Stormed Blue Sands

Books Read in 2012: "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann

2012-01-04T07:41:00.000-08:00

OK, technically I read the bulk of this in 2011, but I finished it this morning, so it goes into the 2012 pile.

We've got to draw lines somewhere, people.

That said, I enjoyed this quite a bit. A lot of people have said that this is really a post-9/11 novel, which I have to say I see only superficially. It's easy to draw parallels, and it may even have been the author's intent to use an event—in this case Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974—as a nucleus around which he could explore shifting human relationships. Day to day interactions between people, even seemingly innocuous events, have consequences. Small, insignificant actions can have repercussions that last for a long, long time, positively or negatively. To have used 9/11, while an obvious choice, would have been just that: Obvious. It still carries too much emotional baggage as we all have our memories of that day, no matter how far we may have been from the events.

Books Read in 2011: "Life Itself: A Memoir" by Roger Ebert

2011-11-29T21:38:00.000-08:00

This is one of those books that I somehow managed to download in different formats, and the mélange of ways in which to read or listen to the it just kind of allowed me to seamlessly switch between them and work my way through. The bulk was probably listened to as an unabridged download from Audible, narrated by Edward Herrmann, a.k.a. The Voice of the History Channel. I admit that I was kind of impressed, given the difficult task that he had. As I once wrote here about why I would sometimes opt for an abridged version of a book instead of unabridged:

When I'm listening to a book written by a well known person, but read by someone else, I have this strange disconnect going on in my head. I work to replace the voice that I'm hearing with the voice that I imagine should be there instead.

Given that Roger Ebert is no longer able to speak for himself but that anyone who grew up, as I did, watching him on TV and knowing his voice so well can still "hear" him as they read his words, I wasn't sure how it would feel listening to someone else. I'm sure that, had his cancer and the surgeries to remove it and repair the damage not robbed him of speech, Ebert would have read this himself. On the other hand, if those events had not happened, Ebert never would have stopped doing his TV show, never would have started blogging, never would have started Twittering, and probably never would have taken the time to write this book, many chapters of which started as posts on his blog. It would always have remained something in his mind to do in the future, perhaps after he retired, as a summing up. But as this book made clear, he never would have retired—he was, is, and always shall be a newspaperman.

So Edward Herrmann read it instead, and did an admirable job. He didn't do an imitation of Ebert, if such a thing was really possible (although some impressionistic imitations of Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, and John Wayne make appearances), but he did a respectful interpretation of the cadences of Ebert's writing. It never felt as though the narrator was fighting with the writer's words.

As for the words themselves, they're good, if not great. And it's a memoir, not an autobiography. I don't know when a distinction started to be made between the two, but I guess a memoir is just that, a collection of memories. Ebert didn't try to collect them to tell a coherent narrative about his life, although they are arranged in a roughly chronological way, but each chapter seems to have a theme of recollection—his mother, his father, the University of Illinois, drinking at O'Rourke's, Gene Siskel, Russ Meyer, Steak 'n Shake, trips to London, et cetera. Those would all obviously overlap in time with one another, which means that the memoir is probably the best way for someone like Ebert to write his story. A politician or a statesman has a chronology, one event follows another in a cause-and-effect relationship. Most of us don't live like that. We think we do, but our lives tend to be much more fragmented. If any patterns exist, they're to be found in concurrent themes, many of which aren't readily apparent until we look back. As Steve Jobs said in his Stanford commencement address: "[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

Books Read in 2011: "Wheels" by Arthur Hailey

2011-11-25T21:52:00.001-08:00

OK, it's a 40-year-old book. One that even hardcore Arthur Hailey fans, if such a thing exists, have forgotten that he wrote. But it isn't very good.

If you'd asked me to rate it when I was about halfway through, I'd have said it was an 8 on a scale of 1–10. Flat, two-dimensional characters and so-so dialogue, but it seemed to make a sincere stab at capturing the zeitgeist of the American auto industry in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Cheesy fun, but a page turner.

Then something went wrong. I can't say exactly when, but it definitely lost its way. Characters that seemed to be natural foils to the automotive titans—like a thinly veiled Ralph Nader doppelgänger named EmersonVale—were introduced on the first page, and then never referred to again after the third chapter. Scenarios rife with drama—the highly anticipated new car has a potentially fatal engineering flaw that can only be fixed by either redesigning the whole thing or by adding a crucial part that adds significantly to the cost of manufacturing each vehicle—were just kind of solved there and then, with no ongoing suspense. (They added the part.)

When you consider the complete overhaul that the American car industry underwent in the 1970s, anyone with an ounce of perspicacity would have seen it coming. Except Hailey. He seemed to see nothing but great things coming for Detroit in the 70s. ("White flight"? What's that?)

Out of 10? 5. And that's probably generous.

Is "Hotel" any better?

Books Read in 2011: "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson

2011-11-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

If Steve Jobs's story had been an Ayn Rand novel, I would mock it as insanely unrealistic. But it really happened.

This would have been a fascinating book even if Steve Jobs were still alive. It might have been extraordinary to have such a warts-and-all biography of a sitting CEO, rather than a hagiographic in house PR piece or a bit of autobiographical self-justification. But the truth is that Jobs would never have cooperated if he weren't faced with, and scared of, his own mortality.

In the book, near the end, Job tells Isaacson that he cooperated because he wanted his kids to know him. He was always so busy and so engaged with Apple and Pixar and all of his other projects that he wasn't the father that he wished he could have been, and he wanted them to know why he wasn't always there. But I suspect that he sought someone to help explain him to himself. He was always so focused on the right now and the near- and long-term future that he rarely took time for introspection and rumination about the past. If he gave someone permission to poke in all the dark corners of his life and shed light on whatever he found there, might he glean some explanation. Not that there was ever any shortage of people who were willing to try and explain Steve Jobs.

The book is not without its faults, though. Early chapters focus a lot of Jobs's "abandonment" and his search for a father figure, which ring hollow when you consider that he was only a few days old when he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. His parents were always open and honest about his adoption. Once, when he was about 8, a neighbor girl teased him and said that he was adopted because no one wanted him. His father sat him down and told him that they chose him because they did want him. He was just that special. By all accounts in the book, and by Jobs's own recollections, Paul Jobs was a loving and attentive father. Surely there were generational clashes, as there were between millions of fathers and sons in the 1960s and 70s, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Again, near the end of the book, after Jobs had resigned as CEO of Apple and was homebound and weak, he shared some photographs with Isaacson for inclusion in the book, including one of his father and himself as a toddler. Isaacson says, "He would have been proud of you," to which Jobs replies, "He was proud of me." This is not a man who doubted the love of his father. While he may have wondered about his biological father, he certainly never lacked for a father figure.

Books Read in 2011: "A Dirty Job" by Christopher Moore

2011-10-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

It's really been almost two months since I've finished a book? Thats... Wow.

It's not that I haven't been reading. I mean, it FEELS like I've been reading. I guess it's just been something other than books.

On the other hand, it's been a busy couple of months, and I haven't had a lot of spare time.

And let me be clear, this was a nice, fun little book, but I have not been struggling my way through it for two months. I just want that to be out there for the record.

Books Read in 2011: "The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History" by John Ortved

2011-08-30T07:45:00.001-07:00

A Month in Shorts: The Tally

2011-08-07T17:42:00.001-07:00

In my last post, I mentioned that I had wanted to try and read a different short story every day in July, but failed to complete my goal. There were only a few collections that I had really started to draw from, so I'll probably just work my way through the two remaining now that I've finished "Buttered Side Down".

Here, though, is the tally of what I did complete, along with my notes and observations.

* * *

1.) "A Touch of Autumn in the Air" by Sean O'Faolain. 2011-07-04. From: Short Stories, A Study in Pleasure.

Quote: "What had begun to bother him was not as much that the days had merged and melted together in his memory -- after so many years that was only natural -- but that here and there, from a few days of no more evident importance than any other days, a few trivial things stuck up above the tides of forgetfulness. And as he mentioned them I could see that he was fumbling, a little fearfully, towards the notion that there might be some meaning in the pattern of those indestructible bits of the jigsaw of his youth, perhaps even some sort of revelation in their obstinacy after so much else had dropped down the crevices of time."

2.) "The Outstation" by W. Somerset Maugham. 2011-07-05. From: Short Stories, A Study in Pleasure.

