You don’t have to open Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest sociocultural rant book, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America to know what it’ll say.

From the title alone, it’s obvious Ehrenreich can’t stand the positivity movement/industry, a very American institution that’s boomed and blossomed of late.

She blames positive thinking (and its assorted tendrils in religion, business, and pop psychology) for infantilizing its followers, for leading a passive-aggressive nation into all those now-popped economic bubbles, and even for the Bush gang’s gung-ho drives into war and ultra-graft.

The book is a minor work of hers, which is odd considering it starts out with a very personal crisis in her own life. (She got breast cancer. She wound up hating the teddy bears and boxes of crayons foisted upon her more than she hated the disease itself.)

And like so many left-wing essay books, it comprises a long sequence of complaints, with only the briefest hint of possible solutions stuck in at the very end. She loathes uncritical, unquestioning “positivity,” but she doesn’t want people to be hooked on depression or stress either.

So what’s left in between? Social and political activism, she suggests.

But I’ve seen plenty of “activists” who get stuck in their own emotional trips (self-aggrandizing protests, feel-good “lifestyle choices,” sneering against the “sheeple,” et al.). They get to feel powerful, or righteous, or smug, or genetically superior to the sap masses. And nothing changes.

World-changing and personal therapy, I believe, are two different thangs.

Still, there is a psychological benefit to working with other people, helping other people, becoming an involved part of our interdependent existence.

That was one of the messages in This Emotional Life, the recent Paul Allen-produced PBS miniseries. Another message was when an interviewee said, “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness. The opposite of depression is vitality.”

That meets obliquely with something I wrote around the time of the Obama inauguration. The “hope” Obama talked about wasn’t pie-in-the-sky positive thinking. It was acknowledging that work needed to be done, and then doing it, doing it with a clear and open mind and with full confidence in one’s abilities.

This has everything to do with Ehrenreich’s usual main topics, progressive politics and the plight of working families.

My ol’ pal and sometime colleague Doug Nufer looks back at a decade in which he got four books out somehow amid an ever more confused book industry and an ever more precarious alternative-literature subsegment within that industry. He offers no solutions, but I will:

• All of book publishing (heck, all of the traditional offline media) need new business models and more efficient, dynamic ways of doing what they do.
• Alterna-lit needs to build its audience. Yes, I believe even the genre’s geekier, tougher material can find more readers and more lovers. I’m sure of it.

Looks like the current lessee of the Elliott Bay Book Co.’s cafe space will follow the store to its new Capitol Hill location.

Publicola’s got this big rant about what’s really wrong with Elliott Bay Books. Being in Pioneer Square, the writer “Heidi” asserts, isn’t really among the store’s liabilities. To her, the store’s real failings are (1) its little-bit-of-everything generalism (which is one thing I happen to love about it), and (2) its failure to embrace the Internet age (which frustrates me, but which I understand as a part of the store’s whole boomer-Luddite aesthetic philosophy).

It’s official. Elliott Bay Book Company is moving to Capitol Hill. Sometime in February or March, it’ll take over the lo-rise industrial building next to the Odd Fellows hall on 10th Avenue. What’ll happen to Elliott Bay’s original Pioneer Square space, or to the now independently operated Elliott Bay Cafe within? Still to be determined.

Blogger Jim Linderman cites our longtime fave Sherman Alexie on a big failing of e-reader machines’ “content”: its lack of textual permanence. Then Linderman adds an aside of his own: If KIndles had been around 50 years ago, would we ever remember that the Hardy Boys didn’t use to be rock musicians?

The Onion’s A.V. Club has a list of 30 “best books of the ’00s,” heavy on bestsellers and hype-beneficieries.

One might not think of Stephen King (commercial horror storyteller supreme) and Raymond Carver (the late local crafter of exquisitely serious short stories) as working the same side of the street. But King, in an NY Times review of a new Carver bio, sees a lot of himself in Carver’s early career, particularly the chain-drinking and chain-moping parts.

But the biggest lesson King takes from Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life is that we should think more (and more kindly) about Maryann Burk, the first Mrs. Carver. It was she who supported and suffered from the struggling (and often violently drunk) early Raymond. The better known second wife got to live with the sober, successful Raymond.

Both Canlis and the Sorrento Hotel’s bar now have special cocktails named after characters in the Twilight novels and movies. Sorry, but  this is the only Cullen I’ve ever admired.

The Huffington Post just started a books section.

The section’s editor, Amy Hertz, explains she won’t run traditional reviews. Too stale, too one-way, too old-media-paradigm.

