The last Official PWxyz Poll we did saw To Kill a Mockingbird win the Great American Novel title. Now: we want to know about how you read. Print or digital? New or used? Bookmark or dogear? See if you’re as neurotic as other PWxyz readers!
Just in time for Spring, our pals over at Macmillan Audio have launched “Listen While You Work Out” — a campaign aimed at helping people get in shape by listening to audiobooks.
Macmillan is encouraging its staff, colleagues, and listeners to use audiobooks as a way to log in extra time at the gym. Just by continuing to work out until the end of whatever chapter (or book) they’re listening to, people can burn more calories and get in shape more quickly.
Participants can log the hours spent working out while listening to audiobooks to track how much more they’ve exercised. As you can see from Macmillan’s Facebook page, people are really racking up some impressive numbers — with Macmillan’s own Esther leading the pack with a whopping 900 plus minutes active!
And, the campaign is getting some serious press — check out these stories from Fitness Magazine, Parents, and Fox. Summer may be almost here, but “Listen While You Work Out” is far from over. So sign up, download an audiobook, grab your iPod, and get to the gym today.
For this list, we didn’t just want book adaptations that were a critical/audience failure or a box office failure–we wanted both. That’s why the films you see below might not be the biggest money losers or the most panned; instead, they’re a combination of the most hated and most wasteful uses of celluloid out there. If none of these movies were made, over $913,000,000 would have been saved and approximately 4 billion viewing hours would have been saved.
(The following films were either critical or money failures, but not both, so they couldn’t make the list: The Great Gatsby [the Redford one], Lolita [1997], Treasure Planet, Beloved, The House of the Spirits, many more)
10. John Carter (2012)
Net Losses (inflation adjusted to 2012): $67,221,900
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 51%
Representative Review Quote: “There’s nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.” -San Francisco Chronicle
Everyone was excited to call John Carter a flop before it even came out in 2012, and though it did tank, it lost less money than some of the other films on this list and it actually received so-so reviews. It’s hard to justify the $250 million dollar budget, and while it was trying to capture the same adventure feel of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it ended up being compared to the worst aspects of Prince of Persia, The Phantom Menace, and Cowboys & Aliens. Yeah, I forgot about Cowboys & Aliens, too.
9. Atlas Shrugged: Part I, II (and probably) III (2011-2014)
Net Losses (first two parts combined, not adjusted): $22,036,572
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 11% (Part I); 5% (Part II)
Representative Review Quote: “A disaster as a film, Atlas also is laughable in its presentation of Rand’s ideology.” -Philadelphia Inquirer
Have you seen the poster? The trailer? Continue reading
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
We’ve been at this literary pie chart thing for awhile now (other pie charts: Underworld, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, The Metamorphosis, Ulysses, and 2666), but making a pie out of Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy is the most challenging yet. Modernist Cuisine challenging. So, in order to do justice to the writer’s masterwork, we special-ordered an emulsifier and a blowtorch. And though we stunk up the PWxyz kitchen during our many failed attempts using logic, reason, and hope, just when we thought we couldn’t go on, we went on.
Here’s our steaming Melton Mowbray pork pie, an ode to the hatchet/bludgeon work of Lemuel, Molloy, and Jacques.
*Other ways to put this: proposition/negation; function/inverse function; considering/reconsidering
Following up on the huge success of the audio editions of conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot, and Killing Lincoln: The Assassination that Changed America Forever, Macmillan Audio is set to release another offering from the O’Reilly Factor host — this time a children’s title.
On June 10, Macmillan will publish the audiobook of Kennedy’s Last Days, the children’s adaptation O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy.
This time around, veteran narrator Edward Herrmann reads the book, with O’Reilly narrating the prologue. Check out this video from Macmillan for an early audio excerpt:
Mr. Murakami is not pleased, Swedish Academy.
PWxyz doesn’t have time for non-nerdy quizzes; there are too many of those. Instead, here’s one of the more blistering tests this side of the Badwater Ultramarathon–guess the Nobel winner by citation. The format is much like a non-demanding English course–everyone’s favorite: multiple choice! In an attempt to make it less trying, we’ve narrowed down citations and choices to the more household-known Nobel winners. Sorry, 1903 laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, you just missed the cut.
Oh, and let’s say a 10/10 gets you a coveted one-way ticket to Mars. Tell us your score in the comments!
