books

Interview with a woman who reads 4 books a day
I'm lucky if I read 4 books in a month (these days, more like every 3 months).

Inevitably The Next Cultural Art Form to Lose Its Physical Identity in a Digital World

Karl: Les gens continueront à payer pour aller voir un concert, car c'est la possibilité d'accéder à une performance unique, donc une nouvelle expression de l'oeuvre d'art. Il n'y a pas de copie possible d'un concert, c'est un événement unique. Les gens payent l'accès qui se passent dans une enceinte close. Là encore droit de passage pour accéder à l'oeuvre à laquelle on ne peut pas accéder par d'autres moyens. On ne paye toujours pas l'oeuvre d'art. Faites l'expérience suivante, concert ouvert en plein air, avec juste une corde et un guichet. Les gens qui payent peuvent rentrer dans le périmètre de la corde, ceux qui ne paient pas restent à l'extérieur, mais il n'y a aucune différence de qualité d'écoute ou de vue du concert. Combien de personnes vont-elles vraiment payer ?

Karl's thoughts mainly concern books, but first, a brief summary of the above. Karl is saying that a musical concert is a unique experience, with the artists' interpretations of their own music and that of others as well as the visuals and spaces for dancing, etc. and the general atmosphere factoring into the experience. Only because it's possible to close people off from a physical space (in the case of a stadium or a club, open-air concerts making it difficult to exclude people who do not pay) can fans get in the door.

As a lover of the physical object of books, Karl reports that he understands that books are inevitably the next cultural art form to lose its physical identity in a digital world. Fortunately he is not worried that writers will lose their livelihood, because writing is incredibly difficult and valued-highly. Just as musicians will continue writing and performing music, authors will continue writing and distributing books.

See also: Jay McCarthy's notes on Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, by Gabriel Zaid.

Keep a Trophy of the Books I Read

Byrne Reese: “why do people keep books around after they have read them and when they know they will not read them again? I am certainly guilty of this, and I ashamed to say that I think the reason for this slightly irrational behavior is simple: pride. I personally like to keep a trophy of the books I read.”

Best of 2004: Books

Best Book of 2004: The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Along with Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, The Wisdom of Crowds is the latest to attack conventional wisdom in an accessible way. Surowiecki argued very compellingly that groups of relatively independent and diverse individuals with well-aggregated information can make better decisions and are more accurate about matters of fact than the "experts". In fact, Surowiecki almost advocates distrusting experts entirely, a remarkably unconvential piece of advice.

Honorable Mentions: Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. The book was read by people I admire for a collaborative audiobook project. Lessig writes with passion and humility about copyright law and digital rights management and other threats to our culture from government and business. He's a believer in copyright and the protections it affords, but he argues that the music and motion picture industries fundamentally misunderstand the nature of creativity and are acting extremely inconsistently with the tradition of using the past to create the future. Also: Gay Marriage by Jonathan Rauch, which had an interesting effect on my views of heterosexual marriage; The Corporation by Joel Bakan. I covered the book for One Book One Vancouver 2004 and interviewed the author.

I didn't read a lot of books published in 2004, but the ones I read were excellent.

To Read in 2005

Matt Mullenweg posted his end-of year tasks. Right now the only tasks I have are making lists of stuff to do in the new year, one of which is reading the unread books in my personal library. First up (but not necessarily in this order) are the following:

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  • Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (already started)
  • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
  • Stanley Park, which was the 2003 selection for One Book One Vancouver, and which I picked up at the local library's annual book sale for a couple of bucks.
  • The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which I bought at the end of a date (yeah, I know) and which will go against my effort stop caring about politics in the coming year.
  • Magritte by Jacques Meuris, about the Belgian painter, because I'm all about the René Magritte references.
  • Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation by Chris Turner. Heard about it through <a title='Planet Simpson' Blog and Book Covers" href="http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/Geek/ReadingMaterial/_archives/2004/10/21/164090.html">Joey DeVilla, saw the book discounted at 40% off, and since I have a weblog about things in real life that remind me of episodes of The Simpsons, I figured the $20 it cost me was better off in the grocery store's hands and the book better off in mine. Evidently I missed the book tour as it rolled through Vancouver, but the Planet Simpson weblog is regularly updated, so I shouldn't miss too much news about it while I'm waiting to read it. Or, more likely, keep it as a reference book for when The Simpsons Archive doesn't have the quote I'm looking for, which is surprisingly often.
  • See also: my other stack of unread books, which I may or may not get to in the new year, though one of them I recently finished reading, finally.

    Lewis Thinks [x] About [y], So There!

