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What I’ve Been Reading
July 25, 2011 in gewgaws
Information sharing comes up, in the course of my job, as a source of contention. My peers in the industry see the importance of being part of an information sharing network, but at a certain point, it becomes a question of how much you can consume while still doing your job.
I’m hopeless at this. I consume and consume with a bottomless thirst. Fortunately, my particular role in publishing rewards knowing “what’s up,” or this’d be a serious issue. In my personal life, I sometimes despair that I’m so much more of a consumer than a producer. In my more glib moods, I reassure myself that the world needs more people to consume what the rest of the world is intent on producing, talent or no.
Whether or not I’m doomed, I do come across a fair bit of interesting reading. Allow me to share the highlights of what I’ve consumed in the past 48 hours:
- The House Next Door’s enthusiastic and careful reviews of every single Harry Potter movie
- moment’s moving essay about the Roma
- Geoff Dyer’s first column in The New York Times Book Review, which is just as brilliantly flabbergasting as I’d hoped
- The Hairpin’s gleeful recounting of Elizabeth Taylor’s affair with Eddie Fisher
And that, folks, is what it’s like to live inside my head right now.
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Meanwhile…
May 15, 2011 in book reviews
All’s quiet on this front, but posts are jumpin’ over at Only Stories, my Tumblr. For the month of May, I’ve been reading and responding to short stories. Check it out.
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The Art of Editing
April 18, 2011 in the literary conversation
Today’s long read comes from an issue of The Paris Review from 1994, per a colleague’s recommendation. It’s an interview with Robert Gottlieb, editor-at-large at Knopf, and his peers about the art of editing. So many great anecdotes and epigrammatic advice about being a good reader. I underlined many bits of it to share here, and then I callously tossed the thing into a street-side waste bin. Fail. You’ll have to find your own favorite bits.
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You Are What You Read
March 16, 2011 in gewgaws
Over at the tk reviews blog, I have a post up on what our childhood bookshelves reveal about us. In my case, the results are mixed.
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Adding Value to E-Reading
March 9, 2011 in the literary conversation
Oh my bereft reader (hey, mom), I haven’t forgotten you! I’ve just dug myself into a large hole of social media platforms that must now be updated. So let’s do this:
Last week, Paul Pangaro of Cybernetic Lifestyles (not a fake company, although it sounds like one) talked to our company about aiding consumers’ participation with our digital text. Pangaro calls himself a conversation theorist, which means he’s made a living out of studying the mechanics of dialogue, whether it’s between people, between a person and an object, or within a person’s head. He started off by defining reading as the process by which the self conducts an internal conversation with itself to create meaning out of a text. In non-grad school language, that means we read a book by looking at the words on a page and asking ourselves questions about its meaning until we’re able to come up with an idea of what the book is about. So how can a digital book facilitate this line of questioning?
My thought is this: it’s the e-reader that’ll have to enable the internal conversation, not the e-book. I can’t think of a way to create a responsive digital book format, the kind of text that allows the reader to dive in and rearrange the furniture until meaning is made. Texts aren’t written on spec, unless you’re reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book. However, I can imagine an e-book reading device or application that can do the rearranging for you, a device that allows you to design the kind of conversation you want to have about a book. Pangaro would probably agree, because he’s come up with a hypothetical e-reader called thoughtshuffler, an application that splices up the text you’re reading to help you answer questions you have about the text (e.g. Who is this Adam I keep reading about? And what is his relationship with Penelope?).
I really hope an e-reading manufacturer starts thinking along these lines, figuring out how to add value to the reading experience, rather than to the device itself (“We’ll add email! and wi-fi!”). Along with Sam Anderson’s musing about shared marginalia layers on e-readers, reading an e-book could one day be more of an enriching experience than reading a book. Too bad no one’s come up with a way to make e-reading more physically pleasant.
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“My Usual Neurotic Museum Experience”
February 25, 2011 in gewgaws
I am loving this essay by Timothy Aubry in Paper Monument about the acute discomfort that some of us generally-educated-in-the-arts-but-not-all-that-knowledgeable-about-anything folks feel when we’re in a museum. The strongest bits come near the end, when Sorin refers to that semi-ironic, gently distant pose adopted by art viewers who don’t know how to articulate their appreciation, which is reliant upon “the role that youthful irreverence plays as a defensive default pretense.” Or you could go the route of the author, who opts for the inscrutably blank face. Yep, been there. Looking at art in public is hard! I’m gonna go read a monograph.
(photo credit: Ray Sorin)
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You Mean I Won’t Find the Meaning of Life by Reading as Many Books as Possible? Ugh, Forget It.
February 18, 2011 in gewgaws
At twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light.
