I have never been a big Young Adult novel reader, but I feel it an important thing to make myself one, at least know what is out there and what the younger readers are reading...other than Harry Potter. Well, I have read two recently that I thought I would tell you about.
1. The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman
My friend has been on me for years to read the His Dark Materials trilogy, but it took the movie coming out to really spur me on. And then there has been so much controversy over the anti-religious aspects of the book and author that I just couldn't wait any longer to read it. But honestly, I don't know that it was entirely worth the hype. I enjoyed the story, found it full of interesting science theory, magical creatures, and a child full of courage and spunk. But I had some problems with the writing style. At times it was very rich, full of detail and description, and then at other times it was completely devoid of detail, almost too sparse. I enjoyed reading it but don't think I will rush into reading the other two books in the trilogy.
2. Tunnels - Roderick Gordon
I am just about finished with this delightful novel. It is about a kid who doesn't fit in except with his quirky father who shares his passion for digging tunnels. But they dug too far this time. Soon, Will's father goes missing and it is up to him and his friend Chester to find out where dad has gone. They find a secret city hidden deep underground. Who would have thought so much could exist underneath modern-day London? This book is the most imaginative book I have read in a very long time. It has science and mystery, a unique blend of reality and fantasy, strong themes of friendship and what the word 'family' really means. The writing is great, full of interesting characters and setting; overall, a great read. It comes out in January and I would highly recommend it for your children or you.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Friday, December 28, 2007
Jeffrey Toobin - The Nine
For progressives, this book about the Supreme Court is chilling because the author shows the definite rightward drift of the Court especially now that Justices Roberts and Alito are aboard. I read this book and I realize more than ever how necessary it is that we elect a Democrat in '08.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's Southwest is lawless and violent, grisly, and terse. It's a unique setting, where Llewellyn Moss and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell struggle to adjust, via its embodiment in the destructive killer Anton Chigurh. This area, the Texas-Mexico border, is called "the country," indicating that what happens here is not exclusive to the Southwest or McCarthy's writings, but a statement on where America is and has been headed for some time. It says that people exaggerate their own abilities, they think they control things that are uncontrollable; we are a place where people may or may not know where their lives are going, but every moment is a choice and each life has a beginning, middle, and end, and sometimes it all comes to an accounting that may be no more than pure chance, like a flip of a coin.
Friday, December 14, 2007
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Splendid book about isolation and the inability to communicate. McCullers is a true Southern writer, reminding me of Harper Lee. Her characters are complex and intriguing, as they reach for a sympathetic heart to understand them. Each cares about something that never satisifies them. A very human novel!
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I tried so hard to read and enjoy LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, but on page 108 I gave up the ghost. The writing is rich and detailed, but I find the plot moves too slowly and the plot is very unrealistic. I don't believe it. I hate to quit on a book, but sometimes you have to cut your losses.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Michael Korda - IKE (a biography)
Though I am a Democrat, I have the utmost respect for Dwight D. Eisenhower, both for his military career as the Supreme Allied Commander at the end of WWII, and for his presidency. For Eisenhower was the last good Republican President.
Eisenhower was a genius at finding consensus: he performed a military miracle in leading the combined British, French, and American forces in the invasions of Africa and Europe. The most important day in the 20th century for Western Civilization was June 6, 1944 with the Allied invasion of Normandy, the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. As President, Eisenhower governed by consensus---getting everyone to agree on the best solution to every problem. He was a centrist. He governed from the middle, as opposed to the current President, who governs not from trying to find consensus, but from his own narrow point-of-view, not caring about the consequences.
This is a light overview of Eisenhower's career. I would call it the People magazine version of Ike's life, but this is just what I sought.
I read this biography to remember the 50's---better times in the body politic--- and to contrast that time and that President with the horrible President we are afflicted with now.
Time will only enhance Ike's stature and diminish that of George W. Bush.
Eisenhower was a genius at finding consensus: he performed a military miracle in leading the combined British, French, and American forces in the invasions of Africa and Europe. The most important day in the 20th century for Western Civilization was June 6, 1944 with the Allied invasion of Normandy, the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. As President, Eisenhower governed by consensus---getting everyone to agree on the best solution to every problem. He was a centrist. He governed from the middle, as opposed to the current President, who governs not from trying to find consensus, but from his own narrow point-of-view, not caring about the consequences.
This is a light overview of Eisenhower's career. I would call it the People magazine version of Ike's life, but this is just what I sought.
I read this biography to remember the 50's---better times in the body politic--- and to contrast that time and that President with the horrible President we are afflicted with now.
Time will only enhance Ike's stature and diminish that of George W. Bush.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
W. Somerset Maugham
I just finished two of his novels. His magnus opus is supposed to be Of Human Bondage. I did The Painted Veil and Up at the Villa. I enjoyed both. Maybe I'll read the former one day.
Both are tightly written narratives with a straight-forward story line. I suppose Maugham is writing about well-to-do English people who get themselves into difficult situations. That's how I would describe both of these novels. The other thing is that Maugham is marvelous at defining character. You feel like you really get to know his characters.
Up at the Villa is the best one. It's a good suspenseful story with memorable characters.
Somerset Maugham is a very good writer.
Both are tightly written narratives with a straight-forward story line. I suppose Maugham is writing about well-to-do English people who get themselves into difficult situations. That's how I would describe both of these novels. The other thing is that Maugham is marvelous at defining character. You feel like you really get to know his characters.
Up at the Villa is the best one. It's a good suspenseful story with memorable characters.
Somerset Maugham is a very good writer.
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Just finished reading this.
My sentiment about this novel is, to quote Fred in his post on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, "Would somebody tell me what I just read?"
I had to force down the reading of this book like I were eating rancid meatloaf or cottage cheese.
What boring drivel this is. Meh.
My sentiment about this novel is, to quote Fred in his post on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, "Would somebody tell me what I just read?"
I had to force down the reading of this book like I were eating rancid meatloaf or cottage cheese.
What boring drivel this is. Meh.
Friday, November 9, 2007
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
What a wonderful, wonderful story!
Cowardice. Courage. Redemption. Regret and grief. This novel is about so many things. Social class. America versus Afghanistan. Fathers and Sons. Political change. And it's about so much more than just this.
I kept hoping Amir would see Hassan again. That he would confess his wrongdoings and ask for forgiveness. That they'd reunite and rekindle their friendship. Their story, what happened between them, how much they meant to each other, is as heartbreaking as anything I have ever read. It's powerful.
Hassan was such a loyal friend. He protected Amir, notably from Assef, just like Sohrab did. They ran kites together. They loved each other, and that endured through everything. What is lost between them is sad, and it's sad that the invasion by the Russians and the eventual usurpation of power by the Taliban turned their homeland into a oppressive, poor shell of rubble, one that kept them forever apart.
Amir learns not to let others fight for him, to stand up for something. He becomes the man Baba wanted him to be. That Baba saw his son marry, which brought him happiness, that Amir's relationship with his father blossoms, and that Amir learns much about Baba, is poignant.
This is such a marvelous novel.
Tashakor, Fred, for this recommendation!
Cowardice. Courage. Redemption. Regret and grief. This novel is about so many things. Social class. America versus Afghanistan. Fathers and Sons. Political change. And it's about so much more than just this.
I kept hoping Amir would see Hassan again. That he would confess his wrongdoings and ask for forgiveness. That they'd reunite and rekindle their friendship. Their story, what happened between them, how much they meant to each other, is as heartbreaking as anything I have ever read. It's powerful.
Hassan was such a loyal friend. He protected Amir, notably from Assef, just like Sohrab did. They ran kites together. They loved each other, and that endured through everything. What is lost between them is sad, and it's sad that the invasion by the Russians and the eventual usurpation of power by the Taliban turned their homeland into a oppressive, poor shell of rubble, one that kept them forever apart.
Amir learns not to let others fight for him, to stand up for something. He becomes the man Baba wanted him to be. That Baba saw his son marry, which brought him happiness, that Amir's relationship with his father blossoms, and that Amir learns much about Baba, is poignant.
This is such a marvelous novel.
Tashakor, Fred, for this recommendation!
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
"The Future Canon"
In this article from New York Magazine, professors and others pick what recent authors/works they think will be taught as part of the canon in years to come.
1. MORRIS DICKSTEIN, Distinguished professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center
Atonement, by Ian McEwan. “Books largely survive because of the quality of their writing, and he writes beautifully.”
2. MOLLY HITE, Chair of the English department, Cornell
Their Dogs Came With Them, by Helena María Viramontes. “It came out about a week ago. I swear, it’s the Middlemarch of East L.A.—a very big, extraordinary, multi-charactered story set around the building of the L.A. freeway.”
3. CAROLINE WEBER, Associate professor of French, Barnard
Zadie Smith. “She has such a distinct, self-assured voice that wears its brilliance very lightly.”
4. DIANA FUSS, Professor of English, Princeton
Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman. “The most exciting new fiction writer of the 21st century. Few novels since Proust’s In Search of Lost Time are this adept at capturing the nuances of human emotion.”
5. MICHAEL WOOD, Professor of comparative literature, Princeton
Amitav Ghosh. “He’s experimental; he changes from one book (The Calcutta Chromosome) to the other (The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace, historical novels about Southeast Asia). It’s good to stretch people’s minds without stretching them to the breaking point. He will be read in 50 years, I’m sure.”
6. JAMES SHAPIRO, Professor of English, Columbia
J. M. Coetzee. “He may not be the most dazzling stylist, but his books continue to haunt me. There’s a moral seriousness to them that rivals George Eliot’s.”
7. BENJAMIN WIDISS, Assistant professor of English, Princeton
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware. “People compared it to Joyce. He’s extraordinary at complexity both visually and verbally, with a sort of meticulous attention to the minutiae of individual consciousness.”
8. STEPHANIE LI, Assistant professor of English, University of Rochester
Colson Whitehead. “Apex Hides the Hurt was not reviewed very well, but I think it’s going to need a longer period of time before critics and scholars return to it. At this kind of historical moment in American literature, I think [his] sense of comedy is somewhat lost.”
9. JAMES ENGLISH, Chair of the English department, University of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Lethem. “He’s someone who kind of sets compositional problems for himself as a novelist. In that way, he’s a little like Nabokov, who would carve out an intriguing artistic and formal challenge with each novel, and that’s relatively rare among contemporary novelists.”
10. BRIAN EVENSON, Director of literary arts, Brown
I Looked Alive, by Gary Lutz. “For me, he’s the one who best represents the next phase after the maximalist, postmodern writers. A lot of the older postmodernism feels very male, and this book captures more the sexual confusion that I see as typifying the age that I grew up in as a young writer.”
11. ANDRÉ ACIMAN, Chair of the comparative-literature department, CUNY Graduate Center
Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald. “People right now are busy writing Holocaust memoirs, which are very necessary, but in 50 years, these will become historical documents, and the high literature will migrate to books like Austerlitz.”
12. CATHARINE STIMPSON, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, NYU
Jhumpa Lahiri. “Obviously this is a career which will grow and grow, taking up themes of global importance, but with a capacity to understand heartbreak. But if anybody thinks they know how canons are going to be formed, they are guilty of hubris bordering on stupidity.”
1. MORRIS DICKSTEIN, Distinguished professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center
Atonement, by Ian McEwan. “Books largely survive because of the quality of their writing, and he writes beautifully.”
2. MOLLY HITE, Chair of the English department, Cornell
Their Dogs Came With Them, by Helena María Viramontes. “It came out about a week ago. I swear, it’s the Middlemarch of East L.A.—a very big, extraordinary, multi-charactered story set around the building of the L.A. freeway.”
3. CAROLINE WEBER, Associate professor of French, Barnard
Zadie Smith. “She has such a distinct, self-assured voice that wears its brilliance very lightly.”
4. DIANA FUSS, Professor of English, Princeton
Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman. “The most exciting new fiction writer of the 21st century. Few novels since Proust’s In Search of Lost Time are this adept at capturing the nuances of human emotion.”
5. MICHAEL WOOD, Professor of comparative literature, Princeton
Amitav Ghosh. “He’s experimental; he changes from one book (The Calcutta Chromosome) to the other (The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace, historical novels about Southeast Asia). It’s good to stretch people’s minds without stretching them to the breaking point. He will be read in 50 years, I’m sure.”
6. JAMES SHAPIRO, Professor of English, Columbia
J. M. Coetzee. “He may not be the most dazzling stylist, but his books continue to haunt me. There’s a moral seriousness to them that rivals George Eliot’s.”
7. BENJAMIN WIDISS, Assistant professor of English, Princeton
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware. “People compared it to Joyce. He’s extraordinary at complexity both visually and verbally, with a sort of meticulous attention to the minutiae of individual consciousness.”
8. STEPHANIE LI, Assistant professor of English, University of Rochester
Colson Whitehead. “Apex Hides the Hurt was not reviewed very well, but I think it’s going to need a longer period of time before critics and scholars return to it. At this kind of historical moment in American literature, I think [his] sense of comedy is somewhat lost.”
9. JAMES ENGLISH, Chair of the English department, University of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Lethem. “He’s someone who kind of sets compositional problems for himself as a novelist. In that way, he’s a little like Nabokov, who would carve out an intriguing artistic and formal challenge with each novel, and that’s relatively rare among contemporary novelists.”
10. BRIAN EVENSON, Director of literary arts, Brown
I Looked Alive, by Gary Lutz. “For me, he’s the one who best represents the next phase after the maximalist, postmodern writers. A lot of the older postmodernism feels very male, and this book captures more the sexual confusion that I see as typifying the age that I grew up in as a young writer.”
11. ANDRÉ ACIMAN, Chair of the comparative-literature department, CUNY Graduate Center
Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald. “People right now are busy writing Holocaust memoirs, which are very necessary, but in 50 years, these will become historical documents, and the high literature will migrate to books like Austerlitz.”
12. CATHARINE STIMPSON, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, NYU
Jhumpa Lahiri. “Obviously this is a career which will grow and grow, taking up themes of global importance, but with a capacity to understand heartbreak. But if anybody thinks they know how canons are going to be formed, they are guilty of hubris bordering on stupidity.”
Friday, November 2, 2007
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome
What a great little novel!
This is my favorite kind of fiction---a tight narrative with a surprising and ironic ending.
It's a simple story that raises profound questions.
Please read and enjoy.
This is my favorite kind of fiction---a tight narrative with a surprising and ironic ending.
It's a simple story that raises profound questions.
Please read and enjoy.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Who Are Literature's Scariest Characters?
From "Paper Cuts," the literary blog by The New York Times, here is list of one website's poll of literature's scariest characters:
1) Big Brother from 1984, by George Orwell
2) Hannibal Lecter from the novels by Thomas Harris
3) Pennywise the clown from It, by Stephen King
4) Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
5) Count Dracula from Bram Stoker
6) Annie Wilkes from Misery, by Stephen King
7) The demon from The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty
8) Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
9) Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
10) Voldemort from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling
I can't think of many characters I'd add to this list. If I had to name a few, I'd say Iago from Othello, Grendel from "Beowulf," and Jimmy Porter from Look Back in Anger. And although he's not scary like these others, but just because his boring and nearly pointless book is one of the few I really dislike (and in that way it, and he, scare me), I'd add Thoreau from Walden if I could.
Who would you add?
