Counterbalance

A PDF about Long Books You'll Want to Peruse

Darby Dixon at Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks threatened to make a pdf with Endnotes about his nearly completed project to read books that are either very long in length or that are shorter in length but had somehow become gargantuan in his mind. Books on his reading list included The Recognitions, War and Peace, Life and Fate, Infinite Jest, and others. He's on his final book of the project, Against the Day.

He could have written a blog post about his reading experience. He did.

But then he made good on this threat. He made a lovely PDF of his thoughts with lots of extras. Who doesn't love extras?

When you can read a thing you might enjoy, it's a good day. When you can read a thing you might enjoy that is also a mini-celebration of type and layout and all things grid-y...well, it's a great day.

Make your day great. Read this PDF.

*"Reading a book..." graphical quote taken from the PDF in question.

Book Reviewing, The State Of...

So you know that post I spoke of yesterday, the one about book reviewing? That remains unpublished in my post queue? I should have published it months ago.

Alas, I may still, but Jane Ciabattari has a long piece at Poets & Writers that examines the state of book reviewing from many vantage points and mentions the role of literary blogs in how the landscape has changed.

I need to re-read it a few more times before I'll have cogent thoughts (and before I'll know if I should truly have published my piece first!) but I invite you to read it as well so we can discuss together.

To whet your whistle:

"The best of the feisty group of literary bloggers who began pushing the boundaries of traditional book commentary a decade ago have been woven into the mainstream, and their iconoclastic styles have freshened the form. This ongoing transformation has challenged our collective creativity and pushed all manner of innovation. This period will be seen as a benchmark in book culture. But it’s not the end of the book review."

Go. Sally forth. Read and report back.

Lit Bits and A Bit About Lingo

Lit Bits:

• Joan Didion will be in LA on November 16th. I cannot recall another time in my life when I've purchased a ticket so soon after opening an email newsletter.
• The UCLA Writers Faire is this weekend on the 28th.There will be mini-workshops and mini-panels.
• I'm in the last days of my re-read all Murakami novels project and I'm floundering a bit on many fronts. I don't really want it to end. I very much want it to end. I probably should have written about each book as I completed it. I should have taken academic-style notes. I'm glad I didn't do anything of the sort. More on this shortly, in a separate post.
• My Read More, Write More, Share More, Learn More project will launch next month, rather than in August planned. This month threw me a few curve balls of the family illness/funeral flavor so I'm a bit behind.
• I clearly like to deem my literary meanderings as "projects." Hmmmm...
• I'm casting about for another re-read project. With Didion coming into town and her new book out this fall, that seems an obvious one, no? Yet in light of the re-hullaballoo around DFW's language (and my obvious liking of and usage of it, much to others chagrin), I could just as easily be lured away from Didion in favor of DFW. Suggestions welcome.

A Bit About Lingo:

The bit about lingo became long enough that it made more sense for it to be a separate post.

A Bit About Lingo

I'm still thinking about Maud's NYT piece on David Foster Wallace's language and her take on how his language has permeated blogging syntax. As in, you know, this is how I'm thinking right now and what do you think and I can't be bothered to be precise in my language and that may be a reflection of my inability to be precise in my thinking or it may be an intentional style thing or whatever et al.

As I said this weekend, I'm guilty of this. I could be more precise in my language. I could be more convincing in my arguments. I often riff in an off-handed way because I'm writing quickly, or I am afraid you'll think I take myself too seriously, or I want you to enjoy books as much as I do, or because I'm very into the rhythm of how something sounds when read aloud or some odd combination of all these things and more.

But the thing is - I don't dislike my writing style. You may dislike it. You may deem me somehow less of an intellectual mind, incapable of rigor, as a result. I'm okay with that. There are many other places you can go for rigor-reading. I also firmly believe that just as wine appreciation can get snotty beyond all enjoyment, so, too, can literary banter. Life is short, wars are being fought, loved ones are dying every day...must we really be so intense about our books?

Ed has a more thought-provoking (see? perhaps there is something to my rigor-less thinking as seen in my rigor-less speech...) reaction to the piece and takes to task the idea that DFW's work in particular is to blame. Yet the thing that is still on my mind from the piece is that while I may be opinionated, I tend to shy away from being overly clear about my position on touchier literary-sphere subjects. I will get angsty about a thing, but I won't cite clear examples of what makes me angsty, if those examples involve my peers. That's not cool. I'm unimpressed with this tendency of mine. So the notion that my lack of clarity is in some way tied to my need to be liked (or, more precisely, not hated) is spot-on.