1. “For having transported the destitution of man into his exaltation”
A. Albert Camus
B. Samuel Beckett
C. Isaac Bashevis Singer
2. “For a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams”
A. Pablo Neruda
B. W.B. Yeats
C. T.S. Eliot
3. “For his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception”
A. Rudyard Kipling
B. John Steinbeck
C. Eugene O’Neill
Attention Audio Publishers:
Spring is finally here, and that means it’s time to prepare Publishers Weekly’s listing of your audio offerings for Fall.
While we’ve had a great response thus far, there’s always a chance we’ve missed someone. So, if you’ve yet to get in touch about your upcoming audio titles, NOW is the time. Please contact our own Shannon Maughan at maughanse@verizon.net. And be sure to check out all the pertinent details after the jump. Continue reading
Recently, I had the opportunity to meet a young software developer who is a graduate student at UC Berkeley. He’s amazingly quick; a good coder, confident in his abilities, and a budding novelist. Both for school and his own needs, he helped to build an open source ebook reader, FuturePress, in javascript. In part, he and his friends felt the need for a lightweight reader; and as a novelist he also wants to play with versioning, reader collaboration, and all the other cool things you can do on the web. What struck me was not that they had written an ebook reader: others have done that. My more significant realization is about the world they know. Continue reading
Last year, a woman at the Anchor Bar in Superior, Wisc. wanted our picture taken after I gave her a book.
World Book Night was a lot of fun last year. I hit two iconic bars in Superior, Wisconsin, the hard-scrabble, blue-collar town across the St. Louis River from Duluth, Minnesota, where I gave away 20 copies of A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. This year, I decided to go outside of my comfort zone again, drive over the bridge to Superior, and give away copies of Population: 485 by Michael Perry, who writes books about his life and times in a small town in the Wisconsin north woods. There’s also, for me, one degree of separation between Perry and me: his cousin, Penny Perry, a native of Wisconsin who now lives in Duluth, is a friend of mine. I felt like this gave me instant street cred.
Things didn’t start so auspiciously: I dropped a book in a puddle even before I left Duluth. But once I got to Superior, it picked up – I ended giving away all 19 copies in less than 30 minutes, minus driving time.
I started off at about 5 pm at the Red Mug Café, a hole-in-the-wall not far from the bridge between Minnesota and Wisconsin. I approached a table of four middle-aged women, enjoying each other over cups of coffee. “Happy World Book Night!” I exclaimed, explaining that on April 23 each year, volunteers “all over the country like myself” give away books to strangers. Holding up Population: 485, I said, “Michael Perry writes about small-town life in northern Wisconsin. Can you relate to that, or what?” The women were very kind, and all four of them took a book and graciously thanked me. Emboldened, I walked around the café and handed out books to a woman slurping a bowl of soup; a middle-aged man on his iPhone, who was initially reluctant, but said, “Well, I am flying to Chicago; I do need something to read on the plane;” and to a young man at the counter, who high-fived me after I handed him a book and told him, “Books rock! Reading rocks!” Continue reading
I felt like one of those women handing out cigarettes in yesteryear. If you’re too young to remember them, you may have seen pictures. Except I have a couple years on most of those women, o.k. all of them, and rather than a sexy outfit, I chose a heavy down jacket over which I wore a sandwich-board sign, and I use the term loosely, made with a reflective vest covered over with a couple World Book Night flyers in clear page protectors. I don’t know if it helped, but I wasn’t too cold last night, given the drizzle and chill.
Last year when I was a “giver” at World Book Night, I chose a spot across from the Central Square T station in Cambridge, Mass., and found it difficult to break down people’s resistance to taking a book. They thought I was trying to foist a Bible on them, or maybe I was part of some cult. This year I was determined that it shouldn’t be so hard to give away 20 books. To get in the mood I used the pre-WBN kick off event at the Cambridge Public Library with Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers), Lisa Genova (Still Alice), and Neil Gaiman (Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett) as a pep rally. It certainly got the high school students in the row next to me wound up. They wanted to sign up then and there to be givers. So did a former educator who had read Still Alice in her book group and had never heard of WBN.
I was especially pleased to get to hear Diffenbaugh, since I had chosen her novel to give away. A debut novel by a local author seemed like an easier sell than many of the more “classic” books on last year’s list. Plus I had one other trick for getting people to take my books. Since her book is so interconnected with flowers, I decided to buy 20 carnations from Brattle Florist, the same florist shop in her acknowledgments, to handout with each book. That was before I learned from Gaiman’s talk that April 23 marks Cervantes’s death and in Spain men give women a rose, and women give them a book on that day. The first Book Day, as it is known, was held on Cervantes’s birthday (October 7) in 1926, then moved to April in 1930. Continue reading