Quote: " 'You have not been very long in this country; believe me, there is no better way to maintain the proper pride which you should have in yourself. When a white man surrenders in the slightest degree to the influences that surround him he very soon loses his self-respect, and when he loses his self-respect you may be quite sure that the natives will soon cease to respect him.' "

Quote: "For Mr. Warburton was a snob. ...[It] was marvellous to watch the ingenuity he used to mention his distant relationship to the noble family he belonged to, but never a word did he say of the honest Liverpool manufacturer from whom...he had come by his fortune."

Quote: He had a certain simplicity of character and the unscrupulous found him an ingenuous prey.

Observation: It builds to this tension of inevitability. They both know what is going to happen, either one of them could make a move to prevent it, and yet both do nothing. Small things, petty excuses. The thought of Warburton's "patronizing smile" keeps Cooper from going to Warburton's office and seeking his counsel when he realizes that things have gone too far. Warburton didn't like the gramophone that Cooper played, so he decided to no go to his residence that night as the infernal device played a ragtime recording.

3.) "The Chorus Girl" by Anton Chekhov. 2011-07-05. From: Short Stories, A Study in Pleasure

Observation: Why do Chekhov stories always feel like little parables? Just as slight, just as ambiguous.

4.) "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway. 2011-07-05. From: Short Stories, A Study in Pleasure.

Quote: "Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.

"Why?"

"He was in despair."

"What about?"

"Nothing."

"How do you know it was nothing?"

"He has plenty of money."

5.) "Evensong" by Lester del Rey. 2011-07-06. From Dangerous Visions.

He felt the eyes of the Usurper on him, and he forced himself away from that awareness. And, like fear, he found that he had learned prayer from the Usurpers; he prayed now desperately to a nothingness he knew, and there was no answer.

“Come forth! This earth is a holy place and you cannot remain upon it. Our judgment is done and a place is prepared for you. Come forth and let me take you there!” The voice was soft, but it carried a power that stilled even the rustling of the leaves.

He let the gaze of the Usurper reach him now, and the prayer in him was mute and directed outward—and hopeless, as he knew it must be.

“But—” Words were useless, but the bitterness inside him forced the words to come from him. “But why? I am God!”

For a moment, something akin to sadness and pity was in the eyes of the Usurper. Then it passed as the answer came. “I know. But I am Man. Come!”

He bowed at last, silently, and followed slowly as the yellow sun sank behind the walls of the garden.

And the evening and the morning were the eighth day.

6.) "Flies" by Robert Silverberg. 2011-07-06. From Dangerous Visions.

“Tell me the line from Shakespeare, Mirabel. About the flies. The flies and wanton boys.”

Furrows sprouted in her pale brow. “It’s from Lear,” she said. “Wait. Yes. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’”

“That’s the one,” Cassiday said. His big hands knotted quickly about the blanket-like being from Ganymede. It turned a dull gray, and reedy fibers popped from its ruptured surface. Cassiday dropped it to the floor. The surge of horror and pain and loss that welled from Mirabel nearly stunned him, but he accepted it and transmitted it.

“Flies,” he explained. “Wanton boys. My sport, Mirabel. I’m a god now, did you know that?” His voice was calm and cheerful. “Good-by. Thank you.”

7.) "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" by Frederick Pohl. 2011-07-08. From Dangerous Visions.

Mr. Mandala stood up. “Better get some sleep,” he advised, “because they might all be back again tonight. I don’t know what for…. Know what I think, Ernest? Outside of the jokes, I don’t think that six months from now anybody’s going to remember there ever were such things as Martians. I don’t believe their coming here is going to make a nickel’s worth of difference to anybody.”

“Hate to disagree with you, Mr. Mandala,” said Ernest mildly, “but I don’t think so. Going to make a difference to some people. Going to make a damn big difference to me.”

8.) "Riders of the Purple Wage" by Philip José Farmer. 2011-07-16. From Dangerous Visions.

This isn't a short story. It's a novella. A weird, trippy novella that took me too long to get through.

9.) "The Malley System" by Miriam Allen deFord. 2011-07-16. From Dangerous Visions.

10.) "A Toy for Juliette" by Robert Bloch. 2011-07-16. From Dangerous Visions.

11.) "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" by Harlan Ellison. 2011-07-16. From Dangerous Visions.

12.) "The Night That All Time Broke Out" by Brian Aldiss. 2011-07-17. From Dangerous Visions.

13.) "The Man Who Went to the Moon -- Twice" by Howard Rodman. 2011-07-17. From Dangerous Visions.

I started to cheat a little bit at this point. Every time I seem to find the time to sit down and read this week, I start to fall asleep. Then I remembered that there is a public radio show called "Selected Shorts", and that I have a backlog of podcasts that I have not listened to yet. Now I can listen to stories as I drive or go for walks. Winning! The only downside is that I don't know how much these stories are cut for time or content before they are broadcast. They may be abridgments. Fair warning.

14.) "The H Street Sledding Record" by Ron Carlson. 2011-07-18. From Selected Shorts (PRI). Podcast.

15.) "Christmas Is A Sad Season for the Poor" by John Cheever. 2011-07-18. From Selected Shorts (PRI). Podcast.

16.) "'A Visit From St. Nicholas' as Written by Ernest Hemingway" by James Thurber. 2011-07-20. From Selected Shorts (PRI). Podcast.

17.) "The Palmist" by Andrew Lam. 2011-07-20. From Selected Shorts (PRI). Podcast.

18.) "The Occasional Garden" by Saki (H. H. Munro). 2011-07-22. From Selected Shorts (PRI). Podcast.

19.) "The Balloon" by Donald Bartheleme. 2011-07-22. From Selected Shorts (PRI). Podcast.

20.) "The Frog and the Puddle" by Edna Ferber. 2011-07-24. From Buttered Side Down.

21.) "The Man Who Came Back" by Edna Ferber. 2011-07-26. From Buttered Side Down.

22.) "What She Wore" by Edna Ferber.

Books Read in 2011: "Buttered Side Down" by Edna Ferber

2011-08-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

Feedbooks

So, I had a plan.

I hatched a scheme for July in which I would try to read at least one different short story, every day, for the entire month. This would be great, I thought, because I wouldn't have to finish a book, just a story. I could hop around from author to author, dip in this collection, try a few in this other one, pull stuff from The New Yorker or other places online. Great, right?

I didn't get very far in my scheme. The last book from June that I was hoping to finish, I hadn't quite finished yet. So that pushed the start back by a few days. And then things like work and life intervened, and left me without a lot of time at the end of the day. I don't mind a reading challenge, but I didn't want to turn it into a chore, either. So stuff just kind of kept sliding away.

Finally, after trying a few odds and ends from a couple of different collections (which I would still like to finish, independent of my "Month in Shorts" concept), I found this collection of Edna Ferber stories on my Kindle, downloaded after I finished another collection, "Gigolo", a few years back. After the first couple of stories, I decided to keep reading all the way through. Once again, I'm pleasantly entertained by her stories, and disappointed that her more famous novels, "Giant" and "Showboat", are not only still under copyright and not readily available from sites like Feedbooks and Gutenberg, but not available as ebooks at all.

Books Read in 2011: "Scorch" by A. D. Nauman

2011-07-04T14:38:00.001-07:00

I don't know if it would be correct to say that I enjoyed this book. I was unnerved by it, shaken by it, and disturbed by it. Oh, it's really good, don't get me wrong, but it's a well-observed, well-written bit of dystopian near-futurism that hit a little close to home. More so as I read it as a PDF on my fancy-shmancy new iPad, wondering, page after page, if I was just another mindless consumer, as numbed and oblivious as most of the secondary characters in the book.

What I would love to say is that I am immediately going to rush out and read everything out by ~~Ms.~~ Dr. Nauman, but I can't find anything else. This would appear to be her only published book, novel or otherwise. A shame, and something that I hope changes one day.

(Corrected Dr. Nauman's title. Unless there is more than one A. Nauman teaching at Northeastern Illinois University.)

Books Read in 2011: "Come to Me" by Amy Bloom

2011-06-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

I liked this. These. They aren't perfect stories, but they don't especially try to be. They're just very ... good. The lives and the people depicted are complex and complicated without seeming overly so.

I'm very happy with what was an impulse purchase in a thrift store in Ventura, CA last fall.

