TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Children’s Books: GRRRR!!! Oops! This beautifully illustrated retelling of the classic fable has only seven words, all sound effects. feeds.nytimes.com |
Mormon stand-up comic? She's funny, she's had a boob job and she's just written a book that could see her thrown out of her church. But, as Elna Baker tells Louise France, it's too late nowIf I told you that Elna Baker had written a frank and self-deprecating memoir about dating which is unlike any other frank and self-deprecating memoir about dating, you probably would not believe me. However, Baker is a Mormon. A peachy, astute, witty 27-year-old Mormon who has never had sex. The book – The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance – is all about what it's like to live in Manhattan when the list of things you can't do (cigarettes, wine, coffee, drugs, swearing, sex outside marriage, marriage to someone who isn't Mormon) seems far more seductive than the things you can (studying scripture, prayer) and where the majority of your contemporaries think you might be – in Baker's words – "a whack job". Until now her faith is something she has avoided talking about when she first meets someone ("You know how in films people spit out their drinks when they're surprised, and you think that never happens in real life? It does").I imagine the pitch to the publishers must have been tough to pull off – how about a book featuring a wise-cracking virginal Mormon, a sort of Candace Bushnell meets, erm, the total opposite of Candace Bushnell? It should not work, but it does. Something to do with the fact that Baker, who also has a stand-up comedy act, is an original voice who writes with an honesty which is both funny and thought-provoking about whether to remain a good Mormon and risk ending her days a lonely, frustrated virgin – the number of single Mormons in New York is a paltry 800 – or abandoning her faith for the sake of something most of us get out of the way by the time we're 17.There is a genuine dilemma here that is, unlike a memoir about giving up sex for a year just for the hell of it, oddly moving. Not least because there is a very strong likelihood that her honesty will appal her devout parents, whom she loves, and have her thrown out of the church to which she's belonged all her life. Mormon message boards in America are already split: some thrilled that finally here's a Mormon that they – and the rest of America – can relate to; others warning that she should beware the wrath of her bishop. "Fifty per cent will really appreciate that there's an honest voice out there," she says. "The other 50% from more conservative backgrounds will feel upset and angry that I am trying to represent them. Unfortunately they're the type who get their rifles out."Baker is the first Mormon I've ever knowingly met (apart from Jimmy Osmond, which was so long ago I've only just remembered it) and is full of surprises, the first being that she suggests we meet in a coffee shop (isn't that a bit like meeting Paul McCartney at the butchers? Not really. She orders an orange juice).The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of those religions we know bizarrely little about. "People don't get Mormons," she says. There are an awful lot of myths about them. The biggest is that they all live in Utah and they're all polygamists (there are a few, but the Mormon church opposes the practice).What does have some veracity to it – although even she hasn't seen them yet because she is not married – are the special garments that every married Mormon must wear and which reach up to the neck and down to the thighs and would preclude wearing anything that might show off a bosom. "Goodbye cleavage," she says, which is a shame because Baker recently had breast implants. "As a Mormon I always thought the first man to see me naked would be my husband, not my plastic surgeon."In the book she explains how she used to be vastly overweight. A three-month crash diet, a course of possibly illegal slimming pills and one bout of plastic surgery later, she is gorgeous, with long strawberry-blonde hair and fabulous skin. Accordingly she has no shortage of male admirers. However, due to the paucity of fanciable Mormon men on the whole, she dates non- Mormons with the caveat that the relationships don't last because she won't sleep with them.So what's a typical Mormon chap like? "It depends where you're living," she replies. "In Utah most Mormon men get married straight after their mission at 21. As a result, if you're not living in Utah and not living with that pool of guys… Let's just say it takes a particular type of man to avoid marriage when you have a whole community pushing you to do it." Most of the options are either closeted gay men or divorcés. Every year in New York there is a dance for single Mormons (hence the title of the book). "A whole room of men who have not had sex can be awkward," she muses. "I am used to dating non-Mormon men who are at ease with themselves."She realised she had been brought up differently to most other people when her parents moved, with their five children, from Seattle to Spain when Baker was nine. Every day would begin with Bible practice. There were lessons in sewing and chastity. Magazines were banned, as were swear words. Sex was never explicitly discussed. "Part of the reason I never had sex was because I had no idea how to."There is no happy ending. As the book draws to a close, Baker