To cite an example (see that rigor?): I wrote a longer post about book reviewing a few months ago that remains unpublished in my post queue. I think it offers a decent look at some of the reasons we could celebrate books more vs. rail on them and their authors. Yet it is light on examples because I didn't want to piss anyone off. And what is that? That is a form of the very bullshit I often rail against.

So. I may or may not post that longer bit on book reviewing nonsense. I may or may not add examples to it before hitting Publish. Maud's piece has got me thinking on two entirely different tracks: on the one hand, I'm okay with my imprecise writing and on the other, I'm not. Whether it came from DFW is not my cross to bear (more precise minds will further this discussion, I'm sure) but it has given me pause in how my writing on this blog has come about and how its imprecision can at times serve me or discredit me.

DFW's Slacker-Lingo and Aw-Shucks Blog Prose

Maud Newton has an interesting piece at the NYT about the many linguistic gambits of David Foster Wallace and how such gambits made their way into blogging lingo. I read her piece with a smile on my face, but must also admit plainly: my writing on this blog is largely made up of many gambits she decries.

I could make excuses for this. I could point out that my day job requires a different, far more rigorous kind of writing. Or that I actually like that sort of writing in doses. Perhaps even large doses. Large doses in, say, the form of a David Foster Wallace novel. I suppose that makes me less academic-paper worthy, but I cannot undo six years of blog posts. You cannot unread them.

What did strike me, though, is that I could be infinitely better at these bits (emphasis mine):

"Even if you reject, as I do, the universality of her diagnosis, Smith has pinpointed the reason so much of what passes for intellectual debate nowadays is obscured behind a veneer of folksiness and sincerity and is characterized by an unwillingness to be pinned down. Where the craving for admiration and approval predominates, intellectual rigor cannot thrive, if it survives at all."

"But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward."

Food for thought.

NOW Reading Redux via The Instructions

While I'm still thinking through NOW Reading (and perhaps crafting a more measured, less "I've had no sleep so let's just blog it and post it, follow-up post), I was pleased to read Darby's comment as well as Mark O'Connell's "The Kindle and the Inner Conflict Between Consumer and Booklover" piece at The Millions as I believe they are all valid points in the conversation I had hoped to revisit.

Of note, while I still mull it all over:

"My point is that I, like a lot of other people, enjoy books as objects. Despite the difficulties that can arise from their accumulation, I like that they occupy physical as well as mental space. In fact, I quietly entertained the futile hope that the whole idea of e-books and e-readers would prove to be a transitory fad, that everyone would just somehow forget that books were cumbersome and comparatively expensive to produce and not especially good for the environment and that they could very easily be replaced by small clusters of electronic data that could be beamed across the world in seconds without ever taking up any actual space."

"So I did the obvious thing, and decided to see whether I could download The Instructions from the Kindle Store. When I found that the e-book version wasn’t yet available, I was briefly seized by that most contemporary (and stupid) of irritations: that of being denied a convenience that didn’t even exist until very recently. Granted, Levin’s novel is an extreme example, but it got me thinking about the unassuageable forces that the book as an object, as a cultural artifact, is up against. The history of what we call progress is a catalogue of ways in which the desire for convenience has trumped almost every other concern."

While I could obviously take from this that my own NOW Reading irritation was a "most contemporary (and stupid) of irritations" I will choose instead to take comfort in the fact that yet another reader is struggling similarly, albeit with a slightly different twist.

I will also say that I purposely bought The Instructions in print form (as I do most chunky novels) because I feel that when the writer has written something hefty and you should literally bear the weight of such heft throughout your reading process. Whether the words and ideas and story rise to meet such physical heft is another matter entirely. For the record, I dragged the weight (physical and otherwise) of The Instructions through seven airports and had to answer numerous questions about what could possibly be contained in such a big red book. I even, on two occasions, had to state plainly that no, it was not The Bible. But lugging around a big book is my own affectation, one that may fall by the wayside should I purchase the next chunky novel in a digital format instead.