1) Big Brother from 1984, by George Orwell
2) Hannibal Lecter from the novels by Thomas Harris
3) Pennywise the clown from It, by Stephen King
4) Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
5) Count Dracula from Bram Stoker
6) Annie Wilkes from Misery, by Stephen King
7) The demon from The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty
8) Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
9) Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
10) Voldemort from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling
I can't think of many characters I'd add to this list. If I had to name a few, I'd say Iago from Othello, Grendel from "Beowulf," and Jimmy Porter from Look Back in Anger. And although he's not scary like these others, but just because his boring and nearly pointless book is one of the few I really dislike (and in that way it, and he, scare me), I'd add Thoreau from Walden if I could.
Who would you add?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Alan Alda - Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
What a wonderful book---a collection of essays by actor, liberal activist, and business speaker Alan Alda.
I saw the author recently when he was in town on a book tour. It was a pleasure to meet him. I sensed that Alan Alda is my kind of liberal, gentle spirit. We are of like matter.
Read this book. Enjoy his advice on life. You will be enriched.
I saw the author recently when he was in town on a book tour. It was a pleasure to meet him. I sensed that Alan Alda is my kind of liberal, gentle spirit. We are of like matter.
Read this book. Enjoy his advice on life. You will be enriched.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Catching Up
Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal is a marvelous book. This is must reading for New Deal liberals like myself. Read this book and you will understanding where we are coming from.
Beckett's Waiting for Godot didn't do anything for me. I think it's frivilous.
I am still reasonating over Native Son. This too is required reading.
Beckett's Waiting for Godot didn't do anything for me. I think it's frivilous.
I am still reasonating over Native Son. This too is required reading.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
The Patriot Act Blues
My wife says, You’d better watch it, Fred.
I say, What are you talking about?
You know, with Bush’s Patriot Act, they might be investigating you someday.
Oh, really. And WHY would they do that?
Well, for starters, you’re corresponding with Mo, aren’t you?
So what? Mo is not some person on this country’s watch list. He was the co-owner of the Texaco station. He’s back in Iran now, and we email each other. I admit he has a shady background, and he used to go to Chicago a lot when he lived here. When he lived Pelham he used to make trips to Iran and back all the time, but he’s not a terrorist. He just likes to keep up with what’s going on here now that he’s back in his native Iran for good. He gives me a different perspective on that crazy president they have in Iran. Their president is actually a very shrewd man. One day he’ll get the best of Bush, you wait and see. Mo’s teaching me about life in Iran these days. It’s interesting. I’m broadening my horizons. Besides, he’s a fellow liberal. What in the world would anybody make of that?
Well, with Bush you never know. I wouldn’t want anyone going thru my emails and seeing that I have a correspondent in Iran. Are you still a member of the ACLU?
You’re silly paranoid. Sure I am—a dues paying member, and I read their blog and get their mail, but I’ve never been personally involved in any of their activities. After all, nothing of consequence ever happens in Birmingham.
And the new owner of the station is a Palestinian? And you’re paling up with him?
Look---Adam is an interesting guy. He grew up in a little town called Bethlehem. Maybe you’ve heard of it. He’s been in the States since 1983. I like to meet people from places other than the South.
I think you’re asking for trouble. What about your library books. You check out liberal books. The UPS truck stops here almost daily. I haven’t told you, but we’ve been getting a lot of calls lately where someone hangs up when I say hello. The caller ID says blocked. And you know the neighbors think you’re crazy.
For crying out loud. So what?
Well, someone could see a suspicious pattern here. And you know you make me nervous when you drop off our trash at various business dumps across town. I know we’re trashy people and you have to do it to get rid of our stuff, but don’t you think if someone were following you, they would find it suspicious?
Well, I suppose so, but who in the world would be watching ME?
Who knows these days? And those anti-Iraq war, anti-Bush letters you send to the paper--- I bet you have at least one a week published; don’t you think someone might put 2 and 2 together?
For heaven’s sake? What 2 and 2?
Well, you and I know this is just the way you are, but the government might wonder. You’d better watch it. Cause I don’t want some van to pull up in front of the house someday and you hauled off to jail without habeus corpuscle or whatever it is and I never see you again.
(Laughing) I don’t think you have anything to worry about. By the way, do you know who’s dark car that is parked across the street?
I say, What are you talking about?
You know, with Bush’s Patriot Act, they might be investigating you someday.
Oh, really. And WHY would they do that?
Well, for starters, you’re corresponding with Mo, aren’t you?
So what? Mo is not some person on this country’s watch list. He was the co-owner of the Texaco station. He’s back in Iran now, and we email each other. I admit he has a shady background, and he used to go to Chicago a lot when he lived here. When he lived Pelham he used to make trips to Iran and back all the time, but he’s not a terrorist. He just likes to keep up with what’s going on here now that he’s back in his native Iran for good. He gives me a different perspective on that crazy president they have in Iran. Their president is actually a very shrewd man. One day he’ll get the best of Bush, you wait and see. Mo’s teaching me about life in Iran these days. It’s interesting. I’m broadening my horizons. Besides, he’s a fellow liberal. What in the world would anybody make of that?
Well, with Bush you never know. I wouldn’t want anyone going thru my emails and seeing that I have a correspondent in Iran. Are you still a member of the ACLU?
You’re silly paranoid. Sure I am—a dues paying member, and I read their blog and get their mail, but I’ve never been personally involved in any of their activities. After all, nothing of consequence ever happens in Birmingham.
And the new owner of the station is a Palestinian? And you’re paling up with him?
Look---Adam is an interesting guy. He grew up in a little town called Bethlehem. Maybe you’ve heard of it. He’s been in the States since 1983. I like to meet people from places other than the South.
I think you’re asking for trouble. What about your library books. You check out liberal books. The UPS truck stops here almost daily. I haven’t told you, but we’ve been getting a lot of calls lately where someone hangs up when I say hello. The caller ID says blocked. And you know the neighbors think you’re crazy.
For crying out loud. So what?
Well, someone could see a suspicious pattern here. And you know you make me nervous when you drop off our trash at various business dumps across town. I know we’re trashy people and you have to do it to get rid of our stuff, but don’t you think if someone were following you, they would find it suspicious?
Well, I suppose so, but who in the world would be watching ME?
Who knows these days? And those anti-Iraq war, anti-Bush letters you send to the paper--- I bet you have at least one a week published; don’t you think someone might put 2 and 2 together?
For heaven’s sake? What 2 and 2?
Well, you and I know this is just the way you are, but the government might wonder. You’d better watch it. Cause I don’t want some van to pull up in front of the house someday and you hauled off to jail without habeus corpuscle or whatever it is and I never see you again.
(Laughing) I don’t think you have anything to worry about. By the way, do you know who’s dark car that is parked across the street?
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Bigger Thomas
I've spent most of the last two weeks with Bigger Thomas. Alas, today I must bid him farewell as he awaits his fate in that Cook County jail cell.
I will miss Bigger. It's been a long time since I viscerally connected with a literary character like I connected with him. All of the characters ring true. The story rings true. It's very realistic.
I don't know that I fully understand Bigger's character development, but I have certainly tried to understand. I like to think he found himself at the end.
The main thing is that this is a great story. I really like the plot.
I'm glad Freddy read the book; otherwise, I might never have read this novel and would have missed a great reading experience. This is great stuff.
I will miss Bigger. It's been a long time since I viscerally connected with a literary character like I connected with him. All of the characters ring true. The story rings true. It's very realistic.
I don't know that I fully understand Bigger's character development, but I have certainly tried to understand. I like to think he found himself at the end.
The main thing is that this is a great story. I really like the plot.
I'm glad Freddy read the book; otherwise, I might never have read this novel and would have missed a great reading experience. This is great stuff.
Monday, October 8, 2007
On Meeting Alan Alda
Alan Alda was in town yesterday to autograph his new book. I can't say that I am an Alan Alda fan or a fanatic about the TV show "MASH." I debated whether to go and get an autographed copy. I did go, and I'm glad I did. I'm glad first of all because I learned that Alan Alda is really nice guy. There is no pretense about him. He's just genuinely decent human being. I enjoyed my 30 seconds with him getting the autographs. He complimented me on my "Hawaiian" shirt and said he had several and wore them all the time. He made sure he spelled "M-o-y-n-a" correctly. You could tell by how he interacted with the people that he was enjoying himself and that he really likes people. I'm glad second of all because I've skimmed thru his books (this new one is his second) and he's a good writer! The books are stories about his life and his points of view on various things, and I look forward to reading them. Had I not gone to the signing, I never would have considered reading these books.So that's the story of my meeting Alan Alda.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Dear Mr. Beckett,
I read your play. Set along a barren countryside, with just a road and a tree, Vladimir and Estragon spend its entirety merely waiting for Godot. That's it. Pozzo and Lucky come along, there's the brief appearance of a boy with news about Godot, they all talk (and talk and talk) without ever going anywhere, but it's really just two people waiting for Godot. As Vladimir notices, they're "in the midst of nothingness." It's like Seinfeld, minus a bunch of humor and, well, pretty much, a story. Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, your play is quite well-known and successful, and it is a pleasure to read. How did you do it?
Honestly, though, I initially couldn't connect with your play. It wasn't always clear what was happening. The dialogue seemed nonsensical. But in Act II, the play started clicking. I caught the humor. I understood the absurdism (I think). And I saw the existentialism. For me, it's about how people are sleeping through life, looking and waiting for something, alone. They don't realize how stagnate and habitual their lives are, as Vladimir and Estragon go back to that tree to wait for Godot day after day. They're just passing time. Nothing really happens. There's a meaninglessness and an insignificance to it all. Maybe there's more, or maybe I'm wrong, but at least I got some sense out of it.
I enjoyed the humor. I like when Vladimir and Estragon have fun by calling each other names, like moron and vermin, and Estragon finally wins when he abuses Vladimir with "critic." Or I like too when Pozzo wants help standing up after falling, but he doesn't answer to his name being called, so Estragon suggests trying other names until he does, figuring they're bound to hit on his real name eventually. He first tries Abel, which rouses Pozzo, and amazes Estragon that he got it on the first try. He then tries Cain too, and Pozzo again stirs, causing Estragon to exclaim, "He's all humanity."
Your play is a pleasure, Mr. Beckett. I don't know how you made it work, but kudos.
Regards,
Mr. Hudson
I read your play. Set along a barren countryside, with just a road and a tree, Vladimir and Estragon spend its entirety merely waiting for Godot. That's it. Pozzo and Lucky come along, there's the brief appearance of a boy with news about Godot, they all talk (and talk and talk) without ever going anywhere, but it's really just two people waiting for Godot. As Vladimir notices, they're "in the midst of nothingness." It's like Seinfeld, minus a bunch of humor and, well, pretty much, a story. Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, your play is quite well-known and successful, and it is a pleasure to read. How did you do it?
Honestly, though, I initially couldn't connect with your play. It wasn't always clear what was happening. The dialogue seemed nonsensical. But in Act II, the play started clicking. I caught the humor. I understood the absurdism (I think). And I saw the existentialism. For me, it's about how people are sleeping through life, looking and waiting for something, alone. They don't realize how stagnate and habitual their lives are, as Vladimir and Estragon go back to that tree to wait for Godot day after day. They're just passing time. Nothing really happens. There's a meaninglessness and an insignificance to it all. Maybe there's more, or maybe I'm wrong, but at least I got some sense out of it.
I enjoyed the humor. I like when Vladimir and Estragon have fun by calling each other names, like moron and vermin, and Estragon finally wins when he abuses Vladimir with "critic." Or I like too when Pozzo wants help standing up after falling, but he doesn't answer to his name being called, so Estragon suggests trying other names until he does, figuring they're bound to hit on his real name eventually. He first tries Abel, which rouses Pozzo, and amazes Estragon that he got it on the first try. He then tries Cain too, and Pozzo again stirs, causing Estragon to exclaim, "He's all humanity."
Your play is a pleasure, Mr. Beckett. I don't know how you made it work, but kudos.
Regards,
Mr. Hudson
Friday, September 28, 2007
The New York Times Bestseller List
The main bestseller list that I consult is the NY Times at http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html
Here is my commentary on the current Top Ten sellers in nonfiction.
1) Laura Ingraham - Power to the People
Ingraham is a right-wing hack. I do not read such garbage.
2) Bill Clinton - Giving - Not a book that I will actually read or purchase, but if the former president did a book signing anywhere close, I'd be there.
3) O. J. Simpson - If I Did It
Please, please, please, say it ain't so.
4)Tony Dungy - Quiet Strength
Probably a good book, but one I will never get to.
5) Mother Teresa - Come be My Light
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
6) Marcus Luttrell - Lone Survivor
I'll pass.
7)Geoffrey C. Ward - The War
I've never been a big fan of WW II.
8) Alan Alda - Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
Probably a delightful book, but one I'll never get to.
9) Rita Cosby - Blonde Ambition
I couldn't care less about Anna Nicole Smith.
10) Robert Draper - Dead Certain
A good one. I just finished it. Concerning the nefarious presidency of George W. Bush.
Here is my commentary on the current Top Ten sellers in nonfiction.
1) Laura Ingraham - Power to the People
Ingraham is a right-wing hack. I do not read such garbage.
2) Bill Clinton - Giving - Not a book that I will actually read or purchase, but if the former president did a book signing anywhere close, I'd be there.
3) O. J. Simpson - If I Did It
Please, please, please, say it ain't so.
4)Tony Dungy - Quiet Strength
Probably a good book, but one I will never get to.
5) Mother Teresa - Come be My Light
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
6) Marcus Luttrell - Lone Survivor
I'll pass.
7)Geoffrey C. Ward - The War
I've never been a big fan of WW II.
8) Alan Alda - Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
Probably a delightful book, but one I'll never get to.
9) Rita Cosby - Blonde Ambition
I couldn't care less about Anna Nicole Smith.
10) Robert Draper - Dead Certain
A good one. I just finished it. Concerning the nefarious presidency of George W. Bush.
Richard Wright - Native Son (Book I)
When I first began the book, it struck me as an allegory. I could not relate to the story in a realist fashion. At first I could not relate to Bigger Thomas. I could not connect to the characters and the plot in a visceral way. I could not get inside Bigger's head. Jan and Mary were funny more than anything, spouting their communist slogans. I saw them as two naive, silly young people who thought there was about to be a revolution in this country. I laughed when Mary called her father a "Capitalist." The 30's were the heyday of the Communist Party in this country with the great depression planting the seeds of an "uprising' if ever there was going to be one in this country. I wonder if the author took Jan and Mary seriously. Maybe he did, but they are comic characters to me.
We all know now in retrospect that the center held and once WW II began and the depression ended that was the end of any prospective revolution from below. But we know that Richard Wright was writing this novel around 1940 and he became a communist and his perspective must have been different.
When Bigger kills Mary everything changes for me. The realism kicks in. I find myself pulling for Bigger as Book II commences. All of a sudden the characters and the plot become very real. I am fully connected and involved in the story now. Let's see where it leads next in Book II.
We all know now in retrospect that the center held and once WW II began and the depression ended that was the end of any prospective revolution from below. But we know that Richard Wright was writing this novel around 1940 and he became a communist and his perspective must have been different.
