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A couple weeks ago, I put out a plea for a Carl Sagan quote for an Ignite NYC talk I was going to do. I had to paraphrase the line as “This is the kind of problem that is fun to think about while walking in the woods on a winter morning.”

My friend Parfait found the quote last week!

“They are books you ponder over as the water is running out of the bathtub or as you walk through the woods in an early winter snowfall.”

Not crazy about the bathtub water image (or image of me), but it still works. It’s still the romantic, “Papa Carl makes the world of science and cosmology so interesting” line I remembered. Except:

The actual line is in reference to three Robert Heinlein novels (Oi!)! Not only that, but Sagan refers to them as “remarkable efforts! (Oi! Oi!). Not only THAT, but one of them has the word Zombies in it! (Oi! Oi! Oi!).

While I’m wondering if maybe he doesn’t use a similar image somewhere else (hard to imagine since I got the book right), it’s now more interesting to me how my initial processing of the quote meshes with my current memory of it and how I matched that memory to science problems and lofty things. I was every bit the snob then as I am today when it comes to Heinlein (not much, but enough to cringe at calling any of them “remarkable efforts”), so I must have been so overwhelmed by the romance of the image of walking in the woods with Saint Carl contemplating something rich and deep on a crisp winter morning that I glossed over it.

Novelist (and fellow alum of my alma mater) Nicholson Baker, went through an interesting exercise in U and I, a memoir of his obsession with John Updike. One of his many exercises in intellectual self-flagellation was to mortify his literary sensibilities by trying to reconstruct, from memory, the passages from Updike that made him want to be a novelist. Then he compared them to real one. He generally was further off in his memories than I was . . . though he didn’t stumble into praising Heinlein’s literary genius.

I recently downloaded a bunch of digital books highlighted by Peter Meyers at OReilly Radar. Meyers is a terrific thinker about digital books, going deep on usability, design, how text should be created for ebooks, and what the medium can do to enhance reading experiences.

In his “10 Innovative Digital Books” to check, he included two Bibles. Interactive, dynamic, well-annotated Bibles are of interest to the spiritual-but-not-religious side of me and to my designer side. Few texts could benefit and be enriched by interactive technology and web connections as the Bible. There are so many versions of the Bible, translation topics and controversies, archaic words that need to be understood to engage the text more fully, concordances, cross-references and allusions (or contradictions, if you’re coming from that angle) that interactive can facilitate. While I’m still bummed at how hard it is to find NRSV translations (the ones that left-liberal types like me go for), there are some interesting ones out there (which is a different post).

This post was just to highlight a great screen shot that caught me early this morning while I was reading Gary Shteyngart’s Russian Debutante’s Handbook. One of the most interesting possibilities of a digital iPad Bible is a reading plan. There are many different versions of daily scripture – to work through the New Testament or the Pentateuch or to follow themes and ideas. There are also plans to help you read the entire Bible across the course of a year. I signed up to do the last (not really, I don’t have time, much as I’d like to). This was what came up while reading about Volodya’s first encounter with Rybakov:

Nearly two years ago, I gushed about how great goodreads.com is. A social site where people record what they’ve read, are reading, just finished reading, or intend to read, goodreads.com is a way find great book recommendations, connect with readers with similar interests (socially, or as a resource), and if I were brave enough to tell people all the crap I read, a journal of your reading life. The textual part of your lifelog, if you will.

Anyway, I convinced a colleague of mine to join up recently, and it’s been a real treat. Whenever someone joins, there’s a rush to put a lot of books out there. Digital natures abhor vacuums, and there’s a need we all have to have a bookshelf that represents recent reading, a collection of favorites, or in my case a pretentious statement of taste. My friend is done with that phase and now he shows up in my daily goodreads.com email (the only one I read faithfully). He’s turned the mini-review, blurb into something of an art form. Today was his best yet:

I don’t know if I’m just noticing this or if it’s new. But it’s kind of weird — Amazon is touting books that have ‘deckle edge’. I originally thought it was an effect of when books needed the pages cut before reading, but it’s actually an effect of papermilling:

Definition: The ragged edge of the paper as it comes from the papermaking machine is the deckle edge. Handmade paper normally has 4 deckle edges while machinemade paper has two. Normally it is cleanly cut. Left in place, the deckle edge becomes a decorative, textured edging. An imitation or fake deckle edge can be created by tearing or sawing the edge of the paper.

