Book love

Over at nicoleandmaggie's, there's a link to a story about weeding books at the Urbana Free Library.  When the Head of Adult Services was away for three weeks, someone created a spreadsheet, red-lined every book that was over 10 years old, and, because she wanted to use part-time workers' hours efficiently, told them to get rid of every redlined book on the list regardless of use.

A couple of lessons there: just because you put it in Excel doesn't make it efficient or wise, and just because it's more than 10 years old doesn't mean that it's useless. Valuable art books, gardening books--all expensive to replace--are gone.  What do you think the odds are that the library will actually replace them?

I've been thinking about this because I've been clearing out some of my shelves to make way for the results of a trip to the City of Books. I have no more wall space for bookshelves and couldn't justify them anyway.  Books are the items that most make me a candidate for Hoarders, since I keep thinking, "well, I haven't looked at it in 15 years, but maybe I'll want to read it again sometime."

That's a harder claim to make now, with web availability for a lot of the books. My main criteria for getting rid of some copies are estimated use and also duplication: I've finally convinced myself that I don't need three copies of Tom Jones or six copies of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. 

But the secondhand bookstore near me will only take certain books, and while I dropped some off at Goodwill, if they won't take them, I can't face putting them in the recycling bin. They're not kittens, but I still want them to go to a good home.

One set I'm not getting rid of is actually a partial set: it's dispatches from Gettysburg, part of a series of Civil War dispatches published in the 1880s or 1890s. On the recent 150th anniversary, I looked at a few of them, just in remembrance.

Where did I get them?

A library was throwing them out, and I snagged as many from the free books table as I could carry before they went into the dumpster.

Don't be evil, Amazon, and abandon your scorched-earth policy

You've probably seen this already, but if you haven't, go read Richard Russo's "Amazon's Jungle Logic" at the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/opinion/amazons-jungle-logic.html?_r=1&hp.

In a new low in shopping promotions, Amazon is giving shoppers a discount if they go into a brick-and-mortar store, compare prices on an item using some price-compare app, and then buy the thing on Amazon.

On a world-affairs scale, that may not amount to much evil, but on an everyday-consumer-life scale, that's evil. It's even ratcheting up a notch the ethically dubious practice endorsed by staid old and usually not corrupt Consumer Reports of test-driving a car or checking out consumer electronics at your local dealer and then ordering it online to save money.

Here's a tip: those brick-and-mortar stores don't exist as free showrooms for online businesses, although Amazon.com would like to think they do. If we keep using them that way, pretty soon those free showrooms won't exist, especially in the book world. You won't stumble on books or find a gift by looking around a store filled with books, because there won't be one near you.

I still do buy from Amazon.com, especially when it's some book of lit crit that no indy bookseller would have or when sending a gift that would mean an hour in line at the post office. But I turned the tables on Amazon by printing out the "wish lists" of gift recipients. I plan to head down to the friendly independent bookseller with those lists later this week--and I won't be doing so with any Amazon Judas app in tow.

Audiobooks

I've been thinking about writing about audiobooks for a while, and Tenured Radical's recent post has inspired me to do so.

1. It's easier to keep several books going at one time and keep your mental place in them than it is with print books. I don't know why this is, but I can click on Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello after a couple of weeks spent on, say, Lyndall Gordon's Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds or Simon Schama's Rough Crossings and still recall what's going on with the Jefferson-Hemings family very well.
2. Since you can't skim and can't easily jump ahead when you're driving, if a chapter is dense with an intricate accounting of financial documents, you have to be able to tolerate the less-than-gripping stretches where you'd usually skim.
   
3. It's also hard for me to get past the "I paid for this, so I ought to listen to it" sense of a book, much harder than it is to put down a dull print book that I've bought. I did skip a chapter of David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History but now don't feel that I can say I've read it. Of course, can you ever say you've "read" an audiobook?
   