Books Read in 2011: "The 'Jaws' Log" by Carl Gottlieb

2011-06-20T22:20:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, Amazon had a summer sale on Kindle books, and this was one of them. Just $1.99. I'd never heard of it, but the reviews were good. While I wouldn't say that reading it was a transcendent experience, it was an entertaining one. Gottlieb was brought on as the third writer to take a whack at the script, and had a bit role as the newspaper reporter in the movie, meaning that he saw quite a bit firsthand, from pre-production through the long, long, long shoot on Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 1974, and onto pickups and looping back on the Universal City lot.

No real tales told out of school, although the ebook is the 30th anniversary edition, so there are some footnotes that explain some of the dated references, update readers on changes in movie making technology, and sets the record straight on exactly how much John Milius contributed to the script. (Answer: Not a lot. "I'll find him for five, I'll kill him for ten" is the only line written by Milius that Gottlieb says made it into the final draft. And while he concedes that Milius may have come up with the idea of the characters comparing scars on the Orca, the speech about the U.S.S. Indianapolis was the work of Robert Shaw himself, who took every draft and every version that had been done (Spielberg had apparently shopped it around to several people to try and make it work), and worked at it until he finally got the thing to sing.)

Books Read in 2011: "Bossypants" by Tina Fey

2011-06-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

Unabridged audio, and I argue that it made for a better experience.

This was kind of an impulse download last week. I wanted something shorter and lighter than some of the other stuff I had in my library, and I like Tina Fey, so I gave it a shot. I was prepared for...I don't know. I didn't think that it would be treacly semi-inspirational working mommy stuff, but I wasn't sure what it would be. I'd read reviews that said it was very funny, but no one really seemed to go into specifics. That's probably because it's funny in the strange, bizarre, absurd, sarcastic way that "30 Rock" and her "Weekend Update" tenure on "Saturday Night Live" were funny. It's sincere, but very aware of it's sincerity, and with a reluctance to convince you that there are a lot of valuable lessons to be learned, all the while teaching you valuable lessons.

Ah, in short, very good, very funny, totally glad that I got the audio version. It's something that I could easily imagine listening to again someday, and will probably buy a paper or e- copy to supplement it someday.

Books Read in 2011: "The Static of the Spheres" by Eric Kraft

2011-06-13T22:19:00.000-07:00

EricKraft.com

A novella, really. Part of a larger ongoing work that the author has been doing for some time. OK, but I think that there were a few things going on that I would have understood better if I had read any of the other stories in the series. I downloaded it for free from Amazon several months ago, so no harm. I haven't decided yet if I want to seek out any of the other short pieces or even move onto one of his novels.

Books Read in 2011: "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon

2011-06-07T21:41:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of astonished that such a high-concept idea was pulled off so well.

Books Read in 2011: "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by William B. Irvine

2011-05-23T20:57:00.001-07:00

Author's Website

Not entirely sure of what I think of this book. There's a lot of good in it, and it certainly points me in the direction to read more of the Roman Stoics. But some of it is maddeningly simplistic in its presentation and thought that I got into arguments with the author more than a few times, making notes on the Kindle and in the Kindle app to register my frustration. On the whole, I would recommend it, but don't think that it did much more than collect some thoughts that I'd already seen elsewhere.

***

I first heard about this book when Irvine wrote a series of essays on BoingBoing.net last year (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).

Why You Should Always Feel Guilty About Treating Yourself to Something

2011-05-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

I placed an order for an iPad on Friday morning. I then clicked over to Google News and immediately started to find stories like this:

I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to do that. I guess mine was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I later wondered what the ship date might now be, what with this horrible explosion. That's when I discovered this:

Forget the rapture, what does all of this prophesize? Maybe I should just cancel the order and walk away. "No, that's OK. I really don't NEED one. It was just a little present I wanted to buy for myself. Please tend to the dead and wounded."

Books Read in 2011: "Cyberbooks" by Ben Bova

2011-05-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

What an unfortunate cover.

Yet, it's a pretty good book. Published in 1989, you could go to any blog today and find the same debates raging about the always-doomed publishing industry railing against the technology that could kill or save it.

Books Read in 2011: "The Conviction of Richard Nixon" by James Reston, Jr.

2011-05-03T20:12:00.001-07:00

Unabridged audio.

A decent follow up to "31 Days".

"Frost/Nixon", for all its flaws, should be showing up from Netflix in the next day or so.

Books Read in 2011: "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter

2011-04-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia

Despite being a really slim volume of three novellas, I took my time reading this. So good. I think that I deliberately slowed down near the end, trying to make it last a while longer. Unlike some books that, despite their brief length, bog down, this one felt just right.

Books Read in 2011: "31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today" by Barry Werth

2011-04-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

Unabridged audio via Audible.

Books Read in 2011: "The Badge" by Jack Webb

2011-04-17T12:14:00.001-07:00

Munsey's

Books Read in 2011: "Blackmailer" by George Axelrod

2011-04-10T16:40:00.001-07:00

Hard Case Crime. In paper, whenever possible, because it only adds to the experience for these titles.

A few months back, I read a post at a blog, Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books, about a book that sounded kind of interesting. As I read it, I thought it sounded pretty good and was about to do a search at Munsey's and Inkmesh to see if I could find it for free or cheap, when I scrolled down and saw that it had been re-released through Hard Case Crime. Hey!, I thought, I own all of those!

Decent, if lightweight. A pretty quick read, and I have to admit that I was surprised by the twist that I thought I saw coming. I like it when I read or watch something and grow frustrated, thinking it's all so obvious, and there's an honestly-won upending of my expectations. "Thought you were clever, eh? Thought you could read it from a mile away, eh? Ha!" Of course it was deliberate, and the author left clues and made insinuations that were supposed to make me think what I thought. There's still a confidence in storytelling, though, if you're willing to string people along like that.

That said, it's pretty good for what it is. It doesn't transcend the genre or anything, but it provided a couple of nights of fun as I read it.

Some good bits:

Standing there in the blazing sunlight I suddenly realized a basic fact. I'm against killing people. (p.76)

***

Anstruther's style was widely imitated. It is, when you come right down to it, a matter of using short sentences and having your characters speak tersely about death and the exotic scenery. (p.124)

Books Read in 2011: "A Contract with God" by Will Eisner

2011-04-07T21:23:00.001-07:00

I don't know what to say. It's both beautiful and repellent. Deeply satisfying and profoundly frustrating.

Need more.

Books Read in 2011: "Bliss" by Peter Carey

2011-04-06T07:26:00.001-07:00

(Paper, this time.)

I really enjoyed this book, which shouldn't surprise me. I really liked "Jack Maggs," too, by the same author. They guy's won a Booker, so, you know, he's got some talent. This is something that I believe I picked up used at a library book fair a long, long time ago. It caught my eye on the shelf a couple of weekends back and I thought, Why not?

What surprised me is that the protagonist, Harry Joy, is supposed to be 39 years old at the start of the novel. I'm 39 years old, now, and for a couple of more months. But Harry felt so much older. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's a matter of my own self-perception.

Books Read in 2011: "At Home" by Bill Bryson

2011-03-25T21:52:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah, another unabridged audio. You know what? I just downloaded, like, eight more of them last weekend. Get used to it!

(I don't really know who I'm arguing with here.)

This book made me think of the James Burke series "Connections," in that it uses the rooms of the home that Bryson has moved into in Britain as a launching point for and examination of the evolution of the things that occupy it or have brought it into being. The chapter about the dressing room was about fashion, and what lengths people have gone to in order to look ridiculous. The bathroom wound up being about the disposal of waste, particularly human, and the control of the spread of disease. The bedroom was about sex, its consequences, and the mores that surrounded it. The whole house, in fact, was once a parsonage, and there's a chapter on what it meant to be a well-off rector, and the economics and politics that went with it.

One strange thing that I realized, though, as I was finishing up the book tonight, is that I started listening to it back in October or November of last year. I started it, got distracted by something(s) else, and then dipped back into it recently. Not that it's of any particular import, just something I realized.

Andy Ihnatko on the iPad 2

2011-03-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

From Andy Ihnatko's review of the iPad 2 in the Chicago Sun-Times:

"Did you really need a notebook in the first place? Or did you buy it just because at way back in the Pre-iPad Era, a notebook was the only mobile device available that could handle such a wide variety of tasks?"