I am a lover of print. I am a lover of font. I am a lover of how a font smells printed on the page. I, too, open a book and smell it first. Yes, still. I am a lover of all that the books-as-physical-objects folks hold dear. I hold them dear too. Yet if a younger generation won't ever love what we love, but will read far more in a format they do love, who are we to stick our noses in the air or the proverbial sand? A story is a story is a story no matter what it's written on. 

NOW Reading

A story in five parts, set in San Diego:

• I attended BlogHer. While this is not the place for a full diatribe on all that entails, I did meet a few incredible women. And, though I met nary a book blogger in the sea of 3,500 women, I did connect with Monica Vila, Founder of The Online Mom, who was recently interviewed by Julie Bosman at NYT for a piece on how & why eReaders are a hit with younger readers. We connected instantly over a shared passion for not giving a hoot how kids consume stories (paper books, Kindles, etched stone tablets) but just that they do. And if an easy reading tool gets them reading more - if the immediacy of a book on the castle they just walked through is available as they travel via train on a school trip - well, then, who are we to be bummed out about that?

 

• I had dinner with my brother. Thrice. Our first dinner he mentions he's reading Warren Buffet's book. Then, a day later, he's reading something else. I mention a book casually during our second dinner and a few days later, wouldn't you know it, he's already halfway through it. I pause. I let this sink in. This is a guy who, though related to me, simply doesn't read much. What has changed? The Nook is what's changed. He got a Nook a few months ago and has been reading more than he's ever read before. What did he love most about his beloved new Nook? That he could finish reading a book and download another one immediately. He is digging the "I want to read it right now" vibe his Nook is all too happy to support.

 

• I had to read Wolf Hall. I am nearly finished with my Murakami re-read project. I have each book in print form as they are much-loved. I even purchased several at Vroman's recently so I had fresh copies without marginalia to experience them anew. I traveled to San Diego with two of them. Of course, I finished them both. I promised a group of lovely folks that I would read Wolf Hall for an upcoming discussion, yet I did not bring my Kindle, did not have an iPad, my phone coverage was spotty at best (AT&T, I'll say no more). Fine, I thought. Perfect. I will simply go to the Barnes & Noble and pick up a print copy of this international bestseller. And yet - Barnes & Noble did not have a copy of said bestseller. I was told they could order it for me and I'd have it in just over a week. No dice, I said, I needed it NOW.

 

• I went to a soon-to-be closed Borders. And guess what? They had four copies of Wolf Hall. In paperback. 30% off. I had it NOW, just as I had wanted, but I felt dirty. Dirty because I didn't want a hard copy in the first place (where was my browser-based solution for all this?), dirty because I wanted Barnes & Noble to succeed on this front for the sake of their business but they didn't, dirty because I went to a closing Borders and feasted off its almost-carcass just to satisfy my NOW reading need.

 

• The cloud I complain about delivers. I work with a lot of tech clients. Instead of "paradigm shift" and "fostering engagement" the new buzz word at the tippy top of the boardroom bingo list is "cloud." Cloud computing. Let's put it in the cloud. We'll retrieve it from the cloud. Will our customers understand the cloud? Ad nauseam. So, while I absolutely "get" THE CLOUD, it has yet to remind me of reading. Until today. Hello Kindle Cloud Reader. You are just what I needed this past week in San Diego. Because you know what I did have with me at all times? My laptop. And what could I have done if I knew about you then? I could've read Wolf Hall NOW.

There is much to be said about how reading devices are not just changing how we read but how writers write and as you all know, I'm fascinated with every facet of this conversation. I want to support bookstores of every stripe, yet if this past week is any indication, we can no longer ignore the fact that immediacy could be the difference for some people (even me!) and, well, are we going to bury our heads in the sand or are we going to embrace this?

I'll caveat all this with the privilege debate (eReaders for the rich et al) as well as the critical library debate as well as the third world debate as well as the bookstores as community hubs debate. All of these are vital pieces of the conversation and many must co-exist with the cloud for a truly robust online/offline reading/writing world.

However.

If having a book NOW, as opposed to a week from now, means the difference between reading it and truly engaging with the content or not - what would you rather champion? For yourself? For your children? For future leaders of this very messed up country? It's a topic I'm exploring in all different ways and I'd love your take on it.