I may very well be the last person on the literate planet to get wise to BookBub, the over-the-Internet purveyor of (mostly) previously published e-works of every conceivable genre that go on sale or for rent for limited periods of time at astonishingly low prices. It has been around, after all, since it was co-founded by Josh Schanker and Nicholas Ciarelli in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2012 and has grown since to a bustling enterprise that employs more than 100 people. Since it earns its nut by charging authors who want to increase their publication numbers, it is a sign-up service (at www.bookbub.com) that’s totally free to subscribers, who will receive, depending upon their interests, a seemingly endless barrage of emails making offers and recommendations on a nonstop basis. (I got more than 50 in July alone.)
The weedlike sprouting in your inbox, however, is worth the annoyance, because, in my experience, there is rarely a single missive that does not contain at least one promo of a book you’ve either already read and enjoyed immensely or a best-seller or hallowed classic you wish you’d read or darn well intend to read someday. In that former category, I would have saved buckets by snapping up Madeline Miller’s “Circe” for $5 through BookBub or Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” or Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” both downloadable for a mere $2. In the wish list category, BookBub has dangled Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” and (shame on me) Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop” in front of me, all for the paltry sum of $1.99 apiece. Also available through the site, for short periods and for under $3 each, have been Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood,” Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain,” George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Carl Sagan’s “The Dragons of Eden,” Alison Weir’s “Eleanor of Aquitaine” and William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
Five years after its launch, BookBub dropped the other shoe by introducing another service, felicitously named Chirp, that makes audiobooks available to fans of the form, on the same model as the original, at chirpbooks.com. Some recent, intriguing-sounding deals promoted there—for a very short time—include best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2021 “Travels with George,” an account of the author and his wife’s retracing of the steps president George Washington took throughout the former colonies of his fledgling nation. Subtitled “In Search of Washington and His Legacy,” the Viking-published book is not available in audio form on Amazon currently, but the Kindle version goes for $13.99, quite a bit higher than the BookBub price of $5.99. Other recent Chirp titles include Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” with all 23 hours and 41 minutes of it read by Pete Cross for $2; Florida-based humorist Carl Hiaasen’s hilarious 2020 release “Squeeze Me” for $5.99; and Ron Chernow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Washington: A Life” for $5.99.
Page to screen: Dropping onto the Hulu channel in late July, “Washington Black” is an eight-episode series based on author Esi Edugyan’s 2018 best-selling novel of the same name, a Man Booker Prize finalist declared one of the 10 best books of its year by the New York Times Book Review. It follows the adventures of the titular character, an extraordinarily gifted 11-year-old slave on a Barbados sugar plantation who escapes his servitude and flees in the company of his master’s brother, a sympathetic citizen scientist who sparks the child’s shared dreams of flying. His travels take him everywhere from the Caribbean to Halifax, London and Morocco, and while the series, which stars Ernest Kingsley Junior, Sterling K. Brown, Iola Evans, Tom Ellis and Rupert Graves, is drawing mixed reviews for its storytelling skills, it is winning wide praise for its gorgeous visuals. It is far from the lone current example of a winning literary work transformed into a cinematic experience; coming later in August will be British author Richard Osman’s “The Thursday Murder Club,” a movie about a quartet of graying retirees who entertain themselves poking around in old “cold cases” when, suddenly, a contemporary real thing ups and smacks them in the face. Debuting on Netflix on Aug. 28, it is sure to draw a curious crowd, with a cast that stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie, with appearances by both David Tennant and Jonathan Pryce. Check out the trailer here.
Also coming up on Hulu sometime this fall is an adaptation of Walter Mosley’s hair-raising best-seller, “The Man in My Basement,” starring Corey Hawkins and an ultra-creepy Willem Dafoe, and on Netflix, yet another blood-curdler, from that master of the genre, director Guillermo del Toro, his take on Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, “Frankenstein,” starring Oscar Isaac as the doctor with the god complex, also debuting this fall, sometime in November. But I’m biding my time waiting for what I expect to be the real eye opener, “Oppenheimer” director Christopher Nolan’s vision of what the blind poet Homer really intended with “The Odyssey,” with none other than Matt Damon, venturing far afield from his multiple stints as Jason Bourne, starring as the wandering warrior from Ithaca. That one won’t drop until July of 2026.
Author alert: Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer whose first novel, “The God of Small Things,” captured the Booker Prize and catapulted her to fame in 1997, is a political, human rights and environmental activist who has produced mostly works of nonfiction, many of them, since. Her latest offering in that genre, coming out on Sept. 2, sounds like it would make a fantastic novel. “Mother Mary Comes to Me” (Scribner, $30, 352 pages) is an autobiography that delves into Roy’s troubled but passionate relationship with her mother, an educator and women’s rights champion who died in 2022. And while the raves are already pouring in from booksellers and reviewers everywhere, none seems as persuasive as what Roy herself has written about the town where she grew up and her mother’s impact there: “In that conservative, stifling little South-Indian town, where in those days women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue — or its affectation — my mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster … I watched her make space for the whole of herself, for all her selves, in that little world. It was nothing short of a miracle—a terror and wonder to behold.” Roy makes an appearance for City Arts & Lectures at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 19, where she will be featured in conversation with Deepa Fernandes, an interviewer for NPR’s “Here and Now.” Tickets, $49 to $71, include a copy of the book and are available through cityarts.net.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
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