IVP - Behind the Books - September 2008 Archives

The Life of a Writer

It's not everyday that I receive an email with a YouTube video recommendation from our esteemed publisher Bob Fryling. However, this morning my editorial colleagues and I received the following note: "I thought you would enjoy this rather entertaining YouTube explanation of being an author from a British novelist named Roger N. Morris. There are four parts but the first part is the best."

You may note in this brief message that he kindly previewed all four segments so that his employees would not have to expend their time doing so. However, I must confess that I did venture to segment two. I thought it was very amusing as well, as it points out the very common obssession of writers: checking Amazon frequently (daily, hourly) to see how their book ranks. This is a crazy-making exercise to say the list. (See the recent blog post in Andy Unedited for more on Amazon sales rankings.)

Check out the videos--and let us know if you decide to post your own!

Is This Heaven? No . . .

“You want to see what happens to books after they go to book heaven?” she asks. On the screen of her MacBook, a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York’s publishing machine.

That's a peek into a recent staff meeting at Harper Studio in New York, profiled in New York magazine recently, and a chilling vison of a world in which a laptop computer can be called a Mac "Book" and a twelve-year-old's suggestion for revitalizing the book publishing industry is to "turn all the books into movies so nobody has to waste their time."

You think that's gloomy? Check out this candid observation:

Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them. Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.

Meanwhile, the sales landscape is changing dramatically, not the least of which (though perhaps the most surreptitious of which) is the positioning going on at Amazon:

Editors and retailers alike fear that it’s bent on building a vertical publishing business—from acquisition to your doorstep—with not a single middleman in sight. No HarperCollins, no Borders, no printing press. . . . The ultimate fear is that the Kindle could be a Trojan horse.

No HarperCollins, presumably, means no InterVarsity Press--not because we are like them but because compared to a corporate behemoth like Amazon we are a teeny weeny grasshopper. That's OK though, because--if I may mix my metaphors--that makes us the underdog, and as the author of the New York article suggests, "the industry's long-term survival" depends on "people who think like underdogs.”

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Thanks to a fellow underdog, NavPress editor Caleb Seeling, for turning me on to this article.

Four Hs, One Bible

Not surprisingly based on my profession—both in the sense of what I do and what I believe—some of the best books, according to my rubric of four Hs—“hard to read, humble, humorous and human,” are consolidated in the Bible.

That the best books are hard to read is confirmed by King Josiah, who when read the books of Moses by his royal secretary, "ripped his robes in dismay" and ordered his court to "pray to GOD for me and what's left of Israel and Judah. Find out what we must do in response to what is written in this book" (2 Chronicles 34:19-20).

Humility pervades the scriptures, of course—not necessarily in the foreground, as a fair number of folks display precious little humility. But those cases generally serve as a kind of cautionary tale reinforcing the axioms that bubble up now and again: “Pride goes before a fall,” “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up,” and whatnot.

Beyond that, the Bible displays a savvy use of humor. The first laugh in the Bible is recorded in the book of Genesis, when old and childless Sarah overhears God promising her husband a son. She laughed out of bitterness, denying it to God's face when he called her on it. But the last laugh was on her, when soon enough she found herself groaning through childbirth and bearing a son, whom she named, appropriately enough, Isaac, or "Laughter." It's a perfect story, and it's just a scene. Plenty more where that came from.

And of course, it all comes together in the very humanness of the book—despite its divine origins. Much like its Messiah, the Bible shows divinity and humanity commingled in the best sense, so that in learning about God we learn something about ourselves, and in learning about ourselves, we learn something about God.

So there. You want to read something good, give the Bible a shot. And then, of course, dig around in the IVP catalog, if I do say so myself.

The Best Books Have Four Hs

This summer I got particularly pretentious on my personal blog as I rolled out the “four Hs of the best books.” I hereby digest the series in a slightly less pretentious form here for you. You’re welcome.

The series began with me showing appreciation for Thomas Merton's No Man Is an Island, while also reading a book that might best be described as propaganda--a digest of several people's arguments against a predictable set of contrarian beliefs, presented with a high level of authoritarian conceit and adversarial derision. Both books were provocative, but only one struck me as particularly conducive to constructive conversation and fruitful meditation. That's the Merton book; I'm not going to name the other one.

So H number one is this: The best books are hard to read. By "hard" I don't mean unintelligible; I mean that they leave us unsettled, uncomfortable, moved in such a way that we feel a need to lay them open in front of other people and say, "What must I do with this?" The best books don't send us to our friends to wag our fingers at them but to ask them to read with us, guide us, pray for us.

But there's a vulnerability to conceit on the part of readers and writers of books that are hard to read. So the best books aren't merely hard to read; the best books are also humble (H number two).

