kip/bot/blog

While my kindle experience has generally been a love-fest, there are some areas where it falls short and I feel the pain:

- the digital version of books don’t always preserve section breaks within chapters. This is especially true in novels, the kindle format sometimes loses the extra paragraph break or first word capitalization that indicates a shift in scene

- some weird capitalization/italicizations appear or linger in the digital versions of some books. I think this is mostly classics, but the last three public domain things I’ve read (two Austens and a Dickens, which, to be honest I haven’t and may never complete) have random-seeming words appear in caps. it’s very jarring

- taking notes can be funky. When you highlight passages of periodicals, you lose those highlights when you store them at Amazon and take them off of your kindle (yes, I’ve spent enough money to fill my kindle memory and my sd card). It’s not really fair to complain that Amazon should store the state of my book, but it is a difference between the book and the kindle

- Random access::difficulty moving through sections. this is the biggest problem. It’s nearly impossible to quickly navigate between sections or highlights of a book.

- real note-taking. While the commenting function of the kindle (with its keyboard) is useful, it’s still less rich, and yes less satisyfing, than having an open book next to an open notebook where you scribble madly. I was wrong earlier, this may be the biggest drawback.

That all said, I still love the thing. And I have to say, I am so over the smell of the books and the sound of the riffling pages thing. I still love my big-ass Riverside Shakespeare and still think there’s a certain majesty to my illustrated Dickens, first edition Orwell, and bound series (like POwell’s “Dance to the Music of Time”, which seems larger as four bound volumes, rather than 12 single ones published under different marketing sensibilities), but I’m not bumming too heavy. AND, during a miserable plane ride where I had kids on all four sides of me, it was wonderful to switch from a work-related book, to Thomas Friedman, to the paper, to a piece of pulp trash like The Camel Club and find the right reading rhythm.

And think of all the trees I’m saving . . . *hugs self-righteous self.

From the NYT article covering French writer Jean-Michel Gustave Le Clezio award of the Nobel Prize, his answer to what message he would convey in his address:

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

Interesting, and interesting to argue, sidenote: Horace Engdahl, the head of the Swedish Academy (which awards the prize) was critical of American literature today, calling it “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” No American has won the Nobel literature prize since Toni Morrison did in 1993.

From Neil Gaiman’s Journal: The Graveyard Book Tour

The Proper US tour starts in New York on Tuesday the 30th. At each US stop, I’m going to read a chapter of The Graveyard Book. I’m going to read them in order. Other things will happen too (we’re hoping for some exclusive Coraline footage, for example), and there will be a Q&A and maybe other things. The stops are going to be filmed. Each Chapter that gets read will also be put online by Harpers very soon after it’s read (depends mainly on how quickly the footage can be edited and put up online). So you can follow the tour around, and get the book a chapter at a time for free…

All sorts of forward-lookingness from an publishers who are already doing trailers, author blogs, digital early releases, crowd-sourced promotions and tours. I just wish I liked Gaiman’s novels half as much as I do his comics.

Looks like Plastic Logic has an e-Reader that covers many things the Kindle doesn’t: touch-screen, larger display, Office document compatibility. None of the coverage talks yet about energy consumption, keyboard input, or better scanning/navigation of documents (though the touch screen could help that a lot). Also, not sure if 8.5 * 11 is the ideal size for a book replacement.

None of those concerns stops the ache to actually have one and convert my library . . .

How much more am I loving my Kindle? I woke up this morning, flipped on the Kindle for the morning paper download and, lo!, there’s Anathem — Neal Stephenson’s newest novel. All reading of Pride and Prejudice, Nixonland, Click and anything else stop.

The timing is great, too. There is a bunch of reportage today that Bletchley Park is getting funding for renovation from a bunch of technology companies. (My favorite Neal Stephenson novel is Cryptonomicon, which is all about crypto in the 90s and during WWII. One of the characters, Randall Waterhouse, goes to Bletchley.)

Photos of WWII codebreaking stuff.

Couple more links at boinboing.

… as opposed to what marketing people define it as.

While I understand the importance of narrative and storytelling in the work of marketers and advertises, this is one of the cooptations/adaptations in the industry that really pains me. Like paradigm shifts, storytelling/narrative is a wondrous and powerful idea that is trivialized when it gets thrown about in business. A recent review in The Nation of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginative New ‘Enchantress of Florence’ is a wonderful re-grounding of what narrative and story really means to people. (It also reminds us that book reviewing can itself be an art form.)

