BOOKNEWS
O’Donnell’s “View”
due out this fall
Rosie O’Donnell has had “an interesting year,” she said recently, and a lot of it will be in her new book, “Celebrity Detox,” coming this fall. O’Donnell said her long- delayed memoir on fame will not be “vindictive” or “mean-spirited,” but will offer a candid look at her very public life, including her brief, battling stint on “The View.”
O’Donnell noted that her book was supposed to come out a few years ago, but she decided it wasn’t ready, not quite “cooked.” Her time on “The View” convinced her she was ready to start baking again. She called the book “half blog, half straight” writing.
– The Associated Press
Sales flattening out
For the near future, book sales are looking flat.
According to the latest report from the Book Industry Study Group, dollar sales and the number of books sold will increase by small levels through 2011, rising by 3 percent or less each year.
According to the study group, the biggest growth in the next few years will be in elementary and high school textbooks. Sales of mass market paperbacks, which had been declining in recent years, appear to have bounced back, thanks to the new “premium-sized” editions that are easier on baby boomers’ aging eyes. Growth looks modest in other areas as children’s book sales look to a future without Harry Potter and religious sales tail off after surging the past few years.
– The Associated Press
FIRSTLINE
Finn
Jon Clinch, $23.95
Under a low sun, pursued by fish and mounted by crows and veiled in a loud languid swarm of bluebottle flies, the body comes down the river like a deadfall stripped clean.
“It proceeds as do all things moving down the Mississippi in the late summer of the year, at a stately pace, as if its blind eyes were busy taking in the blue sky piled dreamily deep with cloud. There will be thunder by suppertime and rain to last the whole night long but just now the early day is brilliant and entirely without flaw. How long the body has been floating would be a mystery if any individual had yet taken note of its passage and mused so upon it, but thus far, under that sky of blue and white and upon this gentle muddy bed aswarm with a school of sunfish and one or two smallmouth bass darting warily as thieves, it has passed only empty fields and stands of willow and thick brushy embankments uninhabited.”
BEST SELLERS
Fiction, trade paperbacks
1. Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen
2. Suite Francaise
Irene Nemirovsky
3. The Road
Cormac McCarthy
4. The Memory Keeper’s
Daughter|Kim Edwards
5. The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
booksense.com