Bingo! The very thing that I'm trying to figure out. I have a 12" PowerBook that I love, but have never used quite as extensively as I imagined I would. And while it certainly has come in handy while traveling, it's a bit more than I've ever really needed on the road. I don't need it for work, so it's useful mainly for entertaining myself on a plane or in a hotel room.

Of course, I'm setting this up as an either/or problem. Either an iPad OR a MacBook Pro. I did the same thing with the Kindle and the iPod touch. They're different machines that do different things. I still have and use the Kindle, and I liked the iPod so much I traded up to a full iPhone. It would be a chunk of change, but if I found I really needed both, I could probably find a way to swing it.

But, for now, while the ol' PowerBook still powers on, I'll probably go for the iPad at some point this summer.

Books Read in 2011: "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

2011-03-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

Feedbooks

Short, yet it took me forever to get through. Not sure why. I started pretty strongly, but then -- oh yes, the dialogue started. When John Carter is incapable of understanding or communicating with the inhabitants of Mars (a.k.a. Barsoom), the observations and descriptions are fine. But then the tortuous purple prose begins, and my eyes alternately roll and glaze over.

Books Read in 2011: "Life, Inc." by Douglas Rushkoff

2011-03-13T18:12:00.000-07:00

"Life, Inc." at Douglas Rushkoff's website.

Another unabridged audiobook.

Not bad, but a little light and unfocused. Not a bad diagnosis, and a decent primer on how things got to where they are, but not much in the way of prescription or prognosis. If anything, it's probably a little soft on the responsibility we all have for willingly handing over so much money, information, and control to corporations. Like Google, who owns Blogger, where I'm posting this. Or Audible, a property of Amazon.com, from whom I downloaded the audio files to my Apple iMac computer and later put them on my iPhone for listening.

Books Read in 2011: "Tales for a Winter's Night" by Arthur Conan Doyle

2011-03-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

Unabridged audio. What can I say, they keep me going on long walks.

Books Read in 2011: "My Year of Flops" by Nathan Rabin

2011-02-11T12:57:00.001-08:00

I suppose you could just click here and read most of the essays as they originally appeared at the A.V. Club, but what would be the fun in that?

Choice bits:

Perhaps the ultimate tragedy of W.’s life is that the humility of an alcoholic prostrating himself before God and conceding his powerlessness before his addiction morphed into the tragic arrogance of a leader behaving as if the Lord acted directly through him. (W, Oliver Stone, 2008)

* * *

Incidents like these speak to the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of our culture’s attitude toward sex and exhibitionism: We leer and ogle with impunity, then, once some vague, invisible line has been crossed, turn into disapproving prudes concerned only with protecting the innocence of children. (Glitter, Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001)

* * *

It seems perverse to make a musical about Gen Xers, the most cynical and sarcastic generation known to man, that’s wholly devoid of cynicism and sarcasm. (Rent, Chris Columbus, 2005)

* * *

The term “America’s sweetheart,” for example, conveys our shared appreciation for women so glorious that a cultural consensus has been reached that they embody everything that is good and American about womanhood. Who doesn’t love Audrey Hepburn, in spite of her being, you know, not American? Only a goddamned Nazi, that’s who. And Nazis have no business pining for our Audrey. (The Rocketeer, Joe Johnston, 1991)

* * *

So every year, a new group of freshmen establish their individuality, disdain for conformity, and rapacious intellectual curiosity—they’re seekers—by reading all the books they’re supposed to.

Such college students are rebels steeped in tradition, or at least the tradition of rebellion. (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Gus Van Sant, 1993)

* * *

Ah, but Christmas isn’t really about religion, you say. It’s that most wonderful time of the year when people forget their troubles and join together to worship the Great God of Commerce and his little buddy Jesus. We pay tribute to the Great God of Commerce with maxed-out credit cards, personal checks, and plain old cash. But then, in a culture-wide fit of passive-aggression, we turn our backs on Him by bombarding children with movies, television shows, and songs where materialism is climactically renounced and everyone learns the True Meaning of Christmas. If these renunciations of greed succeed, then they make everyone involved lots and lots of money, year in and year out. (Santa Claus: The Movie, Jeannot Szwarc, 1985)

* * *

Before, all a hit man needed was a gun and a menacing scowl. In a post-Tarantino realm, the price of entry rose to include novel ideas about popular culture and man’s place in a godless universe and a gift for machine-gun banter. (Gigli, Martin Brest, 2003)

Books Read in 2011: "The Enchanted Type-Writer" by John Kendrick Bangs

2011-01-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

Feedbooks

Books Read in 2011: "Pictures at a Revolution" by Mark Harris

2011-01-21T23:02:00.001-08:00

Choice bits:

[Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn] would argue daily: Beatty would tell his director that the movie [Mickey One]'s stew of symbolism, absurdism, and narrative ellipsis was "too fucking obscure," a point that Penn, years later, conceded. ("He now believes I was right?" says Beatty, laughing. "That's funny, because I now believe I was wrong.") (P. 39)

***

Poitier knew that all eyes were on him, that his win would provide a moment of genuine meaning for black Americans and an occasion for an avalanche of self-congratulation within the industry. He had been here before, five years earlier, when as the costar of "The Defiant Ones," he had become the first black man to be nominated for Best Actor. Now, he could be the first to win -- a moment that he knew would make history and yet change almost nothing. (p.52)

***

Poitier knew that this was nonsense. He was well aware that, as much as the sight of a black man holding an Oscar statuette for the first time might move many black and white Americans, his win would be used to sell a preposterous falsehood, the spurious notion that the movie industry had solved its own race problem and was now pointing the way for the rest of America. (p.53)

***

Hollywood needed an "Exceptional Negro" in the 1950s, and Poitier was perfect in the role. Aside from his talent and magnetism, he demonstrated a remarkable instinct for self-presentation; without anyone to emulate, he knew exactly how much he would say publicly without jeopardizing his status in either black or white America. In the press, he walked a fine line almost unerringly. He was humble but never servile, concerned but rarely intemperate, unwilling to pretend bigotry was anything other than an immense national problem, but optimistic that it would eventually give way. But as much as journalists liked to point out his unique status to him, Poitier didn't spend much time discussing the cost of that exceptionalism. He wouldn't let himself -- couldn't let himself -- play villains. Hollywood would never allow him to play a character with real sexual passion. And the possibility that he might one day be able to compete with white actors for roles in which race could be factored out wasn't even worth discussing. (pp. 54-55)

***

And with an Academy Award, Poitier was no longer just an actor, but himself a trophy, a successful progress report that the Academy had bestowed on the movie business and a name that Hollywood could invoke again and again as a way of telling itself that it had done enough, that a piece of unfinished business had finally been settled. Poitier had been in Hollywood long enough to know that the Oscar would be less useful to him than to the organization that handed it out. (pp. 58-59)

***

"What we were talking about, [David] Newman wrote later, "was what is now known as 'the Sixties.' But as we were in the midst of living through them at the time, we didn't have a chronological name for what was happening." (pp. 62-63)

***

{Mike Nichols] had less than three months to learn how to make a movie, outmaneuver a notoriously combative studio head and a cautious, passive producer, and figure out how to direct the world's most famous couple. And, he says, "I wasn't entirely sure how a camera worked." (p. 74)

***

Between August 1964 and March 1965, four new movies sold so many tickets and made so much money that, collectively, they pointed toward a dramatic shift in the tastes of American moviegoers and suggested an entirely new way for the studios to do business. Hollywood did not react well. Historically, the only event more disruptive to the industry's ecosystem than an unexpected flop is an unexpected smash, and, caught off guard by the sudden arrival of more revenue than they thought their movies could ever bring in, the major studios resorted to three old habits: imitation, frenzied speculation, and panic. (p. 75) (The movies were: "Mary Poppins", "My Fair Lady", "The Sound of Music", and "Goldfinger". - GC)

***

(About Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's long-running affair)

It takes a remarkable degree of finesse and public relations savvy to earn respect for the discretion with which you conduct an affair that everyone seems to know all about. (p. 229)

