“If men read fewer books on manhood and more really good stories they’d be much better for it,” Barnabas Piper tweeted sometime last year. He fleshes out his reasoning in this post, saying stories make you want to be better, show you role models and anti-heroes, and get under the surface. If it’s true, he says, that we learn more by what we catch than what we are taught, then good stories are the places where we will catch what we want to learn.
Category Archives: Reading
What Fiction Do Men Read?
One of our friends, Nick Harrison of Harvest House, asks on his Facebook wall:
“What can we all do to boost men’s fiction? What authors do the men you know read? What are their complaints about the state of men’s fiction (if they have any complaints)? I’d especially like to hear from male readers, but all who can offer some insight are welcome to respond.”
So what do you think? Don’t confine your answer to Christian books. What fiction do you or the men you know read? Answers from the original post include Dale Cramer, Athol Dickson, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, David Baldacci, Vince Flynn, John Hart, John Lescroart, and Lee Child. I mentioned names you’ve seen here, like Bertrand, N.D. Wilson, and Andrew Peterson.
BIG UPDATE in the comments below.
Do You Read eBooks on Your Phone?
Last year, Digital Book World asked its Twitter crowd, “Do you read on your smartphone? Do you read on other devices, too?” They got 30 answers. About half said they read on multiple devices; the other half said they don’t read long works on their phones.
Now, 56% of Americans have smartphones, which are also called pocket reading devices. Some companies are marketing ebooks only to their pocket readers, like the Samsung Galaxy S4.
With some many mobile devices like this, publishers should consider them first when designing ebooks and ebook marketplaces.
Creeping into the 21st century
C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere that for modern souls, the acquisition of new appliances, vehicles, and entertainment devices constituted “the very stages of their pilgrimage.” I bear that in mind as I announce my acquisition of a Kindle HD.
As you know if you’ve been following this blog, I’ve had a Kindle Keyboard (the generous gift of no less a figure than the learned Dr. Hunter Baker) for some years now, and have fallen wholly under its sway. I like its ergonomics, its lightness, and the opportunity, when I need a new book, to satisfy my jones in about a minute. I treasure my Kindle Keyboard, and have no plans to abandon it. In the single day I’ve owned my Fire, I’ve tried reading on it, and it’s fine. I’m sure I could transition to it as a regular reading device without trouble. But the battery on my old Kindle lasts longer, and the essential reading’s equally good.
The Kindle Fire HD is a genuine tablet, albeit a low-end, entry-level one. The first thing that impressed me was the graphics. What I see on my device doesn’t have the definition of the more expensive Kindles, but nevertheless it amazed me. I got a free month of Amazon Prime with my purchase, and I downloaded an episode of “Justified.” I was highly impressed with the speed and picture quality (though downloading YouTube videos can be annoyingly slow and page loading can be poky). Also impressive was the Dolby sound, which is amazingly good for such a small device.
I’m still learning to navigate on the thing, and experiencing the normal old dog’s problems. I like the way you can move around and zoom in on the screen with a finger swipe, and I think the whole thing will become pretty instinctive before long. For someone who’s always worked with Windows, the whole “Mojito” operating system involves a little techno-shock, but like all systems it makes its own kind of sense. The virtual keyboard is OK; it confounded me for a while but I think I’m catching on.
The main reason for the low price of this Kindle is that it doesn’t have either a camera or a microphone, so the buyer should be aware of that. I bought mine because I wanted more flexibility in accessing the web. I think I’ll even be able to do some of my graduate course work through it; at least that is my hope.
This is a preliminary evaluation. I’ll let you know if I change my mind about anything.
Gaiman: Kids Need to Read
Author Neil Gaiman notes that the prison system is big business. How can they predict jail cell growth? “[U]sing a pretty simple algorithm,” Gaiman said, “based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read.” Not that all illiterate people are criminals or all literate people are not, but the relationship between being unable to read and crime is strong. Sixty percent of America’s prison inmates are illiterate; 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems, according to the U.S. Dept. of Education.
Gaiman said he went to China for the first sci-fi convention ever approved by the Communist establishment. He asked an official why this was finally approved. The official replied that the Chinese had no imagination for invention, so they asked the likes of Google, Apple, and others who were inventing new technology. These people were readers of science fiction and fantasy.
“Fiction can show you a different world,” he said. “It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in.”
