James Patterson may hold the Guinness world record for the most #1 New York Times bestsellers, but it's his latest passion project that has him buzzing. The New York native came straight to Just the Right Book Podcast! to tell Roxanne all about the latest books on his children's imprint Jimmy Patterson.
Also in this episode, another installment of "What's on the Front Table" with RJ Julia's Head Book Buyer, Andrew Brennan.
Roxanne Coady: Just ran into George Lucas, Jim?
James Patterson: Yeah, the Star Wars guy, yeah, and I was asking him about how he survives out in Hollywood, and he said, "You know, I just keep pushing that wheel up the hill. I just keep pushing it, pushing it, pushing it inch by inch by inch," and it's the same thing.
Roxanne Coady: I'm Roxanne Coady, and welcome to Just the Right Book, a podcast for enthusiastic and engaged readers that will help you discover new books in all genres, give you unique insights into your favorite authors, and bring you up to date with what's happening in the literary world. One of my favorite parts of being a bookseller is introducing books to kids because they really are the original wide-eyed reader. And what you particularly love is when you have the reluctant reader and their parents say they don't really like to read, or that they're not finding the right book. When you do find that book for them, and you sort of open that window to that world and then see that kid come back in just bursting with enthusiasm and energy wanting to get the next book, I just don't think it gets any better than that.
My guest today has sold over 350 million books worldwide.
James Patterson: And that's just this year.
Roxanne Coady: He holds the Guinness World Record for the most number one New York Times bestsellers. He has won the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community at the 2015 National Book Awards. He's won two Emmys, the Edgar Award, a Children's Choice Award for Author of the Year. He is a tireless champion of the power of books and reading, as exemplified by his new book in print. Jimmy Patterson, and I know this personally, has given millions of dollars to bookstores and libraries. He has donated more than one million books to students and is tireless, tireless in his commitment to books and reading.
James Patterson: Yay, we like him. What's that guy's name?
Roxanne Coady: Who is this guy?
James Patterson: Who is it?
Roxanne Coady: I think his name is James Patterson.
Roxanne Coady: Have you heard of him?
James Patterson: A little bit. He looks at me in the mirror in the morning.
Roxanne Coady: So your new book, Give Please a Chance, has an unlikely pairing of authors.
James Patterson: Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's Bill O'Reilly and myself. You know, years ago there was a picture on the cover of Time magazine. It was Bill Clinton and George Bush, and both being presidents, they had decided to get together and just do good things.
Roxanne Coady: You know what I love about the book, Jim, is for one the illustrations are all by different artists, and they're quite wonderful and make you smile. I love the one where the kid's asking if they can dress themselves and their clothes are on.
James Patterson: Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah.
Roxanne Coady: All funny, but the other thing I like about it is there are things that great picture books do. They give you a lot of context for more conversation, and I think that this book does it with the illustrations? When wouldn't you say please? There's lots of ways to have the conversation.
James Patterson: Right, and each illustration really is a story. It gives you a sense of that kid, and even though you never see the parents or the siblings or whatever, you just get a little sense. One that I like, it's a little kid. He's wearing a cowboy hat and he's on the potty, and there's no toilet paper on the roll.
James Patterson: He said, "I need some help here, pleeease," you know the magic word, which is great. So it's a lot of fun, and I like doing it. I like reaching out to the left and the right, especially in areas where we ought to be able to agree on things.
Roxanne Coady: Well, and I hope this is a first step in doing that. Now, this is under a new imprint that you have called Jimmy Patterson.
James Patterson: Jimmy, yeah. We're basically, Jimmy. I guess legally I have to say Jimmy Patterson, but it's Jimmy books.
Roxanne Coady: And you also have Read, Kiddo, Read. I've got to put in a plug for parents checking that out. The content on there is spectacular, encouraging kids to read and figuring out the books that even reluctant readers will want. Jim, tell us about Jack, your son, and how that inspired you for Read, Kiddo, Read and Jimmy.
James Patterson: Yeah, you know when Jack was eight or so, he wasn't a big reader, but he was a bright enough guy, and Sue and I, my wife and I said, "Well, you know, this summer you're, you're going to read every day and that's going to be the deal." And he said, "Do I have to?" I said, "Yeah, well unless you want to live in the garage. We, we read in our house," but I said, "The good thing is we're going to go out, and we're going to get you a bunch of books." So we went out to the bookstores and a little bit to the libraries and we got him about a dozen books which ranged from Percy Jackson to A Wrinkle in Time, to one of my books, et cetera. By the end of the summer, he had read a dozen books, and he was a reader. I mean, in his case he went from that to when he took his SATs and got an 800 in reading, which is a perfect score, and now he's at Brown.