4. On the other hand, as you listen you really do get a sense of every word, although you can't mark or highlight the text as you would when you're reading. I've listened to some literary works that I knew well and have picked up on additional nuances just by listening to the audio version.
   
5. I hope this doesn't sound too shallow, but the narrator/reader can make a difference. For example, some readers do the accents when they read quotations, and some don't. The reader for Lives like Loaded Guns, who sounds a little like Julie Andrews most of the time, does a kind of dry, scratchy New England accent when she reads the words of the Dickinson family (lower voice for Edward and Austin, higher for Emily). John Slattery (yes, that John Slattery) does a great job with accents and the regular narration in A Farewell to Arms, although I didn't even realize that he was the narrator for a while. ("Why does that voice sound so familiar? Oh, wait--")
6. I hate it when the recording engineers or producers or whoever decide to snip out too many natural pauses in the editing process. I couldn't say for sure that that's what happened in Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, but listening to that one for too long will leave you breathless since there aren't pauses where you'd expect them.
   
7. Buy an abridgment only if you're up for the challenge of figuring out what's going on, since a lot of them seem to simply lop out random chapters. I've bought a few by mistake and been mightily confused with a random character pops up in the last third of the book.
   
8. With audiobooks, you're limited to what's available. I've downloaded some books from Librivox but mostly go through audible.com (2 books/month for $22). Having a limited set of choices isn't necessarily bad since it forces you to read things you might not pay $35 for in a bookstore. For example, I might have given a casual glance to Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line if I'd seen it at a book exhibit, but since it was available in audio form, I bought it and it was excellent.

Does anyone else listen to audiobooks?
[Edited to add links.]

Of newspapers, libraries, and H. L. Mencken

Tenured Radical has an interesting post up about her travails in getting the paper copy of The New York Times delivered early enough to read it before it ends up in the recycling bin. Hearing that the NYT is going to an online-only model in the future, she concludes with this: "Then I was struck by a brighter thought. At a certain point you have to stop running from a problem, and do the sensible thing: throw money at it. So off to the iPad store I go." She also writes about Jeffrey Hamburg and Anthony Grafton's article on saving the Warburg Library.

I've experienced some of what she's talking about-- (I used to subscribe to the Sunday NYT but had to give up because it usually arrived on Tuesday)--but the part about the Warburg Library was what caught my attention.

A visionary scholar, Warburg was obsessed with cultural exchanges of all kinds and in all periods, and tinkered throughout his life with new ways to frame and display visual images, in order to reveal their interconnected meanings across time and space. His unconventional tool for studying this shifting web of historical relationships was a picture atlas that remained in perpetual flux, and to which he gave the name Mnemosyne, or memory.

The library is in danger of having its special character changed and its stacks closed, not to mention the possibility of having parts of its collection sold, which would, of course, destroy the connections and interconnected meanings that were possible by seeing the materials in context. (Go read the article, which says this much better.)

Not everyone agrees, I know, but regular libraries foster those connections in a smaller way when you browse the stacks. There's a process, and I don't know what to call it, when you're gathering information on a topic and working with its concepts in the back of your mind. You browse through your own books, or journal articles, or the library stacks, and suddenly you're making more connections. Conferences have always helped with this, but in recent years, the online bookstores (amazon.com, Powells, and university press web sites) added to the process, as have Google Scholar, Google Books, and the online journal databases. It's not exactly research, because you're not "searching" so much as "informing" yourself in a casual way, and it's also not research because it's not in depth. You skim information; you don't take notes on it. But it's a useful and important process, because it feeds your mind with pieces of information that may not seem useful at first but may arise at a later state in the project. It's our own version of the picture atlas, maybe.

Why H.L. Mencken? Because Mencken believed in the value of books, and because Hamburg and Grafton quote him to good effect:

A center of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz may finally be destroyed by British bean counters. It is a picture, in the words of H.L. Mencken, “to bemuse the vulgar and to give the judicious grief.”

