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

Saturday
10:00 am Google Books and Mythical Beasts
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece defending the Google Books settlement, Google co-founder Sergey Brin stated: "The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns." Here Brin expands upon this statement, clarifying Google's plans for unicorns. "We've rounded up all the extant unicorns and are keeping them at the Googleplex in Mountainview, California," Brin says. "Our goal is to preserve them so that everyone who wants to have access to unicorns can do so. Of course, right now you'll have to come to Google if you want to see a unicorn, but the fact that we possess all the unicorns in the world in no way prohibits other companies from starting their own unicorn preserves. In fact, we'd love to see that happen!" Brin says Google's unicorns enjoy the best possible conditions: "They're free to gambol and frolic, to primp in their magic dens, or to sport with young maidens. These are free-range unicorns." Brin says he discovered that unicorns had survived Noah's flood by reading the apocryphal Book of Noah--a volume he found through a Google Books search. Repeating a claim he makes in his op-ed piece, Brin says that without Google Books you would have to "fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks. Unless," he adds, "you don't have access to the corporate jet. In that case you might want to try the interlibrary loan system."

2:00 pm Wild Things: You Make My Heart Sing
Dave Eggers discusses his recent adaptations of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Eggers co-wrote the screenplay for the film version of Sendak's classic children's book, which opens today. He explains that the trick to adapting a children's book for film is "adding pictures. Seriously, you have to add a lot of pictures. Moving pictures." Eggers also expanded Sendak's story, which consists of just ten sentences, into a 300-page novelization called The Wild Things. "That required adding words," he says. "Lots and lots of words. More words than I bet you can even imagine. And the end result is, it's longer." For his next project, Eggers plans to combine his screenplay with his novelization, revise them by slashing words and pictures, and turn it all back into Sendak's original.

Sunday
11:00 am The Løst Lost Symbol
Police in Iceland are looking for the thief who stole the first proof copy of the Icelandic translation of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. In this segment, the detective in charge of the investigation reports that "the prospects for solving this crime look gloomy. But then everything looks gloomy here in Iceland." Police are considering several theories, including the possibility that the proof was eaten by reindeer or that the thief burned it in an attempt to keep warm. Meanwhile, the publisher has hired its own investigator, "the Private Dick from Reykjavik," who believes that the thief plans to translate Brown's novel back into English in the hope that this time it will be plausible.

3:00 pm Obscure Dickens
A series profiling lesser-known Dickens characters. This week: Manwich, a convict in Great Expectations who is sent to prison in Australia but returns a wealthy man, having made a fortune in sloppy joes.

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

Saturday
10:00 am Balancing the Bernie Books
Publishing industry experts discuss the glut of books about Bernie Madoff. Three competing books will be published simultaneously in August, and a fourth has been scheduled for next year. The panelists weigh the huge financial risks involved in publishing multiple books about a media-saturated topic, but fail to acknowledge the irony that, even from prison, Bernie Madoff can still make a whole lot of people lose a whole lot of money.

4:00 pm "I was Henry Louis Gates's cab driver!"
The one major player from the Henry Louis Gates arrest drama who has been ignored by both the police and the media, "Cabbie X" talks about his instant book Gates Crasher: Driven to the Edge. Cabbie X describes Gates as "a perfect gentleman, except when he was screaming at me"--things like "Can't you turn that music down?" and "What did you go this way for?" He says Gates repeatedly encouraged him to drive faster in order to beat the other cars, but insists the word "race" was never used. X also says that Gates's reported use of the expression "your momma" was actually a reference to Yo-Yo Ma, but X still found it offensive because "I can't stand that crazy cello music." He didn't consider it odd when Gates asked for help forcing open his own front door. Passengers often ask him to jimmy open doors, pick locks, smash widows, and scale the sides of buildings with rappelling ropes and grappling hooks to enter through a skylight. He once dug a 150-foot tunnel complete with electric lighting and a ventilation system simply because a passenger forgot her keys. Cabbie X also confirms the widespread rumor that he is, in fact, Speed Racer's brother.