***

As it turned out, Kramer's movie didn't run into trouble in the North, the South, the ghettos, or anywhere else; it was an immediate blockbuster, the highest-grossing movie Kramer, Hepburn, Tracy, or Poitier had ever made, and the biggest success in the history of Columbia Pictures. Where its critics received the film as a timid and neutered issue picture, audiences saw it as a benign, often very funny, and finally touching portrait of discomposure, a glimpse at every strained smile, awkward pause, and gentle groping toward humanity that would unfold if Sidney Poitier walked unannounced into the home of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Watching two of the most self-assured stars in screen history not know how to behave in front of a black man -- which was exactly how the two of them, particularly Hepburn, had chosen to play it -- may not have ignited any revolutions, but it made for a genuinely crowd-pleasing comedy. As Arthur Knight predicted correctly in "Saturday Review," "the very elements that prevent it from coming to grips with its potentially explosive material are probably also the ones that would commend it to a wide audience." (p.374)

***

As "The Graduate" grew at the box office, first becoming the number two movie in the country and then number one, where it stayed for months, its success shattered a long-standing Hollywood studio business model. Warner Brothers and United Artists both announced that they were rethinking their entire development slates and marketing tactics with an eye toward courting younger audiences and hiring younger filmmakers; and other studios quickly followed their example. (pp. 382-383)

Books Read in 2010: "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

2011-01-04T06:32:00.000-08:00

Baen Webscriptions

This thing took forever to get through. And it wasn't because it was bad, or because it was particularly dense. It just took me a long, long time. It started to feel a little desperate in the second half. When I'm reading a book for pleasure, it shouldn't feel like work. Well, that's not quite right. I'm willing to work through a book if I think it's going to be rewarding in the end. It shouldn't feel like an OBLIGATION, like something I HAVE to do, and therefore contrive ways to postpone and avoid it.

My schedule being what it was through much of December, time would pass where I couldn't read much. And when I did, I very often fell asleep after just a few paragraphs. Reading hard SF at a time like that doesn't help, since there's a whole universe being built that I had to keep straight, and that proved difficult. "Jeez," I would think, "Can't this take place on Earth? Why does it have to be half in space, half on a planet inhabited by 3-armed mutant hermaphrodites with a genetically determined caste system and complex and, well, alien socio-political structure?" And then I'd fall asleep.

But what this book really marked for me was my seeming preference for electronic texts. Under certain conditions, anyway.

I started reading the novel in a mass market paperback that my wife found among her books. She'd forgotten that she'd bought it and wondered if I was interested. I started to flip through it and got sucked in. I carried the paper copy around for a couple of weeks, and even all the way to Chicago and back on a trip to visit my parents, when I decided that I was tired of doing that. Since I couldn't just sit down for a length of time and read, I wanted to be able to dip into the book whenever I had a few minutes. Easier to do on my phone, or even my Kindle. Plus, the cheap qualities of mass market paperbacks really shone through on this one. Tiny text, lousy ink, and a not-so-great binding that was slightly warped to boot. I was always afraid that if I bent the cover too far, the binding would break and snap in half. It wasn't a particularly pleasant "tactile experience," as the critics of ebooks would say in defense of the printed page.

Having enough of this, I checked Inkmesh to see if there were any electronic versions available, and found the link above to Baen's webscriptions, where I was able to purchase a DRM-free copy in multiple formats (.mobi for the Kindle, .epub for the iPhone, .rtf for archive purposes) for just $5.

And it worked out great, for the most part. I finally finished the book, didn't I?

Books Read in 2010: "The War for Late Night" by Bill Carter

2010-11-10T19:48:00.000-08:00

What with Conan O'Brien's new show starting on TBS this week, this seemed like a good choice.

A good rehashing of the whole unpleasant affair. Although the best parts may come in the epilogue, where some analysis comes into play and perspective is achieved. As Jerry Seinfeld notes, with either great clarity or great cynicism, "The Tonight Show," as most people idolized it, ended when Johnny Carson retired. The show that Conan O'Brien wanted to host was that show, not "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." But that show is no more. As Seinfeld continues, no one says "I'm doing the 'Tonight Show'," they say "I'm doing Jay," or Dave, or Conan, or Kimmel, or whomever. "Tonight" used to be the only game in town worth playing for, now its just one of many.

So, ultimately, would it have mattered if Conan went on at 12:05 instead of 11:35? No matter what, he wasn't going to be Johnny Carson. Or Jay Leno. Or Jack Paar or Steve Allen, for that matter.

Books Read in 2010: "A Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle

2010-11-06T10:27:00.001-07:00

Feedbooks

I caught the first episode of the modern-day "Sherlock", the first episode of which was entitled "A Study in Pink," and decided that I wanted to re-read the source material. There's only superficial resemblances between "Scarlet" and "Pink," but both are fun.

It's interesting to see how it all started, and I'd forgotten that this was the story that involved the whole Mormon subplot. One of the first times I'd ever read anything about the Latter Day Saints that hadn't derived from one of their '70s and '80s era PSA/commercials, and that made me go, "Really?"

Anyway, all of the Holmes books have been downloaded from the internet and uploaded to my Kindle. I'll be good for a while.

Oh, and there are lots of cool Holmes covers out there for the picking. Sort of the great thing about public domain titles featuring characters who are known by anyone who hasn't read a single word.

Not very good.

I have a lot of notes that I made as I read it that I think I'd like to combine with some that I made while re-reading "Being Digital", and that I hope to make when I read one more book on a similar subject. But this book just ticked me off, less by any outrageous thing he said, but by the very sloppy way he went about saying it. A lot of inconsistencies in his argument, let's just leave it at that for now.

Books Read in 2010: "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte

2010-10-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

Re-read, actually.

I first read this, I don't know, 13 or 14 years ago. There were a couple of things that I remembered about it, but only vaguely. I thought it might be interesting to read it again and see what has held up in the intervening years and what seems hopelessly naive in retrospect. However, I was mildly surprised by how far out the book DIDN'T seem. Negroponte wisely did not make hyper-specific predictions or lay them out on a timeline that would be too easy to nitpick. (No "...and the Age of the Jet Pack shall be ushered in on May 15, 1998...")

He liked to write about "digital butlers" and "agents" that would do our bidding, finding information that we would want while filtering out the data that we wouldn't have any interest in. What are those but things like RSS feeds and our TiVos, making suggestions based on our likes and dislikes? His "asynchronous broadcatching" as an alternative to synchronous broadcasting has taken form as radio shows downloaded in seconds as podcasts, or TV shows downloaded in a few minutes from iTunes.

There's a lot more, of course. He was sometimes a little too optimistic about the unfettered good that a digital future might bring. I took some notes while I was reading, and I may expand on this a little bit more later on. I'm still mulling over some thoughts, both about what Negroponte wrote and what can be predicted about the digital world in another 13 or 14 years.

(Funny thing, though? I looked and could not find an ebook version of this title for sale anywhere. I re-read my old paper copy. And what's sobering about that is the fact that any electronic version I might have bought this in in 1996 would almost certainly be in a format indecipherable by now. Plus I found the damage pictured below, that was either done by the cat my room mate had at the time, or by the cat of the friend I remember lending the book to. (A post-it with his email address is still affixed inside the front cover. Gateway.net? Yikes!)

Comparable damage to a digital file would probably have rendered the whole thing useless. It's easy enough to read around the tears in an analog format, but any wonky bits in a digital file can just shut the whole thing down. Something that hasn't improved significantly.

"Monsters and Angels" by Voice of the Beehive

2010-10-10T19:39:00.001-07:00

For close to 20 years, I have been trying to find this damn song. I remembered it being really beautiful, with a kind of haunting female voice, and that one of the lyrics went "(something) (something) angels." (So I got that part right.) But damn, I couldn't remember who sang it. No one else did, either. (Although now I'm sure that everyone will say, "Oh yeah! I remember that song! Really? You didn't know who did it? I did!")

After years of occasional unsuccessful Google searches, I tried again last night -- "kroq playlist 1991"* -- and found this. There it was at number 38.

And you know what? It's not that good.

Our memories? They lie to us.

* I actually tried "kroq playlist 1990" first, with a vague memory of hearing it in the fall of that year. I guess I was wrong. But I *knew* it was KROQ. EVERYONE at USC listened to KROQ when I went there.

Books Read in 2010: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson

2010-10-07T07:27:00.001-07:00

Amazon

This is another one of those books that, because of its size and scope, took a long time to get through. I started it before we left on our trip to Illinois at the beginning of August, so at least two months to work through nearly a thousand pages.