is in love with an atheist her conscience won't allow her to sleep with; bewildered by the idea that she might have to begin a life without her faith. By the time you read this, Baker may no longer be a Mormon and may have been thrown out of the church. It's possible she's trying to force the issue, although I suspect that she wrote the book in an insular bubble and did not think about the consequences – especially with the pressure of a publisher urging her to be as honest as possible. "There is a sense now that I can't go back," she says.There is an irony here. Being Mormon is her USP: the book has already had interest from Hollywood; her comedy act is inspired by her Mormon upbringing; when a news story about Mormons breaks she's called up for a quote by the television networks. Some might argue that she's doing her religion a favour by spreading the word that Mormons can laugh at themselves. At the same time, falling in love and marrying another Mormon seems horribly unlikely in this day and age.Can't you just be a bad Mormon instead, I wonder. "Be a pretend Mormon?" she says. "It's kind of hard to do."• The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker is published by Dutton Books in America. Available on AmazonComedyReligionLouise Franceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
US box office enjoys record-breaking year Sequels in the Transformers, Harry Potter and Twilight series helped boost year's total to $9.61bn, with James Cameron's ballyhooed Avatar still to come next weekIt's only the start of December in a year blighted by the worldwide economic downturn, but the US box-office record has already been smashed for the second year in a row.Thanks to blockbuster sequels such as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon, as well as Pixar's latest, Up, cinemagoers have spent more than $9.61bn (£5.89bn) this year, just beating last year's record-breaking haul of $9.59bn, according to Variety.With the Christmas session still ahead, it's likely that the US box office will top $10bn for the first time. The figures bear out experts' predictions that cinemas would continue to prosper in difficult financial periods. Despite rising ticket prices, filmgoing is still a relatively inexpensive form of entertainment.Transformers, Michael Bay's raucous tale of rampaging giant robots battling for supremacy over a battered Earth, is the biggest film of the year to date, having taken $402m. Next up is Harry Potter, with $301m. The big surprise of the year, however, is the remarkable success of Up, which has so far made $283m. The Pixar film looks set to secure a place in the top five movies of the year, despite featuring an octogenarian pensioner as its main character and not being part of a franchise.The 2009 top five is at this point rounded out by zany stag-do comedy The Hangover and JJ Abrams's sci-fi reboot Star Trek, which have grossed $277m and $257m respectively. But both are likely to slip down the chart in the coming weeks.New Moon, director Chris Weitz's latest in the franchise based on Stephenie Meyers' bestselling teen vampire novels, should climb into the top five next week – its total currently stands at $255m.Meanwhile, James Cameron's 3D epic Avatar debuts on 18 December, with high hopes of becoming the year's biggest film. Cameron's last feature, Titanic, released in 1997, is still the highest grossing movie of all time.James CameronMichael BayHarry PotterJJ AbramsStephenie MeyerBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Misery and celebrity: from Chris Evans to Katie Price, this is the ideal antidote to the complexity of modern living | Madeleine Bunting Memoirs of the famous dominate the bestsellers' lists. They don't provide much of a story, but do offer a parable-like clarityChances are that, now the Christmas presents are unwrapped and large amounts of food eaten, you are sitting slumped in varying states of alertness surveying a tome of celebrity biography that you found with your name on under the tree. Thousands of these celeb biogs were walking out of bookshops in the weeks running up to Christmas. Nearly 40,000 a week for Ant and Dec's Ooh! What a Lovely pair: Our Story, and over 30,000 a week for Frankie Boyle, while Peter Kay, Chris Evans and Jo Brand were all clocking a very respectable 20,000 each a week. These are hardback sales figures; lots of money is being made.Half of the non-fiction hardback bestsellers are celeb biogs, only beaten by Delia Smith's latest cookery book and Top Gear's output. TV has well and truly hijacked the publishing industry. The big sales come when people recognise the face on the book from the box – the more recognisable the face, the bigger the sales. Welcome to a world of zombie books, because these celeb biogs often don't meet any of the normal criteria one would expect of a book. Forget authorship: this is writing by a team of ghostwriters. And the substance of the book often doesn't stack up to much of a story. First day at school, what I remember as a toddler of my mum, how I got bullied at secondary school: this is the ordinary stuff of ordinary lives, and it's rather odd that people fork out £20 for hundreds of pages of the stuff.There's a presumption that if you are a good footballer or tennis player, you have an interesting story to tell. But why? Watching a sport can be exhilarating, reading about it can be as dull as ditchwater. Equally, a rash of comedian autobiographies make the dangerous