And because it's his birthday, of course!

NY Times: Books You Can Live Without

It's that time of year again, when you clean out your bookshelves in preparation for the new year, (or maybe you just want to forestall anyone submitting your name for future episodes of Clean House or Hoarders).

"Books You Can Live Without" asks several famous writers how they decided to clear out their libraries. Shorter version: (1) books I'm never going to read again; (2) outdated reference books; (3) books I'm tired of pretending that I'm going to read some day.

In a fit of cleaning not long ago, I did a version of this and got rid of a bunch of books, though not without a few pangs. Some I took to the used bookstore to be traded in for store credit (so I can buy more books, of course!) and some I took to Goodwill. Some, sadly, I couldn't even give away: I had to leave copies of old textbooks in the "Free" bin at the bookstore. I usually put them out on the Free Books table on campus, but I wasn't on campus this semester.

I needed to think about each book, but some were easier to chuck than others.

• Fodor's London 1992, from my in-laws' trip there? Other old reference books? Gone immediately.
• 10+ years of a print run of a journal now online? Gone.
• A couple of books of highly elaborate and stylishly difficult postmodern contemporary fiction from 10+ years ago that I bought from the bargain bin, never got around to reading, and have never heard about since? Gone to the bookseller's. Apparently they were neither pleasurable enough to read nor absorbing enough in a literary sense to make the effort of reading them worthwhile. Who am I kidding? If I need to read them--well, that's what libraries are for.
• Some ancient books of criticism--you know, the kind that talk appreciatively and in general terms about "innate female modesty and reticence" and "robust nature imagery"--that I picked up from a Free Books shelf when some equally ancient professors were retiring--gone.
  
• The one book I ever bought in the How I Went to Tuscany, Fixed Up an Old House, and Learned about Life from the Quaint Italians series or whatever that genre of book is called. I bought it in an airport one time but even a long plane ride couldn't make me get through it. This one--gone without a backward glance. Let's just say I never bought another book about privileged white women Finding Themselves while Learning Life's Heartwarming Truths from the Simple, Close-to-the-Earth People of Another Culture.*
  

But even though they might not pass the "will you read it again in 100 years test," I kept a lot of books. What are your criteria for getting rid of books, assuming that you have to get rid of some?

*[In case it isn't obvious, I think the whole idea is highly insulting to other cultures.]

Homer nods

In preparation for a new project, I've been reading my way through an author's works and have finally come across a moment--all right, several moments--in which the most generous thing to say is that Homer was nodding at that point.

Are there any authors whose works are consistently even and excellent? Don't most authors have books excused with phrases like "She was going through a bad patch" or "She had to make some money with this one" or "If only she hadn't let Editor X get hold of it"?

Sometimes, if a work is flagrantly awful, we can excuse it in a different way: "It's a satire of a bad novel, see? That's why all the situations are so clichéd; it's an ironic take on that form."

I have a certain weakness for flawed books, if only because they show that the author is trying to do something different. I'm not exactly talking about bad fiction, which can be fun in a whole different way, but good fiction gone horribly wrong in some way, the kind that makes you want to knock on the author's tombstone and ask, "What were you thinking?"

So now I'm at the end of a novel whose main character is supposed to be a great figure and whose author has endowed him with what ought to be admirable attributes--and I can't stand him. Let me put it this way: I not only think he's a less-than-admirable person, but he's drawn poorly--his motivations make no sense, the foils that surround him are thinner than the paper they're printed on, and his actions are inconsistent. Oh, and the book, while well written generally, abounds in clichés like "piping hot," for which I have an irrational aversion from reading too many tray placemats describing the coffee at McDonald's over the years.

Maybe I'm just not getting it--always a possibility--but then again, maybe Homer is nodding here. Am I just asking too much? Are there any authors who haven't written a clunker from time to time?

(And please list some memorable clunkers in the comments!)