And it was good, but not the transcendent experience that some reviews led me to believe I would have. I wasn't sure how seriously to take the science, and whether it was based on real theoretical stuff that some readers were whooping over because "Yes, yes, yes! Someone gets it!", or if it was just "Star Trek"-like technobabble that didn't mean anything outside of the story that Stephenson wanted to tell.

May I also add that this is an example of how great ebooks can be. I bought both a paper copy of the book and the Kindle version from Amazon. As I mentioned above, the book is almost a thousand pages long, and even though I have the mass market paperback, it's a bit of a thing to schlep around. Between my Kindle and my iPhone, however, I could slip it into my bag or my pocket and dip into it easily whenever I happened to have a few minutes free. The paper copy, however, proved extremely useful when I wanted to look something up in the glossary that Stephenson put in the back of the book, or one of the appendices that explained the technobabble, since navigating on a Kindle is still a kludgy experience compared to the time-tested stick-a-finger-where-you-left-off-and-flip-to-the-back technique.

PLUS!, the ebook was priced at the same price as the mass market book. THIS MAKES SENSE! An ebook, especially a text-only, no value added edition, should cost at most as much as the least expensive print version.

Books Read in 2010: "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" by Rick Perlstein

2010-09-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

Audible

Unabridged audio -- which in this case ran for 36 hours and 46 minutes.

Totally. Worth. It.

It's hard to read/listen to this and not, in the depths of despair, imagine Sarah Palin as the next Republican nominee for president. An Orthogonian's wet dream.

Books Read in 2010: "Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews" by Sam Weller

2010-08-15T02:00:00.001-07:00

listentotheechoes.com

Books Read in 2010: "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything" by James Gleick

2010-07-29T22:22:00.001-07:00

http://fasterbook.com/

Books Read in 2010: "The Wounded and the Slain" by David Goodis

2010-07-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

Hard Case Crime

A really good one. I found some more Goodis titles at Munsey's, which I think I will make a point of reading in the coming weeks. Or months. Or whatever.

Books Read in 2010: "The Private LIbrary: What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought To Know About Our Books" by Arthur L. Humphreys

2010-06-17T07:23:00.000-07:00

Google Books

Books Read in 2010: "The Kid Stays In The Picture" by Robert Evans

2010-06-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

It's another audiobook, and it's abridged, but Oh. My. God. It's THE audiobook. It's a legend. And did it live up to its reputation? It certainly did.

And the whole time that I'm listening to it, I kept thinking about this:

NYT: "Himan Brown, Developer of Radio Dramas, Dies at 99"

2010-06-07T21:36:00.000-07:00

Himan Brown, who long before there was television created immensely popular radio dramas like “The Adventures of the Thin Man” and “Dick Tracy,” employing an arsenal of beguiling sound effects that terrified or tickled the shows’ many listeners, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

You have no idea how many episodes of "Inner Sanctum Mysteries" and "CBS Radio Mystery Theater" I've listened to over the years.

You also have no idea how often I still listen to them.

Books Read in 2010: "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson

2010-06-06T21:14:00.000-07:00

Why? Why not? Because everyone else seems to be reading it. Or buying it. Or selling it. I can't say that I've seen anyone else reading it, or heard anyone recommend it, but it sure does seem to be on sale everywhere.

Ffor something that is that ubiquitous, it wasn't half bad. I downloaded the second book, "The Girl Who Played With Fire", and it's in queue on my Kindle. Not great literature, but a satisfying summer read.

And I have to admit that I liked that it was set in Sweden. I liked that there were probably all sorts of stock characters and regional types, but that I didn't get the references. I avoid a lot of police/detective genre books because I tire easily of the ex-cop who drinks too much and the corrupt metropolitan police department, the taciturn Northeasterners and the Southern rednecks, all of the tropes that I associate with the laziest of American crime fiction. Unfair to the good stuff, I'm sure, but I don't have the time to wade through all of the best-selling by-the-numbers crap to get to the good stuff.

Books Read in 2010: "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase For Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson

2010-05-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

James L. Swanson's website.

I meant to read this last year, but when I started it, I found a reproduction of the cover for this book inside, and I wound up reading that first.

Books Read in 2010: "I Drink For A Reason" by David Cross

2010-05-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

Audiobook again, but unabridged AND read by the author WITH occasional reprimands from said author as to the listener's laziness in not just reading the damn book.

So...there.

Books Read in 2010: "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman

2010-05-01T12:47:00.000-07:00

Read by the author (among others), but unabridged as well. FTW!

I'e been listening to this, off and on, for the last several months. I'd read the print edition about 10 years ago, as well as the second book in the series, but never quite got around to the third one. I have books two and three downloaded already, and I'll see when I can get around to them.

I found it a little slow going, to tell the truth. I remembered the gist of the story from the last time I read it, but it seemed to take forever to get to the point, which may be why I took several breaks from reading/listening to it.

Books Read in 2010: "Never Have Your Dog Stuffed" by Alan Alda

2010-04-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

An abridged audio book. Wait! I can explain.

There are two versions at Audible, abridged and unabridged. The abridged version is read by Alan Alda, while the unabridged is not. Normally, I would pick an unabridged version, except I have this thing about hearing certain authors read their own work. Sarah Vowell or David Sedaris come to mind, because there is a certain element of performance in their work. Because I came to know of them from their pieces on This American Life, and because they have distinct voices, both in their writing and literally, I can't help but hear their voices when I read their work in print as well. I also think that one of the objections that people raise to audio books -- that someone else is interpreting the author's words for you -- is removed when you can hear a phrase read EXACTLY the way the author wanted it to be read/heard.

When I'm listening to a book written by a well known person, but read by someone else, I have this strange disconnect going on in my head. I work to replace the voice that I'm hearing with the voice that I imagine should be there instead. The best example I can think of is when I listened to "The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore a couple of years ago. It was an interesting book, but Gore has a distinct voice -- or, some would argue, drone -- that Will Patton, the reader, did not have. And I knew that if I listened to a book by Alan Alda, someone who I grew up watching on TV on" M*A*S*H", someone whose voice I knew and expected to hear, I would be distracted. So I picked the abridged version and figured that a certain quality would come across in the reading of the text and the telling of the stories that would offset the loss of some of the words.

Books Read in 2010: "The Night of the Long Knives" by Fritz Leiber

2010-04-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

Feedbooks

Books Read In 2010: "A Thousand and One Afternoons In Chicago" by Ben Hecht

2010-04-12T22:45:00.000-07:00

Munsey's

Books Read in 2010: "Harpo Speaks!" by Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber

2010-04-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

Google Books

Books Read in 2010: "The Walk" by Lee Goldberg

2010-03-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

Amazon (Kindle)

Books Read in 2010: "Three Ways to Die" by Lee Goldberg

2010-03-17T20:40:00.000-07:00

Amazon (Kindle)

Books Read in 2010: "Little Fuzzy" by H. Beam Piper

2010-03-10T22:25:00.001-08:00

Feedbooks

Books Read in 2010: "Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood"

2010-02-27T23:02:00.000-08:00

Amazon

Books Read in 2010: "American on Purpose" by Craig Ferguson

2010-02-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

Audible

I figure an unabridged memoir read by the person who wrote it is about the least objectionable form of "but is an audiobook really reading?" (Answer: Yes.)

Books Read in 2010: "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson

2010-02-21T12:05:00.000-08:00

Manybooks

One of those things that I've spent my lifetime using as a metaphor and a literary reference, but never actually read. I didn't realize how A) short it was, and B) good it was. The prose is dense, which isn't unusual for the time, but it was one of those experiences where, if I could slow myself down to take my time with the words, it paid off. An excellent little rumination about the nature of man, and that dynamic tension between good and evil, between our baser and loftier instinct, that make us who we are.

Books Read in 2010: "Heart Shaped Box" by Joe Hill

2010-02-09T06:53:00.000-08:00

WorldCat (why not?)

Books Read in 2010: "Hawaii" by James Michener

2010-01-17T09:44:00.001-08:00

Amazon

I actually started this way back in September of 2009, but it's kind of huge. It literally starts with the cooling of the earth's crust, so it takes a while to get through. I thought I would be finished before we went to Kauai in November, or at least would finish while we were there, but it wasn't even close.

Really good, though. It gives an interesting overview -- in fictionalized form -- of the politics of the islands.

