TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Books of The Times: Impresario of and for the People Kenneth Turan offers up a raucous oral history of a New York theater titan. feeds.nytimes.com |
Paperback Row Paperback books of particular interest. feeds.nytimes.com |
A Christmas Carol enjoys second helpings as UK No 1 | Charles Gant With new entries becalmed in the chart before Avatar is unleashed, Robert Zemeckis's animated spectacle surges back to the top in its sixth week of release to become the gift that keeps on giving to DisneyThe marathon runnerFor the past four weeks, the top spot has been occupied by 2012, The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Paranormal Activity. But now, five weeks after it first entered the chart at No 1, Disney's A Christmas Carol returns to the summit. It's rare for a film in its sixth week of release to be finding much favour with audiences; to dominate the market at this point is an exceptional result. Box-office takings for Robert Zemeckis's animated Dickens adaptation went up on its second weekend by 31%, and has subsequently enjoyed small week-to-week declines of 11%, 13%, 14% and 7%. The film has now grossed over £16m, compared with £12m for Zemeckis's Polar Express (a figure boosted by seasonal re-releases) and £7.4m for Beowulf. Digital 3D remains the preferred format for cinemagoers seeing A Christmas Carol; 2D screens contributed only 14% of box-office receipts this weekend. That's been good news for Disney, with the ticket-price premium at 3D venues. But this will become its Achilles heel when Avatar arrives on Thursday – it's hard to imagine James Cameron's lengthy event picture not Hoovering up the vast majority of 3D cinemas. The low-key successIn its three weeks on release, genial festive flick Nativity! has never charted higher than sixth place. But extraordinarily consistent takings – the film has so far seen week-to-week declines of only 13% and 3% – mean that it's also never been lower than seventh. After 17 days, Debbie Isitt's improvised comedy has taken £2.68m, compared with £1.84m for her previous effort Confetti at the same stage of its release. And since it isn't occupying 3D screens, the arrival of Avatar shouldn't have a particular impact on Nativity!'s continuing success. The disappointmentWith Where the Wild Things Are, backers Warner Bros always had the problem of addressing twin audiences: the adults who admire director Spike Jonze and the kids who love Maurice Sendak's 10-sentence picture book. Even so, they will probably be disappointed with an £884,000 opening from a wide 491-screen release. Comparisons are tricky, but Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson's adaptation of the Roald Dahl tale, opened with a more robust £1.52m in October. Jonze's previous pictures Being John Malkovich and Adaptation both debuted in the £200,000-300,000 range, on screen counts in double digits.Despite the weak result, Where the Wild Things are is overwhelmingly the highest-grossing new release on the chart, since both Chris Pine horror Carriers and the thriller The Stepfather stumbled with anaemic grosses of £69,000 and £40,000 respectively.Arthouse wipeoutIf your local independent cinema is mostly playing commercial Hollywood fare, don't blame the bookers. Apart from the Coen brothers' A Serious Man, which is enjoying its fourth weekend in the top 10, there's a serious dearth of quality arthouse films to programme. Me and Orson Welles, for example, fell 62% from its disappointing debut the previous weekend, and is not delivering attractive returns for cinemas. Newcomers The Limits of Control and Unmade Beds landed feebly at Nos 29 and 37, behind veteran warhorses An Education and Bright Star. The White Ribbon is hanging in there for fans of austere European highbrow, but the nation's City Screens and Curzons must surely be looking forward to the arrival of the strong awards contenders in January.The futureOverall, 11-13 December was the third worst weekend of 2009, with just one film achieving £1m-plus takings, and a shocking dearth of strong commercial new releases. The reason, of course, is the imminent arrival of Avatar on Thursday: the current flat market is the calm before the anticipated storm. Cameron's movie is being given a saturation release on more than 1,000 screens, although discerning cinemagoers will be trying to book into the 300 UK locations with digital 3D projection. Audiences will also be checking out Nine, from Chicago director Rob Marshall, and St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold. Then, on Monday 21 December, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel arrives. Cinema chains have every reasonable expectation of a timely cash bonanza.UK top 10, 11-13 December1. A Christmas Carol, £1,544,226 from 434 sites. Total: £16,030,0832. Where the Wild Things Are, £883,990 from 491 sites (New)3. Planet 51, £764,742 from 421 sites. Total: £2,537,7184. Paranormal Activity, £758,704 from 399 sites. Total: £8,703,3965. The Twilight Saga: New Moon, £750,227 from 458 sites. Total: £25,004,6806. Nativity!, £667,663 from 405 sites. Total: £2,676,6147. Law Abiding Citizen, £604,873 from 461 sites. Total: £4,731,1758. 2012, £471,856 from 361 sites. Total: £18,674,8649. The Box, £249,707 from 288 sites. Total: £1,011,73510. A Serious Man, £1390,778 from 100 sites. Total: £1,335,999How the other openers didCarriers, 101 screens, £69,224Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Year, 35 screens, £67,389The Stepfather, 80 screens, £40,056The Red Shoes, 12 screens, £13,338The Limits of Control, 10 screens, £10,318Unmade Beds, 9 screens, £6,1077 Husbands For Hurmuz, 2 screens, £3,606Mascarades, 1 screen, £5943DWalt Disney CompanyAnimationCoen brothersSpike JonzeMaurice SendakCharles Gantguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Back to the Hugos: Lord of Light by Robert Zelazny A strange tale of Hindu gods that aren't, this novel's progress through the real world was even strangerWinning the 1968 Hugo Award for best novel isn't the only claim to fame of Robert Zelazny's Lord of Light: it also played a bizarre part in the Iran hostage crisis.As student revolutionaries stormed the walls of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, a handful of staff escaped through a back door. They managed to make their way to the Canadian embassy, but were unable to escape from Iran using their own passports. The Canadians and the CIA eventually came up with a cover to get them out of the country – issuing them with new identities and dressing them up as location scouts working on a science fiction