Posts tagged with books
“ Choose a book and read it at the same time as a bunch of people you hang out with regularly—your friends or colleagues, or just your partner. But: do not discuss the book. Allow the world of the book to seep into yours. Enjoy the sensation of temporarily inhabiting a common fiction, a shared memory palace. Crack in-jokes, reference characters and situations, share metaphors. No pressure. Just enjoy the experience.”
Oblique Reading: a Tutorial | booktwo.org (via adactio)
This is a nice, relaxed way to do it I think. Who wants to read a book at the same time as me?
(via adactio)
“ What you have to say is what you have to say.”
(Source: The Globe and Mail)
OH MY GOD.
I’ve been saying that someone needed to write a history of Riot Grrrl for a minute now (as the kids say these days). Good to see that someone has.
I’m going to own this as soon as it is humanly possible.
I’m going to have a brief “great stuff people are doing” day real quick. So: yeah! Sara Marcus is great: smart and awesome. There’s a copy of this book somewhere in my house, and while I haven’t gotten time to start reading yet, it’s getting really impressive reviews, and on my first browse through I was seriously wowed by the amount of work and research and care she put into it. Kinda staggeringly impressed. And it should be equally of interest whether you’re interested in the music part of things, the activism side of things, or just want to read a story about how something awesome and inspiring happening.
I think I said, a few months ago, that I remembered a time when it seemed like a lot of great writers were getting started with tackling this era, from a lot of different angles — if all the different results look as good as this one does, we’ll be in for a treat.
I’m adding this to my ‘to read’ list!
“ There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
first read of 2009 > dexter
Dexter omnibus by Jeff Lindsay
rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m a huge fan of the television show “Dexter” and also a huge fan of reading the book(s) of any movie or television show. When I started reading the “Dexter Omnibus”, I was expected it to be a facsimile of the television show. After all, the show is fantastic!
The prose itself is stunning - and I’m impressed by how well the Dark Passenger and Harry’s code have been carried into the TV show from the words Lindsay wrote. If I was the author, I’d be well stoked with the representation.
The reading of the novel is definitely informed by the show, even the third novel which is definitely different to and/or has not been covered by the plot so far. In fact, the divergence begins from the first book.
Mental images of characters are the same as the television show, except for Dexter himself and his sister, Deborah - these two are a mix between the actors who portray them and the description in the story.
Well worth reading both for the merits of the writing & for the enthusiasts out there.
View my booklog.
don’t reinvent the book
It’s pretty similar to the saying “we don’t need to reinvent the wheel” - books are not something I consider needing reinvention or real change. There is a great Newsweek article on the new Amazon product, Kindle, which raises a huge amount of points about the potential future of the book, most which I disagree with.
Call me a traditionalist - I don’t see it as a perjorative term in this context. Books should remain as they are today - something which can be tangible, separate, portable, held, tucked into a handbag or a coat pocket, and experienced. I am not against audio books, especially for those with accessibility/disability concerns or who are time-limited. What better than to play an Harry Potter audio book on a long car trip? Text being reproduced onscreen works in a lot of instances, especially when even the Long Tail cannot revive or even produce sales. I also believe that when copyright concerns have passed, the Internet and ebooks can be a great way to have these texts as reference for those who need them. One of the most self-restrictive decisions I think they have made - i.e. for commerce and not for any sense of the greater good - is not to use the open standard for ebooks. Why - when every reason to use the device points to the fact that you should be able to read anything on it - not just books published in the acceptable format. One step forward, two steps back!
There are limits to the changes I would accept to a text though. Books ARE a closed container. That’s the point. I believe in the power of the web to enhance a story, to bring audiences to writers, to allow for the final full stop of a page to only act as a pause until the text is updated or enhanced. However, I expect that to happen away from the original text - not as a series of updates to the intrinsic text of the book itself (well, perhaps for non-fiction but definitely not creative narratives). I can’t imagine how intrusive it would feel to read a text which had historical or political rebuttal (for whatever reason) embedded right within the lines. Some stories definitely have more life and potential to follow than others. Only last week I sat for minutes mourning the end of the story I was reading. I think that is one of the reasons we read these tales posed by a single author. We also have books which are conceived and executed by multiple people, but a “wisdom of crowds” scenario, or however you try to dress it, is not something I think will be widely accepted or even searched for in that medium.
Ultimately, I don’t believe that the Kindle will work - not because of a lacking feature set or the cost (though it is hefty for a unitasking item which adds to the weight of one’s daily load) but because we just don’t need another device. i’d rather buy an iPhone and get all the other features which I can have with it if I’m looking for a slick delivery device. As with the other Mac products I own, even an iBookreader would merge automatically with the suite of products I have already invested in.
(An aside: the Newsweek quotes a statistic about the percentage of Americans reading ANYTHING. This has dropped to under 60% of Americans reading 1 book per year. Shouldn’t we focus on that rather than trying to reinvent something that has a “killer user interface”?)
