Omnivoracious' Amazon Blog

As anyone in the business of selling books knows, sometimes we really do judge books by their covers. (I know I've bought books because of their covers, and not bought others for the same reason.) We've blogged casually but enthusiastically about our favorite book covers in previous years (and it's a constant topic of conversation on our book team here and just about anywhere book people get together, as far as I can tell), but this year, as they say in the reality shows, we've taken it to the next level. Thanks to our Magazines team, which built a sleek and fun voting widget to help them choose the best magazine covers of the year (here's their landing page--the widget itself lives no more now that the voting is over), we were able to do the same to open up customer voting for the best book covers of 2009. And so we narrowed down our favorite covers of the year to 60 nominees in ten categories, and now the rest is up to you.

You can find a link to the best covers voting on our Best Books of 2009 page, but if you're in a hurry, you can go straight to the voting page. The first round of voting, in which you choose your favorite in each of the ten categories, goes through December 7, and then they'll be a second round through December 17 to choose the Best Cover of 2009 from the 10 category champs.

We'll be posting plenty more about covers here over the next few weeks (including interviews with designers and more), but let's just start off with our nominees. You can see larger versions of all these images on our voting page or on this page, but here's a quick thumbnail gallery of each category after the jump. I know which ones I love the best (here are a few), but I'm looking forward to seeing what the top choices will turn out to be from this lovely array. And if there are favorites of yours that have been left off the ballot (some of my personal favorites didn't make the cut either), please shout them out in the comments, and we can feature some of them on Omni later. (We're not the only ones doing this, by the way: I know that the excellent Book Design Review is going to hold their annual favorite covers poll, with a little twist this year, by asking three booksellers to make their own selections.)

This one of the most fun things we've put together on the site recently, and we hope you'll enjoy it too.

Fiction:

Nonfiction:

Childrens & Teens:

Arts & Comics:

Cooking, Food & Wine:

Famous Faces:

One of a Kind Covers:

Classics Reimagined:

Paperbacks:

From a Series:

--Tom

Oprah's Movin' On:  Today Oprah Winfrey announced that the "The Oprah Winfrey Show"--the biggest daytime show in television history-- will come to a close during its 25th season. The last show will air on September 9, 2011. The multimedia icon and mogul is expected to launch a new talk show on her eponymous cable network.  [Yahoo News via AP and The New York Times]

Martin Amis' New Novel: In an interview in today's Guardian, Martin Amis talks about the genesis of his forthcoming novel The Pregnant Widow (coming May 2010), and counters claims that the story--which follows the lives a group of young people during the sexual revolution of the 1970's and the negative consequences of promiscuity for women--might be interpreted as anti-feminist. Amis "insisted that it was actually 'a very feminist book'." [The Guardian]

Open and Shut Case:   David Davis of the LA Times reviews Andre Agassi's just released autobiography, Open, and finds it an "inspiring acheivement."  Don't miss Agassi's candid and touching video introduction to the book. [LA Times]

Moving & shaking:  Sportscaster Len Berman's The Greatest Moments in Sports lands in our top 10 Movers & Shakers following his discussion of history-making games on this morning's Today Show. 

--Lauren

Rolling in like a slow, fuzzed-out guitar line from an Orange-brand amp, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book lives up to the good vibes promised in its title.

Artist and writer Joe Daly's full-color graphic novel collects two stories starring best buds Dave and Paul, as they wander about Cape Town while fully under the influence. Dave has a genetic disorder he calls "monkey feet," where his feet have what appear to be opposable digits. Throughout the book, Dave tries to overcome insecurities stemming from this oddity, and Paul tries his best to compliment his friend's feet ("You're a lucky dude, Dave…I guess."). In the first story, Paul drops in on Dave, sheepishly asking to borrow money, but Dave's internal monologue betrays a bit of resentment from past experience. No clichéd flashbacks or expository dialogue break the moment, though, and it passes sharply. The duo share a friendship so realized that I wondered if I hadn't somehow missed an earlier volume or two. 