Smoothing the edges is an extra cost, of course, and there have always been books — cheap pulpy, genre stuff, and higher end literary stuff — with the edges. But now it’s being called out as a feature of the book:

Right around the time eReading is set to experience another wave of growth . . . curious.

I finally hit a wall with the Kindle where I could no longer continue reading a book on the device and had to get a pressed-pulp book. The book is Dickens’s Bleak House. The factors that moved it into unKindleable, and which make me think there are serious limits to the academic application of the Kindle are:

- complex, rich novel
- first time reading of the novel
- taking notes for more than the recall of a passage
- not a translation, and a deeper engagement in the language

I think Dickens, in particular, provides some challenges for e-reading. His long, circuitous sentences – loaded with asides and interjections – cross Kindle pages in ways that make the button navigation and screen flashes unbearable. Less particular to Dickens, but more to 19th century British writers, the language poses a challenge too. The otherwise convenient in-line dictionary lookup function is helpful less than half the time in Bleak House because the subtlety of the word choice isn’t covered in the dictionary (small dictionary limited definitions), the particulars of the word’s use isn’t covered (British vs American dictionary), or the word isn’t covered at all (19th c.).

Before diving into the real problems with reading Bleak House on Kindle, some things that did work:

Footnotes are very convenient on the Kindle – highlighting the note, clicking the d-button, reading the footnote and then hitting “Back” to return to the text sounds arduous but is actually fantastic. Looking up footnotes with a big brick of a paperback can be a sufficiently prohibitive drag to make me just ignore the reference or word that I don’t understand and stick to the larger flow. (Whether the footnotes are worth reading is a different matter, of course. In my Kindle edition, they ranged from useful historical information, to the explanation of the image or metaphor, to cheesy HS English tips for understanding the book.)

Connecting margin notes to specific text is also an improvement on the Kindle. In paper, you typically have to cram something into the margin and then draw a line to the passage or word the comment refers to, or do an asterisk in the text, and then an asterisk on the note. Kindle is kind of handy in this regard.

Margin notes in general are cleaner and clearer without the space limits of the margin on the paper, it’s possible to take much clearer (no abbreviations or omitted words) and much more legible (no sideways or cramped handwriting, it’s all keyboard) notes.

Now for the #fail part. To transition into the downsides of the Kindle when reading a rich, complex, non-translated book for the first time, an image:

This is a page from Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘teaching edition’ of Madame Bovary. It can be found in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. The book itself is great. Nabokov’s lectures are opinionated, rich, and show how exciting a deep read of a book can be. Each lecture is accompanied by a page from his teaching edition. And the image above shows some of the problems the Kindle potentially solves: tight margins creating illegible notes, the difficulty of noting a particular word choice.

This picture also begins to highlight the problems of the Kindle. The first problem is access to the notes. On the Kindle, there is no scanning for notes. Many times, I’ll try to find a note or passage which I imperfectly remember — I remember the spirit of the passage, or I remember that I put a question mark next to it, or I remember simply that I made a note in a particular scene. On the Kindle, I need some precise information to do a search, or I’m stuck browsing through all my notes.

A bigger problem is when I have more complex notes. The left hand side of the page is mostly highlighting or attaching a comment to a part of the page. But the right hand side is much richer and deeper. On that side you see Nabokov connecting one word to another (in this case a word associated with a character) and highlighting how the sentence structure works or is altered in translation. Kindling Bleak House, I quickly got frustrated at how hard it was to connect Dickens’s carefully worded and important description of a character’s physical attributes to the actual character. In a book, I would circle the name and connect it to the phrase, making it easy to find and emphasizing that relationship. Not easy on Kindle. It was also hard to track the evolution and repetition of word choices with Kindle’s note-taking. The start of Bleak House is all about atmospherics of muddy, foggy, smoky London and the people moving through it and its thick air. Noting what makes it work, or how it connects to the muddy, foggy, smoky Chancery Court is impossible with the Kindle.