mistake of thinking that if someone is funny, their book will be too. Dawn French's was a bestseller last year and now doing handsomely as a paperback; a national treasure I'm sure, but the book, littered with exclamation marks, is achingly dull. So no story, no author, no skill in writing – what's the appeal?The first explanation is that this is simply a story of commercialisation. The celebrity is offered a sum they find hard to resist; the publisher gambles on the chance of big sales helped by extensive publicity.Publishing is like spread betting; 80% of books break even, 10% lose money, and 10% make a lot of money. Katie Price is credited with starting the boom, when her book was sold for £10,000 and went on to sell 750,000 copies. It's those kinds of winnings that keep publishers gambling. Whether the book is any good is secondary to issues of celebrity's profile and likely quantity of publicity. It's the latter which drives the requirement that the celebrity digs up plenty of dirt; to get headlines you need confessions of drugs, infidelity, dishonesty and other lurid details of dysfunctional lives. The celebrity misery memoir is about a crude equation of the more shock and awe, the more books sell.If this sounds overly cynical, an advert a couple of weeks ago for a new editor for Ebury (part of Random House) was unabashed. "Amy, Lily or Cheryl – who would you choose?" ran the copy. "Do you have the ability to spot the next big thing? Do you possess a sound commercial instinct? Are you passionate about popular culture?" The advert prompted a flurry of Twitter outrage in publishing by people appalled that the advert didn't seem to consider that actual editing skills were needed, only celebrity spotting.But if this is all about money, the cynics take consolation in the fact that the boom may be over. Sales figures this year are sharply down. It's a genre that may be burning out.An alternative explanation is more generous to the reader. They are not just dupes of a massive commercial operation but actually get something out of reading these tomes. Just before Christmas, Tina Brown in a blog on The Daily Beast suggested that the seemingly insatiable desire for the details of celebrity lives is a response to the imponderable complexity of so many major issues. She used the continuing fascination of the Tiger Woods story to illustrate her argument; compared with recession, global warming, US healthcare reform or Afghanistan, Woods's story seems to offer a kind of parable-like clarity. It's a misery memoir in real time, showing one person's seemingly perfect life imploding just at the point that many people fear, or are already dealing with, losing their jobs or their homes or both. It's a superb form of distraction, but also a form of putting into perspective one's own problems. When crisis is writ so large – the income crashes; the reputation is smashed; the image of having it all, beautiful wife and family, disintegrate in front of a billion-strong audience – it makes your own anxieties seem a little smaller.Certainly, Andre Agassi's fast-selling memoir, Open, published to catch the Christmas market, achieves something of this purpose. It doesn't fit the zombie category; it's relatively well-written and has a story to tell.A tale of such a punishing, emotional roller-coaster, it left me feeling drained. The man has always absolutely loathed tennis, from the moment his bullying father had him smashing balls over the net as a child – a million a week. It's a tragic story of how someone ends up trapped by his own compulsions – and those of others – to live a life he hated. No one believed Agassi when he kept saying he hated tennis. This is the gilded cage of celebrity revealed in all its brutality, and you can see exactly why he might need to present a more honest account to the world.Agassi's book is already credited with transcending the genre of "sportsman tells tale of inspirational achievement"; it is not a pitch for the after-dinner speech circuit. Similarly, Peter Kay's first volume was widely praised and sold well. But these relatively decent books are exceptions to the rule in an industry that churns out volumes of Katie Price, now on to her fourth. A celebrity is now regarded as worth more than one book – you can spin the story out to three or four at least.This is a confessional genre, the chance for the celebrity who is much written about, speculated about, to put their story. Given libel laws, biographers tread warily into these lives, so the reader has only the partial, anxiously self-justifying "woe is me" version of a life. Above all, the appetite for these books reflects the insatiable curiosity about fame, how it arrives and what it feels like. Nothing seems to prompt as much fascination as hearing what it is like to be the focus of millions of minds.Piers Morgan, in his recent television interview with Susan Boyle (her book can only be a matter of time, although it might be something of a challenge to keep her readers interested during the first 47 years), kept on asking: "Did you ever imagine this might happen to you?" It's a question that echoes the silent hopes people live with for unimaginable futures of their own, and perhaps that's what keeps them turning the pages.CelebrityAndre AgassiKatie PriceMadeleine Buntingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Children’s Books: Seize the Time A novel of three sisters, their mother and the Black Panthers. feeds.nytimes.com |