A paper addict on the digital revolution

I love my computer. I love how Bloglines organizes my RSS feeds for me (although Yahoo doesn’t have a Books feed – grrr). I love watching Law & Order SVU reruns. But I love even more the quarter ton of books I have collected throughout my life. I love even more smudging newsprint, and printing first pages. I love JStor and printing out articles only to attack them with highlighters for my research papers, and yesterday’s speech on…

dun dun dun…

the death of the newspaper and the rise of the Internet. Boo hiss. But as the last magnate Rupert Murdoch told a gathering of newspaper editors, “we have been complacent, hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.”

Newspapers are still working on the switch. I do like the idea of local papers going more in depth locally, because why go to the national networks to read about your home town?

Publishers, however, may have found their savior. My ink-and-paper soul wrenches to say it, but Kindle just may be the industry’s saving grace. The thing has a lot of technical kinks that still need to be worked out, but the concept alone just might bring people back to reading. It saves physical space – think thousands of books in the space of one paperback; great for travelers and people with itty bitty apartments. (My apartment is small but I fit all my crap, including 500+ books, just fine.) People obsessed with gadgets would no doubt love to get their hands on this thing. Also, since they’re essentially selling e-books for these things, the books themselves are cheaper (though the device still tops $350).

The shrinking market of us Luddite page-strokers is becoming more of a niche, whether we like it or not. So if our market in general is to be saved, we must admit at least partial defeat and let the techies have their toys.

 

Don’t Ask Stupid Questions

Janice Harayda pointed out the retardedness of discussion group questions in the back of a certain book. I cannot help but to agree that yes, they are retarded. I have a few books with such questions in the back, and reading them makes me roll my eyes at best. But asking questions that have little or nothing to do with the book? That’s just dumb. Philippa Gregory books are prone to such dumbness. Why can’t book groups come up with their own discussions? Or is it unfashionable to mark up a book with a pencil, pointing out sections to oneself to come back to later?

I’m so disgusted, I’m going to go to class now.

 

Vonnegut in Retrospect

Coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the author’s death, “Armageddon in Retrospect” will probably be read by most Vonnegut fans with misty eyes and fond glances towards his other superior works. This is not his best showing, even for a dead madman who wrote the works in question with a growing sense of self-righteousness. Even his son Mark asks in the foreword, “How could he get away with some of this stuff?”

Several of the stories contained within “Armageddon” are clearly a throwback to his “Slaughterhouse-Five” days, revealing some details of the Dresden post-apocalypse that Billy Pilgrim could not have comprehended. Other non-Dresden stories fall somewhere between “Timequake” and nonsense.

I am not disappointed in the dead man, only regretful that I could not have understood more of his work while he was alive.

 

Dog Ear Diary has just managed to define literature for us, using “Madame Bovary” as an example:

I know this is great literature, meticulously constructed by the author, full of symbolism, details and profound portrayals of human nature. But I just couldn’t sympathize with or like any of the characters, and I got bored.

The post before this insight provides a brief description of “A Leg to Stand On,” by Oliver Sacks. I read another book of his, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” for my Writing with Style class, but it’s nonfiction.

Perhaps the things we read in school and can make little sense of are literature, and everything else isn’t?

One of my favorite books is “Girl, Interrupted” by Susanna Kaysen. It, too, is nonfiction, but is written in what could be a literary style. Ignore the Winona Ryder movie, it’s totally different.

 

Blog Search Part 2

Now that I’ve searched through the tags, here goes the blogrolls and links contained within the chosen blogs themselves. Thus begins narrowing down the useful ones.

A quick scan of Scathing Book Reviews links another blog I chose, goody, and blasts “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” which I rather liked.

Moments in Erasure mixes it up with Rudyard Kipling next to Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Attack of the 50-Foot Book also links to One Minute Book Reviews and Dog Ear Diary, a more personal take on reviewing work.

The Book Eater has a long blogroll, and a lot of the blogs’ names start with “book” which would seem promising. But the four I clicked on weren’t what I’m looking for.

One Minute takes more than a minute to go through, it’s interesting enough. I logged onto it in the midst of the “Delete Key Awards,” which seem to be like the anti-Oscars for books, and its writer (a professional in the publishing world it seems) includes the excerpts which qualify their books for the award. The writer, Janice Harayda, oddly refers to herself and the blog itself in the third person, and puts a copyright symbol underneath each and every post. Internal links include the GalleyCat.

The last item on the list, Read it or Weep, gets to stay because the librarians who run it have a large audience of people they interact with in real life every day, and those people probably aren’t looking for something high-concept to read on their lunch breaks.

 

Blog Search Part 1

I took a look at each blog on the first page of the “recent posts” under each tag and picked the following:

Poetry
Noah the Great is local.
Ocellus uses wordplay.
Monday’s Verse reviews.
Nectarfizz is multigenre.

Literature
Moderato is high art.
Moments in Erasure excerpts.
Scathing Book Reviews is self-explanatory.

Short Stories
Art of Storytelling is wordy.
Attack of the 50 Foot Book has little pictures of books.
The Book-Eater is hungry.

Classics
One Minute Book Reviews are pithy.

Books
Bertram’s Blog is educational.
Urban Fantasy Land has lots of links.

Writing
An Unreliable Narrator uses profanity.

Fiction
The Books of my Numberless Dreams is high-concept.
Read it or Weep is by a library reference staff.