Another Nabokov screen highlights both his intense reading and a dimension of the note-taking problem that seems unsolvable for several more years. This one is from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis:

OK, not everyone is going to spend time to draw the specifics of Gregor Samsa’s transformation. And some of Nabokov’s extensive note-taking simply can’t be done in the book and forces him onto plain sheets of paper: a map of Leopold Bloom’s circuits through Dublin, a map of England highlighting the action in Bleak House, a floor plan of the houses in Mansfield Park (all to be found in the book). But it does highlight a problem with all e-readers and tablets and the iPad, the obvious and reflexive answer to which is “give the reader a touch screen and a stylus.” But the resolution is just too low for good note-taking. Anyone who has worked with a tablet over the years or drawn on the iPhone has seen that the lines are unusably jaggy, the letters look terrible, even an asterisk or a simple circle is impossible to use. The iPad video mentions that there are 1000 touch points on the new screen, which is quite a lot but nowhere near enough to be a meaningful input/note-taking device.

The last bit of suck in reading a rich, serious book on the Kindle is random access. I’m using the phrase loosely, but the idea is that this kind of reading experience (and re-reading and referencing) benefits from or requires the ability to jump around in the book quickly — going back to a character introduction, following a passage that covers several pages, recalling a passage of dialog — in order to re-orient yourself, or, more importantly, follow a development or theme. Not a big deal with a lighter weight business book or genre fiction, but maddeningly off-putting for deeper reads of deeper stuff. (Random access has always been a problem with e-readers – even with the wheel of the first Kindle or the side buttons of the Sony Reader, this seems unsolveable – but in the context of this kind of book, is crippling rather than merely inconvenient.)

So, my personal choice was to switch over to a Penguin edition. It will solve most of the problems above and leave me with the problem of how to turn a page on the subway, the dilemma of whether to find the footnote or just keep reading, and force me into tighter, messier note-writing on the margin. If I want to read deeper (and enjoy more), it seems I have to let go of Kindle-y conveniences.

Which raises the bigger issue: is my Kindle making me a sloppier, less thoughtful reader? I have a line that “I read more and better in less time” with the Kindle. This line is practically a reflex when people ask me about it. I think it holds true for middle-brow reading, work stuff, and periodicals, but I’m worried about more complex books. Is my reading style flightier and more focused on catching the high points and moving onto the next book now?

One of the few ‘technology is hurting us’ arguments I’ve ever bought is Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly piece about the new cognitive style being created by Google. (I blogged it here, the original article is here.) The key passage that threw me off in Carr’s article seems relevant to the Kindle-enforced shallowness of my reading of Bleak House:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

I don’t think there’s economic interest in the Kindle making us shallower readers, but I think it is a natural outcome of the design — at least for encounters with new books or books that require deeper engagement and a record of that engagement.

A new book-reading group from Penguin recommends the top ten classics that everyone should read. The reason to read them?

Why read classic works of literature? There are a myriad of reasons, just one of which is to catch the numerous references that appear in movies, television, politics, and throughout pop culture. In the above video, you can see a trailer for a short film we produced showing what happens to a hapless young suitor who hasn’t read our Essential Classics.

That was disappointing . . . read the classics so you can follow popular culture references (which pop culture artifact references Oedpius beyond the already known sleeping with mom or maybe tearing ones eyes out gag?). I would have had a lot more respect for the outside chance of impressing women or making people feel bad about themselves when you drop little literary bombs on a conversation.

Happily, I was pleased to find I had read all but The Inferno. But even then, I’ve bought several copies of The Divine Comedy‘s various volumes over the years with serious, I mean serious, intent to read them. I feel good about that. And you know what? I don’t actually know any references from Dante (aside from the uncommitted cursed to chasing a blank banner — I like that one), so I may be missing a whole bunch of references in 24 or The Unit.

