Banger's Blog

Have you ever wondered if there is a shortcut, or at least a pattern, to getting your book on the NY Times best-seller list? More than 100,000 new books are published each year, but only about 400 of those will become best-sellers. Albert-László Barabási, a data scientist, analyzed the sales patterns of the 2,468 fiction and 2,025 nonfiction titles that made The New York Times best-seller list for hardcovers over the last ten years.   Here are some quick facts: Half of the best-selling non-fiction titles were memoirs or biographies. Only 1.1% were about science 67% of the fiction titles were genre fiction like mystery, action, or romance (think Danielle Steele or James Patterson, who has had 51 best-sellers in the last decade) 85% of best-selling fiction authors have had more than one book on the list.   Only 14% of non-fiction authors hold this distinction. You don't have to sell as many books as you think – a book can make the non-fiction list by se...

A single choice can have huge, unpredicted consequences.  Today, the 100th anniversary of the End of the War to End All Wars, presents a uniquely personal example of this. Instead of fighting in World War One, like he thought he would have to (against his conscience and better judgement), my Granddad spent most of his WWI time in the Horse Pistol with the Red Nose Curses. As he put it back in the late 60s: "I joined the Royal Navy and passed exams for Chief Petty Officer, my trade helps. My reason for joining the Navy, because there was less chance of having to kill. Being killed would not seem so bad. Anyhow, getting tired of waiting for a ship, Bert Bailey (my best pal) + myself joined the Royal Engineers, + before leaving I was instructing fellows in Sig nalling. However, I was unlucky enough to get a double Hernia with heavy pontoon. Later, which was obscured to me, I was being taken to hospital, there to stay for 5 months with acute nephritis. From the Ramily Road...

When I was in Lawrence, Kansas last week, I stopped by the Spencer Museum of Art .  It's a fairly small museum, especially by Smithsonian standards, but they had a really nice, eclectic collection.  Of course they had the prairie artists like Thomas Hart Benton that you'd expect to see in a Kansas museum.  However, there were also pieces from every culture you could think of: Oceania, India, Japan, China, West Africa, Greco-Roman.   They had a couple of Renaissance carvings, a medieval reliquary, and there was a large collection of Haitian art that reflects the range of modern Haitian art.  And there was a very nicely curated and displayed selection of modern art: Warhol, Motherwell, and Shimomura.  It's well worth the detour and the cost of admission (free!). While I was there, I noticed a couple of pieces by Wendell Castle , a designer of contemporary furniture.  I have a bit of a personal connection with him, as he and my mother went on a fe...

Down the Rabbit Hole Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei by Barnaby Martin Almost any time I read an interesting book, I find myself going down rabbit holes: looking up words, tracing down quotes, researching events, concepts, and people - you could call it cross-referencing or simple distraction. I suppose I just do it because I can - I feel that the internet exposes endless nests and warrens beneath the rabbit hole.  I almost never do anything with the results of these detours; in fact, I rarely even save the links, let alone any of the information I dredge up. Yet I realize that the rabbit holes have become the most meaningful part of the experience of reading for me of late, so I feel I should do something with the results of my diversions. I picked up Hanging Man at the National Gallery of Art because I am interested in China and Ai Weiwei. I thumbed through it and there were some interesting quotes, so I grabbed it. Full disclosure: I wouldn't have bought it...

I enjoyed the first Binti book, so I was excited to see that Ms. Okorafor has published a new one. Binti was the story of a sheltered young woman going into a very big world and eventually making her mark on it. The world expanded over the course of the first novel, as new worlds and characters were introduced.   While most series continue to expand their universes by taking their protagonists to more a nd more new worlds, Binti: Home constricts the universe by taking us back  to Binti's home village, where she must face the consequences of defying the social norms of her culture. The story begins with Binti, our protagonist, in a blue funk.  She is feeling guilty that she has not completed her tribal coming of age ceremony because she is attending school on a faraway planet. Members of Binti's Himba tribe, especially Himbi, don't go to school and they don't leave their village, and they certainly don't leave earth .  Even though the university that Binti atte...

I know you’ve been waiting all year to see what books I managed to get through last year. I started about twice as many as I finished - I've included brief sketches of the more noteworthy ones at the end of this post.  About half of the books I finished were inspired by the Tim Ferriss podcast, and are denoted by **. Let me know your favorite reads, and if you read any of the books on this list, let me know in a comment what you thought of them. If nothing else, this may be the only place you'll see the term "bildungsroman" used twice in 14 pages, er, technically three times now.  So, in no particular order: Akata Witch Nnedi Okorafor Nnedi Okorafor is a science fiction author who hails from Nigeria, and thus has a different perspective on the future than we get from the European white guys who have owned this space from Day One (see what I did there?). I spent quite a bit of time with her works this year, and plan to spend more in 2018. It’s refreshing encoun...