When Bigger kills Mary everything changes for me. The realism kicks in. I find myself pulling for Bigger as Book II commences. All of a sudden the characters and the plot become very real. I am fully connected and involved in the story now. Let's see where it leads next in Book II.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Richard
RICHARD – 2078 A GHOST STORY ?
I was working at my desk last Monday around 3 p.m. when I heard what I assumed was the UPS truck stop in front of the house. The UPS truck stops at our house so many times I know the sound of the truck as it comes down the road. Since it’s usually a QVC package my wife ordered or a Thomson book, I seldom jump up and run to the front porch to see what he’s left. The driver, depending on which one it is, and we’ve gone through many drivers since we’ve lived on Wilderness Road, usually places the parcel on the porch and rings the doorbell before he departs. Sure enough, I hear the door bell ring.
I think nothing of it. Around 6 Moyna comes in from her afternoon bridge club and I think to check the porch. At first I don’t see anything. No packages. That’s strange, I think. I heard the truck and the doorbell. Then I happen to look down and see an 8 x 11 manila envelope. On the front it says FRED HUDSON. No address. No return address. No evidence that it was delivered by UPS. Very strange.
I open the envelope. Inside is a single sheet of paper. On the sheet of paper typed in a strange typeface I’ve never seen before are the words
THANKS, FRED!
Richard 2078
Now this is certainly odd. What is this?
I show it to Moyna. What is this?
I don’t know, she says. You say you heard the UPS truck earlier? You didn’t hear anybody else come up the steps?
Yes, I heard the truck and I heard the doorbell ring. I know of no one else coming on to the porch. That’s all I know. But SOMEBODY left this on our front porch. But who?
And what on earth does this mean: THANKS, FRED. Richard 2078.
Who knows.
Maybe it’s a joke. But what kind of joke? It makes no sense. I don’t know what it means.
Neither do I, Moyna says.
The next day I call UPS and speak to a dispatcher. She informs me that there was no delivery to Hudson at 716 Wilderness Road in Pelham yesterday.
Are you sure?
Yes, I’m sure.
OK, What now?
The next day I happen to be scheduled to have lunch with an old professor of mine, Dr. Charles Rose at Auburn. Dr. Rose is a retired professor of English. We try and have lunch about once a month. He tried to get me to go to grad school in English back in 1973. We talk literature and all kinds of stuff because he’s an avid reader like me.
I tell him the story.
Does “Richard 2078” mean anything to you, he asks me.
No, I reply.
So it’s not some kind of joke?
If it is, I don’t get it, I say.
Hummm. . . he muses. What about “Richard?” That name mean anything?
Well, I say, Richard is a common given name in the Hudson and Hankins (mother’s maiden name) families. Actually, now that I think about it, I’d say it is the MOST common given name in the history of both families.
Well, Dr. Rose continues, it seems to me that there are 3 possibilities.
1) Fred, you’re going crazy to put it crudely. You put the note outside your door and you don’t realize it. I know that’s scary sounding, but at this point, we have to say it’s a possibility.
Why would I do that? I say.
I don’t know. Crazy people do crazy things, Dr. Rose says, as he laughs to lighten the mood since I’m sitting there wondering if I’m going crazy.
2) Someone else put it there. A joke? But you say your wife convinces you she didn’t do it. Who else?
No one else. That doesn’t make sense. The note makes no sense as a joke from anybody.
3) Then here is the third possibility. It’s a message from one of your future descendents---Richard in the year 2078. He’s thanking you for something. By 2078 each individual will be able to chart his or her own genetic history, and maybe he’s thanking you for part of his genetic inheritance.
You are kidding, aren’t you, Dr. Rose? I can’t believe something crazy like that.
No, I’m not kidding. You and I have read some of the same popular physics books. Time travel is theoretically possible. All I’m saying is that under the circumstances, given what we’ve established, it’s POSSBILE.
I feel a cold chill entering my body. Oh, boy. Either I’m going crazy or this is a message from the future. Oh, boy. People are going to think I’m crazy either way! Oh, boy.
We conclude our lunch and Dr. Rose says, Let me know if there are any further developments. Maybe you should see a doctor just in case.
So---this is where it stands at the moment. I am really freaked out.
Who knows.
I was working at my desk last Monday around 3 p.m. when I heard what I assumed was the UPS truck stop in front of the house. The UPS truck stops at our house so many times I know the sound of the truck as it comes down the road. Since it’s usually a QVC package my wife ordered or a Thomson book, I seldom jump up and run to the front porch to see what he’s left. The driver, depending on which one it is, and we’ve gone through many drivers since we’ve lived on Wilderness Road, usually places the parcel on the porch and rings the doorbell before he departs. Sure enough, I hear the door bell ring.
I think nothing of it. Around 6 Moyna comes in from her afternoon bridge club and I think to check the porch. At first I don’t see anything. No packages. That’s strange, I think. I heard the truck and the doorbell. Then I happen to look down and see an 8 x 11 manila envelope. On the front it says FRED HUDSON. No address. No return address. No evidence that it was delivered by UPS. Very strange.
I open the envelope. Inside is a single sheet of paper. On the sheet of paper typed in a strange typeface I’ve never seen before are the words
THANKS, FRED!
Richard 2078
Now this is certainly odd. What is this?
I show it to Moyna. What is this?
I don’t know, she says. You say you heard the UPS truck earlier? You didn’t hear anybody else come up the steps?
Yes, I heard the truck and I heard the doorbell ring. I know of no one else coming on to the porch. That’s all I know. But SOMEBODY left this on our front porch. But who?
And what on earth does this mean: THANKS, FRED. Richard 2078.
Who knows.
Maybe it’s a joke. But what kind of joke? It makes no sense. I don’t know what it means.
Neither do I, Moyna says.
The next day I call UPS and speak to a dispatcher. She informs me that there was no delivery to Hudson at 716 Wilderness Road in Pelham yesterday.
Are you sure?
Yes, I’m sure.
OK, What now?
The next day I happen to be scheduled to have lunch with an old professor of mine, Dr. Charles Rose at Auburn. Dr. Rose is a retired professor of English. We try and have lunch about once a month. He tried to get me to go to grad school in English back in 1973. We talk literature and all kinds of stuff because he’s an avid reader like me.
I tell him the story.
Does “Richard 2078” mean anything to you, he asks me.
No, I reply.
So it’s not some kind of joke?
If it is, I don’t get it, I say.
Hummm. . . he muses. What about “Richard?” That name mean anything?
Well, I say, Richard is a common given name in the Hudson and Hankins (mother’s maiden name) families. Actually, now that I think about it, I’d say it is the MOST common given name in the history of both families.
Well, Dr. Rose continues, it seems to me that there are 3 possibilities.
1) Fred, you’re going crazy to put it crudely. You put the note outside your door and you don’t realize it. I know that’s scary sounding, but at this point, we have to say it’s a possibility.
Why would I do that? I say.
I don’t know. Crazy people do crazy things, Dr. Rose says, as he laughs to lighten the mood since I’m sitting there wondering if I’m going crazy.
2) Someone else put it there. A joke? But you say your wife convinces you she didn’t do it. Who else?
No one else. That doesn’t make sense. The note makes no sense as a joke from anybody.
3) Then here is the third possibility. It’s a message from one of your future descendents---Richard in the year 2078. He’s thanking you for something. By 2078 each individual will be able to chart his or her own genetic history, and maybe he’s thanking you for part of his genetic inheritance.
You are kidding, aren’t you, Dr. Rose? I can’t believe something crazy like that.
No, I’m not kidding. You and I have read some of the same popular physics books. Time travel is theoretically possible. All I’m saying is that under the circumstances, given what we’ve established, it’s POSSBILE.
I feel a cold chill entering my body. Oh, boy. Either I’m going crazy or this is a message from the future. Oh, boy. People are going to think I’m crazy either way! Oh, boy.
We conclude our lunch and Dr. Rose says, Let me know if there are any further developments. Maybe you should see a doctor just in case.
So---this is where it stands at the moment. I am really freaked out.
Who knows.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Shelfari
I found this website called Shelfari and it is something you definitely need to check out. I don't even want to try and explain it. Just check it out. Seriously. Now.
www.shelfari.com
My screen name is Iansfan. Look me up. Be my friend. I promise you will not be able to stop.
www.shelfari.com
My screen name is Iansfan. Look me up. Be my friend. I promise you will not be able to stop.
Native Son by Richard Wright (A comedic/Saturday Night Live Approach)
After reading the first 40 pages or so-----
Imagine if you will that we had TV and Fox News in the 1930's. Bigger Thomas is being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly.
Bill O'Reilly: We are pleased to have tonight as our guest a poor Negro man---
Bigger Thomas: You are SO perceptive, Mr. O'Reilly. You figured me out immediately!
Bill O'Reilly: (a bit perturbed) As I was saying, we are pleased to have tonight as our guest a poor Negro man who lives in Chicago's famed Southside. What do you have to say for yourself, sir?
Bigger Thomas: Look, man. First thing this morning I had to kill a foot-long rat to protect my family. The only pleasure I got out of it was dangling it in front of my sister to scare her. My Mother is on my back to get a job. I hang out with my buddies at the pool hall, a couple of us have fun in the movie house, we think about robbing a white man's store but chicken out. I have to rough up one of my own buddies. What am I supposed to say?
Bill O'Reilly: (musing to himself) Dangling a rat in front of your sister. Boy, that sounds like fun! (composing himself). Look, Mr. Thomas. Do you think this country owes you anything. Get a job! Make something of yourself! You're in the No Spin Zone here! No excuses! You can be anything you want in this country. This is America!
Bigger Thomas: You don't say! YESSIR, boss. Whatever you say. You duh man, Mr. O'Reilly. Why didn't I think of these things before?
Bill O'Reilly: So there you go. Go forth, Mr. Thomas. Glad to be of help.
As the Fox camera cuts away from the set, there is a quick glimpse of Bigger Thomas in his chair, slapping his knee, his face contorted beyond recognition, laughing hysterically to himself, pointing at Bill O'Reilly.
(Fox News now switches to Colmes & Hannity. They are debating President Roosevelt's proposal for Social Security. Colmes is for it; Hannity is vehemently against it).
Imagine if you will that we had TV and Fox News in the 1930's. Bigger Thomas is being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly.
Bill O'Reilly: We are pleased to have tonight as our guest a poor Negro man---
Bigger Thomas: You are SO perceptive, Mr. O'Reilly. You figured me out immediately!
Bill O'Reilly: (a bit perturbed) As I was saying, we are pleased to have tonight as our guest a poor Negro man who lives in Chicago's famed Southside. What do you have to say for yourself, sir?
Bigger Thomas: Look, man. First thing this morning I had to kill a foot-long rat to protect my family. The only pleasure I got out of it was dangling it in front of my sister to scare her. My Mother is on my back to get a job. I hang out with my buddies at the pool hall, a couple of us have fun in the movie house, we think about robbing a white man's store but chicken out. I have to rough up one of my own buddies. What am I supposed to say?
Bill O'Reilly: (musing to himself) Dangling a rat in front of your sister. Boy, that sounds like fun! (composing himself). Look, Mr. Thomas. Do you think this country owes you anything. Get a job! Make something of yourself! You're in the No Spin Zone here! No excuses! You can be anything you want in this country. This is America!
Bigger Thomas: You don't say! YESSIR, boss. Whatever you say. You duh man, Mr. O'Reilly. Why didn't I think of these things before?
Bill O'Reilly: So there you go. Go forth, Mr. Thomas. Glad to be of help.
As the Fox camera cuts away from the set, there is a quick glimpse of Bigger Thomas in his chair, slapping his knee, his face contorted beyond recognition, laughing hysterically to himself, pointing at Bill O'Reilly.
(Fox News now switches to Colmes & Hannity. They are debating President Roosevelt's proposal for Social Security. Colmes is for it; Hannity is vehemently against it).
Saturday, September 22, 2007
A New Species of Reader
In my book meanderings over the years I have discovered a new species of reader: what I call the Young Science Fiction & Fantasy Reader. Note the word "young." That's because this is strictly a youth phenomenon. I have never known a science fiction/fantasy reader over the age of 30. Reading science fiction and fantasy is something that a normal person should outgrow, like bed-wetting and calling old girl friends at 2 a.m.
But alas, they are out there---those young science fiction & fantasy readers. I was once one myself back in high school. I caught the disease from a then brother-in-law (there is a lesson here: don't let -brothers-in-law influence you) but I out-grew it by the time I started college.
I need to talk to my anthropology professors again. No longer will I ask them about the latest theories on cannabalism. I can ask if they are familiar with this new species of homo sapiens, the Young Science Fiction & Fantasy Reader.
Young Science Fiction Readers are the type who will keep mice in their basement for pets. They have a pronounced inability to carry on normal small talk. Ask them what they've been up to lately and they'll look at you like you're speaking Swahili. They stare into space a lot but can never tell you what they are thinking about when they do so. Acne is a major health problem well into their late 20's. Young Science Fiction & Fantasy Readers work in and patronize health food stores. If you see a young person in a health food store holding a book, I'll bet my mortgage that it's a science fiction/fantasy book.
Recently I saw a couple in the science fiction/fantasy section of a local bookstore. The guy looked like a black-haired Drew Carey with a U of Alabama shirt and black shorts. The girl had shoulder length blond hair and tilted her head 45 degrees each time she turned to her friend to say something.
They were having this SERIOUS conversation about the books, picking up this book and that book, reading the backs of them to each, talking about authors. I was stunned. I did not know that anybody COULD have a serious conversation about sci-fi/fantasy. But they were going at it.
I felt like grabbing a notebook and asking them if I could follow them around the science fiction section taking notes as if I were an anthropologist observing some so far undiscovered tribe on some newly discovered island.
And let me say this. Young Science Fiction & Fantasy readers read ONLY science fiction and fantasy. If you ask them if they've read Faulkner or Proust, you'll get that Swahili look.
And the science fiction/fantasy section of the bookstore. Have you ever looked at that stuff? You don't have to see the people. Just look at those weird books and you'll stay away from the people who read this stuff.
Manga? Quest? Poltergiests? Tolkien? Well, okay, maybe Tolkien. We were reading Tolkien when I was in college in the late 60's and early 70's. Then Tolkien made a comeback with the movies. I'll give you Tolkien, and Jasper Fforde, but NOTHING ELSE.
When I am in a bookstore with a science fiction/fantasy section, I always take a look at the people in those aisles. I feel like I'm in a sci-fic/fantasy alternative universe being around these people.
But alas, they are out there---those young science fiction & fantasy readers. I was once one myself back in high school. I caught the disease from a then brother-in-law (there is a lesson here: don't let -brothers-in-law influence you) but I out-grew it by the time I started college.
I need to talk to my anthropology professors again. No longer will I ask them about the latest theories on cannabalism. I can ask if they are familiar with this new species of homo sapiens, the Young Science Fiction & Fantasy Reader.
Young Science Fiction Readers are the type who will keep mice in their basement for pets. They have a pronounced inability to carry on normal small talk. Ask them what they've been up to lately and they'll look at you like you're speaking Swahili. They stare into space a lot but can never tell you what they are thinking about when they do so. Acne is a major health problem well into their late 20's. Young Science Fiction & Fantasy Readers work in and patronize health food stores. If you see a young person in a health food store holding a book, I'll bet my mortgage that it's a science fiction/fantasy book.