Although book-writing still has some of its mystique, in reality if I—some random guy from the suburbs—can get two books published, then really anyone can. Ah, democracy. But with some 200,000 titles in English being published every year, no book can reasonably claim to have the final word. So the best books recognize that the hard things they have to say represent only one voice in a much, much larger conversation, and that the conversation is ongoing, and that the things they say will, in the best world, ultimately be supplanted by better words and better thoughts.

At this point I’d committed myself to four Hs, but I conveniently forgot one of them. Fortunately the H I remembered was thus particularly appropriate: the best books are humorous.

I don't mean that the best books are joke books. In my humble opinion, most joke books are hard to read simply because they are (a) horrible and (b) not funny. Rather, the best books carry within their writing a sense of humor that is born out of the author's humility and extrapolated out into something more universally true. The stories these writers tell aren't necessarily fantastical absurdist escapism, although some of them may well be. But they are funny, because we recognize in them a bit of ourselves, a bit of our parents or our children, a bit of our most favorite and least favorite people. We don't cease to be human in the wake of tragedy or loss or otherwise difficult circumstances; we continue to feel the range of emotions common to the human condition—which includes humor, because even when we're sad some things will strike us as simply laughable. So although the best books are not merely humorous, I'd argue that a humorless book--whether a novel or a book of poems or a book of nonfiction or a book of holy scriptures--is not telling the reader the whole truth.

The fourth and final H emerges out of the first three: The best books are human. That may go without saying in the minds of many, but I'm not talking about the humanness of the author; I'm talking about the humanness of the content.

The best books regard the human condition in a way that causes us to regard the human condition differently. Animal Farm is a human book despite the near-total absence of humans; Charlotte's Web is a human book despite the primacy of the nonhuman characters. The best books don't pummel us with the author's dogmatic assertions of what is really real; the best books crawl into our laps and ring true for us, and then we close them and revisit the human race from a fresh, even more human perspective. In that respect the best books are not only serving their readers, they're serving the communities inhabited by their readers, and in the best-case scenario, they change a generation.

So there you have it: the best books have four Hs in them. Now go write some.

Publishers Weekly on IVP's books and authors

The Sept. 1 issue of Publishers Weekly featured several IVP-related items.The article "Emergent and Beyond" mentions Tom Sine's The New Conspirators as a guide to understanding the differences between emerging, missional, mosaic and neomonastic Christianity. I was quoted a few times commenting on the phenomenon of emergent (and non-emergent) books. Our forthcoming book by Julie Clawson (working title of Everyday Justice is not final) was mentioned, and Julie was quoted on the topic of emerging female authors.

There was also a profile of Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, coauthors of our new book Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers. Jana Riess writes,

Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer for Ordinary Radicals (IVP, Oct.) marries Claiborne's activism with the “new monastic” outlook of coauthor and fellow sojourner Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and argues that prayer should be actively engaged in changing the world.

“There are lots of good books on why we pray and different ways to pray,” says Wilson-Hartgrove, who cites excellent books on prayer by Philip Yancey, Mother Teresa and Brother Lawrence. “But this is a book about becoming the answer to our prayers. It's about how God wants to transform us and our way of life through the prayers Scripture teaches us to pray,” including the Lord's Prayer and Jesus' prayer for unity in John 17.

And the issue also included a nice review of Reconciling All Things, the first volume in the Resources for Reconciliation series. This is a partnership between IVP and the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation, and the first book is by the Center's codirectors, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice. PW says of the book: "Against a background of difference, the two argue for a vision of reconciliation that is neither trendy nor pragmatically diplomatic, neither cheaply inclusive nor heedless of the past."

National Punctuation Day

Make your plans now. September 24 is National Punctuation Day. One of our freelancers, Tabitha Plueddeman, kindly alerted us to the web link. The website is loaded with of information about how to celebrate, including a photo and recipe for a meatloaf formed in the shape of a question mark.

In honor of the approaching day, I pose the question: what is your punctuation pet peeve?

I think for me the overuse of scatter quotes for emphasis rates highest. Apparently, I am not the only one who feels this way as there is a very amusing blog entirely devoted to the topic. The blogger collects images such as the one below demonstrating unusual and contradictory quotation use. (Note also the singular "good tire" for sale.)

I was once a member of a church (well, actually, it was Baptist, so I'm probably still on the roles) where the secretary had a high affinity for the use of quotes, demonstrated in little signs she penned and posted around the church:

Don't let this "door" close.

Please "clean" the counter when you are finished.

Buy your "luncheon tickets" in the office.

What do the quotes mean in this sort of usage? In my first months at the church I was honestly confused. Was it not a real door? Was she mocking the potential cleaner of the counter, suggesting that this version of "clean" would still be lacking? And what kind of tickets were being offered? Was this some kind of code language for a gambling event?

Eventually, unsure of what sort of church this really was, I had to ask someone else. The answer I received was that the scatter quotes in this usage are equivalent to underlining or italic. That made sense to me. But, you see, bad punctuation almost severed me from a church community. So in honor of National Punctuation Day we honor the importance of well-placed quotation marks.