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...