Roxanne Coady: I can't believe he's already at college.
James Patterson: Yeah, I know. Neither can I. He's 6'1 and you know, he's a really good reader and really loves it. And he reads very broadly, which is a nice thing.
Roxanne Coady: I love the title.
James Patterson: Really, you never know when you start a book whether it's going to turn out well or not. This turned out great. Word of Mouse is about a blue mouse who escapes with his family initially from a laboratory, so he and his family are being experimented on, and then suddenly he loses track of his family, and he's alone in the world and he's never experienced, like kids, he's never experienced anything that's in this world. It's very exhilarating at times and scary at times. He gets into what seems to be a perfect household because the people are so sloppy and they're kind of piggy and whatever, and there's food all over the place, so that seems delightful for him at first.
Then he meets a girl who lives next door. It starts that he scares her a little bit, and he talks, and he writes, so he's learned some things at this laboratory. Where it came from is one of the local churches here, they have these bless your animal days when you bring in your pet, or your cat, and your mouse, and your llama or whatever, or your lion, or whatever you have at home, and they bring them all into the church, which is kind of cool. But I was thinking it would be so weird, everybody's bringing in their pets, and if a mouse got loose in the church they'd all be like jumping up in the chairs and stuff, you know?
So the poor little mice, and mice are actually quite wonderful, and you'll learn about them. Kids will learn about them and that they're very clean and very loyal, and they can actually sing. So we have Isaiah, who's the blue mouse. He meets a girl mouse and he just falls in love with her because she's singing, and she has this delightful voice, so it's a really, I think, a really neat story. I can't imagine any kid not really getting a kick out of the book.
Roxanne Coady: Or grownup. I mean, it has a real energy. I mean, as I read it, it just made me smile. It was a fun way to take a break from lots of things going on, and obviously it's for a middle reader and obviously I'm a woman in my late 60s, but it makes you smile. One of the things that I think great middle reader books do, which I think this one does, is they're straightforward stories and they remind you about the sort of basic things in life, about finding people who are different like you, or finding people who care, or getting over being scared. There are very common elements told with this funky energy of these mice.
James Patterson: I don't give people any extra credit for making a story hard to follow.
James Patterson: Some people do. They go, "Aren't I smart? I actually followed that." Well, yeah that's okay. That's all right, but I'm not really giving extra credit for that.
Roxanne Coady: How about just a great story that you have fun reading?
So Jim you've done so much for the world of publishing, and book selling, and literacy. What's been the most satisfying element of the work that you've done?
James Patterson: Well, I think the kids' books. That's really my passion now. I actually think they're the best things I do. We just had the movie "Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life," which I thought turned out really well. I was very happy with the movie. Word of Mouse I really like. I'm proud to do Give Please a Chance with Bill O'Reilly and to spread the word left and right. The whole notion of getting kids reading when they're already pretty good readers, is getting them reading more broadly so that they're better critical thinkers and they can really come to grips with some of the problems that we have now when they don't come up with the easy answers. Like we just did with the election, or didn't do.
James Patterson: More important, are the kids who are kind of at risk and not very good readers, because I really think we can get, not all of them, but we can get most of them to become competent readers. I went to Vanderbilt for graduate school, and I have a program there, this is like the fifth year, and we bring in kids from six different middle schools in Nashville, Tennessee, and they're all kind of at-risk kids. What's happened in the schools, and the schools didn't expect this, even though we're only bringing 10 or 15 kids from each school, is the whole school's reading scores have soared because what happens is these kids come back and the teachers go, "Wow, can't believe how well you're reading," and the other kids go, "Wow, can't believe how well you're reading." It works.
Roxanne Coady: You and I have had many conversations over the years with the work that we do at Read to Grow, and I know you've been involved and generous with really focusing on teaching parents of children from birth to three about the importance of those kids hearing words. Books are the pathway and just that step, just that step of reading to their kids, will immediately make them ready.
James Patterson: You can keep it going, even kids that are a little behind the eight ball. You can still get kids reading when they're seven, eight, nine, ten. You can still. They can, in a half a year, go from troubled to being competent readers. But parents, and grandparents too, need to understand that it's your job. That's what you signed up for. That's what you signed up for. How dare you send your kids out into the world as incompetent readers and go, "It's not my fault. They don't want to read." It is your fault. You've got to make them read.
Roxanne Coady: Well, you've given them plenty of ammunition.
James Patterson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fun stuff.
Roxanne Coady: You have books in every shape and size. Jim, on behalf of booksellers and literacy activists, the difference you have made, your generosity, and the books that you've written that are so much fun, whether you're zero or a hundred, have really made a difference in the world.
James Patterson: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Roxanne Coady: I really want to thank you for that.