Recently I saw a couple in the science fiction/fantasy section of a local bookstore. The guy looked like a black-haired Drew Carey with a U of Alabama shirt and black shorts. The girl had shoulder length blond hair and tilted her head 45 degrees each time she turned to her friend to say something.
They were having this SERIOUS conversation about the books, picking up this book and that book, reading the backs of them to each, talking about authors. I was stunned. I did not know that anybody COULD have a serious conversation about sci-fi/fantasy. But they were going at it.
I felt like grabbing a notebook and asking them if I could follow them around the science fiction section taking notes as if I were an anthropologist observing some so far undiscovered tribe on some newly discovered island.
And let me say this. Young Science Fiction & Fantasy readers read ONLY science fiction and fantasy. If you ask them if they've read Faulkner or Proust, you'll get that Swahili look.
And the science fiction/fantasy section of the bookstore. Have you ever looked at that stuff? You don't have to see the people. Just look at those weird books and you'll stay away from the people who read this stuff.
Manga? Quest? Poltergiests? Tolkien? Well, okay, maybe Tolkien. We were reading Tolkien when I was in college in the late 60's and early 70's. Then Tolkien made a comeback with the movies. I'll give you Tolkien, and Jasper Fforde, but NOTHING ELSE.
When I am in a bookstore with a science fiction/fantasy section, I always take a look at the people in those aisles. I feel like I'm in a sci-fic/fantasy alternative universe being around these people.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Native Son by Richard Wright
This novel has more insight and understanding about being black and poor in America, especially during segregation, than anything I've read.
Set in 1930's Chicago, it centers on the black Bigger Thomas, who kills a young white woman, Mary, and a young black woman, Bessie. With the aid of Mr. Max, his lawyer, a sympathizer who recognizes the social conditions that led Bigger to murder, and who dedicates himself towards fighting for equality, Bigger comes to realize the truth about himself and his relation to the world, and so too the emotional and psychological climate of race and poverty becomes evident to us.
In killing Mary, there was no motive; it wasn't even planned. She, like Mr. Max, treats Bigger kindly and as a human, not a black. They met only hours earlier, when Bigger took a job with her father as a chauffeur, to help provide for his mother, brother, and sister. But that night, when Mary's blind mother came into her bedroom, Bigger felt only fear: fear that his presence would be betrayed by Mary's drunken mumbling, leading him to smother her with a pillow. He knew, being black, he'd be in trouble if caught with a white woman in her bedroom. Indeed, all his life, white people told him how to act, where to live, how much education he could get; they told him what he can and can't do, how to speak, what jobs he's allowed to work. Basically, he always felt a white oppressive force upon his life, keeping him from fulfilling his dreams and from seeing himself as part of, not separate from, the world. All he knows is fear, hate towards whites, guilt and shame for being black, because everything has told him he's nothing, and Bigger believes it. This is what it means to be black, and that is what thrusts him to kill Mary. As Bigger puts it, it means he "'was guilty before he killed!'"
Wright doesn't justify Bigger's actions. But what this novel does is deftly depict race and poverty and the social conditions therein. I can see why this novel is considered one of the important books in twentieth century American fiction.
Monday, September 17, 2007
What I've Been Reading
I know I haven't posted anything original in a while and I apologize. Here are some thoughts on what I have been reading recently.
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss - Great story of the powers of imagination, creating your own reality in order to survive, and the amazing power of literature to change lives. I thought it an excellent novel.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - I originally tried to read this book several years ago and had trouble with it but read it last month for book club and sped right through it. I think I understand Emma's conflicts and did not really hate her as perhaps I should have.
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks - Brooks, who won the Pulitzer in 2005 for March, writes with a journalist's eye. This historical novel covers a year during the plague and the story of one remarkable woman who survives.
The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham - His wit and amazing power to describe human relationships makes this book amazingly current. It was written in 1925 but if you didn't know better you would swear it was just published.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell - I don't read much in popular psychology but I found the case studies in this book to be very fascinating. I have completed Harvard's IAT tests several times. You should give them a try.
Also read/reading: Coraline by Neil Gaiman, The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris.
I have been reading a lot of current fiction, don't really know why, just in that mood I guess. I know this is a lot to say without much detail on any one book but if anyone has anything to comment on any of these titles, I would love to chat!
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss - Great story of the powers of imagination, creating your own reality in order to survive, and the amazing power of literature to change lives. I thought it an excellent novel.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - I originally tried to read this book several years ago and had trouble with it but read it last month for book club and sped right through it. I think I understand Emma's conflicts and did not really hate her as perhaps I should have.
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks - Brooks, who won the Pulitzer in 2005 for March, writes with a journalist's eye. This historical novel covers a year during the plague and the story of one remarkable woman who survives.
The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham - His wit and amazing power to describe human relationships makes this book amazingly current. It was written in 1925 but if you didn't know better you would swear it was just published.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell - I don't read much in popular psychology but I found the case studies in this book to be very fascinating. I have completed Harvard's IAT tests several times. You should give them a try.
Also read/reading: Coraline by Neil Gaiman, The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris.
I have been reading a lot of current fiction, don't really know why, just in that mood I guess. I know this is a lot to say without much detail on any one book but if anyone has anything to comment on any of these titles, I would love to chat!
Friday, September 14, 2007
Patricia O'Toole - When Trumpets Call
This is a splendid biography of Theodore Roosevelt in his post-presidential years. TR was quite busy after leaving office in March of 1909, but he had a rough time of it without political power. He ran as a Progressive in 1912 and lost and probably never recovered from the loss. TR was probably the most amazing and interesting person to ever occupy the office of President.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Bookstore Weakness
"Alas," wrote Henry Ward Beecher, "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore!" Mine is relatively strong at Barnes & Noble, because I know that if I resist a volume on one visit, and someone else buys it, an identical volume will pop up in its place like a plastic duck in a shooting gallery. And if I resist THAT one, there will be another day, another duck. In a secondhand bookstore, each volume is one-of-a-kind, neither replaceable from a publisher's warehouse nor visually identical to its original siblings, which have accreted individuality with every change of ownership. If I don't buy the book now, I may never have another chance. And therefore, like Beecher, who believed the temptations of drink were paltry compared with the temptations of books, I am weak.
-Anne Fadiman, EX LIBRIS
-Anne Fadiman, EX LIBRIS
Saturday, September 8, 2007
The Common Reader
I believe in the power of serendipity in the reading life. While browsing in a Barnes & Noble in Montgomery this week, I came across a marvelous book called EX LIBRIS by Anne Fadiman. This is a neat little book of personal essays by the author on reading.
In the book the author makes reference to an essay by Virginia Woolf called "The Common Reader." The bookstore had this Virginia Woolf volume. Wolfe describes what she calls the common reader. I quote from Woolf's essay because this describes me. I am a common reader in the Virginia Woolf sense.
"The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the scholar and the critic. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or to correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole---a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. . . Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are to obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honors, then, perhaps, it may be worthwhile to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so might a result."
So now I see my place. I am a common reader.
In the book the author makes reference to an essay by Virginia Woolf called "The Common Reader." The bookstore had this Virginia Woolf volume. Wolfe describes what she calls the common reader. I quote from Woolf's essay because this describes me. I am a common reader in the Virginia Woolf sense.
"The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the scholar and the critic. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or to correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole---a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. . . Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are to obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honors, then, perhaps, it may be worthwhile to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so might a result."
So now I see my place. I am a common reader.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Everyman by Philip Roth
Roth's canvas is a poignant meditation on being human. His everyman is painted fearful of illness and death and of growing old. Millicent tells him his choice (and ours) in life is to either be a force upon life and take control of it or let life control him. Following the latter, he is rendered worrisome, vulnerable, incapacitated by his choices, and limited in his ability to act. He believes that life is to be endured and taken as it comes. But as an old man, staring at imminent death, he is stricken with loneliness, desiring of intimacy, left to reckon with a fate of bleakness, oblivion, and nothingness, stagnate in his loss of youth and vitality.
Alienating everyone he cares for, save his daughter Nancy, he retires to his joy of painting. This finally renews his creativity and imagination, but, soon, it becomes boring and unsatisfying. He (and us) cannot sustain himself on something like painting alone. He misses the human connection, that need to love and be loved. No affair or lust for a younger woman or nostalgia for swimming or his father's jewelry store can fill that void or offer an escape.
Everyman is a novel about facing mortality. It is a novel about what it means to grow old. But it is also something more: like the bones in his parents' graves, it is a novel that strips down humanity raw. By depicting humans for what they are, it teaches us to live with vigor and meaning, with love towards others, lest we become like the everyman: feeble, ridden with regret and loss, becoming aware of our mistakes only when it's too late, diminished to a caricature of ourselves, all brought upon by ourselves: “I am seventy-one. This is the man I have made," he says.
With some of the finest prose I've ever read, this is one of the best books I've read.
Alienating everyone he cares for, save his daughter Nancy, he retires to his joy of painting. This finally renews his creativity and imagination, but, soon, it becomes boring and unsatisfying. He (and us) cannot sustain himself on something like painting alone. He misses the human connection, that need to love and be loved. No affair or lust for a younger woman or nostalgia for swimming or his father's jewelry store can fill that void or offer an escape.
Everyman is a novel about facing mortality. It is a novel about what it means to grow old. But it is also something more: like the bones in his parents' graves, it is a novel that strips down humanity raw. By depicting humans for what they are, it teaches us to live with vigor and meaning, with love towards others, lest we become like the everyman: feeble, ridden with regret and loss, becoming aware of our mistakes only when it's too late, diminished to a caricature of ourselves, all brought upon by ourselves: “I am seventy-one. This is the man I have made," he says.
With some of the finest prose I've ever read, this is one of the best books I've read.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Candice Millard - The River of Doubt
This book---a travel book, a book of adventure, but most of all a book about the feat of one man, Theodore Roosevelt, and his son Kermit and friends---is one of the best books I've ever read.
It is a gripping and powerful story of how TR led an expedition down a Brazilian river called The River of Doubt, a river that had never been explored, a river that some geographers doubted even existed, in 1914.
Theodore Roosevelt dealt with disappointment and tragedy in his life by embarking on sheer physical exertion---pushing his body to extreme physical limits. He embarked on this journey after losing his race for the Presidency in 1912.
The journey was successful, but took its toll on everyone involved. TR was pushed to the point of death, even to the point of suicide. There is no doubt that this adventure led to his early death in 1919.
The author is both a nature writer and an historian. You think YOU are on that river as you read the narrative.
This is a great story, a well-written book, and a compelling work.
It is a gripping and powerful story of how TR led an expedition down a Brazilian river called The River of Doubt, a river that had never been explored, a river that some geographers doubted even existed, in 1914.
Theodore Roosevelt dealt with disappointment and tragedy in his life by embarking on sheer physical exertion---pushing his body to extreme physical limits. He embarked on this journey after losing his race for the Presidency in 1912.
The journey was successful, but took its toll on everyone involved. TR was pushed to the point of death, even to the point of suicide. There is no doubt that this adventure led to his early death in 1919.
The author is both a nature writer and an historian. You think YOU are on that river as you read the narrative.
This is a great story, a well-written book, and a compelling work.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
J.M. Coetzee - Disgrace
My take on this fine, tight novel is that it's primarily about people trying to communicate with each other and not having much success.
David Lurie cannot properly explain to anyone his disastrous behavior. No one understands; no one CAN understand except him.
David cannot understand his daughter Lucy and she cannot fathom him. Petrus is mysterious, a creature of South Africa that he is.
Melanie's parents do not understand David, and he cannot relate to them.
The only communications that finally occurs is between David and Bev Shaw. At least David comes to understand why Bev devotes her life to taking care of animals. At least David ends the novel with SOME understanding of someone or something other than himself.
This is a great novel. I highly recommend it.
David Lurie cannot properly explain to anyone his disastrous behavior. No one understands; no one CAN understand except him.
David cannot understand his daughter Lucy and she cannot fathom him. Petrus is mysterious, a creature of South Africa that he is.
Melanie's parents do not understand David, and he cannot relate to them.
The only communications that finally occurs is between David and Bev Shaw. At least David comes to understand why Bev devotes her life to taking care of animals. At least David ends the novel with SOME understanding of someone or something other than himself.
This is a great novel. I highly recommend it.
Friday, August 17, 2007
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
A frolicking read... Britain is a surreal world here... Will-Speaks spout lines from Shakespearean plays and audiences perform Richard III nightly... time travel is frequent... debates rage over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays... even vampires and werewolves are a menace... Britain and Russia have warred for years over the Crimea... and the Prose Portal allows you to jump into a book and live in that world...
The fun doesn't stop there as Thursday Next tries to save Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit and, later, Bronte's Jane Eyre... with the manuscripts stolen by Hades, the third-most evil man on the planet, any change he (or anyone else) makes to the story when inside the book changes all copies of the book... Thursday lives in Jane Eyre to stop Hades and rescue her aunt from entrapment in Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"... add a love triangle, and the entertainment never ceases...
The novel is delightful, especially for bibliophiles, with all its literary references... I think the end is hurried and has too many cases of deus ex machina, but that may be expected from a quick and light read like this... Still, a thoroughly enjoyable book...
I thank K-Dog for the recommendation!
The fun doesn't stop there as Thursday Next tries to save Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit and, later, Bronte's Jane Eyre... with the manuscripts stolen by Hades, the third-most evil man on the planet, any change he (or anyone else) makes to the story when inside the book changes all copies of the book... Thursday lives in Jane Eyre to stop Hades and rescue her aunt from entrapment in Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"... add a love triangle, and the entertainment never ceases...
The novel is delightful, especially for bibliophiles, with all its literary references... I think the end is hurried and has too many cases of deus ex machina, but that may be expected from a quick and light read like this... Still, a thoroughly enjoyable book...
I thank K-Dog for the recommendation!
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Emory M. Thomas - Robert E. Lee
This biography of Robert E. Lee seems to be the standard biography of the great Southern general. Indeed, it is a carefully balanced account of Lee's life, sparing no praise, yet not sparing to point out his mistakes and shortcomings.
Bobby Lee (as I call him) will be one of reading projects in the coming months.
The Southern Man has to come to terms with Bobby Lee.
Bobby Lee (as I call him) will be one of reading projects in the coming months.
The Southern Man has to come to terms with Bobby Lee.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Summer Reading
My reading over the summer --- focusing on what I learned
The new FDR biography by Jean Edward Smith will likely be the standard one-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt for generations to come. It is excellent. What I learned that I didn't know was the build-up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. No, there is no evidence that FDR knew of the attack beforehand, but US officials did think that Japan would strike somewhere. You get the impression that war with Japan might have avoided with the right diplomacy. This book makes it seem like the US pushed into Japan into attacking us. Was this what FDR wanted.
Khaled Hosseini's THE KITE RUNNER is marvelous. Everyone should read this book. I can't believe I took so long to read it.
Carl Bernstein's biography of Hilary Clinton, A WOMAN IN CHARGE, is tremendous. I come away from this book with greater respect for Senator Clinton. I learned many things about her life that I did not know.