film with a middle-eastern theme. This film was supposedly called Argo, and the CIA developed an elaborate back-story to make it appear real. They set up a production office, took out ads in Variety and bought up already-made set designs and script treatments for a film that neatly fitted into the remit of middle-eastern SF – Lord Of Light. The attempt to make the actual film had stalled in early production when it emerged that one of the crew had been embezzling most of its budget, but the hostage escape operation it enabled was a resounding success (and earned itself the fond nickname the Canadian Caper). That success seems all the sweeter thanks to the delicious irony that the religious revolutionaries in Iran had been duped using the story of a revolution against religion.The religion in question in Lord Of Light is Hinduism – or, at least, a version of Hinduism that has been operating on an Earth-like planet with the aim of keeping its population enslaved. Yama, Brahma, Khali and co are actually the crew of a spaceship that crash-landed on the planet thousands of years ago. They have used their advanced technology to provide themselves with weaponry that gives them godlike powers, and to transfer their minds to new bodies when the ones they're occupying wear out. They've kept the rest of the human population (largely made up of the descendants of their old bodies) in a state of medieval ignorance and cowed those who don't immediately do their bidding with the threat that they'll be reincarnated as animals – or not at all. Not that you'd know any of that if you stopped reading before the halfway point. At first it seems as if the gods really are gods – even though they're all fond of smoking cigarettes and slipping in American slang and western cultural references (generally in the form of groansome puns) to deflate the high epic prose in which Zelazny has chosen to present most of his story. The author only slowly reveals the gods' true nature, and the nature of the struggle against them. Even the central character is a mystery – an enigma summed up, but not fully explained, by the novel's typically slippery first paragraph:"His followers called him Mahasamamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit."And the complications don't end there. The novel's dozens of characters have a habit of changing name as well as shape. The chapters do not fit into regular chronology. Many episodes only make sense in the light of things that happen later in the book; some never really do. It's nearly impossible to tell whether Sam is serious or joking – or whether Zelazny is, for that matter. Did he really write an entire dramatic episode in which an unfortunate character called Shan is given the body of an epileptic just to enable him to land the pun: "then the fit hit the Shan"? What's with the Christian zombies? Is a long episode in which Sam hacks the planet's oppressive Hinduism with Buddhism a giant mickey-take, another example of the absurdity of religious thought, a touching demonstration of the beauty of true spiritual enlightenment or a heady combination of all three? Is this book profound, or daft – or both?The obscurity and ambiguity are sometimes irksome but generally add to Lord Of Light's considerable appeal. Reading it is a strange and exhilarating experience. I didn't have much of a clue about what was going on for the first 100 pages, but didn't really mind because I was enjoying the dappy dialogue, eastern-tinged scene-setting and epic battles (there are fight scenes in here as beautifully constructed and carefully brutal as Hemingway's boxing descriptions). From the point of view of six American hostages, it's probably a good job it was never made into a film, but the visual appeal is obvious.Sometimes the epic prose is heavy and overwrought (there are a lot of flames issuing forth and a few too many ponderous constructions: "They sat in the room called Heartbreak and they drank of the soma, but they were never drunken.") Sometimes, too, the more philosophical passages tend towards the windy. But all that's easily forgiven when enlightenment kicks in and you realise how cleverly Zelazny has been spinning the wheels of his story. This intriguing game of bluff would deserve to be remembered even if it hadn't played such a curiously apt part in the hostage crisis. Next time: John Brunner, Stand On ZanzibarHugo awardScience fiction, fantasy and horrorSam Jordisonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Tony Williams's poetry workshop In this month's workshop, Tony Williams asks for your poems on commodities: from lollipops, farmland or petrol to body parts, microchips or precious metals, anything that can be bought and soldTony Williams grew up in Matlock, Derbyshire and now lives in Sheffield. His poetry collection The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street is published by Salt. He has carried out research into contemporary pastoral poetry, teaches creative writing and literature, and works as a freelance graphic designer.Take a look at his exercise on commodity poemsI want you to write a poem about a commodity. Think of what your commodity will be. It could be anything that can be bought and sold: lollipops, farmland, petrol, body parts, microchips, precious metals ... Make some notes about what your commodity is and what it does. You may need to do some research (Google and Wikipedia are great tools for poets pursuing a tangential line of thought). Think about physical characteristics, location, price, value. What can it be exchanged for? Think about storage. What's its journey through life? Who buys it, and who sells it?What's useful about your commodity? What are its good points and bad points? If it were alive, how would it behave? How would it talk, and what would it say? How might it affect the people involved with it? I want you to look beyond the facts to get at the intuitive character of your commodity; to write something which feels true, even if it sounds preposterous.Write an essay in verse on your chosen commodity. It doesn't all have to be true, though it helps if some is. But focus on the subject – the poem should be about your chosen commodity, not about yourself, your lover, war, parents, or death (though any of those things may appear in it). There are no formal rules, other than to keep your poem to 40 lines or less. Horrify me. Make me laugh.Please submit your entry (pasted into the email, rather than as an attachment) to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk before midnight on Friday January 29.Poetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |