We Walk the Line

Since most of the people involved with January Magazine have a very real passion for books, it probably would not surprise you to know that many of our reviewers are also authors, or hard on the road to becoming authors.

A lot of people know that Rap Sheet head honcho and January senior editor J. Kingston Pierce is an expert on crime fiction and that he is, in fact, working on a novel. However, Pierce is also a respected and widely published author/journalist in the field of history. His most recent book, Eccentric Seattle, has spawned an Emmy-nominated television series for the Seattle Channel, which Pierce hosts.

I am the author of three novels and a fourth, Death Was the Other Woman, will be published by St. Martin’s Minotaur in January 2008.

Regular contributor Tracy Quan is best known as the author of the Nancy Chan series -- which thus far includes Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and Diary of a Married Call Girl. (And she’s been hammering away at what I think is a new Nancy Chan, which is why you haven’t seen her byline around here for a couple of months.)

Contributing editor Tony Buchsbaum is already the author of the novel Total Eclipse, and he’s working on another. Contributing editor Mary Ward Menke is the author of The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Coming Back to Life After a Spouse Dies (2006), and Pedro Blas Gonzales, who is also a professor of philosophy, is the author of Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega y Gasset’s Philosophy of Subjectivity.

A couple of January alumna -- Andrea MacPherson and Margaret Gunning -- spent the period just prior to the publication of their first long works hammering away at reviews, then, sadly, gave us up like we were Lent when their first books came out. (Sadly, but we so get it: writing books is hard work. And writing about books while you’re facing sophomore slumps and other such hazards isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. A postscript here: both of these ladies are way beyond their slumps. In fact, I don’t think either ever hit one.)

Many of the writers whose bylines you see at January on a regular basis are currently involved in some aspect of writing or placing their first novel. But we don’t spend a lot of time talking about that in this space. First of all, the writers mostly don’t want -- and certainly don’t expect -- pre-publication mentions. But also, we can’t. Our server stats tell us that many of January Magazine’s thousands of daily visitors check in with us every day or a few times a week. You keep coming back, is what I’m saying. But, if every time you got here, one of us was touting his or her new book ... well, let’s just say that our server stats probably wouldn’t say that anymore.

Then there’s that fine line. Anyone who has spent much time around here knows that we take the whole journalistic integrity thing pretty seriously. (And chocolate won’t help get your book reviewed, so stop sending it. Especially in summer, when it might actually hurt your chances.) And when you’ve written a book, you’re proud. It’s a little like giving birth and you feel like trumpeting about it: it’s kinda primal. But we restrain ourselves. Refocus. Take a very real joy in trumpeting about other people’s new books. We all want the same thing, anyway: we want more people to read.

Even though most of us are always madly writing about something, and a month seldom goes by when one of our number doesn’t have a book coming out, usually, as January’s head editorial-type goddess, I have some sort of handle on who has what coming out where. So I was surprised recently when, opening a package of review books from children’s publisher Annick Press, a slender volume caught my eye. It carried a very familiar and distinctive byline: Sue Bursztynski. It was a surprise and, on a certain level, it was a joy. I felt an almost maternal pride (which is odd, I guess, since I had absolutely nothing to do with the book’s creation. Or Sue’s, for that matter). And even though we don’t as a rule review work by the editors of January Magazine, something in having that book slide into my hands in such an unexpected way -- and in Sue’s modesty about the new volume -- compels me to mention the whole matter here.

The book is called It’s True: This Book Is Bugged. As you might have surmised, it’s about the place of the spy both in our modern world and in history. The Rosenbergs, Hedy Lamarr, the carrier pigeon in espionage, Mata Hari, a glossary of spyspeak and more. Fascinating stuff even for those of us older than the 10- to 14-year-olds for whom the book is intended. And although Sue will have to qualify the first line of the book for me (“Spying the world’s oldest profession ...”), I’m enjoying This Book Is Bugged a great deal.