Speaking of 24, Season 7 of Jack Damnit Bauer is my current exercise motivation. Jack has been exposed to some weaponized bionanotechnocellulonucleo whoozeewhatsit and is, apparently, waiting to die, wishing he could lead a mission but knowing that that would endanger the mission and the men on it. He is already dead. Positively Shakespearean. Good night sweet prince.

Just signed up for bookarmy this morning. Someone had posted on an old entry of mine that it was pretty good, but first impressions can be killer. Leaving aside some confusing design issues (a mix of authors, readers, reviews, publisher descriptions, and user-generated content threw me off), the first recommendation was beyond terrible. After you sign-up, you ‘get started now!’ by entering a book. I entered my standard Unbearable Lightness of Being. Not only is it a favorite book that I go back to again and again, it’s also the classic example of how weak recommendation systems are — Amazon seems to always indicate that if I liked that book by Milan Kundera, I might like these books. Until very recently, all these other books are invariably by Milan Kundera — like reading more of this author hadn’t occurred to me.

So what did I get at bookarmy?

In fairness, the top listings can be hard to sort out, so I went to the second page of recos:

This would almost have to be driven entirely by “people who read this also read this” with little to no reliance on even basic publishing data such as genre, period, fic/non-fic. Bummer. I’ll give it a few more titles.

Clive Thompson has a nice, quick piece in WIRED about how technology can help increase reading and readership and why people, particularly publishers should stop bemoaning it.

Hits a lot of nice notes, but I most like the way in which it turns reading into a social activity . . . again. Like other markets, reading has become fragmented. In my social circles, I am almost never, I mean never, reading the same book as even one of my friends. Thompson cites some powerful examples of collaborative intelligent reading, where readers of books open-sources on-line annotate and interact with the texts helping to make works accessible and advancing scholarship. For my part, the Kindle has caused me to read more and better stuff.

And just for fun . . .

While looking the Nintendo DC classics series, I found this on Amazon:

A package deal from Penguin where you get roughly 1000 penguin books (chosen by Penguin to be the best or most representative of their publishing tradition and literary excellen), for less than 8000 dollars. “Kate” went ahead and did it:

Re-reading Ralph Ellison’s amazing Living with Music. The title essay is an excerpt from an article Ellison did for High Fidelity(!) magazine. The setting is his early days as a struggling writer living in a back-room, first floor apartment, surrounded by record players on the left, a singer above, and an airshaft/courtyard with variously entertaining, articulate, and annoying drunks (plus one very sad drunk who spent his last three days on earth yelling at the world to ‘shut up’). Ellison, a once fervently devoted student of the trumpet, decides to take control of the noise and buys a sound system and records:

Between the hi-fi record and the ear, I learned, there was a new electronic world. In that realization our apartment was well on its way toward becoming an audio booby trap [his phrase for a place filled with wires, cables, boxes all in service of the ever-elusive perfect sound]. It was 1949 and I rushed to the Audio Fair. I have, I confess, as much gadget resistance as the next American of my age, weight and slight income, but little did I dream of the test to which it would be put. I had hardly en tered the fair before I heard David Sarser’s and Mel Sprinkle’s Musician’s Amplifier, took a look at its schematic and, recalling a boyhood acquiantance with such matters, decided that I could build one. I did — several times — before it measured within specifications. … I built a half dozen or more preamplifiers and record compensators before finding a commercial one that satisfied my ear. … There were wires and pieces of equipment all over the tiny apartment (I became a compulsive experimenter) and it was worth your life to move about without first taking careful bearings. Once we were almost crushed in our sleep by the tape machine, for which there was space only on a shelf at the head of our bed. But it was worth it.

Gotta love a guy, a literary genius no less, who professes to gadget aversion but who can consult schematics, revisit childhood tinkering memories, and then go on to build sound systems — just so he can listen to music and get back to his writing. The people at MAKE would love it . . .