Still left to read this summer ---
Salinger's FRANNY AND ZOOEY
J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE
Emory Thomas's biography of Robert E. Lee
The new FDR biography by Jean Edward Smith will likely be the standard one-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt for generations to come. It is excellent. What I learned that I didn't know was the build-up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. No, there is no evidence that FDR knew of the attack beforehand, but US officials did think that Japan would strike somewhere. You get the impression that war with Japan might have avoided with the right diplomacy. This book makes it seem like the US pushed into Japan into attacking us. Was this what FDR wanted.
Khaled Hosseini's THE KITE RUNNER is marvelous. Everyone should read this book. I can't believe I took so long to read it.
Carl Bernstein's biography of Hilary Clinton, A WOMAN IN CHARGE, is tremendous. I come away from this book with greater respect for Senator Clinton. I learned many things about her life that I did not know.
Still left to read this summer ---
Salinger's FRANNY AND ZOOEY
J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE
Emory Thomas's biography of Robert E. Lee
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Book Quotes
"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes."
- Erasmus
"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
- Marcus T. Cicero
"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"My home is where my books are."
- Ellen Thompson
- Erasmus
"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
- Marcus T. Cicero
"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"My home is where my books are."
- Ellen Thompson
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Just finished this very fun read... Franny and Zooey are vibrant, pedantic, and neurotic siblings of the dysfunctional Glass family. She, like an adult Holden Caulfield, is unequivocally opposed to phonies and egos, to the point, Zooey describes, of blind homicidal aggression when venting her frustration, so much that she collapses in crisis, reciting the Jesus Prayer in hopes of transcendent peace and wisdom; he, thinking that their older brothers Seymour and Buddy corrupted them into freaks by educating them with boocoos of knowledge (he admits that in the first two minutes of meeting someone he either becomes bored and never bothers with that person again or becomes overly talkative and preachy, and that the only people he'd care to have lunch with are dead or unavailable), tries to help Franny by launching convoluted and erratic diatribes that are oddly cogent. Their back and forth arguing and complaining is quite humorous... Adding to the laughter is Salinger's Henry Jamesian detail of every nuance, physical and mental, vocal and otherwise, often with hyperbole and peculiarity... Although a funny book, Franny's and Zooey's quandaries are serious and troublesome, but exploring them with the characters makes the book even more compelling.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
Set in post-Apartheid South Africa, the novel begins with the downfall of David Lurie, a man in his fifties and a professor of Communications. Willingly submitting to scandal, he resigns his position at a university in Cape Town, leaving the city for the country farm run by his daughter, Lucy, in Eastern Cape. While looking to patch his strained relationship with her, he also tries to find meaning in his sudden disgrace. That includes volunteering at an animal clinic where giving special care to the dogs he helps euthanize provides him comfort; it includes facing himself and his daughter's life and her maturation. Everything changes, however, when the reality of the new South Africa crashes upon them in an incident of horrible violence.
What I like most about this novel is the vividness of post-Apartheid South Africa. It is a place where Africans run rampant in bouts of pillaging and bloodshed. Nothing and no one is safe here, especially in the country moreso than the city. There is little the law can do; even for the most armed and vigilant of whites, becoming a victim of this brutality is only a matter of time. I did not realize that this is the face of South Africa today: Africans thirsty for revenge for years of racial prejudice, and the only refuge for their targets is to flee or be subjugated to unwanted peace proposals like that offered to Lucy. This is an intriguing moral complexity between David and Lucy. Both have different approaches in handling the violence that threatens and strikes them both.
I also like Coetzee's prose. His writing is simple, his sentences short. I liken it to Hemingway, although I don't know how the comparison would hold against literary analysis. Unlike Ernest, however, Coetzee's prose has more cadence and melody, is more poetic, while still easy to read. This, and it's replete with meaning and interpretation.
An example of that depth is the change in David. He insists he is too old, too close to the ends of his life, for him to learn any lessons, but he does. He becomes more understanding, more compassionate, and more of the father to Lucy he should. I liked witnessing that change, as at first I thought David to be despicable, but later more likable.
This is the second book I've read from the Nobel Prize winning J. M. Coetzee. This was a thoughtful, splendid read. Coetzee has become a favorite writer of mine.
What I like most about this novel is the vividness of post-Apartheid South Africa. It is a place where Africans run rampant in bouts of pillaging and bloodshed. Nothing and no one is safe here, especially in the country moreso than the city. There is little the law can do; even for the most armed and vigilant of whites, becoming a victim of this brutality is only a matter of time. I did not realize that this is the face of South Africa today: Africans thirsty for revenge for years of racial prejudice, and the only refuge for their targets is to flee or be subjugated to unwanted peace proposals like that offered to Lucy. This is an intriguing moral complexity between David and Lucy. Both have different approaches in handling the violence that threatens and strikes them both.
I also like Coetzee's prose. His writing is simple, his sentences short. I liken it to Hemingway, although I don't know how the comparison would hold against literary analysis. Unlike Ernest, however, Coetzee's prose has more cadence and melody, is more poetic, while still easy to read. This, and it's replete with meaning and interpretation.
An example of that depth is the change in David. He insists he is too old, too close to the ends of his life, for him to learn any lessons, but he does. He becomes more understanding, more compassionate, and more of the father to Lucy he should. I liked witnessing that change, as at first I thought David to be despicable, but later more likable.
This is the second book I've read from the Nobel Prize winning J. M. Coetzee. This was a thoughtful, splendid read. Coetzee has become a favorite writer of mine.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Response to the post on Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree
I also read this book, and Fred's comments are spot on.
Louise Rosenblatt said when reading, "the human being is... continuously in transaction" (Making Meaning With Texts, page 3). That means reader and writer are always engaged in conversation, an exchange in which the reader's experience and knowledge influence his or her reading, and the text also affects the reader. This is strongly how I felt when reading Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree: it was as if I was communing with a fellow lover of books, in which our mutual bibliophilism danced.
In addition to revealing his reasons for why he bought the books he did, where he bought them, what he has read and what he thinks about them, and what he hasn't read, Hornby entertains with witty remarks and anecdotes:
Louise Rosenblatt said when reading, "the human being is... continuously in transaction" (Making Meaning With Texts, page 3). That means reader and writer are always engaged in conversation, an exchange in which the reader's experience and knowledge influence his or her reading, and the text also affects the reader. This is strongly how I felt when reading Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree: it was as if I was communing with a fellow lover of books, in which our mutual bibliophilism danced.
In addition to revealing his reasons for why he bought the books he did, where he bought them, what he has read and what he thinks about them, and what he hasn't read, Hornby entertains with witty remarks and anecdotes:
- Reading No Name by Wilkie Collins is like a boxing match. He'd read one paragraph and be knocked out. He'd read twenty or thirty pages, feel as if he'd won, but then have to go to his corner and wipe the blood and sweat off his reading glasses.
- Mark Salzman's True Notebooks was mostly written "naked, covered in aluminum foil, with a towel around his head, sitting in a car."
- Dickens should be the judge of the length of biographies. As a towering literary figure, a biography of Dickens should be around 1000 pages; anyone more important deserves a bigger book, anyone less important deserves a shorter book.
- He uses the Trivial Pursuit system to organize his books.
- He's one of seventy-three people who buy poetry. (Incidentally, I just purchased Tony Hoagland's What Narcissism Means to Me - so make that seventy-four now, Nick).
- Gabriel Zaid, in So Many Books, says it would take fifteen years to read a list of names and authors of all the books ever published. Hornby is tempted to do so because "A good chunk of coming across as educated, after all, is just a matter of knowing who wrote what..."
In addition, Hornby describes the realistic life of a bibliophile, which is refreshing. He admits that "... Boredom and, very occasionally, despair are part of the reading life, after all," reading can vary with your mood, and he has forgotten a lot of what he's read. He quips, "Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events... and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path."
All in all, reading this book is a sharing of the joy of reading: "Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. 'The Magic Flute' v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. 'The Last Supper' v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it."
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Nick Hornby - The Polysyllabic Spree
This is a delightful book---a romp through one man's reading and purchasing of books. Nick Hornby is a bibliophile like those of you who are reading this blog, and it's wonderful to discover such people.
I have not read most of the books referred to in this book, but that's all right: it's the spirit of the writing that matters, a book-lover's delight at the book treasures at his disposal.
Read this book and enjoy the musings of another book-lover!
I have not read most of the books referred to in this book, but that's all right: it's the spirit of the writing that matters, a book-lover's delight at the book treasures at his disposal.
Read this book and enjoy the musings of another book-lover!
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
The Reading Effect of the Harry Potter phenomenon
Have the Harry Potter books increased reading amongst young people? Maybe so, but not as much as has been ballyhooed. In the long run, the influence of the Potter books on young people's reading is negligible.
From the NY Times
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: July 11, 2007
Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.
And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.
From the NY Times
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: July 11, 2007
Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.
And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.
Monday, July 9, 2007
A NOT SO LITERATE REVIEW by Moyna
Fred has insisted that I add to this blog - all about my 'educational' and/or 'philosophical' books that I read! I'm not as "well-read" as Fred, at least not anymore. In my late teens and all through my 20's, my main interest was in science - particularly books on cancer/leukemia and blood. I kept up with all the newest research, reading a lot of the current books on those topics. I had seriously considered a career as a doctor, doing research in leukemia, but I had to choose between 10 years of study or partying...no need to say anything more. When I married Fred, he suggested I read a murder mystery book by Thomas Thompson. I WAS HOOKED!! I read everything he wrote and have been reading murder mysteries ever since. When Thompson died, I had to look for a new author(s), and found 2 that I really enjoy - Patricia Cornwell and Sue Grafton. My review below is on Patricia Cornwell's PREDATOR. It's not a new book, having been published in 2005, but I've just gotten around to reading it. Here goes:
PREDATOR by Patricia Cornwell
One reason I like this writer (as with Sue Grafton) is that she usually writes using the same characters - Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner, being the main one. There is also the same group of characters in her books - Marino, Benton Wesley, Lucy, Rose, etc.
This book was a little different than her others, and I wasn't as enthralled as usual. There were a lot of chapters just a few pages each. It's like her thoughts were scattered & she wrote a small chapter for each thought. And also a lot of characters...I had to read a little slower to keep everyone straight - who was who doing what! It took me 3 days to read rather than my usual 2. I knew though, in the end, everything would tie together and everything would be made clear - and it was!
In this book, Kay has left the head position as chief medical examiner in the state of Virginia and moved to Florida, where she is 2nd in command of a company started by her niece, Lucy. Lucy was a former FBI agent, but found there was just too much red tape, so she left and started her own company...doing pretty much the same forensic work as the FBI. In her new position, Kay doesn't do the autopsies like in previous books, but does more in examining the information to help solve the cases. She also teaches - to help students that believe they want to become forensic pathologists.
This book had the murders (how else would it be a murder mystery?), but you had to really work on "who did it?" You think it might be this one person, and then you think 'no,' it has to be this person, or wait..., this person might be working with this person doing the killings... The story takes place in Hollywood, Florida, around where Kay lives, and also in Walden, Massachusetts, where Kay's lover Wesley Benton lives. You wonder as you read how the two areas will tie all the murders together, but you know it will be done.
It begins with an old case being brought to Kay's attention; it was ruled a suicide, but there are those that think it was murder. On examining evidence, it leads to more questions, and other people that have "disappeared" and others being murdered. Kay and her crew continue to examine the evidence, with all of its twists & turns, leading to more & more questions, until the evidence begins to bring everything together - with a twist to the ending that I didn't see coming! The last 75 pages made reading the first 350 or so pages worth it! Another great ending to a Patricia Cornwell book! I am one - I'm admitting it - that for about 25% of the time, will read the ending before I start the book. That way, I can see more clearly how things are done to reach the end. I didn't do it this time, and was quite happy I didn't. If I had known the ending beforehand, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the book with all of its short, what I consider scattered-thoughts, chapters.
One last thing: besides the main story, there is also a secondary story. It's about a man named Joe Amos who is on a fellowship with Lucy's company. It's about all the things he's into to try to ''get-ahead..." Marino, the top-notch cop, figures out what Joe is up to, and gets him in the end!
This book is a good (not as exciting & great as some of her others) read if you're into murder mysteries. If you like them, you will more than likely know Patricia Cornwell.
PREDATOR by Patricia Cornwell
One reason I like this writer (as with Sue Grafton) is that she usually writes using the same characters - Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner, being the main one. There is also the same group of characters in her books - Marino, Benton Wesley, Lucy, Rose, etc.
This book was a little different than her others, and I wasn't as enthralled as usual. There were a lot of chapters just a few pages each. It's like her thoughts were scattered & she wrote a small chapter for each thought. And also a lot of characters...I had to read a little slower to keep everyone straight - who was who doing what! It took me 3 days to read rather than my usual 2. I knew though, in the end, everything would tie together and everything would be made clear - and it was!
In this book, Kay has left the head position as chief medical examiner in the state of Virginia and moved to Florida, where she is 2nd in command of a company started by her niece, Lucy. Lucy was a former FBI agent, but found there was just too much red tape, so she left and started her own company...doing pretty much the same forensic work as the FBI. In her new position, Kay doesn't do the autopsies like in previous books, but does more in examining the information to help solve the cases. She also teaches - to help students that believe they want to become forensic pathologists.
This book had the murders (how else would it be a murder mystery?), but you had to really work on "who did it?" You think it might be this one person, and then you think 'no,' it has to be this person, or wait..., this person might be working with this person doing the killings... The story takes place in Hollywood, Florida, around where Kay lives, and also in Walden, Massachusetts, where Kay's lover Wesley Benton lives. You wonder as you read how the two areas will tie all the murders together, but you know it will be done.
It begins with an old case being brought to Kay's attention; it was ruled a suicide, but there are those that think it was murder. On examining evidence, it leads to more questions, and other people that have "disappeared" and others being murdered. Kay and her crew continue to examine the evidence, with all of its twists & turns, leading to more & more questions, until the evidence begins to bring everything together - with a twist to the ending that I didn't see coming! The last 75 pages made reading the first 350 or so pages worth it! Another great ending to a Patricia Cornwell book! I am one - I'm admitting it - that for about 25% of the time, will read the ending before I start the book. That way, I can see more clearly how things are done to reach the end. I didn't do it this time, and was quite happy I didn't. If I had known the ending beforehand, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the book with all of its short, what I consider scattered-thoughts, chapters.
One last thing: besides the main story, there is also a secondary story. It's about a man named Joe Amos who is on a fellowship with Lucy's company. It's about all the things he's into to try to ''get-ahead..." Marino, the top-notch cop, figures out what Joe is up to, and gets him in the end!
This book is a good (not as exciting & great as some of her others) read if you're into murder mysteries. If you like them, you will more than likely know Patricia Cornwell.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
This Month in Books - The Gnu's Room - Auburn
July 2, 1961
In Ketchum, Idaho, the winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, Ernest Hemingway, (The Old Man and the Sea) dies at 62 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Explaining how he worked: “When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes, and that is my idea.”
July 4, 1845
Henry David Thoreau begins his 26-month stay at Walden Pond: “I went to the woods because I wished to…see if I could learn what it {life} had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
July 4, 1855
Walt Whitman, 36, publishes Leaves of Grass at his own expense. The book does not sell.
July 7, 1535
Sir Thomas More (Utopia) is beheaded for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as the supreme authority of the Catholic Church.