Blessed Nonsense
Today, just a snippet from an article in the current issue of Intercollegiate Review – “The Subhumanities: The Reductive Violence of Race, Class, and Gender Theory,” by Anthony Esolen:
So much of human life, says [Marilynne] Robinson in her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is blessed “nonsense,” not overmuch concerned with survival or whatever else preoccupies the reductivists of our time. It is like the folly of God, as Erasmus reminds us, thinking of the mighty words of Saint Paul, who declares that all the wisdom of the world cannot overcome the foolishness of the Cross, which is of course the foolishness of love.
Our friend Anthony Sacramone is Managing Editor of IC.
Extinction soon
Photo credit: Raysonho.
Over at the American Spectator (which seems to have rejected my last submission, but hey, I’m not bitter) Matthew Walther writes about his recent experience at the American Library Association convention in Chicago, where he particularly wanted to talk to people about the increasing trend of libraries dumping perfectly good books because electronic versions are now available.
WHICH REMINDS ME: At this gathering of a few thousand librarians, teachers, writers, publishing types, I saw surprisingly little evidence of reading taking place. With two or three exceptions—elderly women whose badges told me that they are librarians from Indiana—the only printed text I saw anyone interact with was the 308-page full-color conference guide. This also brings me to why I was there. I was trying, am in fact still trying, to understand why, with little or no visible resistance or even comment from patrons, library friends’ societies (local charities that raise funds for libraries and organize things like book signings and reading groups), school boards, members of university faculties, elected officials at the local, state, and federal government level—to say nothing of the national press—thousands of public and academic libraries across the country are all but throwing away millions of books, many of them rare, expensive, or both. Three years ago the Engineering Library at Stanford University was home to more than 80,000 volumes; it now houses fewer than 10,000….
The American Library Association is an organization which looms large in my consciousness these days. Everyone in my Library and Information Sciences class talks about it in terms of “us,” though I have no plans or need ever to join, and it’s not a requirement for the program. Mr. Walther makes no comment on the reflexive progressivism which I perceive in it, based on classroom discussions. His concern is simply to question whether libraries without physical books can really be considered libraries at all (I read the other day that a library in Texas has gone precisely that route). He seems a little Luddite about the Kindle, but at least he gave his a fair try. My own devotion to paper and ink survived my first experience by about 20 seconds. (That’s not to say I want to jettison my own personal books, whose name is Legion, or those I husband at work.)
I spoke with a former academic librarian yesterday, and his opinion was more pessimistic even than Walther’s. Once the digitizers solve the problem of copyright for more recent works (he said) libraries will simply cease to exist. They will go away. They will be made redundant. He’s studying Theology now, in order to teach that for a living.
I don’t know if he’s right. I do think the academic library will survive for a while, if only because accreditation agencies love to set requirements for collection size.
My friend suggested that I join The Association of Christian Librarians, instead of the ALA. I heeded his counsel.
I’m pretty sure I’ll need the support. I’m beginning to think I’m working very hard to prepare for the equivalent of a managership at a Barnes & Noble store.
Printed Books or E-Books: Which Is Better?
This Infographic is produced by Coupon Audit and Brandywine Books .
Citation sighted
Today in the library I was cataloging a set of books by a friend, Dr. John Eidsmoe – Historical and Theological Foundations of Law. Out of curiosity I checked the second volume to see what he’d written about Viking elements in our English tradition. And behold, he has good things to say. Even better, he mentions me in a footnote.
I’ve joked about being a scholarly citation before, since Prof. Torgrim Titlestad of the University of Stavanger has mentioned my Erling novels in a couple of his books on the Viking Age. But this is a genuine footnote. In a passage about Erling Skjalgsson he inserts the following note:
…Lars Walker, a friend of this author, has recently published an engrossing and well-researched novel that portrays Erling Skjalgson as a Christian ruler who desires his kingdom to be a free republic under God’s law. Lars Walker, West Oversea: A Norse Saga of Mystery, Adventure and Faith (Nordskog, 2009).
He makes a couple small errors, calling Erling a jarl (he seems to think jarl is a generic term like chieftain), and talking about Erling’s “kingdom,” which was the last thing Erling wanted. Nevertheless, it’s nice to be a citation.
I wonder if I can get credit for it in graduate school.
Something tells me the answer is no.
The bearable lightness of being orthodox
I’ve been reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I’ll review it later, as if its reputation depended on me to any extent. But here’s a quote:
It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern “force” that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile and full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.” They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.