Sunday
11:00 am A Little More Than Kin(dle) and Less Than Kind(le)
Live coverage of the Book vs. Kindle Smackdown, hosted by Green Apple Books in San Francisco, which pits Amazon's proprietary ereader against the traditional book in a contest designed by a traditional bookstore. In a stunning turn of events, the traditional book is winning. However, only a fool would try to predict the outcome at this early stage, so check back often for updates on this nail-biter.
In another segment, novelist Nicholson Baker, who offered a highly critical evaluation of the Kindle in a lengthy essay in The New Yorker, has more examples of how Amazon's ereader falls short as a replacement for the book. Among them:

-A book can prop up the leg of a wobbly table, but the Kindle just shatters, leaving thousands of Vizplex shards and bi-stable microspheres all over your floor.
-A book can serve as a coaster, but the Kindle just sparks and smokes and zaps you with tiny lightning bolts, especially if your glass is "sweaty."
-You can offer to carry your sweetheart's books home from school, but offering to carry her Kindle is just stupid.
-An exciting book will set your heart pounding, but the Kindle will stop your pacemaker.

The segment concludes with Baker lining up ten or twelve Kindles and smashing them with a baseball bat while Jeff Bezos' maniacal laugh is heard in the background.

2:00 pm Obscure Dickens
A series profiling lesser-known Dickens characters. This week: Olymphe Jejune, fancy-pants guillotine operator in A Tale of Two Cities.

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

Saturday
10:00 am Ernest Hemingway Blofeld
The authors of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America talk about their contention that Ernest Hemingway served as a KGB agent during the 1940s. Recently discovered files show that Soviet recruiters were, in fact, in touch with Hemingway, who first caught their attention with his fondness for shooting things and punching people out. The KGB trained him and sent him into the field armed with various gadgets, including a special typewriter that could produce enough muscular prose to overpower an enemy agent. Hemingway once nearly killed future spy novelist Ian Fleming--not because Fleming was with a rival spy service (British Naval Intelligence) but because he was "an effete tea-sipping Limey fop." (Fleming is thought to have based James Bond's archenemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, on Hemingway, which would explain all the cats running around the Hemingway House in Key West.) Ultimately Hemingway's career as a spy came to an end when he ran afoul of the American intelligence community, an experience he relates in his book The Old Man and the CIA.

2:00 pm Reading with Sonia Sotomayor
The Supreme Court nominee discusses the literary characters that influenced her. In her youth, she devoured the Nancy Drew mysteries and dreamed of becoming a detective. She credits Perry Mason with inspiring her to pursue a career in law. Once she ascended to the bench, however, she focused her attention on reading material that would clarify and elucidate the role of the judiciary and the courts. In particular she cites Mike Hammer in Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury as "a guy who knows how to mete out justice in the court of no appeal," and the stories of Judge Dredd, who she describes as "a kickass jurist," especially as embodied by "that hottie" Sylvester Stallone.

Sunday
11:00 am Lost in Translation
Michael Luongo, author of Gay Travels in the Muslim World--the first gay book to be translated into Arabic--discusses the controversy that resulted when Arabic translators substituted the word "Pervert" for the word "Gay" in the book's title. Subsequent developments reveal that there is some precedent for this: A quick canvass of several bookstores in the Middle East turned up copies of Enola Pervert by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts; Our Hearts Were Young and Degenerate by Cornelia Otis Skinner; and several books by Deviate Talese. [Related programming note: Later tonight C-SPAN will air the Arabic version of the Fred Astaire classic, The Debauched Divorcée.]

4:00 pm Obscure Dickens
A series profiling lesser-known Dickens characters. This week: Hieronymous Quillplucker, naïve publisher in Bleak House who believes that no book with the word 'bleak' in the title will sell.