July 8, 1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley (one of the major English Romantic poets), 29, is drowned while sailing with a friend off Viareggio (north of Tuscany, Italy) and is cremated on the beach onto which his body is washed. Strangely, his heart will not burn. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein) carries it with her in a silken shroud for the rest of her life.
July 16, 1951
Little, Brown publishes J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
July 20, 1869
Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad is published. In chapter 19 he quips: “They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.”
July 24, 1940
A former bank teller and bookkeeper at the First National Bank of Austin, Texas, William Sydney Porter, better known as short story writer O. Henry, is released from an Ohio penitentiary after serving three years of a five-year sentence for embezzlement.
July 25, 1914
The day before leaving Barcelona for the United States, 11-year-old Anais Nin (pronounced ana-ESSE neen) makes the first entry in her diary: “I am sad to think we are leaving a country that has been like a mother and a lucky charm to me.” Except for a four-month gap in 1917, she will continue the diary for the rest of her life.
July 30, 1918
Alfred Joyce Kilmer, 31, prolific American poet, journalist, literary critic, lecturer and editor, is killed in fighting near Seringes, France during World War I.
In Ketchum, Idaho, the winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, Ernest Hemingway, (The Old Man and the Sea) dies at 62 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Explaining how he worked: “When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes, and that is my idea.”
July 4, 1845
Henry David Thoreau begins his 26-month stay at Walden Pond: “I went to the woods because I wished to…see if I could learn what it {life} had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
July 4, 1855
Walt Whitman, 36, publishes Leaves of Grass at his own expense. The book does not sell.
July 7, 1535
Sir Thomas More (Utopia) is beheaded for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as the supreme authority of the Catholic Church.
July 8, 1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley (one of the major English Romantic poets), 29, is drowned while sailing with a friend off Viareggio (north of Tuscany, Italy) and is cremated on the beach onto which his body is washed. Strangely, his heart will not burn. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein) carries it with her in a silken shroud for the rest of her life.
July 16, 1951
Little, Brown publishes J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
July 20, 1869
Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad is published. In chapter 19 he quips: “They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.”
July 24, 1940
A former bank teller and bookkeeper at the First National Bank of Austin, Texas, William Sydney Porter, better known as short story writer O. Henry, is released from an Ohio penitentiary after serving three years of a five-year sentence for embezzlement.
July 25, 1914
The day before leaving Barcelona for the United States, 11-year-old Anais Nin (pronounced ana-ESSE neen) makes the first entry in her diary: “I am sad to think we are leaving a country that has been like a mother and a lucky charm to me.” Except for a four-month gap in 1917, she will continue the diary for the rest of her life.
July 30, 1918
Alfred Joyce Kilmer, 31, prolific American poet, journalist, literary critic, lecturer and editor, is killed in fighting near Seringes, France during World War I.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Response to Mike
Mr. Mike---
Let me first quote from a book called The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby.
"I don't want anyone writing to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intensions are good. It's my money. And I bet you do it too."
I couldn't say it better myself. If I buy books impulsively, if I buy books that I know that I will probably never read, then hey, what the heck? Books are meant for reading. But for me, books are also art objects---things of adoration to have adoring your walls to look at and admire even if you never read them. That's my philosophy, and I'm sticking to it.
Yes, you did talk me out of purchasing those Lincoln books in California, and that was a good thing because I would, in fact, never have read them and would probably never appreciate seeing them on my shelf as you would. So you saved me there, and I applaud you for it.
OK. So there. Silly me. I admit it.
All kidding aside, I'm glad that you have joined this blog. I hope you continue to post, about books your reading and any other jostling as you see needed!
Let me first quote from a book called The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby.
"I don't want anyone writing to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intensions are good. It's my money. And I bet you do it too."
I couldn't say it better myself. If I buy books impulsively, if I buy books that I know that I will probably never read, then hey, what the heck? Books are meant for reading. But for me, books are also art objects---things of adoration to have adoring your walls to look at and admire even if you never read them. That's my philosophy, and I'm sticking to it.
Yes, you did talk me out of purchasing those Lincoln books in California, and that was a good thing because I would, in fact, never have read them and would probably never appreciate seeing them on my shelf as you would. So you saved me there, and I applaud you for it.
OK. So there. Silly me. I admit it.
All kidding aside, I'm glad that you have joined this blog. I hope you continue to post, about books your reading and any other jostling as you see needed!
Friday, July 6, 2007
1st Post
This is my first comment on Mr. Hudson's blog. I have no idea that my comment will ever be read--Mr. Hudson is a very busy man--but here it is.
The Hudsons are exemplary folks, although Mr. Hudson has a tendancy towards collecting books which he never intends to read. Mr. Hudson appears to suffer from a condition wherin one is struck by a compulsion to purchase books whenever certain books that he is on the look-out for becomes available, regardless if he ever intends to read them or not. It is a fairly common malady among readers, and especially those of a serious and intellectual nature, to buy books that one either imagines himself enjoying reading or buys simply out of the sheer orgasmic compulsion of having spent years looking for a book and all of a sudden finally seeing it available on a shelf. A true and recent example is that I, personally, was able, via the internet, to talk Mr. Hudson out of purchasing a serious and voluminous set of books which he had found at a great deal but which both of us doubted he would ever actually read. Nevermind that the set was on sale at a great price; nevermind that this particular set is becomming harder and harder to find in good shape; nevermind that the set he had found was in good shape without any water marks or outward signs of serious wear--no matter the price, if he had no intention of actually plowing through the set then I (and he) considered it money wasted.
I am in no way trying to imply that Mr. Hudson is a "phony" reader, one who buys and buys books yet never reads them. Mr. Hudson reads a lot, more so than many of us. Yet, sadly, he--as aforementioned--suffers greatly from the compulsion to buy almost any book that he can in his mind justify buying, usually on the spur of the moment and without much regard as to the cost. Imagine an "impulse buy" section of books at a check-out in a store, and you can bet on Mr. Hudson clearing the racks in rapid order. As a fellow book buyer, I am proud to have been in a postion to have at least once in my lifetime talked him out of a wasted purchase.
With that said, I once again want to praise Mr. (and the more even-minded Mrs.) Hudson's generosity, intellect, and overall humanity.
Now, if anyone can please put me in contact with someone who can put in my hands the as-yet-unpublished short stories of JD Salinger "An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" and "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans" I will be willing to pay a handsome price, as I have been wanting those two items on my shelf of envy for many, many years...
The Hudsons are exemplary folks, although Mr. Hudson has a tendancy towards collecting books which he never intends to read. Mr. Hudson appears to suffer from a condition wherin one is struck by a compulsion to purchase books whenever certain books that he is on the look-out for becomes available, regardless if he ever intends to read them or not. It is a fairly common malady among readers, and especially those of a serious and intellectual nature, to buy books that one either imagines himself enjoying reading or buys simply out of the sheer orgasmic compulsion of having spent years looking for a book and all of a sudden finally seeing it available on a shelf. A true and recent example is that I, personally, was able, via the internet, to talk Mr. Hudson out of purchasing a serious and voluminous set of books which he had found at a great deal but which both of us doubted he would ever actually read. Nevermind that the set was on sale at a great price; nevermind that this particular set is becomming harder and harder to find in good shape; nevermind that the set he had found was in good shape without any water marks or outward signs of serious wear--no matter the price, if he had no intention of actually plowing through the set then I (and he) considered it money wasted.
I am in no way trying to imply that Mr. Hudson is a "phony" reader, one who buys and buys books yet never reads them. Mr. Hudson reads a lot, more so than many of us. Yet, sadly, he--as aforementioned--suffers greatly from the compulsion to buy almost any book that he can in his mind justify buying, usually on the spur of the moment and without much regard as to the cost. Imagine an "impulse buy" section of books at a check-out in a store, and you can bet on Mr. Hudson clearing the racks in rapid order. As a fellow book buyer, I am proud to have been in a postion to have at least once in my lifetime talked him out of a wasted purchase.
With that said, I once again want to praise Mr. (and the more even-minded Mrs.) Hudson's generosity, intellect, and overall humanity.
Now, if anyone can please put me in contact with someone who can put in my hands the as-yet-unpublished short stories of JD Salinger "An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" and "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans" I will be willing to pay a handsome price, as I have been wanting those two items on my shelf of envy for many, many years...
Thursday, July 5, 2007
The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen
This book purports to reveal how the mind of the average American male works. With that mission, the unnamed narrator is a twenty-something male who works an unimportant job, caring only about physical satisfaction from his girlfriends and other girls, playing video games, and hanging with friends. He does not care about a career, avoids commitment in his relationships, and candidly expresses whatever he thinks about anything and anyone, which is often crude and debasing. Basically, he is driven by his primal and selfish urges, the sort of male that men aren't supposed to be.
It is hard to figure this book. The narrator's honest, brutal, and unrepressed sexual feelings and actions incessantly barrage you, filling every chapter and every molecule of this narrator. It gets trite quickly, yet remains funny and appealing too. I found myself relating to the narrator's thoughts and reminiscing about similar experiences. I laughed aloud. But there is also so much of this stuff that the narrator appears cartoonish. Is this what the average American male really is like? Or is there something more important going on?
I did some reading about the book, and this is the debate. It could be argued it's the kind of story with the kind of guy for keg-chugging, dim-witted, prankish college guys. It would thus have little literary value. Indeed, CNBC reported that print publications would not review the book because of its raunchiness. Harper Perennial then launched a marketing campaign by showing short videos on YouTube, a site that appeals to young people like college students, which drastically increased sells and led to multiple new printings. Hmmm... using the Internet to promote a book and more people end up reading - I wonder what Andrew Keen would say?
As much of a pig slop as the book can seem, it also could be a response to the male mold that culture has fashioned for guys, a male who should be sensitive, a good listener, and thinking about the relationship's future (or just thinking), someone who does chores and errands and stands in line while she buys her nineteenth pair of shoes, all so he can watch a few hours of football. This is the type of male Dr. Phil and Oprah would approve: he exists to obey and make his woman happy. As such, I don't know what kind of message Kultgen has. I think there is a lot of truth to the notion that this is what men are really like, and it is tempting to say this male is endearing and many would want to unhinge this beast inside and be this male. But there may not be a place in our culture for this male. Can such a guy really exist and still get married and not change? Or, should he exist and is culture right about how guys should act and think? I think the novel's ending has an answer that gives it its power, perhaps a resounding, but reluctant and regrettful, goodbye to primal malehood.
It is hard to figure this book. The narrator's honest, brutal, and unrepressed sexual feelings and actions incessantly barrage you, filling every chapter and every molecule of this narrator. It gets trite quickly, yet remains funny and appealing too. I found myself relating to the narrator's thoughts and reminiscing about similar experiences. I laughed aloud. But there is also so much of this stuff that the narrator appears cartoonish. Is this what the average American male really is like? Or is there something more important going on?
I did some reading about the book, and this is the debate. It could be argued it's the kind of story with the kind of guy for keg-chugging, dim-witted, prankish college guys. It would thus have little literary value. Indeed, CNBC reported that print publications would not review the book because of its raunchiness. Harper Perennial then launched a marketing campaign by showing short videos on YouTube, a site that appeals to young people like college students, which drastically increased sells and led to multiple new printings. Hmmm... using the Internet to promote a book and more people end up reading - I wonder what Andrew Keen would say?
As much of a pig slop as the book can seem, it also could be a response to the male mold that culture has fashioned for guys, a male who should be sensitive, a good listener, and thinking about the relationship's future (or just thinking), someone who does chores and errands and stands in line while she buys her nineteenth pair of shoes, all so he can watch a few hours of football. This is the type of male Dr. Phil and Oprah would approve: he exists to obey and make his woman happy. As such, I don't know what kind of message Kultgen has. I think there is a lot of truth to the notion that this is what men are really like, and it is tempting to say this male is endearing and many would want to unhinge this beast inside and be this male. But there may not be a place in our culture for this male. Can such a guy really exist and still get married and not change? Or, should he exist and is culture right about how guys should act and think? I think the novel's ending has an answer that gives it its power, perhaps a resounding, but reluctant and regrettful, goodbye to primal malehood.
Friday, June 29, 2007
New York Times Review of The Cult of the Amateur
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: June 29, 2007
Digital utopians have heralded the dawn of an era in which Web 2.0 — distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing — ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees. Yet as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen points out in his provocative new book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” Web 2.0 has a dark side as well.
Catherine Betts
Andrew Keen
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture
By Andrew Keen
228 pages.
Doubleday. $22.95.
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”
This book, which grew out of a controversial essay published last year by The Weekly Standard, is a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the “wisdom of the crowd.” Although Mr. Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book — to deliver some generic, moralistic rants against Internet evils like online gambling and online pornography — he writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred.
For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century.
Mr. Keen also points out that Google search results — which answer “search queries not with what is most true or most reliable, but merely what is most popular” — can be manipulated by “Google bombing” (which “involves simply linking a large number of sites to a certain page” to “raise the ranking of any given site in Google’s search results”). And he cites a recent Wall Street Journal article reporting that hot lists on social networking Web sites are often shaped by a small number of users: that at Digg.com, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible at one point for submitting one-third of the postings on the home page; and at Netscape.com, a single user was behind 217 stories over a two-week period, or 13 percent of all stories that reached the most popular list in that period.
Because Web 2.0 celebrates the “noble amateur” over the expert, and because many search engines and Web sites tout popularity rather than reliability, Mr. Keen notes, it’s easy for misinformation and rumors to proliferate in cyberspace. For instance, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (which relies upon volunteer editors and contributors) gets way more traffic than the Web site run by Encyclopedia Britannica (which relies upon experts and scholars), even though the interactive format employed by Wikipedia opens it to postings that are inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent. This year it was revealed that a contributor using the name Essjay, who had edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people given the authority to arbitrate disputes between writers, was a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, not the tenured professor he claimed to be.
Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it’s hard for users to be certain of their identity — or their agendas. Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information. For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.” What’s more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well.
Although Mr. Keen’s objections to the publishing and distribution tools the Web provides to aspiring artists and writers sound churlish and elitist — he calls publish-on-demand services “just cheaper, more accessible versions of vanity presses where the untalented go to purchase the veneer of publication” — he is eloquent on the fallout that free, user-generated materials is having on traditional media.
Mr. Keen argues that the democratized Web’s penchant for mash-ups, remixes and cut-and-paste jobs threaten not just copyright laws but also the very ideas of authorship and intellectual property. He observes that as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines and television news to the Web, organizations with the expertise and resources to finance investigative and foreign reporting face more and more business challenges. And he suggests that as CD sales fall (in the face of digital piracy and single-song downloads) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or worldwide recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.
“What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,” Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”
Published: June 29, 2007
Digital utopians have heralded the dawn of an era in which Web 2.0 — distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing — ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees. Yet as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen points out in his provocative new book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” Web 2.0 has a dark side as well.
Catherine Betts
Andrew Keen
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture
By Andrew Keen
228 pages.
Doubleday. $22.95.
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”
This book, which grew out of a controversial essay published last year by The Weekly Standard, is a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the “wisdom of the crowd.” Although Mr. Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book — to deliver some generic, moralistic rants against Internet evils like online gambling and online pornography — he writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred.
For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century.
