TIME’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 is my new fiction to-read list.
Posts Tagged ‘books’
Vacation!
Saturday, July 25th, 2009I will not be posting next week because I’m in seclusion. I’m taking the following books with me, which I may or may not get around to reading:
- The Next Enlightenment: Integrating East and West in a New Vision of Human Evolution by Walter Truett Anderson
- The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg
- Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann
- The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett
- The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion: A Sourcebook for Understanding the Cuisines of the World by Eve Zibart
My music player is loaded with BBC’s The Sound of 2009:
- The Big Pink
- Walking on a Dream by Empire of the Sun
- Lungs by Florence and The Machine
- Complete Me by Frankmusik
- A Kid Named Cudi by Kid Cudi
- La Roux
- The Fame by Lady Gaga
- Hands by Little Boots
- Manners by Passion Pit
- Conditions by The Temper Trap
- Traveling Like the Light by VV Brown
- To Lose My Life by White Lies
Review: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
Friday, May 8th, 2009I started this post while eavesdropping on the bus while a student describes “this great book he read”…I look it up and it hasn’t been published yet. Clearly he has read, or is at least familiar with, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.
It turns out that the title of this book is misleading: it only has space to argue that if you talk about a book you haven’t read, you are saying the same things as someone who has. It doesn’t give positive recommendations for how to talk about books and doesn’t say how not reading a book puts you in a better position to talk about it. The argument is as follows:
- While reading a book, you’re forgetting most of the detail
- By the end of a book, you’ve already forgotten a lot about the beginning. Every day after that you forget more. At what point do you become equivalent to someone who hasn’t read it?
- You can tell as much by skimming a book as by reading it
- Very rarely do we read books with the rigor of a scholar. There must be a point of diminishing returns in reading, who’s to say it’s not at skimming speed?
- What matters about a book is not it’s contents but it’s context in society and intellectual frameworks
- Summed up by the joke “you know you’re a grad student when…you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text” – and who are grad students if not experts at reading?
A lot of reviewers believe that this book is satire, but I think they underestimate the realism of a French literary professor. The last point goes along with contemporary literary theory by saying post-structural analysis is better than other ways of understanding a text.
Writing is a Dead-End Job
Friday, April 3rd, 2009If you’re reading this, chances are you think I would make a good professional writer. I’m attracted to the concept, but when I look at the future that strikes me as a career of suicide. I believe that the amount of money people spend on the written word will decrease every year and writers will have to be constantly moving to find revenue.
Right now, novels appear to be the safest market – the market isn’t large, but most consumers pay for them. Non-fiction books have to compete with Wikipedia and the rest of the web, while people have less and less time to get deep into a topic. Besides, many non-fiction books seem to either be collections of magazine articles (eg: Malcolm Gladwell), or single magazine articles stretched to book-length with the addition of anecdotes (eg: Urban Tribes).
Jakob Nielsen believes that eBook readers will invert that as the Kindle is very usable for linear, engrossing content but unusable for most non-fiction. He also believes that non-fiction still has a market: The ability to inspire deep thinking is why non-fiction books still have value compared with websites, which are better for quick hits and controversial writing.
But Clay Shirky (an Internet fanboy whose ideas must be taken with a grain of salt) argues convincingly that all the writers are going to go broke before we invent a new way to pay them:
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it.