Roxanne Coady: I really want to thank you for that, and really thank you for taking the time to be with us on Just the Right Book.
Roxanne Coady: Enjoy the day.
James Patterson: Yep, you too. Bye-bye.
Roxanne Coady: It's now time for our segment "What's on the Front Table?" I'd like to welcome a very special guest to Just the Right Book. Andrew Brennan is the head book buyer for RJ Julia. Andrew, thanks for stopping by.
Andrew Brennan: Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.
Roxanne Coady: Well, thanks. Andrew, as you know we've been talking to our listeners about the decision of what to put on a front table at an independent bookstore is one that is very independent. Nobody's telling you what to do, and sometimes we can't even tell Andrew what to do. Andrew, as the head buyer, knows all the books that are coming out from all the publishers, which we call in the industry our front list. Andrew starts planning what he thinks ought to be on the front table, so what we're going to ask you to do Andrew is tell us what's on RJ Julia's front table and why he put it there. He's got the best nonfiction What's your first book?
Andrew Brennan: Well, my first book is Forever Words by Johnny Cash. It's the unknown poems. This time of year what goes on the front table is mostly gift stuff, but this is really the perfect book for the Johnny Cash fan. His wife, June Carter Cash, found just troves of information, paper, notebooks, poems, and songs that he never got around to finishing. A lot of the best have been edited here by Paul Muldoon, who is chair of poetry at Princeton University. This is really cool stuff. It's very much in keeping with his song lyrics. I think fans are really going to like it. I have one poem that I could read.
Roxanne Coady: Okay. I'd love to hear it. But I have a question before you read it, Andrew.
Roxanne Coady: Are these lyrics that are poetic-like, or did he actually write poems?
Andrew Brennan: Well, I think he wrote them as poems. He didn't write them with music on the paper. You can certainly hear the music in the background when you read these poems, which is why I think the fans are really going to like them. You can imagine any of them as a song, but they were not written to music per say.
Andrew Brennan: This is a particularly good one.
Andrew Brennan: It's called Forever.
Andrew Brennan: You know, so there's a lot of them that are narrative. There's prison ballads, and gun ballads, and girlfriend ballads, and everything that the typical fan is used to in here, but some of them are very much just poems, and maybe like a piece of a song he never got around to.
Roxanne Coady: Maybe, I mean I'm a Johnny Cash big, big fan. I'm an even bigger Rosanne Cash fan, who had written a memoir. I wonder if it'll be of interest to non-Johnny Cash fans? It'll be interesting to see if there's some curiosity because they do seem to stand on their own, whether you're a Johnny Cash fan or not, and if you hear the music, how fun for you, right?
Andrew Brennan: Yeah, I mean, I feel like the musical artists of that era, we can see Bob Dylan just won a Nobel Prize. I think the musicians of that era are really being reexamined, and that's part of the reason that books like this are coming out. They're being examined simply as writers.
Roxanne Coady: Yeah. Pretty cool. Okay, your next book.
Andrew Brennan: My next book is called At Home in the World by Thich Nhat Hanh. Now, most people have heard of him. He has been teaching Buddhism in his homeland in Vietnam, in Tibet, now in France for 70 years. He looks like he's about 30, so he must be doing something right.
Roxanne Coady: — as a good Irish boy.
Andrew Brennan: Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is definitely the best thing I've found. There is one passage I want to read.
Andrew Brennan: I'll try not to make too much noise as I turn the pages. Okay. Here it is.
Roxanne Coady: Andrew, I'm loving what you're bringing here today. This is good.
Andrew Brennan: This book is very much out of the box for me.
Roxanne Coady: Out of the box, I'd say out of this planet for you!
Roxanne Coady: I like the evolution though, Andrew. I like the movement here.
Roxanne Coady: This is good. [Laughs] This is all good. We've ruined you.
Andrew Brennan: Well, it's stuff that sounds great to read on the radio, right?
Andrew Brennan: These are essays collected about his life, so it's not kind of strictly the teaching stuff. This is also about as close as we've gotten so far to an autobiography from him, so it really covers a lot of ground for his fans.
Roxanne Coady: I have read him, and I started reading this once you pointed it out to me, and it feels memoir-ish, but it is saturated with his kind of selflessness and his ability to be present, which I think then makes the reader present, right? Then you're feeling, you're in that with him. I think he talks about in one of the essays about eating slowly, like taking 45 minutes to eat something, and it does make you think about how sometimes all of us are in a rush and sucking our food down without really savoring that we're getting to do that. Or he talks about cleaning a toilet, like how lucky to get to clean the toilet and have a toilet, which most of us in the United States don't think about, Wow, lucky me. I've got a toilet! I think he opens our eyes to different ways in which to be present, so I'm excited and I found that book on our front table in my own store. What else do you have on the front table?