Mr. Keen also points out that Google search results — which answer “search queries not with what is most true or most reliable, but merely what is most popular” — can be manipulated by “Google bombing” (which “involves simply linking a large number of sites to a certain page” to “raise the ranking of any given site in Google’s search results”). And he cites a recent Wall Street Journal article reporting that hot lists on social networking Web sites are often shaped by a small number of users: that at Digg.com, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible at one point for submitting one-third of the postings on the home page; and at Netscape.com, a single user was behind 217 stories over a two-week period, or 13 percent of all stories that reached the most popular list in that period.
Because Web 2.0 celebrates the “noble amateur” over the expert, and because many search engines and Web sites tout popularity rather than reliability, Mr. Keen notes, it’s easy for misinformation and rumors to proliferate in cyberspace. For instance, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (which relies upon volunteer editors and contributors) gets way more traffic than the Web site run by Encyclopedia Britannica (which relies upon experts and scholars), even though the interactive format employed by Wikipedia opens it to postings that are inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent. This year it was revealed that a contributor using the name Essjay, who had edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people given the authority to arbitrate disputes between writers, was a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, not the tenured professor he claimed to be.
Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it’s hard for users to be certain of their identity — or their agendas. Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information. For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.” What’s more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well.
Although Mr. Keen’s objections to the publishing and distribution tools the Web provides to aspiring artists and writers sound churlish and elitist — he calls publish-on-demand services “just cheaper, more accessible versions of vanity presses where the untalented go to purchase the veneer of publication” — he is eloquent on the fallout that free, user-generated materials is having on traditional media.
Mr. Keen argues that the democratized Web’s penchant for mash-ups, remixes and cut-and-paste jobs threaten not just copyright laws but also the very ideas of authorship and intellectual property. He observes that as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines and television news to the Web, organizations with the expertise and resources to finance investigative and foreign reporting face more and more business challenges. And he suggests that as CD sales fall (in the face of digital piracy and single-song downloads) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or worldwide recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.
“What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,” Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Litblogs Article
After reading Fred's post on The Cult of the Amateur and thinking about the article on litblogs he posted a while back, I am intrigued by this article from Village Voice. Amidst the discussion on how the Internet is affecting our culture and the worry that books are an unfortunate victim, it is interesting to think specifically about the proliferation of litblogs and their importance. I am still undecided if the decline in newspaper book reviews and reading in general, in favor of litblogs that appeal to casual word of mouth - and, some might say, unfortunately, populist fiction too - is good or bad.
This article says that people are still reading, just that the medium has become the Internet. Indeed, litbloggers even write book reviews for newspapers, as if literary blogs have become a farm system. I also find interesting that authors and publishers are capitalizing on this trend. There is a Virtual Book Tour, where authors make appearances on up to fifteen blogs in one day, and publishers even advertise on litblogs.
Book Smart
Could cyberspace be the novel's best friend? Litblogs take off—and grow up.
by Joy Press
The media have spent so much time gnashing their teeth over the influence of political bloggers that barely anyone has noticed something equally convulsive happening in the book realm. Despite the on-going panic about a contraction in both the audience for serious literature and the amount of mainstream print coverage books receive, literary conversation is erupting all over the Internet in the form of litblogs. Multiplying like the tribbles on Star Trek, these online journals suggest that reading is far from a dying pastime.
Literati are increasingly turning to the blogs for discussion, gossip, analysis, and a sense of community. Inevitably, publishers have noticed the power of these informal networks to generate word-of-mouth buzz—the holy grail of marketing—and are looking for ways to harness it. In turn, many bloggerati are on the verge of becoming that contradiction in terms, the professional enthusiast. So what happens now, when these amateurs are faced with the chance to wield influence and become insiders?
It takes five minutes to create a blog, and even the most successful litbloggers say they embarked on the whole thing casually—a kind of public doodle. Maybe they wanted to alert friends to cool articles and reviews, which is how Jessa Crispin of Bookslut started, or distract themselves from the impending war in Iraq, like Brooklyn blogger Maud Newton. Maybe they were bored or just plain procrastinating. But that non-professionalism is a big part of the appeal to readers—the off-the-cuff intimacy, the ornery opinions, the bloggers' ability to say whatever they think without worrying about editors reining them in.
"What people look for in a book blog is someone whose taste aligns with theirs and who can lead them to some good recommendations," says Crispin, a former librarian for Planned Parenthood in Chicago, "and that's where their power lies." Last month, a British survey suggested that nearly a third of those under 35 considered personal word of mouth the most important motivation for buying a book; only 6 percent based their purchase on ads. Over the years there have been plenty of attempts to bottle this transaction—for instance, amazon.com's "personalized" suggestions made by a computer. But blogs are much closer to the real thing. Delight and disappointment are transmitted in ways more akin to dinner-table banter than to a verdict delivered from on high.
"Publicists take note—people who love books are making pilgrimages to our sites and they're taking our word for things and buying books we recommend," wrote Mark Sarvas of the Elegant Variation in an online essay last year. An L.A.-based screenwriter with a novel in the works, Sarvas started his blog impulsively in 2003. But he began to see it as a forum for championing unsung writers. Now Sarvas wants to prove that these sites have clout. He has recruited 19 fellow bloggers to launch the Litblog Co-op, a virtual collective stretching across the country that will bestow attention on four books a year—literary books that would not, Sarvas promises, get review attention otherwise.
Sarvas is only one of several entrepreneurial minds eager to channel the power of the litblog. Kevin Smokler, editor of the forthcoming Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, founded the now defunct site Central Booking in the '90s. His current side project is the Virtual Book Tour, in which authors spend one day making "appearances" on as many as 15 blogs. Sometimes they take over the site as guest bloggers; other times they are interviewed or contribute essays. (Smokler charges $1,500 for a one-day tour.) While he generally gets paid by the publisher or author, he says the host bloggers get no money—"just a free copy of the book, and if they're writers themselves, they get contact with the New York publishing industry. Paying them would open up an ethical hornet's nest, since there's no way we can expect bloggers to be impartial if we're paying them." Although Smokler says bloggers are under no obligation to praise these guests, Crispin chose not to participate because "to me, Virtual Book Tour means saying you give your stamp of approval to this book, even if you don't particularly like it." Sarvas, who met Smokler on a blogging panel, has hosted three tours and sees it as a pretty informal arrangement: "My feeling was, how much damage can someone do to my reputation in one day?"
Inspired by the promotional possibilities of an online book tour, Southern novelist and self-proclaimed "hype hag" Karin Gillespie launched her own informal Girlfriend Cyber Circuit. It consists of 21 female writers with blogs, each of whom agrees to host and publicize two or three fellow Girlfriends a month to bump up sales and name recognition. Gillespie admits that she doesn't always love the books she endorses on her site but says, "I would never say if I didn't like something!"
"Everyone's starting to grapple with those ethical issues," according to Ron Hogan of Beatrice, the literary-zine-turned-blog that started in 1994, way before the current wave. "It's that old punk rock question of authenticity versus assimilation." Hogan has spent a lot of time mulling over this stuff, having worked as a book reviewer in the '90s at the fledgling amazon.com. "With Amazon's increasing corporatization, we effectively became catalog copywriters. We knew we were there to sell books and we were grounded in that reality that even when you're in the media, the marketing and publicity departments are coming to you because they want to get featured. That's part of the equation for me, but it won't control my editorial decisions." He does worry that it's especially hard for litbloggers—almost always one-person operations—to erect a firewall between themselves and those who want something from them.
Publishers aren't just leaving it to the bloggers themselves: A few are trying to generate buzz by any means necessary. At the far end of the spectrum is viral-marketing company BzzAgent, which uses volunteers to covertly make recommendations to friends and create warm fuzzy feelings about literary novels like Meghan Daum's The Quality of Life Report and Adam Davies's The Frog King. Then there are some recent ads running on blogs, paid for by publishers, that try to tap into good word of mouth by linking to other blogs that have said positive things about a book (as in a recent blog ad for Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore) or to good reviews in print media.
Everyone has drawn his or her own ethical line in the sand. Bookslut declined to join either the Litblog Co-op or Virtual Book Tours, but it is one of the few litblogs with ads, many of them for small-press books. Crispin says she briefly panicked when she realized she wanted to write about a book that has an ad on her site, but then shrugged it off. "If people think I'm going to hawk a book in return for a $90 ad, they should probably read another blog! I'm glad we waited to take ads until now, though, because at first, we were so thrilled that someone sent us a free book that our choices were dictated by that." It can be a heady experience for a publishing outsider to be showered with advance copies, courted by publicists, and offered paid work in print media.
So many litbloggers are now writing book reviews in mainstream newspapers that Hogan jokingly suggests these sites now act as a farm team, just as fanzines once did. It's an idea that irritates Sarvas immensely: "I hope the Co-op can challenge the supremacy of print." He points out the positive effects of widespread blog admiration for a quirky novel such as Sam Lipsyte's Home Land, which became a darling of the realm earlier this year. "Its Amazon rating climbed through the roof while the blogs were covering it," says Sarvas, though he admits that "it also got reviews in some places like The New York Times, so it's hard to tell the direct influence of the blogs."
Lipsyte became aware of this blog love for Home Land during his book tour. "Bloggers in different cities showed up at readings and then wrote about it. I kept calling my publisher from the road excitedly and telling them all these people were writing about me, but I think the publicist thought I was crazy." He sees it as a case of good timing: "Bloggers started realizing that they could connect to each other and create a momentum"—just what the Litblog Co-op hopes to crystallize.
Several of the most established book sites—Maud Newton, Bookslut, and MobyLives—are not participating in the Co-op. Newton says she declined because she's already juggling a full load among her blog, a novel in progress, freelance book reviewing, and her day job. But she also argues that "the Co-op does something like what the media do—it creates a big push for a book. If their goal is to prove the influence of blogs to publishers, I think they'll succeed—but it's not a goal I share myself." Instead, she says she prefers the way ideas slowly percolate down to the reader, independent of publishing dates and industry agendas.
Crispin, who expanded Bookslut into a full-fledged webzine with 40 contributors, says she's not even sure what all the fuss is about. She describes the litblogs as a kind of parasite, feeding off the mainstream media. "They aren't generally about content—they just link to it. So if something is dominating the print book reviews, that's what the blogs have to work with." This creates the danger of a catch-22 scenario: Newspapers attribute decreasing book sections to shrinking ad sales. And if publishers begin to funnel more of their marketing budget toward the Internet, print media coverage could decline further, leaving the bloggers with even fewer book reviews to comment on.
An editor at feed.com back in the Internet boom days of the '90s, Lipsyte believes the new wave has a very different agenda from the Web pioneers who founded content-heavy sites like Feed and Suck. "These bloggers are not so evangelistic about the medium," he says. "For them, it's not about using technology to create a new world. It's about creating a space that isn't available elsewhere to talk about the thing they care about—which happens to be books."
We read the best of the litblogs for the way they sift through the media ether, make interesting juxtapositions, provoke intelligent conversation, and connect lesser-known writers with an eager audience. In an era when books have been pushed to the margins of the cultural conversation, maybe that's more than enough...
This article says that people are still reading, just that the medium has become the Internet. Indeed, litbloggers even write book reviews for newspapers, as if literary blogs have become a farm system. I also find interesting that authors and publishers are capitalizing on this trend. There is a Virtual Book Tour, where authors make appearances on up to fifteen blogs in one day, and publishers even advertise on litblogs.
Book Smart
Could cyberspace be the novel's best friend? Litblogs take off—and grow up.
by Joy Press
The media have spent so much time gnashing their teeth over the influence of political bloggers that barely anyone has noticed something equally convulsive happening in the book realm. Despite the on-going panic about a contraction in both the audience for serious literature and the amount of mainstream print coverage books receive, literary conversation is erupting all over the Internet in the form of litblogs. Multiplying like the tribbles on Star Trek, these online journals suggest that reading is far from a dying pastime.
Literati are increasingly turning to the blogs for discussion, gossip, analysis, and a sense of community. Inevitably, publishers have noticed the power of these informal networks to generate word-of-mouth buzz—the holy grail of marketing—and are looking for ways to harness it. In turn, many bloggerati are on the verge of becoming that contradiction in terms, the professional enthusiast. So what happens now, when these amateurs are faced with the chance to wield influence and become insiders?
It takes five minutes to create a blog, and even the most successful litbloggers say they embarked on the whole thing casually—a kind of public doodle. Maybe they wanted to alert friends to cool articles and reviews, which is how Jessa Crispin of Bookslut started, or distract themselves from the impending war in Iraq, like Brooklyn blogger Maud Newton. Maybe they were bored or just plain procrastinating. But that non-professionalism is a big part of the appeal to readers—the off-the-cuff intimacy, the ornery opinions, the bloggers' ability to say whatever they think without worrying about editors reining them in.
"What people look for in a book blog is someone whose taste aligns with theirs and who can lead them to some good recommendations," says Crispin, a former librarian for Planned Parenthood in Chicago, "and that's where their power lies." Last month, a British survey suggested that nearly a third of those under 35 considered personal word of mouth the most important motivation for buying a book; only 6 percent based their purchase on ads. Over the years there have been plenty of attempts to bottle this transaction—for instance, amazon.com's "personalized" suggestions made by a computer. But blogs are much closer to the real thing. Delight and disappointment are transmitted in ways more akin to dinner-table banter than to a verdict delivered from on high.
"Publicists take note—people who love books are making pilgrimages to our sites and they're taking our word for things and buying books we recommend," wrote Mark Sarvas of the Elegant Variation in an online essay last year. An L.A.-based screenwriter with a novel in the works, Sarvas started his blog impulsively in 2003. But he began to see it as a forum for championing unsung writers. Now Sarvas wants to prove that these sites have clout. He has recruited 19 fellow bloggers to launch the Litblog Co-op, a virtual collective stretching across the country that will bestow attention on four books a year—literary books that would not, Sarvas promises, get review attention otherwise.
Sarvas is only one of several entrepreneurial minds eager to channel the power of the litblog. Kevin Smokler, editor of the forthcoming Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, founded the now defunct site Central Booking in the '90s. His current side project is the Virtual Book Tour, in which authors spend one day making "appearances" on as many as 15 blogs. Sometimes they take over the site as guest bloggers; other times they are interviewed or contribute essays. (Smokler charges $1,500 for a one-day tour.) While he generally gets paid by the publisher or author, he says the host bloggers get no money—"just a free copy of the book, and if they're writers themselves, they get contact with the New York publishing industry. Paying them would open up an ethical hornet's nest, since there's no way we can expect bloggers to be impartial if we're paying them." Although Smokler says bloggers are under no obligation to praise these guests, Crispin chose not to participate because "to me, Virtual Book Tour means saying you give your stamp of approval to this book, even if you don't particularly like it." Sarvas, who met Smokler on a blogging panel, has hosted three tours and sees it as a pretty informal arrangement: "My feeling was, how much damage can someone do to my reputation in one day?"
Inspired by the promotional possibilities of an online book tour, Southern novelist and self-proclaimed "hype hag" Karin Gillespie launched her own informal Girlfriend Cyber Circuit. It consists of 21 female writers with blogs, each of whom agrees to host and publicize two or three fellow Girlfriends a month to bump up sales and name recognition. Gillespie admits that she doesn't always love the books she endorses on her site but says, "I would never say if I didn't like something!"