This may sound like a strange compliment, but the color separation in The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book is a highlight. It's clean, crisp, and exact. In one panel, Dave is in an apartment surrounded by frogs, each with individually-colored patterns and pigmentation. One leaps from a pool of water, giving off a splash that sends droplets of blue about the room and onto Dave. Daly is careful to separate this blue from the tint in the sky that lies behind Dave through an open window. The attention to detail only deepens as Dave and Paul cruise the city in Dave's "cool old car," past a shipyard, into a rainforest, and more. Cape Town feels and looks like Cape Town, so much that it is easy to take for granted as the story opens wide.

Having recently finished Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, I couldn't help but consider The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book as a distant third-cousin to those titles. Daly's work includes the psychedelic mystery elements from Inherent Vice (the aforementioned apartment full of hallucinogenic amphibians and a quest to locate a capybara named "John Wesley Harding"--yes, named after the Bob Dylan album), and all the spacey dialogue from Chronic City ("That was a really great moment when Kermit the Frog and Ray Charles sang together on The Muppet Show, hey, dude?").

The bad news is that I could not find more Dave and Paul stories, but the good news is that I wanted to. In my search, I found that Joe Daly has an earlier book, Scrublands, and a new title arriving later in 2010 called Dungeon Quest: Book One (all of his books are from Fantagraphics). While waiting for the latter, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book is a weekend read, best consumed with your feet propped up, opposable digits or not.

--Alex

 
(The crowd lining up to get into the National Book Awards, the amazing Cipriani ceiling inside)

The National Book Awards for first-time attendees like my wife Ann and me constituted a kind of blur of sharp-dressed men and women, most of them graying a bit but still elegant, mixed with a few twenty-somethings running around on the fringes like the kids at a bar mitzvah. The location, with its high ceilings and spectacular dome, perfectly lit, conveyed a sense more of publishing’s memory palace than of its harsh reality right now. At the same time, you could hardly blame editors and writers, publishers and agents, for wanting to engage in a high-end collective sigh of relief that, despite many grim indicators, the whole thing hasn’t yet gone bust.

Zadie Smith is not only one of my favorite novelists to read, but one of my favorite novelists to hear talk about being a novelist (she's like Jonathan Lethem that way). As I wrote in my Best of November review of her new collection of "occasional essays," Changing My Mind, it's been clear that she is a novelist from the moment she broke through with White Teeth in her early twenties, but what kind of novelist she is (or will become) seems open to change. I was always fascinated with her response to James Wood's sometimes harsh criticisms of her early work: without being either defensive or defenseless, she seemed to take his critique back home for consideration, and to look at her own work as something outside herself, something that doesn't define her and that she expects to move beyond.

She seems wonderfully open to absorbing influence, while retaining her core intelligence, warmth, and wit--that's clear from her novels, but also from her critical essays, which are not distant pronouncements or summaries, but almost physical engagements with her reading (or watching, as in the case of her movie reviews or her excellent pieces on Katherine Hepburn and the love of a particular kind of British comedy she shared with her father). When she writes a piece comparing two recent novels (Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Tom McCarthy's Remainder), it's as if she's trying both their styles of fiction on for herself (and one imagines part of her rougher treatment of Netherland is that it's closer to the kind of writing she's done in the past and wants to outgrow).

Her only essay in the collection that's directly about her own writing, "That Crafty Feeling," is one of my favorites, especially for the way she talks about her openness to influence. She acknowledges that some writers can't read other writers at all while they are working on their own books, but (also like Lethem) she's the opposite: "My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight." And the influences extend from book to book:

Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you were going.

There's an ease to all of this river-crossing, it seems, just as there appears to be in her unfailing graceful sentences. But one of her further charms is that she's always looking to turn a story like that against itself, and so in her brilliant piece on Barack Obama and Pygmalion, she acknowledges the costs of such transformations through the words of others. She discusses her own hard-earned speaking voice, "the rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place," which was not the voice she grew up with. Thinking that she was adding a voice through her education, she has since found that she lost the other:

Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose--now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth.

