How many copies did Sahara actually sell? As many as the publisher says it did, according to the LA Times. “Publishers are notoriously reluctant to divulge sales numbers, and the complex, arcane nature of bookselling makes it hard to determine how well or badly a title is doing,” writes Josh Getlin. “Publishers routinely withhold full sales figures, saying the information is proprietary. The only people legally entitled to know those numbers are authors and their agents.”
Apparently, most books don’t sell well, even losing money for the publisher, so insiders keep real sales figures, if they can be known, to themselves. If an author claims his book sold 100,000, you have to trust him. There’s no public record to verify it.
Presbyterian blogger Donovan praises some Lutheran doctrines and criticizes others. He writes, “. . . though I love the first part of the section on Election (and think that the best Calvinist practice is in line with its cautions), find the second part (which teaches the doctrine of resistable grace) to be in conflict with the FoC’s own teaching earlier on, in the section on Free Will. And not in a paradoxical sort of way either, just an out-and-out contradictory sort of way.”
You don’t have to thank me for bringing this to your attention. I blog because I care.
I’m late to point out another of Frank’s interesting reviews (Books, Inq. is a top ten litblog anyway, so you probably should read him first and scan this one when you have the time.) He reviews J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, in which the ten favorite books taken from the submissions of 125 writers are revealed. Anna Karenina tops them all.
Strange also, to me at least, is the omission of Austen. I think the inclusion of Lolita and Gatsby is odd, too. Nothing wrong with either, mind you. Both are bona-fide masterpieces. . . . Paging through the 125 individual lists, what proves interesting is how many of the books chosen were written in the 20th century, and often pretty late in the century – which only reinforces the impression that these are books the writers have learned from.
Frank Wilson says A.S. Byatt is the greatest living British author. As you may know by now, I don’t have the experience to argue this point. (What did they teach me in that school I attended?)
Jeffrey Lord writes at The American Spectator site today about the Democratic Party and race.
I think he makes a lot of sense.
He particularly reinforced my prejudices in regard to questions of war and peace:
It is striking that Democratic Party history shows a repeated pattern of wanting to declare failure and come home in the Civil War, Vietnam and Iraq or opposed involvement in Grenada, the first Gulf War over Kuwait or stopping the genocide in Rwanda – all wars that involved liberating non-whites.
I’m probably being judgmental, even though I used to be a Democrat myself (never a peace-at-any-price Democrat, but a Democrat).
In any case, this argument certainly does not apply to any Democrat who happens to be reading this.
Mr. Bertrand blogs, “For all our speculative theorizing, precious few of us can make our theories work out on paper. The rhetoric of Christian fiction is a more exalted thing than the reality, in part because we understand our ambitions better than we do our abilities, but also because rhetoric is always more exalted than reality, no matter who’s talking.”
Mr. Bertrand blogs, “For all our speculative theorizing, precious few of us can make our theories work out on paper. The rhetoric of Christian fiction is a more exalted thing than the reality, in part because we understand our ambitions better than we do our abilities, but also because rhetoric is always more exalted than reality, no matter who’s talking.”
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