—Geoff Dyer in an excerpt from his forthcoming Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
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Foreign Favorites
February 18, 2011 in the literary conversation
I started reading Chad Post’s serialized essay, “In the Age of Screens,” about three days ago, and I’ve only just finished. I’m a slow and easily distractible reader. Which probably has something to do about reading in the age of screens!
I didn’t agree with everything Post wrote, namely the Manichean categorization of books as entertainment or books as literature, a distinction Post assures us we’ll know when we see. The definition of this distinction is that entertainment “reinforces current dominant cultural modes” while literature “upends beliefs, ways of thinking, assumptions,” which certainly sounds nice, if naive. But if I handed you the summer 2010 catalog of books being published by the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, who can separate the entertainment from the literature? Who’d want to? You’d certainly get a different answer from every person you asked.
More interesting is Post’s assertion that the majority of “influential” books are works in translation. He uses this example: ask an avid reader to name his or her favorite books, and translated works will likely be named. Just when my skepticism rose, Post continued:
What could be better at throwing a wrench into predicted patterns than something coming from an entirely different culture, with a totally different semantic web, and unique way of perceiving the world? And it’s worth noting that although we may initially resist these sorts of titles, it’s the uniqueness, the upending that is most memorable and has the longest lasting impact.
What a lovely thought! And it rings true for me. My most favorite book is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio but my second favorite book is Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England precisely because of its exuberantly fluid prose, unique sense of history, and use of peasantly solitude as means to transcendence. Not a message one often encounters in suburban Connecticut.
Which makes me wonder: how many works in translation feature in your list of favorite books?
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Pouring One Out
February 15, 2011 in gewgaws
I found out from reading William Pollitzer’s dry but informative anthropological study, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage, that pouring one out for your fallen homies is a practice that can possibly be traced back to African funereal traditions: “At the ‘settin’ up’ or wake, bread and coffee are usually served to the mourners . . . each of them pours some on the group for the spirit of the deceased, as done among the Efik, the Ashanti, the Dahomeans, and other West African people.”
How coffee became, in popular culture, a 40, neither Pollitzer nor I can begin to speculate.
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Social Media Week, part two
February 11, 2011 in the literary conversation
It’s over! Thank goodness. Back to only being social on the internet.
But before I retreat into bookish reflections, I’d like to recap the latter half of this week’s panels that I attended, because no sooner did I ask “What is a social book?” in my last post that I attended a panel on that very subject.
The standout speaker at this event was Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired and The New York Times Magazine. He brought up three points that I’d like to elaborate on:
- Conversing with your commenters to think more deeply. Thompson’s writing a book about computers…people…changing culture…something, something. Anyway, the point is that he frequently updates his blog to reflect the topic he’s working on and explicitly asks his readers to respond to his initial forays into the subject at hand. He finds that his commenters’ responses lead him to think more expansively about the subject than he would have if he were writing on his own. I love this thought! It reminds me of that brain-tingly feeling I’d get during my English seminars, listening to other students talk and formulating my response. The thoughts I developed in the classroom were more incisive for having been tested and prodded by my peers. I’d like to think—ahem—that if people commented on my blog, that’d provide the push I need to think more deeply about books, reading, writing.
- Ebooks are reshaping books. Thompson meant this literally. He brought up, as an example, publishers’ practices of beefing up slim novels (sometimes with wide margins—students, you’re not alone in this!—and sometimes by asking the author to puff up what ought to be a svelter piece) or cutting expansive ones, because big, heavy novels cost too much to print and ship to bookstores. (Er, by the way, these are Thompson’s accusations, not mine.) With ebooks, you don’t have to worry about this: a novella or long essay is free to be short without facing accusations of looking skimpy on a bookshelf. A doorstopper can revel in its length without having to settle for Bible-thin pages. Ebooks will free the author to write the kind of book he or she wants to write! Or so the rosy vision goes. Of course, if your ideal book has a physical component to it (e.g. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes), this argument does not apply.
- Digital annotations. Just like readers seek out annotated books in the physical space, readers are seeking annotated books in the digital space. Whether these annotations take the form of traditional footnotes, comments on articles and essays, or simply highlighted passages in novels or textbooks, it behooves device manufacturers and content publishers to provide this auxiliary material—and to make it easier for readers to provide their own, too.
Phew, lots of think about. Unlike the event that ended my Social Media Week, a heckle-fest called Suxorz. The audience was kind of tame (shoulda had more to drink before arriving, I guess?), and the examples were almost too varied to judge. However, I did find it reassuring to know that consumers aren’t offended by inept social media campaigns, but rather by exploitative and invasive social media campaigns. Good news for the bumbling marketer!
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Currently reading
The Double Game
Seating Arrangements
The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist
Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth
The Flame Alphabet
Big Questions
Letters from Hawaii
The Adventures of Augie March
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Last Man in Tower
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Lost Steps
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s
Vintage Murakami
A History of the Modern World
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