Regrets or not, you get the feeling that her voice, along with her mind, will continue to change, in her novels as well as in these lovely, brilliant essays that are their equal. --Tom

Dream Big:  Four years ago, author Stephenie Meyer had a life-changing dream about a vampire in a meadow. 70 million copies later, it appears she was correct to act on it.

Basketball Jones:  Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum and I are on the same page:  this is a great year for hoops books.

Style Candy:  New York Times bestselling author Lauren Conrad will be sharing her fashion sense next fall with her first nonfiction book, Lauren Conrad Style. 

The book, which will be published by Harper Collins next fall, will also include exclusives shots of the ex-"Hills" star and her own personal advice on how to infuse her fashionable traits into every day life.

Moving, Shaking, and Cooking:  After his Top Chef performance last night, Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook occupies the top spot on our Movers & Shakers list today.

You can follow Jeff's account of the National Book Awards gala from press row in his running comments to his post earlier tonight, but here's a quick wrapup of the winners, which include, we're thrilled to say, our own choice for the Best Book of 2009, Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann's tender ensemble novel of New York City at the moment of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. The #nba09 Twitter thread was very long, and the news reports of the awards are rather short so far tonight, but Jeff will be back in the daylight hours with a lengthier first-hand account of the evening.

The winners:

• Fiction: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• Nonfiction: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
• Poetry: Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop
• Young People's Literature: Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose

Quick links...
Phillip Hoose wins the National Book Award in the young readers category for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

Shona, a blogger, starts the Rory Gilmore Books Project, in which she sets out to read 260 books mentioned, shown, or joked about on the Gilmore Girls. (via Book-a-rama.)

Variety calls New Moon, the movie, "as good as Twilight and arguably a shade better."

The Daily Beast compiles a photo gallery of the Best Twilight Tattoos. (via GalleyCat.)

Tired of vampires yet? You're not the only one. Stephenie Meyer tells Oprah.com: "I'm a little burned out on vampires right now."

Happy reading!--Heidi

As Omni readers know, our own Jeff VanderMeer, who usually posts from the Florida panhandle, has been on a typically hydra-headed book tour for his two new releases this fall: his latest novel, Finch, a hard-boiled tale set in his city of Ambergris, and Booklife, a guide to the writer's life in the early 21st century, with from-the-front-lines advice on how to survive in the new world of new media. Happily, as his fuzzy phone photo from last week confirmed, he made it to Seattle (twice!) and we were able to sit down for lunch at a pub near the Amazon offices (and meet in person for only the second time). At the end of the meal I risked what I'm learning is the ultimate buzz kill for any convivial author meeting and pulled out my beloved Flip camera to record a little of our conversation for Omni. But Jeff was game, and had some sharp things to say about a couple of my questions.

So while Jeff and Ann get all gussied up in New York for tonight's National Book Awards, here is Jeff talking about what a booklife really means in 2009. (Pardon the background pub chatter: we call that "atmosphere.")

My first question, after being somewhat daunted, as I'm sure some writers will be, by all the possible routes to getting your work out there he describes in Booklife--and having seen in practice how many of them Jeff uses, often in the space of a single day--was: do you have to be a whirling, multi-platform dervish like Jeff VanderMeer to live a modern booklife?

Then, taking from his comment that he had "laid bare" his own methods and writing career in Booklife, I asked if the new writer's life demanded that he or she erase the line between public and private life? How do you draw the line, when the culture demands that you erase it?

--Tom

This evening I'll be reporting back from the National Book Awards here in New York City, technology permitting. Check back at this blog entry from about 9pm EST on, and I'll be posting results to the comments section as an easy low-tech way to get you the information. In the meantime, I'll try to comment on the preamble to the awards as time allows.

To refresh your memory, here are the nominees.

Fiction:

• American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
• Far North by Marcel Theroux

Nonfiction:

• Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook by David M. Carroll
• Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
• The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor
• The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles

Poetry:

• Versed by Rae Armantrout
• Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach
• Speak Low by Carl Phillips
• Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
• Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop

Young People's Literature:

• Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman
• Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
• Stitches by David Small
• Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor
• Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia