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It’s that time of year to make lists. With this list I will cover two memes at once – my Two Thirds Book Challenge update, and my contribution to the #libfavs2011 tag (librarians listing their favorite 11 books read in 2011). So in no particular order …
(1) The Sparrow and (2) Children of God by Mary Doria Russell
Early in 2011 I read two books recommended by one of our English professors at my university. I’m surprised I had never heard of them before. They were (1) The Sparrow and (2) Children of God by Mary Doria Russell. Basically, the books are about a team of Jesuits (yes, Jesuits) who become the first humans to visit Alpha Centauri after catching snippets of song on a SETI satellite. Imagine the stories of the Spanish missionaries and treasure hunters who came to the New World in the 1400′s and later, retold as a sci-fi alien contact parable. These were books that stayed with me for a long, long, long time. I still think about things from these books and it’s been almost ten months since I read them! The characters, the cultures, even the details for the logistics of the trip itself are laid out in details. I will warn you, though, that the second book – Children of God – can be a harrowing book in some parts. It’s when everything breaks down, just as things inevitably did when our Old World met New World. Highly recommended.
(3) An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
I enjoyed reading Steve Martin’s Shopgirl a few years ago, and I want to know more about the art world someday so this little book seemed like a good choice for me. Overall, it was just okay, but I’m including it on this list because of the way he wove the artwork and the experiences of seeing the artwork into the story. In the edition I had from the library, there were even color images of the paintings in question sprinkled throughout the book. But for anyone who thinks ebooks can’t improve on their paper counterparts, this would be an example against that claim. I would much prefer to have read this as an ebook on the iPad with hi-res images for the paintings that I could make full-screen and really absorb. The little bitty images in the paper book did not do justice.
(4) Among Others by Jo Walton
I read this book on the heels of other similar stories about awkward kids discovering some unknown ability or world and battling their own monsters, imagined or otherwise. The other books included Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I chose Among Others for my list because I think it was the best written and the characters stayed with me far longer. Most importantly, the protagonist had a deep and abiding love of books that delighted me. Seeing the way the character thought about books, people, and places felt like stepping into someone else’s life. This one of the few books written as a diary that actually felt like reading a diary.
(5) The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
I’ve seen wildly different reviews for this book – seems to be a love it or hate it item. I myself absolutely loved it and can’t wait to own a beautiful hardcover mint condition copy of my own. I think the “hate it” crowd wanted stronger characters or plot or something, though I didn’t see much lacking in those departments for what it is — a fantasy/magic realism fiction. I think those same critics are pleased as punch with writers like China Mieville – who I also enjoyed this year, with his book Embassytown. But here’s the thing that a writer like Morgenstern has, that a writer like Mieville does not: Style. Mieville’s prose is clumsy and choppy. The words trip over themselves, the dialogue is stilted. But his story ideas are fantastically brilliant and original. Morgenstern, on the other hand, writes beautiful prose with gorgeous descriptions. She sets a scene and you can practically walk in it. You can smell the circus food, you can hear the gravel crunching, you can feel that breeze go by. I only wish her circus had more amazing tents so I could read her descriptions of them.
(6) The Late American Novel, edited by Jeff Martin
Now we get into my Two Thirds Book Challenge books. Though, of course, I am reading themes not books. This one comes from my Writing theme and it was an excellent choice. Dozens of writers of various genres put in their two cents about the future of writing, reading and books. The reactions are all over the place, the styles vary dramatically, and the different voices are very strong. Out of all these essays, there were only a couple I found myself skimming through rather than reading carefully and soaking up. I took many notes and in some places laughed out loud. Ironically, I read the book in the Kindle app on my iPad. I would love to get a paper copy and read it again in a year to see how the predictions are faring. Highly recommended for personal collections and gift giving.
(7) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
One of the motivations of using themes in my Two Thirds Book Challenge was to broaden my reading palette, but so far I’m still stuck in fiction, which is the theme of my next couple books on this list. Gaiman was one of those authors that seemed to be too hyped to me, so I avoided his books for a while. Then a year or so ago I read Good Omens by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett — lots of fun. After that the Twitter book club 1 Book 140 picked Gaiman’s American Gods and I read along. Enjoyed that, too. All sorts of mythology and legends being pulled together and brought into a modern age that doesn’t know what to make of mythology or legends. The Graveyard Book is no exception to that trend — Gaiman takes Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book and changes the setting to a graveyard. He pulls it off in a wonderful way, and without a tacky ending. I would love to see more stories with these characters.
(8) The Magicians and (9) The Magician King by Lev Grossman
When Magician King came out, I saw all sorts of interviews and reviews on book blogs discussing the allusions and references to writers like C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, Neal Stephenson, and many others. Just like my fascination with retold myths, I was intrigued by this series that admitted to so many influences. It took me a couple times to start The Magicians — Quentin is not the most sympathetic character, after all. But once I pushed through the first few chapters, the book really took off for me and the second book was even better. Now I’m contemplating a return to the Narnia books that I haven’t read in … 25 years?? Though seeing them through the jaded, skeptic eyes of Grossman’s characters makes me hesitate, too.
(10) and (11) … ??
I’m not going to pick these yet because I still have ten days in the year left – ten days that include quite a few hours in airports, airplanes, and away from work. Who knows what I might read next? Maybe even (gasp) a nonfiction book!
A Jane By Any Other Name
Last week I started reading Jane Eyre since we made plans to see the new movie adaptation, directed by Cary Fukunaga. I had read Jane Eyre many years ago, but didn’t have a good memory of it at all, which became more and more apparent while Mark was reading it for one of his classes this semester. I finished the book the day before we went to see the movie and loved the story all over again.
Before I go on, let’s just get some things clear: First, I do not expect a movie to strictly adhere to any book it might be based on, especially if said book would require an epically long film or miniseries to squeeze in every last character and story thread. I don’t think movies *should* try to follow the book closely because a movie is a different animal altogether. Secondly, here be spoilers. Lots of spoilers. About book and movie. So if you’re planning to either read the book or see the movie soon, just go ahead and add this little blog post to your Read It Later or Instapaper and we’ll meet again sometime.
Okay then. You caught that part about the spoilers, right? Just checking.
Let’s start with the casting. In short:
Jane (Mia Wasikowska) – too timid, not enough “direct glare” as she’s famous for in the book. Though the kid playing young Jane was perfect, I thought.
Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) – too handsome, but the voice was right on, better than I expected.
St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell) – not handsome enough, but adapted well. This is a character that could have been simplified into really annoying or really tyrannical, but was handled very well and given a good balance.
The too handsome / not handsome enough complaint might seem petty but it struck me as an important distinction in establishing Jane’s feelings for the two men. On this point the movie actually added a scene that didn’t appear in the book but was superb for the film [spoiler]: when Jane is alone in her schoolmarm cottage on a bleak snowy winter night, she hears a pounding on the door and opens it to find Rochester in all his dark, brooding, sexy glory storming in to kiss her passionately. Alas, it turns out this was just a fantasy for Jane and it’s actually St. John at the door. The difference and disappointment for her is made unmistakable in that scene. Beautiful addition.
Another change that helped the movie was near the very end when Jane returns to Thornfield to find a burnt out ruin. In the book, she hears from the innkeeper at the pub what happened, and Mrs. Fairfax is explained away by a line from Rochester. In the film, Mrs. Fairfax finds Jane at the ruins and tells her what happened. I like this much better. But maybe that’s because I think Dame Judi Dench is the bomb and I loved seeing her show up again.
I found special pleasure in seeing this movie with a crowd. It was pretty clear that many folks in the theater either hadn’t read the book or hadn’t read it recently. I heard murmurs and giggles during certain key dialogues that came straight out of the book, and one of my favorite moments was when Jane returns to Thornfield and the camera pulls back to reveal the damage. Audible gasps from the crowd. Loved that.
This is all to say that the film did get some things right. Unfortunately, on the whole, the film was weak. I think it assumed that the audience would have read the book, and tried to fit in pieces from every storyline without actually developing any of them. Where the book had time and space to follow these story lines carefully and develop some delicious tension between Jane and Rochester, Jane and Blanche Ingram, and Jane and St. John, the film just flitted from one snapshot to another without finishing a thought. I wish someone had suggested to the filmmakers, “You don’t have to cover everything in the book. Leave out the whole childhood, for example, and make the relationship between Jane and Rochester stronger.” With such a great Rochester, I feel cheated that we didn’t get the gypsy fortune teller scene, or the duet between Rochester and Blanche. In fact, we only see Blanche for maybe 5 minutes? No jealous tension whatsoever.
The filmmakers also seemed to be scared of scaring us. The novel of Jane Eyre has plenty of creepy bits, and to leave those out is to deprive the story of half its identity. The movie weakened everything that should have been spooky — the red room at Gateshead was not actually red or dark or gloomy or haunted in any way whatsoever. We never hear a single crazy laugh at Thornfield, just the occasional thump on the floor upstairs. We don’t get crazy Bertha ripping up Jane’s bridal veil. Rochester has both his hands at the end. Why soften it so much? Why hold back on these parts?
Overall, I guess I have to give it a B for effort. It was beautiful to watch. If you see it without reading the book, I’d love to hear whether or not it made any sense to you. For me the film, like its Jane, needed to be much bolder.
Hurray! I have read 6 of my 12 Books 12 Months list. And with this book I am fully appreciating the benefits of the 12 Books 12 Months idea because without it, I would most likely have gotten lost on reading tangents about sci-fi Jesuits, emotional food, and teenage demi-gods. And I would completely forget about all these books that the Sara from 6 months ago wanted to read. With the 12 Books list and the brilliant monthly summaries from E on latter day bohemian (I think those monthly round-ups really play an important role in motivation), I’ve managed to alternate between my whim readings and my planned readings – thus, moving ahead on some goals while also pursuing other spontaneous interests. It’s a really good feeling.
So even though I was very tempted to immediately jump into the sequel to the space traveling Jesuit story, I did myself a favor and picked up Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I had heard about this book at the ALA Conference this past summer in D.C. when I had the great privilege of seeing Salman Rushdie at an author talk. He was charming and intelligent, and his story about the beginnings of this book had me hooked.
This is a children’s book with some obvious, but playful, political messages. Rushdie wrote this just after the fatwa against his life was announced, wondering each day if he would see his son again, to whom the book is dedicated. So we get greasy politicians, evil tyrants, and egotistical princes. We also get some absolutely delightful bits — like the chapter headings: The Shah of Blah, An Iff and a Butt, and a wonderful nod to Beatles’ lyrics.
My timing in reading this book was good and bad. Bad – the pace and humor of a children’s book felt kind of jarring when I was in the middle of a stressful, high-stakes work week. Good – the pace and humor of a children’s book jarred me out of thinking about the stressful, high-stakes work week … for a few minutes at a time, at least.
I also had to rethink my reading style for this book. See, I’m anal. I know it. I admit it. I use folded sheets of paper as bookmarks so I can take notes while reading, and I even do this with fiction books. It’s a habit I developed after reading Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Educated Mind (very highly recommended as a book to own). I have a 3-ring binder full of old book notes from pre-grad school, and now a nice thick manilla folder of book notes post-grad school. But children’s books do not lend themselves to taking notes, at least not for me. I tried taking basic fiction notes at the beginning of the book — things like characters and place names — but finally I just put the pen down and read the book for the sake of reading. Pleasure reading. Personal pleasure reading.
This truly is the work of a storyteller. Sure, it might not be the best story in the world, or the most developed characters, or strongest plot, but it’s not supposed to be. This is a book that was meant to be read aloud at night to children, or read aloud to anyone who needs a distraction. And if you feel like being anal about it, well, read the short glossary at the end about the names in the book and then get on with the story.
“Believe in your own eyes and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess…” — Iff, the Water Genie (p. 63)
Doctor Who, Delicious, and the Commonplace Book
Once again, all my worlds colliding in interesting ways this week. For starters, I got Mark watching Doctor Who — he’s working his way through Season 4 with Doctor David Tennant on Netflix Streaming, and whenever the red envelopes show up, we slowly work our way through Season 5 with Doctor Matt Smith.
What the heck could this possibly have to do with Delicious.com and Commonplace Books, you ask? Excellent question. Here goes…
In the Season 5 episode “The Time of Angels” River Song reappears with her intriguing blue TARDIS book, which basically serves as her commonplace book of all things Doctor-related. But I didn’t think of it as her commonplace book till I saw some tweets coming out of THATcamp about digitizing them, plus Amanda Watson’s Ngram comparing commonplace books to scrapbooks. On top of all this, I’m reading Steven Johnson’s new book Where Good Ideas Come From (*highly* recommended) and I just came to the part in chapter 3 where he talks about the magic of commonplace books, particularly in regards to Darwin, who wrote copious notes and re-read them later to compare with other notes.
So with my brain churning around questions about commonplace books, a seemingly unrelated event happens — rumors spin out of control about my beloved bookmarking site Delicious.com riding off into the dot.com horizon, and suddenly I (and thousands of other people) start really thinking about where to keep our treasure troves of both useful and forgotten links (I’m toying with both Diigo and Pinboard, for what it’s worth…).
But then tonight I came back to Steven Johnson, where I’m still in the middle of musings about commonplace books – especially John Locke’s system of indexing his books and the Enlightenment habit of treating text as a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, here-and-there kind of thing. And I realized that these commonplace books proved invaluable to their writer-owners because they held everything … reading notes, letter drafts, observations, recipes … sound familiar? How many times have you tried to devise a Thing To Hold All Thoughts for yourself? Be it a filing system, a gadget, a piece of software, or a website — many of us are constantly waging this battle to reinvent the commonplace book in a digital age.
I realized that I don’t need a Delicious replacement. I need a whole bloody completely different way of doing things. What can serve as my commonplace book? My home laptop…? My Evernote account …? Do I go back to paper journals…? Right now I have ideas and snippets and quotes scattered across all of these places, which means I have a hard time finding that one recipe I’m thinking of or that one short story I have another idea for. So the good news for me is – Delicious and Yahoo aren’t the problems at all. The bad news is – I need to think about a much bigger picture and do my future self a favor by making up my mind and condensing my workflows.
Speaking of the future … a bit ironic that River Song is still using good old paper as her commonplace book centuries from now, isn’t it? *
*Yes, I know it’s fiction, silly. But I also know the writers can dream up things like sonic screwdrivers and time-eating stone angels, yet they still trust memories to paper. I find that very, very interesting.
This post is about 3 books I read for the 12 Books, 12 Months reading club and 1 book that I did not.
On my original 12 Books, 12 Months blog post (http://esquetee.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/latecomer-to-12-books-12-months/), I listed out the Connie Willis related books as such:
- - Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, 1992
- - Three Men in a Boat, to say nothing of the dog by Jerome K. Jerome, 1889
- - To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, 1998
- - Black Out by Connie Willis, 2010
- - All Clear by Connie Willis, 2010
Here’s the gist of this series: It’s the year 2057, time travel has been invented but only the history departments of major universities even bother with it since the money holders found out they can’t steal things from the past (no really, they physically cannot remove objects from the past, no matter how hard they try). I don’t recall any of the historians trying to visit the future, but then … all the time travelers are historians, not futurists. Most of the stories focus on visitng England in World War II. Doomsday Book, however, is focused on the Black Plague, and To Say Nothing of the Dog (TSND) centers around 1888 – Victorian times.
But in my 12 Books 12 Months list, I forgot about the story that started it all — Fire Watch, from the 1984 short story collection of the same name. So I read that first and I’m very glad I did. Even though this story was published first, the events in it actually take place *after* the events in Doomsday Book, which came out in 1992. Fire Watch is a good place to start not only because it’s the first story in the series, but because it takes the reader right into the heart of Willis’ style. Our hero is a PhD student in history who has to do “field work” in London, England during the Blitz. He is stationed at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Have you ever seen war ruins? Have you visited a church or a school that has remained in shambles for decades as a reminder of how stupid war can be? I visited such a church in Stuttgart, Germany while I was a freshman in college. The roof was gone, the windows were empty eye sockets. There were large laminated black and white photographs around the ruins showing what it looked like before the war. It was beautiful. Even as a heathen atheist, I could see how beautiful and special this place was. And it was dead now. Fire Watch reminded me of that church and then it showed me what it would have been like to be there when it happened. Bombs, incendiaries, fires, and more bombs. The Fire Watch was the group of volunteers who stood guard at the cathedral and tried to put out as many fires and incendiaries as they could, often getting killed in the process.
Strange as it may sound, this novella set in World War II reminded me how painful it had been to read Doomsday Book set in 1348 the first time. So I decided not to read it again after all. Doomsday is a very good book — historical fiction done as historical fiction should be, but man, was history depressing sometimes. I don’t remember the story very well, but I remember crying at least once. I don’t want to be depressed when the days are getting shorter and the weather colder so I moved on to Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) by Jerome K. Jerome – a comedy travelogue about three chums taking holiday on the Thames in a pleasant English June.
But first I will tell you about the book that got me here. I first read To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis when I was a sophomore in college. I found it on a “take one, leave one” shelf at the college library and completely fell in love with it. I was a history major with crazy, delightfully eccentric history professors, and the book seemed to be made specifically for me. One of my requirements of an excellent book is that it leads me on to other excellent books. In the 10ish years since I first read it, I have worked my way through some of the other classics that it introduced me to — The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, the Sherlock Holmes canon, and – of course – Three Men in a Boat. My re-read this time around has given me more to look up that I forgot about — Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Dorothy Sayers’ mystery novels.
Call me a heretic, but I actually think the Connie Willis sci-fi is a far better book than the Victorian classic. I did enjoy Jerome’s anecdotes and (some of) his tangents into English history and sentimental descriptions. I have to admit that the Victorian elements of TSND made a LOT more sense after reading Jerome. My advice would be to skim through Jerome’s book (it is free out on Gutenberg and FeedBooks) and get the taste of Victorian flourish and a dose of good humor before traveling through time with Willis.
Willis definitely has her own sense of humor and uses it very well in TSND — especially where dogs and cats are concerned. I also love that sci-fi in this instance is not about the gadgetry but more about theory and thought puzzles. In TSND, the thought puzzle revolves around time, paradox, and whether or not history can “correct” itself. I won’t go more into it because I would just confuse us both, trust me.
Also, she doesn’t simply quote from other works, she weaves them into the texture of the story. One of her characters uses examples from Agatha Christie’s Poirot to try and solve a problem, and another character relies almost entirely on Tennyson’s poetry for everything he says.
TSND cries out to be a hyperlink novel. Unfortunately, the ebook edition available on Amazon is pathetic. Granted, I only looked at the sample chapter, but the format of the chapter headings was ghastly and it did not include any table of contents. Why? Why would you not have something as basic as a table of contents for an ebook? I read the entire Jerome book in the Kindle app on an iPad and it had the same problems – no table of contents and clumsy formatting in the text. Being able to quickly look up obscure Victorian terms by simply tapping made the reading much easier, though. I realized that my experience in reading these books now is very different than it was ten years ago thanks to the online search tools that I keep close at hand. I first read TSND around 1999. Google Images and Wikipedia didn’t come out till 2001 – which I used this time to find what the heck a penwiper is supposed to look like and to follow the route along the Thames.
Part 1: Off-the-cuff initial reactions to Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
The book could be summed up as “No! That’s not what I said!” in a painful, wincing way.
It was very simply and elegantly written, mixing phrases and metaphors from famous English translations of the Bible with Pullman’s own what-if imaginings. He managed to put some realistic human angles into the story of the gospels yet keep some of the original fairy tale aspects, too. One of the best examples I’ve seen of showing how we got it wrong, we got it all wrong.
Jesus’ soliloquy at Gethsemane is a beautiful, believable, universal surrender to doubting the divine and, at the same time, a love letter to this crazy world we live in. I think everyone should read this book for at least that chapter alone, and if you want to skip ahead to it, fine — it’s pages 192 – 201 in the hardback edition.
I do wish that the book had a completely different title. The given title was too distracting to me. As I was reading, I kept trying to place things according to what the the title told me to expect, which made parts of the story confusing. I wish the title had instead been the big bold phrase on the inside front flap of the dust jacket, as well as the splash for the book’s official website:
This is a story.
A much more powerful way to describe what the reader is about to experience … and by the end of the book, you might think of that title in a whole different way.
Part 2: Paper or Plastic?
On another note completely … this is a book I will definitely be reading again in it’s e-book edition. Or perhaps I should say … in it’s Enhanced Edition. It’s not clear to me whether it would be Philip Pullman’s voice reading the audio track that accompanies the text, but I am very excited to see the interviews. The re-reading will probably have to wait till November, however.
