So, a couple months back, I posted a long look at Riffle, the new “Pinterest for Books.”

The other day, after blowing up on Bookish I went back into Riffle and played around a bit, adding some books I’ve read in recent months, and making a few lists—all with the goal of increasing my “Influence” score.

Yes, that IS how lame I am. But an Influence Score of 6 just seemed damn pathetic. I’ve since gotten it up to 16, mainly by creating lists of books—those I want to read (based on last week’s podcast), and books that I use in the “World Tour” section of my class.¹

There’s no way this will replace GoodReads for me, but it can be fun to play with. (And the site is pretty slick looking. Much nicer than that Bookish disaster, the aesthetics of which are designed to appeal to exactly no one.) Although, to be honest, I’m using these in two different ways—I track everything I’ve read and want to read on GoodReads, and am using Riffle to make fun lists of books. (Although Kaija Straumanis’s lists are much more interesting. Especially that “Open Letter Books” one.)

Anyway, I just got a message from Gina Rodriguez, the World Literature editor at Riffle, with a special invitation for readers of Three Percent. Riffle is still in Beta mode, so you need an invite to join. I have a few personal ones that I’ve sent to people, but Gina sent me this link
which will allow 100 people to join.

So if you’re interested in checking this out, click there, then follow me and check out my lists. That way my Influence Score will go up, and I won’t have to cry myself to sleep at night. (At least not every night.)

¹ There are three sections to my class: a section about the craft of translation (where we read Clifford Landers’s Literary Translation: An Introduction and David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, among others), a World Tour in which students read excerpts from influential authors from around the world and present on them, and discussion of six contemporary translations resulting in the class deeming one of them “The Best Translated Book of LTS206/406” (the sexiest title I could come up with). The World Tour usually blows their mind, since today’s college students are exposed to just a sliver of a fraction of a culture’s literature, and very few are well-read in literature from more than one country in the world. They might know a lot about Shakespeare and Latin America, but have never read anything from Scandinavia. So this “World Tour” helps expose them to all the varied greatness that is out there, and helps to build a bit of a mental map of what authors have influenced others, etc., so that they can see that “world” literature constitutes a field not a series of individual authors or literatures bound by language.

So, yesterday was the official release date for Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, one of the most curiously designed Open Letter books to date. With two openings, and myriad ways to read it, you can read a totally different Canvas at the same time as your friend:

The novel consists of two narratives: Amnon Zichroni’s depiction of growing up in an orthodox Jewish family, and his eventual realization of his “gift” to see people’s memories; and, Jan Wechsler’s quest to recover his missing memories after receiving a mysterious briefcase with information about his past. These two stories play off each other in subtle ways, and it’s not until the very end of the book (or middle, if you prefer) that you find out how the two character intersect . . .

To celebrate this (and my birthday, which is why we always publish a book on September 26th), we’re offering The Canvas for free to all new Open Letter subscribers. If you’ve been thinking about signing up—and who hasn’t? what could be better than receiving an excellent work in translation every month—this is the time. You’ll get 6 books for $60 or 11 for $100, which is just an insanely good bargain.

So since up for the savings, and stay for the literature.

Or just sign up as a birthday present to me. Please?

This weekend, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its books wards for publishing 2011 and—not to bury the lede—including Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture as one of the five finalists in the Criticism category.

This is the first major book award that one of titles has been nominated for (not counting the BTBA), and we’re extremely psyched. I’ve been on and on and on about this book for the past year, which makes this news just that much sweeter. To celebrate this honor, we’re selling copies of Karaoke Culture through our website for the special price of $9.99.

OR, if you’d rather become an Open Letter supporter and receive all of our fantastic books, you can buy a subscription and we’ll throw in a copy of Karaoke Culture for free.

Going back to the NBCCs, I have to say, the Criticism category is the very definition of LOADED. Check out this list of finalists:

• David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber)

• Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf)

• Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday)

• Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture (Open Letter) (Translated by David Williams, Ellen Elias-Bursac, and Celia Hawkesworth)

• Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press)

Bellos, Lethem, Ugresic, AND Dyer?!?!? Damn. That’s all I can say.

By contrast, the other categories—all of which contain a few truly excellent books—seem tame. You can read the full press release and list of all finalists by clicking here. And here are my picks for which titles should win in the various categories:

Fiction:

• Teju Cole, Open City (Random House)
  
  

Nonfiction:

• James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon)
  
  

Autobiography:

• Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt)
  
  

Biography:

• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution (Little, Brown)
  
  

Poetry:

• Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions)

Congrats to everyone, and special congrats to Dubravka Ugresic, David Williams, Ellen Elias-Bursac, and Celia Hawkesworth!