The novel, on its fourth page, is finding its subject, and its subject is storytelling itself. The men are driven by hungers and thirsts, and so is the writing. In its greedy piling up of nouns–”hostelries, saloons, food stalls, and hawkers”; “Cloths, utensils, baubles, weapons, rum”–we feel the force of storytelling’s appetite for the world, its sheer sensual relish for the thingness of things. It is no surprise that the great compendiums of stories tend to swell virtually without limit: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote and Gargantua and Pantagruel. This is the same impulse, of course–under stricter regulation in The Enchantress of Florence–that gives Rushdie’s greatest novels their girth.

I love the phrase “greedy piling up of nouns” and the sense of fullness the passage conveys. I’m also fond of how the review picks up on the importance of cities in stories and culture:

for Rushdie, the city is storytelling’s supreme subject. Delhi, Karachi, Cochin, New York, above all Bombay, the city of his childhood (“Back to Bom!” is Saleem’s happiest thought in Midnight’s Children), and London, the city of his maturity (“Ellowen Deeowen,” The Satanic Verses calls it, yoking Semitic and Indo-European divinities in a numinous pun on the spelling of the city’s name). The city, for Rushdie, is the place of variety, mystery, fortuity, possibility, conflict–all the elements that most make for good stories. It is the place where strange people live next door and unimaginable worlds are waiting to be discovered on the next block, a place that invites you, as the title of his latest essay collection urges, to “step across this line.”

City here, is more a gathering of people with broader-than-tribal coincidental affililiations, and therefore a place of discovery. Not to discredit the much- and recently-vaunted small towns (from which I come), but I love the sense of magic that surrounds stories, cities, and even trade in this review.

On the work-related side of this, those who bandy narrative and story about might still benefit from this definition (and the underlying energy) to get beyond the A to B nature of story. Story is too often seen as a distilled beginning, middle, and end with connective tissue. Here, it’s more rollicking, intricate, layered, recursive, and rich in bewildering detail.

I have Kindled Rushdie’s book and plan to get to it as soon as I find out what happens between Mister Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.

Just came across references to the NEA Big Read Meme in Cocktail Party Physics.  The NEA is trying to “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture”, a worthy goal questionably stated.  I would think a Trojan horse approach (reading that entertains, books that are fun) would work better than a return to the past and an attempt to displace the web and mp3 players.  But that’s non-profits for ya. 

The list below, and I haven’t found the original source yet (and see no point in trying to having found the same list three times already), has 100 books that are somehow worthy of people’s attention.  It’s a mix of popular and fun (Harry Potter, LOTR) and more traditional classics (Lolita, Pride and Prejudice).  The viral activity around it is to see what we have read, intend to read and which ones we love.  Great fun to play  with, critique, and build your own.

One thing around the categories worth doing is distinguishing between “Read and discarded from thought” which would apply to most of Tess of the D’Urbervilles which was part of AP English, “Read and Internalized”, “Read but should Re-Read”.  Not all read-s are equal.

Look at the list and bold those we have read.
Italicize those we intend to read.
Underline the books we LOVE.

I’ve also put a footnote anchor by incomplete reads, with notes at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [1]
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky [2]
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez [3]
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving [4]
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert [5] (Currently reading this.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (No, but I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that was enough for me!! )
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt [6]
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [7]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Really great article in The Atlantic about the internet’s possible impact on our cognitive structures/patterns/modes. The title, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, sounds like the usual whingeing about the internet — how it hurts our spelling, makes us less polite, decreases our capacity for independent thought, makes us less inclinced to memorize epic poetry, etc. But this article is smarter and more relevant on several fronts.

The thread of the article is that the author has noticed that while he has become quite adept at scanning a staggering amount of information and number of articles on the web, he has become less and less able to finish books or even articles. Friends of his have noticed that as well.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The article, and many of the people cited in it, speak in clear tones of worry that we are losing something, but it avoids being a tedious baby-boomer lament. Instead, it has a nice survey of how we have always lamented new technologies (Socrates worries that texts will undermine memory and deep learning in The Phaedras, Nietszche’s typewriter causes speculation about what his real voice is, people worry that the printing press will make knowledge too cheap).