    Mark D Lew has a lengthy review of Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. He criticizes Lewis for not focussing on popular pitchers like Barry Zito and Tim Hudson. That would have been the expected route, and Lewis decided to follow a different one. Instead, according to Lewis' acknowledgements, interviews with those two pitchers were instrumental to the background stories that informed the book. Lewis does an excellent job summarizing both the book and its larger context (in terms of baseball, but not of baseball).

    He calls the lack of an index a minor error. I think not having an index is a major error, mainly because after reading it, I wanted to use the book as a reference. (I bought the book for my dad as a birthday present but made him promise to give to me to read after he did.) "See?" I would say. "Lewis thinks [x] about [y], so there!" But I can't do that without an index. Dave Pollard has also called not including an index in recent non-fiction an annoying trend.

    If These Were the Only Copies On Earth

    Steve Landsburg wonders if there are too many books: “This year's Man Booker Prize, Nobel Prize for Literature, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction have now all been awarded for works I will never read, and next month's National Book Award is certain to follow suit. Which causes me to wonder whether the world's got enough books already. I own hundreds of novels that I will never have the time to read. If these were the only copies on earth and a fire destroyed half of them, my life would not be signifcantly impoverished.”

    I wonder if Landsburg has read So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Jay McCarthy has extensive notes) or what he thinks about the long tail. The demand for books coupled with the number of readers or sales that the author considers enough for the book to be a success justifies the number of books that exists and its steady increase. If Landsburg is worried that there are too many books now, just wait until publishing books is available to the masses. This is already happening.

    Also, his life may not be impoverished by the copies of books being destroyed, but I wonder how people other than him would think. He may not have the time to read them, but surely there is one person out there who does. That is the premise of "the long tail": there are enough people in the world with diverse enough tastes that there will always be a market for something, no matter how small. I doubt a rational economic model can explain it, but it offends the sensibilities of someone who loves books as much as I do, and who has worked in a library, that anyone could consider the burning of books and the ideas contained within them as something unproblematic.

    Overheard: "What Was the Last Book You Read?"

    Another overheard conversation on the bus. This was more of a monologue, a girl in her very early twenties talking about a guy she met at a party. She related to her girlfriends how she and and the guy had "crashed at Cassandra's place", and that the couch was shaped in such a way as to discourage cuddling—any couch that is designed in such a way to discourage cuddling is a crime against nature—ƒand that they had talked for hours and when they woke up, talked for 4 hours in the morning. The remarkable part, for me, is not that they had such a long conversation: I've had such long conversations, some that lasted well in to the morning. One lasted up until 5 AM. I felt kind of bad for one of my friends who was part of that conversation, because he really wanted to get alone with one of the girls also in the conversation group. It was all good though: at a party later, they got to second-base-or-so.

    No, the remarkable part was that this was the first time that I heard a recap and evaluation from the girl's side of the story. She talked about how he was not especially good-looking, but that from their long conversation she found out much about him that she had in common, and even discovered that he was studying journalism and was into sports and that maybe he would become a sports columnist because that was "more accessible". (The best political columnists start out as sports columnists, a wit once wrote. Watching sports you have to suspend belief for 2 1/2 hours at a time and then write about it. Watching politics, you have to suspend belief full-time.) She said that because of that conversation, she figured out that she could find out whether a guy was more than just good-looking—that is, that there is a brain behind the body—if she asked him what book he was reading. She figured if he had an answer—any answer—other than "nothing", she could better determine whether he was a smart guy or not was not. Their conversation moved on to other guys they knew, including a "hot British guy" who could evidently could also speak French and Spanish. "Yeah," I wanted to ask them, but what book had he just read?"

    A few months ago, I showed up to a party wearing a t-shirt and jeans and whatever else I was wearing that day. It was a spur-of-the-moment invitation, and I had planned to do nothing that night but sit in front of a cathode ray tube chatting with people I will never meet in the flesh. I decided it would be an opportunity to see a few friends I hadn't seen in a while. After politely declining alcoholic drinks, and impolitely accepting cookies in the shape of the female reproductive organs, I sat down and proceeded to mind my own business when a relatively cute Asian girl started, for reasons known only to her, talking to me. She saw my T-shirt and I explained it, and then she asked what I did for a living, to which I said that I was an independent contractor doing tech support for an Internet hosting company, a little bit of script programming, setting up websites and some other impressive-sounding tech-related phrase. She then asked, as if she were genuinely interested, what book I had last read. I lied and said Moneyball by Michael Lewis, because it was far more interesting than the book I had really last read, and proceeded to explain what the book was about. The question caught me a little off-guard—not so off-guard that I couldn't deftly think of an interesting lie, mind you—;for the very simple reason that no remotely attractive member of either sex has asked me at a party what book I last read, especially not in the drunken state he or she was in. Those who have skipped ahead here or those who have actually read up to this point may be wondering if I got her phone number. I can be confident and funny when I'm tired, but not confidence only goes so far when a girl's sober significant other is sitting next to her. If I had business cards at that point, or if I had been working for the employer that currently has yet to provide me with them, I would have handed it to her. Since both conditionals on which that last sentence is based is false, it naturally follows that the ritual conversation-concluding exchange of business cards did not occur.

