Professor Erin O’Connor writes, “I’m a huge believer in reading out loud–and in having students read literature out loud, together, in real time. It creates a kind of shared, immediate experience that makes for remarkable class discussion–and it also helps hone reading skills and oral presentation skills in students who, almost universally, badly need them.”
Love it.
There’s good and bad in Seth Godin’s post on libraries, as Ben Domenech points out (Get Seth’s latest book, Poke the Box
Seth throws several ideas together, not all of them fully developed. For example, he says, “Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.” How old is the iPod now? Is it as cheap as a razor? There’s no reason for Amazon to sell Kindles at $10 in five years, and does Seth plan to write new ebooks to sell at $5 or less?
There’s a movement among librarians and what I believe are to be called library advocates to boycott HarperCollins e-books because the publisher has stated it plans to release new e-books that will have distribution limitations. For Overdrive and other library e-readers, HarperCollins intends to publish new works that will permit only 26 check outs before expiring. They haven’t done it yet, but they still intend to.
Publishers Macmillan and Simon & Schuster don’t publish ebooks for libraries at all, but no boycott has been organized for them that I know of.
One librarian said, “Consumer market eBook vendors like Barnes & Noble and Amazon don’t let publishers get away with the amount of nonsense that we get stuck with through library eBook vendors. I fault the publishers for not realizing what a huge mistake they are making by not realizing that new formats are opportunities…”
In other library news, at least six Alabama libraries were severely damaged in the tornado storm we had last week. Three of them may be completely destroyed. Several more libraries are in badly damaged areas of the state, but no word has come from them yet.
A local history library just south of where I live took a good bit of damage. “Our genealogy and local history material was boxed up and stored at the temporary location,” the Dade County librarian said. That location lost some of its roof. The materials inside were soaked.
A couple interesting (to me) links tonight.
Rick Gekoski, writing in the Guardian, gets all curmudgeonly about book lovers:
If you think that reading the right things in the right ways is morally bracing, improves one’s discriminations and heightens sensitivity – basically, the Leavis line – then all you have to do is look at the behaviour of Dr Leavis himself to begin to doubt the thesis. Indeed, if it were true that wide and deep reading redounds wholly positively on the development of a wholesome self, consider a typical member of a university English department, and despair.
He scores some nice hits, as in the passage above, but also takes some shots at comments by Milton and C. S. Lewis that strike me as just snarky (I’ll admit I’m prejudiced in the matter). Frankly, he reminds me a little of one of those misanthropes who can’t see a young couple in love without muttering, “Give ’em a couple years and they’ll be hiring hit men to murder each other.”
Tip: Joe Carter at First Things.
Dennis Ingolfsland, at The Recliner Commentaries, quotes a book that sounds fascinating, Is God a Moral Monster, by Paul Copan:
Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love (Miroslav Volf as quoted in Is God a Moral Monster? by Paul Copan, 192).
That noise you hear in the distance is me yelling, “YES! YES!”
I’m like a kid with a new toy, because… well, because I’m emotionally stunted and have a new toy. As mentioned Friday, through the generosity of Hunter Baker, prize-winning author of The End of Secularism, I’m the proud owner of an Amazon Kindle (the picture above shows what I’ve actually got, the new one. The picture I posted in haste on Friday was so last year).
The new Kindle can hardly fail to delight any reader (perhaps not any book lover, if he’s emotionally attached to the smell of paper and the feel of binding). It’s smaller and lighter than a paperback book. Shockingly small, to be honest, about the width of a pencil. Thousands of books are now available for this platform, usually at below hardback prices (and comparable to paperback if you figure in shipping and handling, which you get to bypass completely here). Downloads take no time at all (I downloaded a free version of Heimskringla, a book more than two inches thick, in about five seconds). The display is clean and clear (not backlit, but neither is a traditional book), and you can select your font size and other display options. If you want to read it sideways or upside down, you can rotate the image. Just to sweeten the deal, the Kindle also operates as a web browser (in black and white), and an MP3 player.
My only criticisms are minor. The controls are small and a little fussy, especially for web surfing. My great fear remains that I’ll drop mine, but I’ve ordered a padded cover which ought to cushion any shock.
Owning a Kindle opens up to me, not only the growing inventory of books available for sale in electronic form, but the riches of free public domain download collections, like Project Gutenberg. I’ve only actually paid for one book so far (Meadowlands by Thomas Holt. I’ll let you know how I like it), but I’ve downloaded several free tomes, and have my eye on more when I have a few minutes to play with it.
The main downside is that I think I hear the death knell of my campus book store.
Photo credit: Jon ‘ShakataGanai’ Davis
That unspeakable poltroon, Hunter Baker, has frustrated me yet again.
I was all set to deliver a jeremiad tonight. I have seen the demise of our civilization, clearly and ever more near, and I was ready to deliver the fatal diagnosis in tones of stentorian woe. I promise you, it would have wrecked your weekend, if not your whole month.
Then I get a package, and what has Hunter Baker done? He’s sent me an Amazon Kindle.
Because I’ve commented frequently that I’m not about to jump into this newfangled gimcrackery. Paper books were good enough for Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and by hunky, they’re good enough for me.
Now I have a Kindle.
I kind of like the idea.
In light of this development, I hereby delay the Apocalypse, at least until I can figure out how to hook it up to my WiFi.
I’ll keep you posted.
Update: I ought to mention that Hunter Baker is the author of The End of Secularism.
Ed Champion is a remarkable reader, critic, etc. (feel free to add to the list of how remarkable he is), and in this interview he recommends books for writers.
Ultimately, a novelist’s job — irrespective of whether she is writing speculative fiction or hard realism — is to understand how human behavior emerges from systematic consequence. If you can generate an atmosphere based on systematic consequence, then your novel will likely feel “real” even if it is set in a land populated by dancing elves or talking fruit.
For plot structure, “read Richard Stark.” For great openers, Burgess, Cain, and Murray have good examples.
An excerpt from page 34 of The Memoirs of Peer Strømme:
In the fall of 1868, just a few days before I was to leave for Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, I suddenly became seriously ill, so that the trip had to be postponed until the following year. Grandmother thought that my illness was a punishment because we simple folks had no business pursuing ambitions not suited to our class and circumstances.
I promise there will be a point somewhere further down in this post, but the first part involves a lot of Norwegian stuff. I apologize for that, after the fashion of one who apologizes for a vice he has no intention of giving up.
Someone gave our library a couple books recently, and I’ve been reading them in preparation for accessioning them, because of their historical value. They’re translations, done a few years back by a very small publisher, of a couple books by a Norwegian-American pastor and journalist named Peer Strømme (1856-1921). Strømme was quite well known—within our community—in his own time, but because he wrote mainly in Norwegian, and was not great enough to invite translation on the scale of Ole Rølvaag, he’s not much remembered.
The Memoirs of Peer Strømme (not available on Amazon, though this volume, which seems to be the first part of it, is) tells of the author’s life from his boyhood in eastern Wisconsin, though his education at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, to his installation as a Norwegian Synod pastor on the prairies of northwestern Minnesota (he would later leave the ministry and become a journalist in Chicago). Continue reading Against the Strømme
Author Daniel Handler writes about reading and loving poetry.
If you were to walk into my living room on some weekend night, that would be creepy. But before I stood up alarmed and demanded to know what you were doing there, you would see me in a big black leather chair that, I’ve been told, is too big for the room. I’d be all dressed up, and reading poetry.