The Globe and Mail’s 8th annual selection of the 100 best and most influential books of 2005 was announced on Saturday.

The Sweet Edge by Alison Pick
Described as gorgeous, strange, funny and terribly sexy.
What’s it about: Two lovers set to break up lead separate lives one summer. Ellen works through the muggy days in a trendy Toronto art gallery, her boyfriend Adam takes a solo canoe trip into the Arctic.

Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey through Iraq by Hadani Ditmars
Described as a unique triumph and a daunting debut.
What’s it about: Ditmars, a Canadian journalist, returns to Iraq in September 2003 to find the friends she met over the years and to see how their lives have changed since her first visit in 1997.

Do you have a favourite book on the list? 

Amazon.ca has chosen The Highest Tide as one of the Best Books of 2005: Editors’ Picks.

Visit Amazon.ca Best Books of 2005: Editors’ Picks

Thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley is the first person to ever encounter a live giant squid, but it’s not the first or the last of Miles’ discoveries.

Enter to win a signed copy of The Highest Tide:
Visit Raincoast.com and mention you saw this posting.

Listen to Jim Lynch, Raincoast Podcast (MP3).

More Best Books of 2005 Selections
Best Books of 2005: Nonfiction Editors’ Picks include:
Pyongyang by Guy Delisle
Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin

And the Amazon.ca Customers’ Favourites include
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Fastcompany.com has a fantastic article on the distinctive business model of publisher Berrett-Koehler (distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books).

Getting on the Same Page: Book publishing is a difficult and contentious business. Upstart Berrett-Koehler has a more collaborative--and profitable--model. From: Issue 100, November 2005, by Lucas Conley.

Berrett-Koehler is a small 13-year-old, San Francisco-based publisher with a radically different approach to book publishing. Instead of a traditional model where the publisher pays the author an advance on royalties and then makes all the decisions on the marketing and sales plans for the book, Berrett-Koehler uses a collaborative model that brings in the author. But they don’t only bring in the author, they bring together the editor, outside reviewers and outside readers. As a team they make decisions on all aspects of the publishing process.

The results--smarter books and better sales--speak for themselves. Last year, BK’s revenue grew 25%, to $7 million, and is projected to grow another 50% in 2005. The average BK author sells some 15,000 copies, 27% more than the industry average [11,800 according to the Book Industry Study Group]. “BK epitomizes what . . . smaller, focused publishers of the present and future can and should be doing,” says Michael Cader, founder and editor of “Publishers Lunch,” a daily newsletter that covers the publishing industry.

The article goes on to talk about the ownership structure of the company (46% is owned by more than 100 authors, customers, employees and suppliers). Details of the difference in contracts and negotiations are described, as well as the manuscript-review process. The model is more than clever, and apparently quite successful.

Average revenue per book [publishing industry]: $146,667
Average revenue per book [Berrett-Koehler]: $220,000

Read the article and post what you think of this model.

The Capilano College Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation Lecture Series welcomes

Hadani Ditmars

author of
Dancing in the No Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey Through Iraq

Wednesday, November 30, 2005
7:00 pm

Cedar Theatre (CE 148), Capilano College
2055 Purcell Way, North Vancouver

Funding for this free lecture has been graciously provided by Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation

Join us for a multimedia presentation, complete with live music by Iraqi oud master Serwan Yamolky and video footage, complimenting Ditmars’ unique narration of her travels and work in present-day Iraq.

When Hadani Ditmars first went to Iraq in 1997 for the New York Times, she was shocked at what she saw. Six years of the worst sanctions ever inflicted on a modern nation had brought the people to their knees. Yet there was so much more to the “cradle of civilization” than misery and suffering. In the midst of despair she found art, beauty, architecture, music. She discovered orchestras who played impassioned symphonies on wrecked instruments, playwrights who pushed the limits of censorship, artists who spent their last dinars on paint and canvas, families who still celebrated weddings by dancing to makam--traditional love songs.

Hadani Ditmars is a Canadian journalist whose work has been published in the New York Times, London Independent, Globe and Mail, Time, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Newsweek and broadcast on the BBC and CBC radio and television. Her Saturday Night feature on the situation in Israel/Palestine has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and her Ms. Magazine essay on Iraqi women has been adopted for several university courses. She has been reporting from the Middle East since 1992 and and has been on assignment in Iraq six times since 1997.

She is currently working on a documentary film about her experience of returning to post-invasion Iraq. 

House of Anansi has joined Raincoast Books as one of the first Canadian publishers experimenting with podcasting.

Anansi’s first podcast features writer and critic Noah Richler interviewing Stephen Lewis, author of Race Against Time.

To subscribe to the Anansi podcast, copy and paste the below URL into the “Subscribe” function in
your podcast application or software: http://www.anansi.ca/podcast/apod.xml

The Raincoast podcast is available from iTunes by searching for “Raincoast” or the RSS feed is available from Feedburner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/raincoast

The MP3 file can also be downloaded by clicking on the below link:
Full Podcast: Listen to Jim Lynch

Jim Lynch is the author of The Highest Tide

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/

The issue that is on newsstands (as of this week) contains a story from none other than Colin McAdam, author of Some Great Thing.

Winner of the 2005 First Novel Award (Books in Canada/Amazon.ca)
2005 Finalist for The Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
2004 Finalist for Governor General’s Literary Award

It’s a good book. Check out the website.

The Raincoast podcast is available from iTunes by searching for “Raincoast” or the RSS feed is available from Feedburner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/raincoast

The MP3 file can also be downloaded by clicking on the below link:
Full Podcast: Listen to Jim Lynch

Jim Lynch is the author of The Highest Tide

Whole Life Expo 2005, The 19th Annual Showcase of Natural Health, Alternative Medicine & Green Living, takes place this weekend (Friday November 25 to Sunday November 27) at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

http://www.wholelifeexpo.ca

The Eternal Moment Bookstore will have a booth there, promoting B.K.S. Iyengar’s new book Light on Life among other things.
http://www.eternalmoment.ca

Considered to be the most important living yoga master, BKS Iyengar in Light on Life shows how yogic principles can be used in the search for wholeness and harmony with the world. 

Germs is a contagious new book from the award-winning Ross Collins.

Pox is harmless but that’s not a good thing when you’re a germ. After training at Germ Academy he’s packed off on his first mission--to infect Myrtle, an unsuspecting little girl. So what’s a reluctant germ to do?

Germs is perfect for the flu season. If you’re sick in bed consider infecting your friends and family with laughter.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Readers’ Institute has led the movement to stand up for those who sit down and read in the bathroom. The Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series is the longest-running, most popular series of its kind in the publishing industry. Now available is Uncle John’s Shoots and Scores. Full of high-scoring facts and hard-hitting trivia, Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores offers a cross-checking, cross-section of hockey’s history, mythology, hagiography, psychology and pathology.

Have you seen the Bathroom Reader Blog?
http://www.bathroomreader.com/blog.asp

On November 16, Raincoast officially launched its literary podcast series. See original announcement.

The inaugural podcast features original interviews and readings by author Jim Lynch, recorded when he attended the 2005 Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival. Find out more about Jim Lynch’s novel The Highest Tide.

The Raincoast podcast is available from iTunes by searching for “Raincoast” or the RSS feed is available from Feedburner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/raincoast

The MP3 file can also be downloaded by clicking on the below link:
Full Podcast: Listen to Jim Lynch

** CBC News offers background information on “what is podcasting."

In December 2005, Alice Walker’s classic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel opens as a soul-stirring new musical and landmark Broadway event. A recent BusinessWeek article by Susan Berfield “The Making of The Color Purple” talks about the producer’s success and challenges in getting the blessing from Alice Walker to turn her masterpiece novel into a musical, about Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of the production, as well as the trials and tribulations of raising $11 million, casting, marketing, and getting the show ready for Broadway.

Broadway demands much of its producers. [Scott] Sanders, who is 48 and has never produced a musical before, describes the job as wrestling an octopus, keeping all the puppies in the box, the hardest thing he has ever done, more white-knuckle than he’d like, and the most fun he has ever had.

The show opens December 1. After that first performance, Sanders is hosting a party at the New York Public Library. Oprah will be there. Alice Walker will be there. Quincy Jones will be there. Will you be there?

Regardless, the masterpiece novel The Color Purple is available in any bookstore or library. Remind yourself of the sassy, tough Sofia and the literary voice who inspired a nation and now a Broadway musical, Alice Walker.

CBC News is reporting that “an Iranian appeals court has ordered that the case involving the death of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi be reopened, lawyers said Wednesday.”

FULL STORY:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/11/16/kazemi051116.html

Nasrin Alavi in We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs discusses the Zahra Khazemi case briefly in a section called “Crime and Punishment.”

“Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested for taking pictures outside Evin prison during a student protest in Tehran ... Kazemi was beaten into a coma while in the custody of the judiciary and died of a brain haemorrhage on 11 July 2003 ... After a two-day trial in July 2004, her lawyers refused to sign documents which legitimized the court, stating the whole trial a farce.”

The following is a brief account by an Iranian journalist of one of the court sessions, it is included in the book We Are Iran.

18 July 2004
They have finally closed down Joumhouriat and Vaghayeh Etefagieh [reformist newspapers]. So there are now no papers left that can put out uncensored reports of Zahra Kazemi’s court session. Well this is exactly what Mortazavi [Prosecutor General Judge Saeed Mortazavi] wanted.

The situation in court today was sinister beyond words.

The journalist goes on to describe the court scene, the accused, the statements by Kazemi’s mother that her daughter’s body was covered in bruises, her hands and legs were broken, there were burn marks on her chest, and the judge’s pronoucements that there were no mentions of such abuse in the forensic reports.

Nasrin’s further commentary focuses on the struggle from within the regime by women like Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A defender of Islam, she has written authoratively about women and children’s rights under Islamic law. Azam Talaghani is another example. She is the founder and head of the Society of Islamic Revolutionary Women of Iran, but is now one of the most outspoken critics of the present regime. Although totally committed to Islam, Talaghani challenges any interpretation of the Koran that supports male supremacy.

Nasrin Alavi’s We Are Iran offers an unprecedented and uncensored look at the lives and thoughts of Iranian people. Through Alavi’s commentary and that of the Iranian bloggers quoted in the book, the reader can form a better understanding of contemporary Iran, which is not the Iran presented to us by Western governments. Certainly the struggle for democracy and revolution is evident in this book, as is the conflicts with the law, the conditions of women, of repression and its subversion, but the book goes beyond the stereotypical images of thuggish militias and bearded ayatollahs to portray a highly educated, youthful and literate country searching for balance.

Raincoast Books is now offering a literary podcast for some of our top print titles. The inaugural podcast features Jim Lynch’s novel The Highest Tide (published by Bloomsbury USA and distributed in Canada by Raincoast). The podcast includes original interviews and readings by author Jim Lynch, recorded when he attended the 2005 Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival.

Jim Lynch’s debut novel, The Highest Tide, is about one transformative summer for 13-year-old, speed-reading, insomniac Miles O’Malley. Miles is obsessed with Rachel Carson and with the sea. One night while exploring the mudflats of Puget Sound he becomes the first person to see a live giant squid. The discovery sets in motion a media frenzy and a bizarre chain of events related to further marine discoveries. In Lynch’s words, “What I was hoping to do was give a rendition of reality that felt like science fiction ... all I was essentially doing was describing things in as precise a detail as I could ... I did the research so I could do things like describe a moon snail and how it prowls along the flats and how its shell rides up high on its big fleshy body like a bulldozer.”

The recordings for Raincoast’s inaugural podcast were captured by Robert Ouimet of At Large Media, Ltd., who produced the podcast for Raincoast Books. Future podcasts will include interviews with bestselling authors and new talents, excerpts from Raincoast published and distributed titles, and other special features.

For more information on The Highest Tide visit www.raincoast.com/highest-tide/

The Raincoast podcast is available from iTunes by searching for “Raincoast” or the RSS feed is available from Feedburner:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/raincoast

The MP3 file can also be downloaded by clicking on the below link:
Full Podcast: Listen to Jim Lynch

Or listen to this shorter audio excerpt
Sample reading by Jim Lynch

CBC News is reporting on a new database that shows rare species and lands around the Great Lakes. The information will help scientists and governments decide which areas need to be conserved.

“Rare Great Lakes species mapped” article by CBC News, Nov. 14.

The map, called a Conservation Blueprint, is a database of facts, figures and maps available on the web or as a CD-ROM.

It highlights imperilled species found only in the Great Lakes basin including the aurora trout and dwarf lake iris, as well as healthy ecosystems such as sugar maple forests and coastal wetlands.

Currently 1.7 million species have been identified on Earth, but scientists estimate thae total number of species at 5 million to 10 million. The Conservation Blueprint is an interesting way of ensuring that known and unknown species are protected in Canada.

Raincoast Books and Maple Tree Press have also announced a contest related to rare species. In the Name A New Species Contest kids across Canada and the U.S. have the opportunity to name a new species that was identified in 2004 by 21 year-old college student Ashlee Allred.

Allred was working as part of a research team studying life in extreme environments. The new species is part of a group of organisms called extremophiles. Canadians and Americans have a chance to name the new species.

Contest runs: November 1 to March 31, 2006. The winner will be announced on Earth Day, April 22, 2006.

Enter the Name a New Species contest at the Maple Tree Press website.
Click here to Enter