a bunch of stuff and provide links so y’all can read it for yourselves.

There is an epidemic of Indie authors plagiarizing and “skimming” stories.  Read more about it here.

A shitfight broke out on Khanh’s review of POD when the cover artist and someone seemingly associated with the author attacked the reviewer.

And… frankly, there may have been other stuff but we weren’t keeping track.  Sorry!

To be honest, this all takes its toll on us.  But the important thing is, wonderful bloggers whom we love, we are still here and loving you!