Karen Armstrong. A Short History of Myth, 2005
First book done! for 12 Books, 12 Months
I am SO glad I started 12 Books, 12 Months with this one. It was the only non-fiction book in my list but it paves the way for much of the fiction that I’m planning to read this year (and into next). I started with Short History of Myth because it is the first title in the Canongate Myth Series — books by different authors, from different countries, retelling a myth from their culture. I heard about this series because Philip Pullman’s latest book is the latest addition to the series (The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ). But I have this thing about putting my media consumption in chronological order, whether it be movies, books, or TV series. I can’t start Buffy in the middle or end, I have to see it from the pilot episode, moving forward… for example.
With the Canongate Myth Series, I am making an exception because: 1) I can’t get all the books anyway since a couple of them have not been translated yet, as far as I know, and 2) I really don’t want to wait that long to read Philip Pullman’s book, man. And besides 3) I only have the Pullman book from my local public library for another week, so I have to start reading it, like, now.
It also helped that Mark happened to own a copy of Karen Armstrong’s book already.
The book is a nice, short introduction to mythology — just 150 pages long. In such a small amount of space, it would be hard to really do justice to any particular aspect of mythology so I have to give Armstrong some credit for summing things up as well as she did. My biggest problem with the book was in the second and third chapters when she is describing the development of mythology and religion during the Palaeolithic and Neolithic Periods. There were so many universal statements and broad sweeping assumptions that I started getting really annoyed with the writing, even though I was really into the topic. Starting with the fourth chapter on early cities and city-states, the writing improved and the book got a lot more interesting. I now have a longer reading list with things I never thought I would want to read, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, when man first turns his back on his gods — “Mortals are better off without these destructive encounters with irresponsible gods” (p. 74).
From there, we go into the Axial Age – so named because it is considered a pivotal time in humanity’s spiritual development and marks the beginning of religions as we know them today. Post-Axial followed that with religions trying to become rational – throwing out their mythology in favor of silly attempts at “proving” the facts in their respective literatures. And finally, we get The Great Western Transformation, which brings us up to modern day. This chapter is terribly sad, depressing, emotional, but, by the end, hopeful.
This might be a weird analogy, but bear with me … I felt like I was reading something like Peter Pan, with a lot of foreshadowing of Tinkerbell’s death and not knowing if this new altered version of Peter Pan would save her or not. At the same time, I found myself rooting for Tinkerbell even though I’ve always thought of her as rude and troublesome before. Replace Tinkerbell in this equation with religion/mythology and maybe you’ll get what I mean.
Mythology is the hero in this little book. A misunderstood, riches-to-rags character of heartache. Our heartache. Their heartache. Everyone’s heartache. But if another person’s mythology isn’t dressed up like our own, we try to destroy it … then steal the clothes to drape over our own mythology anyway. Does mythology die in the end? I’ll leave that to you to decide.
The last twelve pages of the book are some of the best twelve pages I have ever read — Armstrong mentions both T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and magic realism as two examples of modern literature foreseeing and dealing with the nihilistic position we’ve put ourselves in by rejecting all our mythologies. And no, she does not accept fundamentalist nuts as participants in mythology — one of my favorite quotes from the book: “once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.” (p. 130)
And why do we need mythology, you might ask? Armstrong gave plenty of reasons, but I like how her quote from Blaise Pascal summed it up best: “When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.” (p. 127)
Some other quotes to end with:
p. 124 “Myth had made human beings believe that they were bound up with the essence of the universe, yet now it appeared that they had only a peripheral place on an undistinguished planet revolving around a minor star.”
p. 138 “It has been writers and artists, rather than religious leaders, who have stepped into the vacuum and attempted to reacquaint us with the mythological wisdom of our past.”
p. 149 “If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.”
5. you have to fight an urge to offer uninvited help when you overhear conversations at the coffee shop / post office / in line
4. you create spreadsheets / databases… at home
3. an ex has ever accused you of loving them for their books / bookcases / bookshelves
2. you wear corrective lenses (ooo, stereotype. But no really, do you?)
1. when you hear a movie based on a book is coming out, you read the book anyway
If you can think of 5 more clues to librarian-tude, please share in the comments.
This post has been in draft mode for a long, long time and resurfaced in my memory thanks to various conversations including this one at FriendFeed and this post on e-book reading.
It seems like a great way to get a bunch of librarians really going is to ask “Is paper dead?” and let them have at it. For the most part, people immediately think of books and that’s how this post started, too. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my own personal paper-to-computer transition has been happening gradually for a few years and didn’t really involve the book aspect until recently.
I’ll start with music. I’m including this in “paper-to-computer” because CDs are, after all, digital music so it’s not really “analog to digital”. The change is really in packaging. In 2003 I went from carrying CDs and a Discman to keeping all my music as MP3s on an iAudio. Oh, the great magic of shuffle! And playlists that could be longer than a 70 minute CD-R! My listening habits started changing right away. I eventually moved to an iPod after switching to a Mac and only in the last year have I started downloading a few songs off of iTunes and Amazon. I still primarily like to own my music on CD because of the paper and physical media (or my perception of something closer to permanence than MP3s).
Gallery Leather
My calendar switch took me by surprise. Before I started grad school, I used the same brand of beautiful little day planners each year. In my first year of grad school I started using Google Calendar and within two months I wasn’t looking at my paper planner at all. I was still optimistic that I would find some reason to use the paper planners (and still bought the same brand of beautiful little planner even last year) but found that I was adding events to my online calendar from too many different places (home computer, work computer, cell phone) to keep my paper calendar “synced” anymore. For a back-up, I use iCal.
Grad school also changed my reading habits to some extent. Perhaps reading blogs paved the way, but I found myself reading most of my articles for class as PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro, where I could highlight, bookmark, and annotate very quickly and then easily search my notes during class discussions. At ALA Midwinter this past January I used a friend’s iPod Touch rather than lugging around a laptop. Out of sheer boredom I started reading an e-book (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) on the plane trip home. Once I got my own Touch, I continued reading on the bus trips to campus each day. It was just so darn convenient! The downside for me, however, was the lack of a trusty paper bookmark that I’m accustomed to using for jotting notes and quotes. Right now my bus trip book is a hardback paper book again, and the trusty paper bookmark is almost full. I could possibly keep a scrap of paper with the Touch for such notes, but I usually use the book as support when I’m writing the note and I wouldn’t want to press on the Touch like that. For the most part, I think I would just use e-reading for the kind of books I would check out from a library and not actually own. In other words, fluff books for pure entertainment. All other books, I will continue reading as paper for a while longer.
And now in the last couple weeks I’ve made the paper-to-computer transition that was the hardest but the best: journaling. I have a small chest full to the brim of paper notebooks I’ve used as journals from the past 20 years (what?? not going to think about the implications of that…) and I’ve been toying with the idea of moving this very personal ritual to the computer for over a year but kept resisting. I was too attached to the physical act of using pen on paper to give up paper journaling until recently when I looked through my current paper journal and realized that in the last 3 months I’ve only written 11 entries, the most recent being a month ago.
The final push came from talking with a good friend who had been using Word as a journal platform for some time now and who was generous enough to show me how he set up his files. He used a new Word document for each month, with many entries that were simply a line or two. Some days had several of these brief entries, some days were skipped entirely, and some entries were longer, more reflective. For some reason, I never gave myself this much flexibility in my paper journaling and that is most likely one of the reasons my journaling had become so infrequent.
VoodooPad Journal
So I started journaling in VooDooPad, creating a page for each month with links to the page for each day that has any entries. Sure enough – in the month of March alone I had 21 entries. The most surprising benefit to me was how much more easily (and flowingly?) I could write when typing than when writing by hand. I also appreciate the ability to search all my entries at once and back up the journal in multiple places (a factor that worries me a little re: my paper notebooks). I’m not convinced yet that I have the right structure going (year / month / day) but it’s working for now.
With such big parts of my life now in my computer, I wondered what paper habit might be next to make the transition. I looked around my apartment and here are some of the paper things I found:
to do lists / grocery lists
checkbook (only used for rent, though)
hand-outs from presentations
concert programs / tickets / flyers
class hand-outs & notes
receipts
doodles / outlines / sketches
paper scraps from collage book workshop
coupons
greeting cards
I have a shelf full of blank notebooks of various colorful bindings and another shelf of blank notecard box sets, one of which I use each month when I send my paper rent check to my landlord.
And honestly… do I *want* all these paper things to turn into bits & bytes? I have to say “no” because I do still have a love affair with paper.