Instead, she wants to treat books as a topic of, yep, “conversation with our readers.”

Sounds like Hertz wants to reconstruct the entire book marketing business, a business that could urgently use some new blood and some new ideas.

The ideas she’s choosing to implement are those of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?)—Facebooking, chatting, “buzz” seeding, and the like.

The thing is, these tactics end up looking like hokum when Hollywood movie publicists try to use them. They’ll surely look even more fake when the even less-slick hawkers of books start using them bigtime.

Which will, from the standpoint of online scoffers such as myself, make lots of fun. I can hardly wait.

I already told you I’m bringing my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story back into print next year.

Now, I’ve signed contracts for an all-new book.

It’s Walking Seattle. It’s a book of walking tours, part of a series by the Calif.-based Wilderness Press.

You can help me put this book together. Tell me what routes and destinations should be in it (especially if they’re not in previous books or flash-card sets with the same topic).

Some clever publishers, with permission of the bands being referenced, are putting out an Indie Rock Coloring Book. (I know, some of you snarkers would color all the pages pale, white, or the colors of dingy discount sneakers.)

I really wanted to like The Progressive Revolution, ex-Clinton aide Michael Lux’s breezy review of liberal thought and action from the Revolutionary War days to today.

Or rather, to some time early last autumn.

That’s the problem. For reasons known only to publisher John Wiley & Sons, Lux’s book had an official publication date of Jan. 17, 2009. As Lux admits toward the book’s end, “I’m writing these words without knowing the outcome of the 2008 election, and you are reading this with the knowledge of how it came out.”

If you’re putting out a bigtime hardcover treatise about American progressivism, and you leave out that movement’s most recent history-changing event, you’ve got a product that’s obsolete even before it’s for sale. Throughout, Lux refers to George W. Bush’s administration in the present tense, and wonders out loud when the lefties will ever regain any influence in the federal sphere.

The bulk of Lux’s work, the historical stuff, is fine. It’s a quick and easy read, albeit incomplete. It reassures readers who suffered through all the Bush-era nonsense that, yes, progs really are Americans—indeed, that “the best in America” is progressives’ doing. Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the long drives for race and gender equality, the labor movement, the environmental movement—whenever and wherever Americans got anything right, the progressives got it done and the conservatives fought like hell to stop it.

Had The Progressive Revolution come out at the start of the 2008 Presidential season, it might have been a building block toward an Obama/netroots philosophy of pride in progress. As for now, maybe Lux will bring it up to date for a paperback edition.

Strangely enough, Wiley did bother to include a copyright-page “Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty” more appropriate for the company’s computer books:

“While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.”

…will perform another Vanishing Seattle book signing, for those who missed the previous two. It’s Saturday, 1-3 p.m., at the Aurora Village Costco in salacious Shoreline.

Somebody with the cute pseudonym of “Jane Austen Doe” has issued yet another of those “why the book biz sucks” essays.

Like most essays of this type, Doe’s invokes nostalgia for the kind, tweed-suited, boutique industry book publishing’s supposed to have once been.

I’m not buying it.

The book biz used to be such a personal industry because it used to be such a small industry. Low volume, low profits, high barriers to entry (especially for distribution to the small, sparse bookstores and department-store book sections of the day).

“Serious” publishing was subsidized by textbooks and technical/instructional books. Fiction was predominantly the realm of pulp magazines and of short-story sections within nonfiction magazines. Authors proved themselves worthy of book deals by placing stories in either the biggest or the swankiest mags.

The chubby, insider clique at the top of the publishing world kept things manageable by keeping the supply of available titles down.

Would Jane Austen Doe have fared better in that book industry than in today’s book industry? Only if she’d managed to break into a much smaller inner circle of literary stars.

Literary people often profess to progressive stances about politics and society. But when the topic is their own business, too many of them turn into the worst kind of nostalgic reactionaries.

At least the people who complain about the music industry sucking usually admit that that business always has sucked.

Postscript: None of the above caveats diminishes the fact that, just as Doe says, today’s book business does indeed suck.

Part of it’s due to the oversupply of stores (particularly big chain stores), copies, and titles. (It’s great that so many tens of thousands of books are coming out; it’s bad that publishers don’t even bother to promote most of them.)

Part of it’s due to the general media/entertainment glut and shakeout, which is affecting everything from TV and radio to magazines and DVDs. (Theatrical films, which still have gatekeepers, also still have profits.)

But a lot of it’s due to conglomerate-owned publishers striving too hard, as execs in so many other industries have, for unfeasible profit margins, in worship of the Almighty Stock Price.