    Inner cinema now takes over as I consider the possibilities: what if I had a business card that night to give out? What if Mr. I Should Probably Be Taking My Girlfriend Home Now wasn't sitting next to her when I was not only not giving a fuck but sounding relatively coherent and intelligent in the presence a good-looking, about-my-age and single-for-all-I-know woman? Although surely there is more than one reason a woman would want to know what book the person sitting next to her has just read, overhearing that conversation on the bus fills in a spot on that list, which is, to see whether the individual in question might be thinking about things other than how to get in their pants.

    Before the Market Becomes Our Prison

    Lindsay Waters: “The humanities must now take steps to preserve and protect the independence of their activities, such as the writing of books and articles, before the market becomes our prison and the value of the book becomes undermined. It was not always so. John Milton once wrote that good books are "the precious lifeblood of a master spirit." Today the humanist should look back to such expressions of illuminated belief. The task is to engage in constant re-examination.”

    I don't share Waters' concern, at least not the concern he addresses in the opening section of his essay. I'm optimistic that the "problem", in the forseeable future, will be one of too many books, not, as Lindsay suggests, too few. For people like me who are consumers of books rather than writers, this is no problem at all, simply because that means there will be always something to read, and reading is an activity I spend hours a day doing and will continue doing until the day I'm robbed of my eyesight. Reading for me is an essential part of the conversation that life is supposed to be, though it is only one part of the conversation. The other parts include, but are not limited to, critically thinking about what I've read, discussing it with those around me, and, through writing for my weblog(s), those who are far from me. Most of the friends I literally talk to are not really book-inclined (that's changing, but they're still mostly non-book-nerds), and that's okay: I like having them around for reasons other than talking about books. I write far less than I read (far, far less), and that too is okay. I feel no obligation to share every single thought (though regular readers of this weblog, especially in its early days, may disagree). A market for books, and a market in books is both a good thing—like I said, the existence of a market means there will always be something for me to read—and a "bad" which can be bypassed if necessary through publicly funded universities, independent, second-hand book stores and, my homes away from home, libraries.

    The bulk of the essay addresses the lack of critical thinking, especially in American culture, and to an extent, he has a point, though critical thinking will never disappear. There's only so much that TV can do (“teacher, mother, secret lover”, Homer called it, but that's about it), and the Internet, still a textual medium despit an onslaught from audio if not so much video (yet) will have a lot more people fighting for it if—when, says Lawrence Lessig—the forces of control and permission and conformity start weilding their power than TV ever will. In the meantime, I expect to continue my obsession with books.

    Fellow obsessives will do well to read So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Jay McCarthy has an an excellent summary and comments on the book.

    Thus Diversity Flourishes

    Jay McCarthy, reviewing a book I sent him to help rebuild his library after the fire that burned down his house, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid, translated by Natasha Wimmer, highlights one of the arguments the book makes: “Books are the most versatile media form because they support blockbusters and experimentation--they promote wealth, diversity, and creativity. This is because the barrier to entry is so much less than a movie or a television program, and thus a book doesn't have to make as much money to be justified, and thus it does not have to appeal to as many people to be published. Thus diversity flourishes and hits are possible.”

    One argument that Jay does not highlight is the fact—and not argument, admittedly, but that this is not obvious strikes Zaid as strange—that books require no special device to read them. No software to install, no hardware to buy (and upgrade), no format lock-in. Books are extremely portable, are easy to write on for annotations and highlights, it's easy to keep the place of where you stopped reading (and you can stop and start reading whenever you want!), and they're cheap. Yes, cheap: for up to 30 dollars each for a hardcover and up to 20 dollars each for a softcover (or for about 40 dollars a year, at least in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, you can borrow them for a few weeks at a public library), you get hours and hours of entertainment and information and education. For me, I've stopped reading books for the information and ideas (okay, not quite), and have taken to reading simply because I derive pleasure from the act of reading. That's not to say there aren't I don't derive pleasure from other activities, but reading is and always be chief among them, and Gabriel Zaid's book made me fall deeper in love with reading books.

    Jay also highlights a section suggesting that finding a good book is, because bookstores don't come close to stocking 1 percent of all books, that finding a good book—or, rather, the book you're looking for—is a miracle, to say the least. It's interesting that I found the book because it was on hold for me at the library. I don't remember every placing the hold. In fact, it was the first book that I don't remember every putting on hold. But seeing the title of it and reading the blurb on the back, I decided to give it a chance, and it turned out to be one of the best books I ever read.

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