Books Read in 2009: "Say It With Bullets" by Richard Powell

2009-11-21T18:51:00.000-08:00

Hard Case Crime

Books Read in 2009: "Agent to the Stars" by John Scalzi

2009-10-11T16:36:00.001-07:00

Scalzi.com

ManyBooks

Munsey's

Books Read in 2009: "Wild Wives" by Charles Willeford

2009-09-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

Munsey's

The Kindle is proving to be both a plus and minus when it comes to reading old, fun, pulpy novels like this one. On the one hand, you don't get the great covers anymore, which is half the fun of reading these things. Sometimes the cover suggests a better story than the one that's in print inside of it. (Although this one was pretty good on its own.) On the other hand, you don't get the covers anymore, which means you don't have to endure the strange looks from people when you're reading something with a man punching a woman on the cover, or a woman in an extensive state of undress. ("Oh, hi kid. Let me just move my hand to cover up that part that you shouldn't be looking at...")

The overall experience is a great plus, though, since finding most of these titles in paper anywhere would be difficult.

Books Read in 2009: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future" by Cory Doctorow

2009-09-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

Feedbooks

Books Read in 2009: "Twenty Years of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction"

2009-09-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Books Read in 2009: "Gigolo" by Edna Ferber

2009-09-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

Feedbooks

I don't remember exactly how I stumbled across this, but I did, and it was a total delight. I don't think I've read anything else by Ferber before this, but I definitely will in the future.

Books Read in 2009: "The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth" by George Alfred Townsend

2009-09-04T21:49:00.001-07:00

Project Gutenberg

UPDATE: I guess you can embed some Google Books. Neat.

Books Read in 2009: "The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton" by Wardon Allan Curtis

2009-08-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

Manybooks

A New York Times review from 1903.

Books Read in 2009: "Lullaby" by Chuck Palahniuk

2009-08-13T21:53:00.001-07:00

Google Books

Books Read in 2009: "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

2009-08-09T18:02:00.001-07:00

Google Books

This book group and I? We just can't seem to get together. I finished the book in time this month, or so I thought. The next meeting was scheduled for today, August 9, according to the website when I RSVP'd. I went to double check the start time yesterday afternoon, and discovered that it had been "corrected" to August 8. It had started 2 hours earlier.

Grrr.

Next month? Looks like I will be traveling that weekend.

Guess I can read whatever the hell I want to as I wait to discover the October selection and try again.

Nicholson Baker on the Kindle

2009-07-28T07:21:00.001-07:00

A number of people have ben linking to this piece by novelist Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker about the Kindle, describing it as a take down.

While it is a rather clear-eyed view of the Kindle and of ebooks in general, one of the things you have to consider is the source. Baker wrote a book a few years back called "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper." In it, he chronicled various anti-paper initiatives undertaken by American libraries in order to free up space and reduce large, bulky, underutilized collections, while documenting the shortcomings of each of the technological solutions, such as replacing card catalogs with computer databases and scanning books and newspapers to microfilm instead of keeping rarely referenced paper copies. (The title itself comes from a test librarians were to perform to determine whether a book was too fragile to keep. The corner of a page was to be folded over once, then folded back on itself -- the double fold -- and if the acidic paper broke off, the book was a candidate for destructive scanning. This meant that the spine would be guillotined off, the pages hastily scanned to microfilm, and the paper pages thrown away.)

So for Baker to enter into his Kindle experiment with an open mind is admirable. And it is surprising (to me, anyway) that he ultimately preferred the experience of reading ebooks on his iPhone rather than the Kindle itself, deciding that the Kindle tried to mimic the experience of ink on paper and came up short, while the iPhone/iPod touch did it's own thing, which made it more immersive.

Books Read in 2009: "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy

2009-07-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

Google Books

I read this once before, years ago, and remember being underwhelmed because the title seemed to promise something about movies. Having been a film major and still entertaining fantasies about breaking into the industry, I took this quite literally. I read it, said "OK, I guess it's not," and moved on.

I re-read it because it was the selection for a book group I was thinking of joining. I didn't finish it in time for the meeting, but it was definitely well worthwhile. Although I am kicking myself now that I have finished it, because I would love a good discussion with someone about it.

Books Read in 2009: "Technopoly" by Neil Postman

2009-07-07T23:01:00.001-07:00

Amazon

Oh, my, but this is a maddening book.

There's just enough insight to make one continue reading, but so many poor and inconsistent arguments, and bad examples to illustrate them, that I wanted to throw the book across the room on several occasions.

Frankly, it would have worked better as a collection of essays rather than this jumbled mess that he tried to shove under a pathetic umbrella of a unifying theory.

More on Kindle Pricing

2009-07-04T15:00:00.001-07:00

The George Pelecanos book I just posted below is one of those things that I normally wouldn't buy, but was on sale for something like $3 a few weeks back. Right now it's going for $6, and the mass market paperback is $7.50 at Amazon. That makes sense. I know that there's a lot of hue and cry about new books for the Kindle being priced at $9.99, with readers saying that anything more is robbery, and publishers saying that there's no way to make money at that price. Frankly, I don't care. Charge a premium for new titles, charge as much as a new hardcover would cost, just make sure that the price drops as time passes and interest wanes. There's no reason why a 2-3 year old novel that has long since been released in paperback should still have an electronic version pegged to the new hardcover price. $6-7 is good, $3-4 would be better.

My favorite example of this is the book "Print is Dead," by Jeff Gomez. As of today, the hardcover list price is $24.95, discounted at Amazon to $18.96. The Kindle list price is also $24.95, discounted to $14.97. The paperback list price is $16.95, discounted to $11.53. Print may be dead, but it's still cheaper than bits, apparently.

My point is that these back titles are usually found money. Pelecanos is in a different league, but most titles, if they're going to become big runaway hits, have become runaway hits by the mass market paperback stage.

Books Read in 2009: "The Night Gardener" by George Pelecanos

2009-07-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

Read it on the Kindle.

Happy Independence Day!

2009-07-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

Enjoy the holiday with some clips from the greatest musical ever written about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

(Seriously, I love this film. I don't know why, when you consider that it was made in 1972, and this kind of musical was already a relic. But love it I do, and I don't care who knows it. Mock me all you want, but try to stop singing "Sit Down, John," underneath your breath all day, or to keep from dancing ("...to the right, ever to the right, never to the left, forever to the right...") to "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men", or to just get the sheer hokiness of "The Lees of Old Virginia" out of your head.)

"Sit Down, John"

"Piddle, Twiddle, and Resolve"

"The Lees of Old Virginia"

"But, Mr. Adams"

"He Plays the Violin"

"Cool, Cool, Considerate Men"

"Momma Look Sharp"

"The Egg"

"Molasses to Rum"

"Is Anybody There?"

Books Read in 2009: "Supermind" by Mark Phillips

2009-06-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

Feedbooks

Kindle Pricing Shenanigans

2009-06-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

After reading "Ur," I'm contemplating some other Stephen King books. A lot of people seemed to read him at a formative age, and I think I missed out. And while I've tried some of his stuff in the past and been underwhelmed, the Kindle seemed like a good way to dip a toe in from time to time without too much of a commitment.

How about "The Shining"?

Kindle price? $19.25! Marked down from the digital list price of $35.

Mass market paperback price? $7.99. That's without any discount.

Yikes!

At least "The Stand" has only a 90 cent difference between the paperback and the Kindle versions, with the Kindle having the advantage of being the cheaper (marked down from $50!) as well as freeing one from having to carry a 1141 page tome with one for the duration.

Books Read in 2009: "Death at the Excelsior and Other Stories" by P. G. Wodehouse

2009-06-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

Project Gutenberg

Books Read in 2009: "The Impossibles" by Mark Phillips

2009-06-02T22:52:00.000-07:00

(Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer)

Feedbooks

Books Read in 2009: "Brain Twister" by Mark Phillips

2009-05-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

Feedbooks

(Phillips is a pseudonym for Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer)

Books Read in 2009: "Ur" by Stephen King

2009-05-28T07:11:00.000-07:00

Amazon

Yes, this means that I bought a Kindle. And while this was a quick and fun read, Amazon probably should have thrown it on for free for all new buyers:

"...he had unpacked his new acquisition with real pleasure—similar to the pleasure he felt when unpacking a box of books, but sharper. Because there was that sense of heading into the unknown, he supposed. Not that he expected the Kindle to replace books, or to be much more than a novelty item, really; an attention-getter for a few weeks or months that would afterward stand forgotten and gathering dust beside the Rubik’s Cube on the knickknack shelf in his living room."