"Everyone's starting to grapple with those ethical issues," according to Ron Hogan of Beatrice, the literary-zine-turned-blog that started in 1994, way before the current wave. "It's that old punk rock question of authenticity versus assimilation." Hogan has spent a lot of time mulling over this stuff, having worked as a book reviewer in the '90s at the fledgling amazon.com. "With Amazon's increasing corporatization, we effectively became catalog copywriters. We knew we were there to sell books and we were grounded in that reality that even when you're in the media, the marketing and publicity departments are coming to you because they want to get featured. That's part of the equation for me, but it won't control my editorial decisions." He does worry that it's especially hard for litbloggers—almost always one-person operations—to erect a firewall between themselves and those who want something from them.
Publishers aren't just leaving it to the bloggers themselves: A few are trying to generate buzz by any means necessary. At the far end of the spectrum is viral-marketing company BzzAgent, which uses volunteers to covertly make recommendations to friends and create warm fuzzy feelings about literary novels like Meghan Daum's The Quality of Life Report and Adam Davies's The Frog King. Then there are some recent ads running on blogs, paid for by publishers, that try to tap into good word of mouth by linking to other blogs that have said positive things about a book (as in a recent blog ad for Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore) or to good reviews in print media.
Everyone has drawn his or her own ethical line in the sand. Bookslut declined to join either the Litblog Co-op or Virtual Book Tours, but it is one of the few litblogs with ads, many of them for small-press books. Crispin says she briefly panicked when she realized she wanted to write about a book that has an ad on her site, but then shrugged it off. "If people think I'm going to hawk a book in return for a $90 ad, they should probably read another blog! I'm glad we waited to take ads until now, though, because at first, we were so thrilled that someone sent us a free book that our choices were dictated by that." It can be a heady experience for a publishing outsider to be showered with advance copies, courted by publicists, and offered paid work in print media.
So many litbloggers are now writing book reviews in mainstream newspapers that Hogan jokingly suggests these sites now act as a farm team, just as fanzines once did. It's an idea that irritates Sarvas immensely: "I hope the Co-op can challenge the supremacy of print." He points out the positive effects of widespread blog admiration for a quirky novel such as Sam Lipsyte's Home Land, which became a darling of the realm earlier this year. "Its Amazon rating climbed through the roof while the blogs were covering it," says Sarvas, though he admits that "it also got reviews in some places like The New York Times, so it's hard to tell the direct influence of the blogs."
Lipsyte became aware of this blog love for Home Land during his book tour. "Bloggers in different cities showed up at readings and then wrote about it. I kept calling my publisher from the road excitedly and telling them all these people were writing about me, but I think the publicist thought I was crazy." He sees it as a case of good timing: "Bloggers started realizing that they could connect to each other and create a momentum"—just what the Litblog Co-op hopes to crystallize.
Several of the most established book sites—Maud Newton, Bookslut, and MobyLives—are not participating in the Co-op. Newton says she declined because she's already juggling a full load among her blog, a novel in progress, freelance book reviewing, and her day job. But she also argues that "the Co-op does something like what the media do—it creates a big push for a book. If their goal is to prove the influence of blogs to publishers, I think they'll succeed—but it's not a goal I share myself." Instead, she says she prefers the way ideas slowly percolate down to the reader, independent of publishing dates and industry agendas.
Crispin, who expanded Bookslut into a full-fledged webzine with 40 contributors, says she's not even sure what all the fuss is about. She describes the litblogs as a kind of parasite, feeding off the mainstream media. "They aren't generally about content—they just link to it. So if something is dominating the print book reviews, that's what the blogs have to work with." This creates the danger of a catch-22 scenario: Newspapers attribute decreasing book sections to shrinking ad sales. And if publishers begin to funnel more of their marketing budget toward the Internet, print media coverage could decline further, leaving the bloggers with even fewer book reviews to comment on.
An editor at feed.com back in the Internet boom days of the '90s, Lipsyte believes the new wave has a very different agenda from the Web pioneers who founded content-heavy sites like Feed and Suck. "These bloggers are not so evangelistic about the medium," he says. "For them, it's not about using technology to create a new world. It's about creating a space that isn't available elsewhere to talk about the thing they care about—which happens to be books."
We read the best of the litblogs for the way they sift through the media ether, make interesting juxtapositions, provoke intelligent conversation, and connect lesser-known writers with an eager audience. In an era when books have been pushed to the margins of the cultural conversation, maybe that's more than enough...
Friday, June 22, 2007
Andrew Keen - The Cult of the Amateur
If you are at all interested in the impact of the internet, which this author calls Web 2.0 (explained in the book), on print publishing, the movie business, and the music business, then you need to read this book.
We can only hope that the author is overstating the case that Web 2.0 with YouTube, file sharing, and music downloading is killing the above industries. I don't know enough to know if he's right or not.
But I do think he paints a scary picture. If this is the future, then take me back to the past.
We can only hope that the author is overstating the case that Web 2.0 with YouTube, file sharing, and music downloading is killing the above industries. I don't know enough to know if he's right or not.
But I do think he paints a scary picture. If this is the future, then take me back to the past.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Very interesting read... This book has a unique structure. It is a series of letters Charlie writes, revealing his thoughts and experiences during freshman year of high school. We don't know, though, to whom he is writing or why; even they don't know each other. But after Charlie's friend, Michael, dies, he hears a classmate talking about this person and decides to begin these letters, calling him/her "friend."... The book is descriptive about what it's like to grow up and find yourself: friends, parties, family, etc. Typical teenager stuff... But behind this, I think there are questions and issues that confront everyone, perhaps most importantly - Is it better to be passive, quiet, understanding (a wallflower) or passionate, honest, self-assertive? Through his experiences, often troubling, Charlie finds his answer to this question...
The novel dragged for me during the letters where Charlie is more introspective. It moves along smoothly when Charlie is with friends or family and things are happening... Also, I didn't have the same sort of childhood as Charlie, so it was often hard to relate, but I think the questions and issues the novel raises are universal. For example, to connect Fred's earlier discussion about Frost in an earlier post, the choices Charlie makes seem like guesses and trying to simply do his best at the time. Like when he is dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the room, he is compelled to kiss Sam, not his girlfriend Mary Elizabeth. These choices drastically affect what happens to him next.
I enjoyed this book a lot. It was quick and easy to get through. I thank Kristin Saxon for recommending it.
The novel dragged for me during the letters where Charlie is more introspective. It moves along smoothly when Charlie is with friends or family and things are happening... Also, I didn't have the same sort of childhood as Charlie, so it was often hard to relate, but I think the questions and issues the novel raises are universal. For example, to connect Fred's earlier discussion about Frost in an earlier post, the choices Charlie makes seem like guesses and trying to simply do his best at the time. Like when he is dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the room, he is compelled to kiss Sam, not his girlfriend Mary Elizabeth. These choices drastically affect what happens to him next.
I enjoyed this book a lot. It was quick and easy to get through. I thank Kristin Saxon for recommending it.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Paul Hemphill - The Good Old Boys
The first time I remember hearing the term "good old boy" was 1976/1977 when Jimmy Carter was running for and was elected President. Jimmy was NOT a good old boy, but brother Billy was, and everybody was talking to and about Billy and his gas station in Plains, Georgia.
It was during this time that I first read Birmingham native Paul Hemphill's collection of essays about the South called The Good Old Boys. I enjoyed it immensely because I grew up in the rural South and I understood everything Hemphill says in the book.
I just reread the book, having purchased a copy 10/2/05 at the Gnu's Room bookstore in Auburn, Alabama. I have enjoyed it all over again.
What has happened to the good old boy? Is he still around?
Sure he's still around; it's just that he is not as sharply defined as he once was.
Molly Ivins, that liberal elitisit who masqueraded as a good old girl Texan, had a good run with her "Bubba," who bore a strong resemblence to a good old boy.
George W. Bush has his good old boy side. I can't tell if it's real or fake like his religiosity.
In the circles in which I run in Alabama, I don't know any real good old boys. I wish I new at least one. It would help keep me grounded in reality to know at least ONE good old boy.
If Billy Carter were still holding court at his gas station in Plains, I'd make a beeline over there. Now there was the quintessential Good Old Boy.
It was during this time that I first read Birmingham native Paul Hemphill's collection of essays about the South called The Good Old Boys. I enjoyed it immensely because I grew up in the rural South and I understood everything Hemphill says in the book.
I just reread the book, having purchased a copy 10/2/05 at the Gnu's Room bookstore in Auburn, Alabama. I have enjoyed it all over again.
What has happened to the good old boy? Is he still around?
Sure he's still around; it's just that he is not as sharply defined as he once was.
Molly Ivins, that liberal elitisit who masqueraded as a good old girl Texan, had a good run with her "Bubba," who bore a strong resemblence to a good old boy.
George W. Bush has his good old boy side. I can't tell if it's real or fake like his religiosity.
In the circles in which I run in Alabama, I don't know any real good old boys. I wish I new at least one. It would help keep me grounded in reality to know at least ONE good old boy.
If Billy Carter were still holding court at his gas station in Plains, I'd make a beeline over there. Now there was the quintessential Good Old Boy.
Monday, May 28, 2007
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the latest book I have finished reading. It is marvelous.
Imagine you are in a crowd, maybe at a train station or a street in a big city, and people are rushing to and fro all around you, nonstop, bunches and bunches of them. You try to hear and look at everything that's around you - the people, signs, sounds, cars, colors. You try to get a mental picture of all of this, and everything else, but it is too much for you. You can't process all that is happening; there's too much noise, too many things to look at, too much to remember...
This probably doesn't ever happen to you, and it doesn't for most of us, at least not like it does to the book's narrator, Christopher John Francis Boone. That's because Christopher has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. Imagine Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main, only he's fifteen years old. That's what Christopher is like. He hates being touched, always tells the truth, and is excellent at math. He remembers every experience he ever has, keeps his promises, and sometimes has difficulty understanding what people do and say. Christopher likes to feel safe too. He has never traveled on his own farther than the store down the street, and whenever he gets upset he finds a place to hide and curls up and groans or does maths in his head and stops eating.
Haddon weaves a touching tale through this character. It revolves around Christopher's finding his neighbor's dog, Wellington, dead with a garden fork sticking in him. He decides to be a detective and investigate this incident, much like Sherlock Holmes, whom he loves to read and whom uttered the quote from which the novel's title is derived. He decides to write a book, a murder mystery, about finding Wellington's killer, which turns out to be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. His father disapproves of this and hides the book. Christopher finds it though, but also makes a new discovery, one that takes him to London and almost destroys his relationship with his father. But along the way, Christopher finds confidence, triumphs, and realizes that anything is possible, including his dream of becoming an astronaut.
It is fascinating to get inside the head of a narrator with Asperger's syndrome, like Being John Malkovich but written words instead. By detailing Christopher's ways of thinking and how he responds to the world around him, Haddon easily gives us a new set of eyes, one where things are confusing, information is incomplete, and a lot is not what it seems. We feel helpless and sad and scared too when Christopher does, and just as joyous and anxious and victorious as well. All the while we know that this is not how we're suppose to see things, but Haddon doesn't allow us to stray too far away from Christopher so we can feel normal again. So long as you are reading, he keeps us inside Christopher's autistic mind, and that makes the book more powerful.
I could particularly relate, I think, because I taught a student this year with Asperger's syndrome. I think I could somewhat relate Christopher to this student, which made it more interesting for me.
The book is also funny. When Christopher wants to ask a stranger where the train station is, he decides it would be best to ask a lady. His reason is they told him in Stranger Danger in school (he goes to a school for students with special needs) "that if a man comes up to you and talks to you and you feel frightened you should call out and find a lady to run to because ladies are safer." There's also a classmate that eats everything, no matter what it is, and when he does a "poo" on the bathroom floor, the teachers have to stop him from eating it.
What's also compelling is how touching the story is. You find yourself empathizing with Christopher. You want him to succeed. You want him to find Wellington's killer and resolve things with his family. Haddon is remarkable, however, in putting you in Christopher's mind, for which you feel this sympathy for a narrator that has Asperger's, without the novel being overly sympathetic. Things are what they are. The only complaint is that the last few pages are too hurried, but this pales versus Haddon's not inundating you with pity, but creating a story that is emotional but also entertaining and funny and imaginative and provocative too.
Imagine you are in a crowd, maybe at a train station or a street in a big city, and people are rushing to and fro all around you, nonstop, bunches and bunches of them. You try to hear and look at everything that's around you - the people, signs, sounds, cars, colors. You try to get a mental picture of all of this, and everything else, but it is too much for you. You can't process all that is happening; there's too much noise, too many things to look at, too much to remember...
This probably doesn't ever happen to you, and it doesn't for most of us, at least not like it does to the book's narrator, Christopher John Francis Boone. That's because Christopher has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. Imagine Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main, only he's fifteen years old. That's what Christopher is like. He hates being touched, always tells the truth, and is excellent at math. He remembers every experience he ever has, keeps his promises, and sometimes has difficulty understanding what people do and say. Christopher likes to feel safe too. He has never traveled on his own farther than the store down the street, and whenever he gets upset he finds a place to hide and curls up and groans or does maths in his head and stops eating.
Haddon weaves a touching tale through this character. It revolves around Christopher's finding his neighbor's dog, Wellington, dead with a garden fork sticking in him. He decides to be a detective and investigate this incident, much like Sherlock Holmes, whom he loves to read and whom uttered the quote from which the novel's title is derived. He decides to write a book, a murder mystery, about finding Wellington's killer, which turns out to be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. His father disapproves of this and hides the book. Christopher finds it though, but also makes a new discovery, one that takes him to London and almost destroys his relationship with his father. But along the way, Christopher finds confidence, triumphs, and realizes that anything is possible, including his dream of becoming an astronaut.
It is fascinating to get inside the head of a narrator with Asperger's syndrome, like Being John Malkovich but written words instead. By detailing Christopher's ways of thinking and how he responds to the world around him, Haddon easily gives us a new set of eyes, one where things are confusing, information is incomplete, and a lot is not what it seems. We feel helpless and sad and scared too when Christopher does, and just as joyous and anxious and victorious as well. All the while we know that this is not how we're suppose to see things, but Haddon doesn't allow us to stray too far away from Christopher so we can feel normal again. So long as you are reading, he keeps us inside Christopher's autistic mind, and that makes the book more powerful.
I could particularly relate, I think, because I taught a student this year with Asperger's syndrome. I think I could somewhat relate Christopher to this student, which made it more interesting for me.
The book is also funny. When Christopher wants to ask a stranger where the train station is, he decides it would be best to ask a lady. His reason is they told him in Stranger Danger in school (he goes to a school for students with special needs) "that if a man comes up to you and talks to you and you feel frightened you should call out and find a lady to run to because ladies are safer." There's also a classmate that eats everything, no matter what it is, and when he does a "poo" on the bathroom floor, the teachers have to stop him from eating it.
What's also compelling is how touching the story is. You find yourself empathizing with Christopher. You want him to succeed. You want him to find Wellington's killer and resolve things with his family. Haddon is remarkable, however, in putting you in Christopher's mind, for which you feel this sympathy for a narrator that has Asperger's, without the novel being overly sympathetic. Things are what they are. The only complaint is that the last few pages are too hurried, but this pales versus Haddon's not inundating you with pity, but creating a story that is emotional but also entertaining and funny and imaginative and provocative too.
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