Andrew Brennan: The third book I have is called The Hidden Life of Trees. This is by a German author named Peter Wohlleben. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. Anyway, he started out his career very much in the commercial logging industry, so he would look at trees as how much is this one worth to cut down? What can I get for this one from a very […] He looked at it from a very commercial standpoint. Later in his life, he went more to the ecological side and really started to study the fact and discover the fact, the reality, this is an emerging science, that trees are a social network. They feed each other. They have children that they take care of. There are huge fungus networks that transfer food in between trees. There are stumps that have been kept alive by the trees next to them for hundreds and hundreds of years. We tend to look at most plants as individuals, and it's just not that way. It's very, very readable. You get to learn a lot about all the different types of trees. This is a runaway bestseller in Europe, and it's doing fantastic here.
Roxanne Coady: Why'd you pick that for the front table, Andrew?
Andrew Brennan: Because it's a great nature-lover gift. It's readable, but it's emerging science, and it's not too long. And it's about trees.
Roxanne Coady: And it's a nice trim size.
Roxanne Coady: I always think about trim size. I like smaller books.
Andrew Brennan: It's true. It's true. I mean, he's concise.
Roxanne Coady: Whenever you put books on the front table do you think of their jackets at all?
Andrew Brennan: Absolutely. It's a factor in every single aspect of my job, what the jacket is, unfortunately.
Roxanne Coady: Isn't that weird?
Andrew Brennan: It's not weird at all.
Roxanne Coady: If people respond to that, right? It makes them pick it up or not.
Roxanne Coady: Since you're not there hand-selling every book to every customer walking in, that's the only way you can talk to them.
Andrew Brennan: You have to judge the book by its cover, right?
Roxanne Coady: I know, that's a little sad, Andrew. What else do you have?
Roxanne Coady: So they all have stories attached to them?
Andrew Brennan: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and in the very end, there's like this timeline that ties together all of these Stradivarii and Pele's shirt from when they won the World Cup. They tie it to specific events in history, so you can see kind of where you are in the chronology for each one of these things.
Andrew Brennan: Well, you know Phaidon does this type of thing really well. It's one of those books that I think you're right, that you're kind of like, "Why didn't someone do this?" Because it's really, really hard.
Roxanne Coady: Andrew and I are both Phaidon fanatics. We love their books. They're beautiful. They're brilliantly printed and published, and they're just gorgeous books. Okay, now your last book is going to be a departure, huh?
Roxanne Coady: Now remind us what Twin Peaks is.
Andrew Brennan: Twin Peaks is a television show that came out in about 1990, I think. It is the brainchild of David Lynch. The other co-creator is Mark Frost. I consider it one of the top five television shows ever made. It's certainly one of the most groundbreaking. It has lots of fans still to this day.
Roxanne Coady: Should I tell you I've never seen it?
Andrew Brennan: That doesn't surprise me.
Andrew Brennan: It doesn't surprise me at all.
Roxanne Coady: Okay. I won't go into that.
Roxanne Coady: What a beautifully […] Wow, that's crazy.
Andrew Brennan: It's very [inaudible 00:27:59].
Roxanne Coady: That's it. That was the reason.
Andrew Brennan: Sometimes I just have to force things on people.
Andrew Brennan: But this book has been selling. It's something that the big fans are going to know about, but casual fans might not.
Roxanne Coady: So sometimes Andrew when you're deciding what's on the front table are you kind of leading the witness and trying to shape what's going on? Is that possible?
Andrew Brennan: Yes, but I feel like if I didn't do that a little bit, I wouldn't be doing my job.
Andrew Brennan: Well, that's the point. It's to show people books that they've already heard of and that they might not have heard of but they should.
Roxanne Coady: Yeah, so Andrew I really want to thank you for being on our Just the Right Book podcast. I hope we'll get you back for you to keep telling us what's on our front table.
Andrew Brennan: Anytime. We've got new books coming in every week.
Roxanne Coady: Okay. Thank you.
Roxanne Coady: For a complete list of all the books we've talked about today, including what's on RJ Julia's front table and James Patterson's Give Please a Chance make sure you head to bookpodcast.com, and of course make sure to subscribe to Just the Right Book podcast on iTunes, and email us at [email protected] Just the Right Book is produced by Collisions, a division of CRN International. Original music was created by Mark Berman and many thanks to our producer, Christina Torres, and our sound engineer Pat Keogh. Thank you all for listening.
Absolutely loved this one. Roxanne has an amazing way of bringing out the warmth and humor of James Patterson. What a surprise! Jimmy books is a super idea and great way to get kids turned onto reading.