At the Chronicle: "Against Readings"

Dr. Crazy has a long and fine post about Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings" at the Chronicle. Her analysis is more, well, analytical than mine is going to be, so go and read it. She agrees and yet doesn't agree with him, and I can see why.

Edumundson's argument is really seductive in a Culture and Anarchy kind of way: "the best that has been known and thought." When you're reading that book for the first time, especially as a naive reader, you just want to say,"oh, give me the touchstone, Matthew Arnold, and I'll be as good and sensitive a critic as you are--I promise." And certainly we've all read our fair share of the kind of mechanical-application-of-theory-to-texts-criticism he's critiquing, as in "here are five things that Judith Butler says about performing gender, and here are the five points in X text that prove her point."

(And I can't help taking umbrage at this: "Prius-proselytizing." Hey! You talking to me?)

But this seductive vision of reading also demands some absolutes, or maybe binaries, that make me squirm. For example, if you read between the lines, it's clear that there are two kinds of books: the kind that transforms your life, and the kind that doesn't. The first kind is literature, and the second kind isn't.

Here's the problem: while he's right about "befriending the book" in the sense of reading it with an open mind as to its possibilities, and to teaching it in the same way, it's possible to befriend a book that you don't like and that hasn't transformed your life at all, especially if you've chosen to teach it for some reason.

For example, haven't you ever worked up enthusiasm to teach a book that personally left you cold? Heck, I've befriended some texts I didn't care for to the point of going steady with them, but what made that unholy partnership possible was my understanding of how well they performed some particular literary or cultural task, an understanding made possible by understanding some theoretical frameworks, even the New Criticism that's at the heart of his "no criticism" idea. I think what he's saying is that the book that left you cold--say, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent*--but that you could understand conceptually was great might transform a student's life.

I always feel a little dishonest in presenting the books in this way, though, and if I'm going to make Blakean ecstasy and the power to change lives criteria for course books, that creates a problem. How can we know which books will change lives until we teach them? And since as far as I know there isn't a Norton Anthology of Changing Lives and Creating Ecstasy in the Reader, the judgment is still going to rest with us as teachers to balance what we like, what we know students like, and what gets across the concepts that we hope will catch fire with students.

*I know it's supposed to be great, but years ago it just plain left me cold. Are there any books that you feel this way about?

I want a Netflix for books

File this under inventions I'd like to see: Netflix for books. If Netflix can do instant, on-demand viewing, why, oh why, can't university presses get together and create a service like this?

Like a lot of people, I'll be traveling this summer, and like a lot of academics, I need to take books with me. In the past, this wasn't as much of a problem. I'd pack a suitcase with clothes and a suitcase with books, and away I'd go.

But now, with the airlines waging unceasing war on passengers (my theory: Amtrak is pulling the puppet strings so the airlines will wither and die) and charging for extra bags and extra weight, that's not feasible. I would kill--well, pay, anyway--for access to books that I didn't have to lug in a suitcase.

The databases for journals have made this easy, but there's still no comprehensive option for books. What are the alternatives?

University of California Press has made some of its scholarly books available for free, bless its heart, but not all of them.

Google books has full-text versions of some useful books, but for most of them you just get the maddening striptease that they call "limited preview."

Questia has quite a few books, but many are older.

Netlibrary has a ratio (for my field, anyway) of about two scholarly books to about 25 repackaged public domain books that I can get anywhere.

Kindle looks promising at first, but its offerings are a lot heavier on the Eat, Pray, Love and Tom Clancy kind of thing than on the Arcades Project, if you know what I mean. In other words, stuff that I can buy in an airport bookstore I can also get through Kindle. Stuff that I can't get there, I can't get through Kindle, either.

What would a Netflix for books look like?

It would have to have affordable subscriptions or purchase prices, not the gazillion dollars that Project Muse and Ebsco extort from libraries so that individuals can never afford it.