Books Read in 2009: "Night Walker" by Donald Hamilton

2009-05-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

Hard Case Crime

Books Read in 2009: "Ask the Dust" by John Fante

2009-05-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

Amazon

Books Read in 2009: "Morte D'Urban" by J. F. Powers

2009-05-14T23:16:00.000-07:00

Google Books

Books Read in 2009: "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis

2009-04-26T12:39:00.001-07:00

Google Books

The seeds of everything that has happened in the last few years were planted twenty years ago.

Books Read in 2009: "Paint It Black" by Janet Fitch

2009-04-19T14:06:00.001-07:00

Amazon

(What was with all the similes? "It sliced right through her, like the little egg slicer Gommer Ida used, a wire contraption that cut the white flesh and yellow heart into clean bare rounds." Um, okay.)

Books Read in 2009: "Whose Body?" by Dorothy L. Sayers

2009-04-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

Feedbooks

Comprehension of the Obvious Is Not Her Strong Suit

2009-04-15T07:53:00.000-07:00

I read this quote (of a quote) from Maggie Gallagher at Instaputz, concerning the issue of gay marriage:

Rod Dreher: Maggie, you and I are on the same side of the gay marriage issue, but I am pessimistic about our chances for success. You, however, are optimistic. What am I missing?

Maggie Gallagher: Vaclav Havel mostly. "Truth and love wlll [sic] prevail over lies and hate." On that basis Havel took on the Soviet empire. Where is that invincible empire now?

Could anyone misread their position relative to this statement more than Gallagher?

You have thousands of people who are refusing to live lives in the closet, refusing to pretend to be something that they're not, or to not be something that they are, and to accept themselves and their sexuality as, well, God-given.

That would be the truth.

And those same people are now fighting to get full legal recognition of their partnerships as marriages.

That would be love.

Books Read in 2009: "How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day" by Arnold Bennett

2009-03-22T22:10:00.000-07:00

Project Gutenberg

Books Read in 2009: "The Snatch" by Harold R. Daniels

2009-03-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

Munsey's

Books Read in 2009: "The Accused" by Harold R. Daniels

2009-03-16T22:02:00.000-07:00

Munsey's

Books Read in 2009: "The Dead Man's Brother" by Roger Zelazny

2009-03-03T21:57:00.000-08:00

Hard Case Crime

Books Read in 2009: "The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair" by George Plimpton

2009-03-02T21:54:00.000-08:00

Google Books

Books Read in 2009: "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1"

2009-03-01T20:43:00.000-08:00

Amazon

"Dollhouse"

2009-02-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

I found the first episode a little confusing and disorienting, but I don't mean it in a bad way; I think it was supposed to be like that. I have a whole bunch of questions about the Dollhouse and why they provide the service that they provide (and the cost to the Actives who provide it), but that's what'll make me watch the next few episodes, to see if I get any answers. I actually like being dropped into a fully realized world and having to piece together its dynamics as I watch rather than getting an hour of exposition.

I didn't get "Firefly" at first either. I remember being a little disappointed that it wasn't exactly like "Buffy" or "Angel," until I accepted that it was its own thing. Then they showed "Out of Gas" and it all clicked. "Dollhouse" isn't exactly like Joss Whedon's other shows (although Handler = Watcher, I mean come on), but once I get its language and rhythms, there's some potential for goodness.

Staying tuned...

Books Read in 2009: "A Splendor of Letters" by Nicholas Basbanes

2009-02-08T23:07:00.001-08:00

"The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World"

Google Books

A Good Start

2009-01-22T08:03:00.000-08:00

EFF: On Day One, Obama Demands Open Government

The order itself.

From the press release:

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizingthe public.

Stormed Blue Sands

Books Read in 2012: "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann

Books Read in 2011: "Life Itself: A Memoir" by Roger Ebert

Books Read in 2011: "Wheels" by Arthur Hailey

Books Read in 2011: "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson

Books Read in 2011: "A Dirty Job" by Christopher Moore

Books Read in 2011: "The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History" by John Ortved

A Month in Shorts: The Tally

Books Read in 2011: "Buttered Side Down" by Edna Ferber

Books Read in 2011: "Scorch" by A. D. Nauman

Books Read in 2011: "Come to Me" by Amy Bloom

Books Read in 2011: "The 'Jaws' Log" by Carl Gottlieb

Books Read in 2011: "Bossypants" by Tina Fey

Books Read in 2011: "The Static of the Spheres" by Eric Kraft

Books Read in 2011: "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon

Books Read in 2011: "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by William B. Irvine

Why You Should Always Feel Guilty About Treating Yourself to Something

Books Read in 2011: "Cyberbooks" by Ben Bova

Books Read in 2011: "The Conviction of Richard Nixon" by James Reston, Jr.

Books Read in 2011: "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter

Books Read in 2011: "31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today" by Barry Werth

Books Read in 2011: "The Badge" by Jack Webb

Books Read in 2011: "Blackmailer" by George Axelrod

Books Read in 2011: "A Contract with God" by Will Eisner

Books Read in 2011: "Bliss" by Peter Carey

Books Read in 2011: "At Home" by Bill Bryson

Andy Ihnatko on the iPad 2

Books Read in 2011: "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Books Read in 2011: "Life, Inc." by Douglas Rushkoff

Books Read in 2011: "Tales for a Winter's Night" by Arthur Conan Doyle

Books Read in 2011: "My Year of Flops" by Nathan Rabin

Books Read in 2011: "The Enchanted Type-Writer" by John Kendrick Bangs

Books Read in 2011: "Pictures at a Revolution" by Mark Harris

Books Read in 2010: "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Books Read in 2010: "The War for Late Night" by Bill Carter

Books Read in 2010: "A Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle

Books Read in 2010: "Print is Dead" by Jeff Gomez

Books Read in 2010: "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte

"Monsters and Angels" by Voice of the Beehive

Books Read in 2010: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson

Books Read in 2010: "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" by Rick Perlstein

Books Read in 2010: "Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews" by Sam Weller

Books Read in 2010: "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything" by James Gleick

Books Read in 2010: "The Wounded and the Slain" by David Goodis

Books Read in 2010: "The Private LIbrary: What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought To Know About Our Books" by Arthur L. Humphreys

Books Read in 2010: "The Kid Stays In The Picture" by Robert Evans

NYT: "Himan Brown, Developer of Radio Dramas, Dies at 99"

Books Read in 2010: "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson

Books Read in 2010: "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase For Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson

Books Read in 2010: "I Drink For A Reason" by David Cross

Books Read in 2010: "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman

Books Read in 2010: "Never Have Your Dog Stuffed" by Alan Alda

Books Read in 2010: "The Night of the Long Knives" by Fritz Leiber

Books Read In 2010: "A Thousand and One Afternoons In Chicago" by Ben Hecht

Books Read in 2010: "Harpo Speaks!" by Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber

Books Read in 2010: "The Walk" by Lee Goldberg

Books Read in 2010: "Three Ways to Die" by Lee Goldberg

Books Read in 2010: "Little Fuzzy" by H. Beam Piper

Books Read in 2010: "Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood"

Books Read in 2010: "American on Purpose" by Craig Ferguson

Books Read in 2010: "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Books Read in 2010: "Heart Shaped Box" by Joe Hill

Books Read in 2010: "Hawaii" by James Michener

Books Read in 2009: "Say It With Bullets" by Richard Powell

Books Read in 2009: "Agent to the Stars" by John Scalzi

Books Read in 2009: "Wild Wives" by Charles Willeford

Books Read in 2009: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future" by Cory Doctorow

Books Read in 2009: "Twenty Years of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction"

Books Read in 2009: "Gigolo" by Edna Ferber

Books Read in 2009: "The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth" by George Alfred Townsend

Books Read in 2009: "The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton" by Wardon Allan Curtis

Books Read in 2009: "Lullaby" by Chuck Palahniuk

Books Read in 2009: "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

Nicholson Baker on the Kindle

Books Read in 2009: "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy

Books Read in 2009: "Technopoly" by Neil Postman

More on Kindle Pricing

Books Read in 2009: "The Night Gardener" by George Pelecanos

Happy Independence Day!

Books Read in 2009: "Supermind" by Mark Phillips