Things I'd Like to See This Weekend on C-SPAN's "Book TV"

Saturday
11:00 am Ate, Prayed, Loved, Then...
Elizabeth Gilbert discusses the pressure attendant upon her to deliver a suitable follow-up to her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. This week the New York Times reported that Gilbert completed, then scrapped a 500-page manuscript last year, and that she had since written an entirely different book, Committed, about marriage. Now Gilbert announces that she has finally hit upon the right idea for her sophomore effort, one that is guaranteed to replicate the success of Eat, Pray, Love by tapping into the most successful trend in publishing at the moment--flesh-eating zombies. Her new book, Eat Prey Live, will recount Gilbert's violent, bloody encounters with hordes of the hungry living dead in the jungles of southeast Asia. "There's something very scary about having millions of people waiting to see what you're going to do next," she told the Times. Here she adds, "that's not nearly as scary as having hundreds of undead cannibalistic fiends trying to eat your intestines."

Sunday
10:00 am Airplane Read
Alain de Botton talks about his experiences as Heathrow Airport's first "writer in residence." De Botton agreed to spend a week at the airport, writing about what he saw and pissing off a lot of other writers who were stuck at Heathrow but weren't getting paid for it. Mr. de Botton reports that the experiment got off to a rocky start--he had just begun typing his observations when a flight attendant asked him to turn off his laptop and other electronic devices. Mr. de Botton's reporting will be turned into a short book called A Week at the Airport--an apt title, as it is possible to spend a week at Heathrow on any given day. The publisher says the book will capture the arrivals and departures, the greetings and farewells, the delays, the lines, the tedium, and all the other things that make you want to avoid going to the airport in the first place. 10,000 copies will be given away to Heathrow travelers; the book will then go on sale at just about the same time those first 10,000 copies are hitting Amazon as "used books." Publication date is September 21, though the book could be delayed due to heavy weather conditions over Albuquerque.

2:00 pm Obscure Dickens
A series profiling lesser-known Dickens characters. This week: Josephus Shyster, successful barrister from A Tale of Two Cities who tires of urban life and retires to two suburbs.

Things I'd Like to See This Weekend on C-SPAN's "Book TV"

Saturday
10:00 am Gov. Mark Sanford
Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina discusses the newly revised edition of his 2000 book The Trust Committed to Me, now entitled The Tryst Committed by Me. The book has been updated with new material about the governor's unconventional approach to crisis management, a strategy that relies on multiple teary narcissistic public apologies played out over an extended period of time. Governor Sanford also reveals that he and his South American paramour did the Lambada together, even though he was fully aware that it is the forbidden dance.

4:00 pm The Book Review Crisis
A panel of authors discusses the dearth of book review coverage in daily newspapers. Alice Hoffman points out the important cultural service performed by the idiots and morons who write book reviews, and Alain de Botton suggests that, while critics should be hated till the day they die and wished nothing but ill will in every career move they make, they still perform a valuable function, especially when they write nice reviews of his work. Also weighing in is Ayelet Waldman, who posits that certain reviewers should rot in hell, presumably because Hades is as much in need of vibrant cultural debate as we are. As a public service, C-SPAN will run an onscreen crawl throughout the program listing the home phone numbers and email addresses of major book critics.

Sunday
11:00 am James Frey
The controversial author of the embellished memoir A Million Little Pieces talks about his forthcoming YA novel, I Am Number Four. Mr. Frey says I Am Number Four is the first volume in a series of six books, or maybe twenty-two, or, why not, seventy-eight books, and that HarperCollins paid "in the low nine figures" because they were so happy with his last book, the novel Bright Shiny Morning, which, according to Mr. Frey, sold "three-quarters of a gazillion copies." Frey says the main character of his new book is actually identified as Number Three in the text, but lies about it because "four is a much more impressive number. " He describes I Am Number Four as a story about teenage space aliens hiding on Earth, though one insider who saw the manuscript says it consists entirely of the phrase "All work and no play makes James a dull boy" repeated for five hundred pages in a variety of fonts and tab settings.

2:00 pm J.D. California
After a federal court banned U.S. publication of 60 Year Later: Coming Through the Rye, his unauthorized sequel to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Mr. California reveals that he wants to put the Salinger affair behind him, concentrate on the future, and take his literary career in an entirely new direction. He discusses his work in progress, 50 Years Later: Zanny and Frooey.