It wouldn't have a proprietary device attached. Maybe it would come in .pdf versions that you could mark up.

It would be easy to access and have a good search feature. Maybe it could even emulate Amazon's "people who bought this book also bought X" feature.

It would allow you to get a "twofer"--an e-copy with every paper copy purchased. You could also just buy or rent the e-copy, for less money.

It would be centralized so you didn't have to go on a scavenger hunt to find the book you wanted.

I know, I know: digital rights, copyright laws, royalties, blah blah blah. But the movie companies aren't exactly holding hands and singing on a mountaintop when it comes to digital rights management, and Apple and Netflix have managed to make a go of things.

So I ask again: Netflix did it. Why can't academic booksellers?

Books: not dead yet!

The New York Times can't get enough of quoting--and refuting--Steve Jobs on the Kindle and the death of the book. In case you've been under a rock and haven't seen the Jobs quotation, here it is:
"It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

The latest response is by Randall Strauss, a professor of business at San Jose State. After the inevitable "we do too read, so there!" statistics, he says something interesting:

The book world has always had an invisible asset that makes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors and most frequent customers have to books themselves. Indeed, in this respect, avid book readers resemble avid Mac users.

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell.

It seems to me that Strauss has two kinds of "books" in mind here: the physical, dead-tree object that people are as passionate about as Mac users are about Macs, and the "object we are accustomed to calling a book," which exists somewhere between cyberspace and the reader's eye. What this separation does is raise more questions than answers about Steve Jobs's comment:

A lot of us are passionate about books, the dead-tree physical object that makes us as obsessed as Mac owners. Is it this kind of readership/ownership that Jobs is talking about when he says that people don't read books any more?

Does the second kind, the book "stripped of its physical shell," count for anything? Does Steve Jobs mean that, say, an online version of Jane Eyre doesn't count as a book? For that matter, if I listen to it on my iPod, as I listen to a lot of books, it's still a book, isn't it?

And does reading necessarily mean reading a book? That's important for the Kindle with its downloading-on-the-fly capabilities, but is the Internet maybe also a book?

How are we defining a book, anyway? I'd be willing to bet that more people are voluntarily writing--if not reading--now than they used to 25 years ago, if only so they can weigh in on fanboy sites and opine about the latest troubles of Britney Spears. I don't say it's good writing, but it is writing, and I'm about the thousandth person to observe that more people have a voice and a larger audience for that voice than ever before because of blogs, fan sites, newsgroups, and the rest.

For the record, I like my books served up dead-tree style, with a side order of interesting -looking covers and decent fonts, so that I can mark them up and find things. (No SEARCH function on a Kindle can be as fast as my blizzard of Post-It notes stuck to pages.) But I'm willing to recognize that that's an old-school, increasingly esoteric notion, as evidenced by the few students I've had who bring laptops with the texts online instead.

Maybe what Steve Jobs is really saying is that a taste for reading books on paper is what's passé and that those of us who like them are going the way of eccentric button collectors in an age of zippers.

True confessions: Five books I haven't read

After seeing Lennard Davis's article "Huckleberry Who?" at Paper Chaser, I decided that full disclosure was in order. Has this ever been a meme? It should be. I give you herewith five books I've never read:

1. The Lord of the Rings. Comment: Yes, I failed to read this trilogy at a time when everyone was reading it. No, I haven't seen the movie(s), either.
   
2. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook. Comment: I got so bored hearing people talk about this one that I never read it. Shorter Golden Notebook, based on interminable conversations in which people talked about it: Anna Wulf (or is it Martha Quest?) is oppressed by men and domesticity, finds self.
   
3. Anything Harry Potter. I did see one of the movies, though.
   
4. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
   
5. Shakespeare's Cymbaline
   

Davis says that Pierre Bayard "admits to giving lectures on books he hasn't bothered to read." How did he get away with that, and what's that magic pixie dust he used to do it?