It goes deeper, though, into how we have always thought about our consciousness and how our consciousness may be shaped, by our technologies. We used to think of our brains as clocks, then machines, now computers . . .

There is a woe to us argument:

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.

This puts me in conflict. My tech side, which abhors tech laments rolls my eyes, but my conspiratorial said “uh-oh.” Then there is a genuinely sad part:

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

This upset in ways that upset me: I am no longer even a trailing member of the digital vanguard.  (And the fact that I found the article through a sample of the magazine on the Kindle — the device that was going to get me reading again — is not a comfort.)

Kindle is fast becoming a bigger conversational go-to for me than wikipedia on the iPhone.  Last night, while hanging with my friends (and cultural guides) Tom and Donna, I shared my story about being a real “trouper” versus “trooper”.  This brought up other phrases, like “the proof of the pudding” (or the proof is in the pudding), which Nownow sorted out thus:

The entire phrase is “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” meaning that the true value or quality of a thing can only be judged when it is put to use. (“Proof” in this context means “the act of testing,” rather than our more common “conclusive evidence” sense.) “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” dates back to around 1600, and is more often heard in the United Kingdom than the U.S., probably because puddings of various kinds occupy a more prominent place on the dinner table there.

“The proof is in the pudding,” a fairly common mutation of the proverb, does make a certain amount of sense, i.e., that the final product, not the recipe, is what counts. But personally, I can’t shake the feeling that “the proof is in the pudding” would make an excellent last line for a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Source:
http://www.word-detective.com/081100.html#proofpudding

They also provided confirmation for my personal pet peeve about the misuse of “begging the question”:

In logic, begging the question has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy (also called petitio principii) in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. Begging the question is related to the fallacy known as circular argument, circulus in probando, vicious circle or circular reasoning. The first known definition in the West is by the Greek philosopher Aristotle around 350 B.C., in his book Prior Analytics.

In contemporary usage, “begging the question” often refers to an argument where the premises are as questionable as the conclusion.

In popular usage, “begging the question” is often used to mean that a statement invites another obvious question. This usage is disparaged.
* Suppose Paul is not lying when he speaks.
* Paul is speaking.
* Therefore, Paul is telling the truth.

I love these guys.
Toby, at Pondering Points, seems to get quite agitated by misused phrases as well.  Perhaps Nownow would help . . .

Eos books, the imprint for the next Neal Stephenson novel . . . pause for a minute to celebrate that fact (which I didn’t know until this morning) . . . pause for another moment to celebrate the fact that it is not historical fiction (as opposed to his last three) . . . too many ellipses …

Eos books, the imprint for the next Neal Stephenson novel, had a nifty blog entry today announcing that Stephenson would be doing an interview soon and that readers could submit questions in the comments section. Stephenson has done a lot of interesting publishing things. When he released Cryptonomicon, a novel in which the importance of cryptography and secrecy to WWII and business today was prominent, he offered readers a code to crack. For the release of Quicksilver, the first volume of his Baroque Cycle he started a wiki in which readers could document the characters, events, ideas, and books covered in what turned out be a massive historical cycle. The release of In the Beginning was the Command Line, a book about software design and the predominance of the GUI in it, as a free downloadable was one of the early instances of ‘free’ in publishing. He semi-famously told the NYT that he wrote Snow Crash because programming it as a multi-media thing turned out to be too hard. He also used to provide soundtracks to the writing of the novels as part of his acknowledgements.

So this is another of those interesting things that Stephenson is doing to publishing. The questions and comments are awesome:

Stephenson has a fervent following, which cares deeply about his work and the subject matter driving his work, so it’s not entirely safe to say that every author can or should do this. But there are two points worth noting. First, Stephenson writes dense fiction that entertains but which also goes somewhere. He can write hilarious, memorable scenes, but they almost always occur in a setting that has depths the novel doesn’t have time to explore. Even his pen-name-written Interface, one of his more straightforward narratives, gets into how the brain works, how much we can manipulate people’s tastes, and, oddly enough, turned me onto a now decade old love of Mahler (along with Kundera . . . I read Immortality a month before Interface. Second, he is all about the “More…” dynamic of the internet era. Knowing that there is a feedback loop where his intellectual passions feed his fiction which fuel his and his readers’ passions, he participates readily and effectively in creating and pointing to content that deepens the reading and appreciation of his work.

Meanwhile, I’m just psyched that he’s doing a novel about monks. I love that s@!$.