I Can Read!

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Stefanie

From Carlin Romano’s article “Will the Book Survive Generation Text?” in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

My own peculiar worry about Academe 2020, offered with less than 20/20 foresight, may seem less catastrophic: the death of the book as object of study, the disappearance of “whole” books as assigned reading. Does that count as a preposterous figment of extreme academe, or is it closer than we think?

I don’t mean the already overwrought debate over the crisis of the book as codex—the daily New York Times announcement that electronic readers stand primed to eliminate paper books. (This shift, of course, plays into the problem, since any shrewd publishing type can see how the paper book’s demise might make it easier to digitally trim, abridge, and repackage texts in more “appealing” forms than their benighted authors envisaged.) The issue isn’t the decline in book sales, though it, too, remains an element of the big picture. I am talking about the growing feeling among humanities professors—intuitive and anecdotal, shared over lunch like an embarrassing tale about a colleague—that for too many of today’s undergraduates, reading a whole book, from A to Z, feels like a marathon unfairly imposed on a jogger.

When I finished reading the article I felt the need to read only really long novels for the rest of my life.

When you get used to a routine that means most of your time every evening is spent doing homework with only a few minutes to read before bed and then there is suddenly no homework to do it sort of throws one for a loop. It took me awhile to figure out what to do with myself last night. But of course when it dawned on me that I can read, all was right with the world.

So I finished Mansfield Park and will let that sit in my brain another day or so before I write anything about it. This was book number 15 in Emily’s TBR Challenge. I have five and a half more to go:

  • The half is Hermione Lee’s bio of Edith Wharton. I am planning on finishing it while I am on quarter break.

  • The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley. This is as fat as the Wharton bio. I have serious doubts I will be able to finish it this year but I will try.

  • A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland.

  • Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman.

  • 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.

  • A Human Eye by Adrienne Rich.

Not too bad. The year isn’t over yet, right?

Posted in Books, Challenges, Reading, TBR | 6 Comments

Let ‘er R.I.P.

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Stefanie

All of my projects for class are turned in and I am free until September 20th when my fall class on digital preservation begins. Being free means I can read, read, read. Hooray!

This morning on the way to work I noticed a tree already turning red. And then I checked in at Carl’s to find out that it is time for the R.I.P. Challenge. Today is a good day. I am going for a combo platter of sorts this year of novels and short stories with no set goal of reading a certain number by October 31st. My time once school begins again becomes uncertain. So, here are a few things I plan to draw from:

  • Dracula by Bram Stoker. My Bookman insisted I add this to my list this year when he discovered I had never read it. I’ll be partaking of the Norton Critical Edition.

  • Various ghost stories by Edith Wharton. I’m still working my way through Hermione Lee’s mammoth biography of her and I would love to sample her ghost stories, especially since Wharton herself did not like to read ghost stories because they frightened her. Oh irony!

  • I’d also like to try some ghost stories by M.R. James. I have never read him but I hear they are pretty good.

  • The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I think I might be the last person to read this one.

  • The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. If time allows I would love to reread this. It has been a very long time since I first read it and Colm Toibin’s The Master has a fictionalized telling of the novella’s creation which has had me wanting to read it since Toibin’s book earlier this year.

That seems to be enough. I could add more but that would really be going overboard since I said at the beginning I didn’t know how much time I would have to devote to the pleasures of reading come mid-September.

Posted in Books, Challenges, TBR | 21 Comments

Almost There

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Stefanie

I had a productive weekend and have just about finished both my group photo indexing project and my thesaurus project for my summer library school class. This evening should bring the conclusion of both with a few days before the due date to spare. That means my quarter break will be just a few days longer. Yay! With luck, tomorrow will see me free to read whatever the heck I want. Yay! Yay!

Until then, here is a little humor that one of my classmates posted to lift our tired spirits:

You can get this on a t-shirt from Neatoshop.

And for the scinetifically inclined gardener there is the Lawn Gegnome Project.

Posted in Library, Personal | 11 Comments

Language and the Way We Think

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Stefanie

I haven’t finished reading Does Your Language Shape How You Think? yet in the New York Times, but it is proving to be a fascinating article. Benjamin Lee Whorf (no relation to Mr. Worf though it would be interesting to consider the Klingon language in a linguistic study), the man who originally floated the idea that people who speak a language that, say, has no words to indicate time, can’t grasp the concept of time, was long ago discredited (though not so long ago that we didn’t talk about his ideas in a graduate level linguistics course in the early 90s). Since his theory fell out of favor, apparently no one has bothered to study whether or not language does have any effect on the way we think. Until recently.

Recent studies are showing that people who don’t have words for certain concepts in their language can still understand the concept perfectly well (and it might be that they just express it in a different way). However, studies are finding our language does influence the way we see the world not because it doesn’t allow us to think about certain things but because of the things it obliges us to think about.

Take for instance languages like German or Spanish in which the nouns are gendered. People who speak those languages have to think about gender all the time and it appears to influence the ways they describe objects and the sort of characteristics they attribute to them.

Like I said, I haven’t finished reading the article yet, but so far it is quite interesting and I just had to share it with you since readers, I think, find language to be an especially fascinating topic.

Bookman and I just made our very first batch of nondairy ice cream thanks to our new play and freeze ice cream ball. It was fun and easy and preliminary taste tests say yum! We made vanilla for our first attempt. Bookman, my kitchen wizard, is already planning future variations. Have a good weekend everyone!

Posted in language | 15 Comments

Just an Update

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Stefanie

My summer library school class is drawing to an all too rapid close. Isn’t that the case when there are not one but two big assignments due? My thesaurus is moving along. It is well into the tedious stage that calls for checking and cross-checking of terms and making sure everything is formated correctly. I still have to write an explanation of how to use the thesaurus and then I have to locate five documents that could theoretically be in a topical database covered by my thesaurus and then I have to index the documents using my thesaurus. Whew.

The other project is a group photo indexing project and that is moving along quite well. I get to be the lucky one who writes the section of the report about all the things we learned from the project. Yay (she says with heavy sarcasm).

The only reading I’ve been able to do outside of school work is during my commute and work day lunch break. I’m in about the last quarter of Mansfield Park. I must say my reaction to the book this time around is much different than when I read it in college. I actually am liking it this time, not loving it, but that is a significant improvement over hating it the first time I read it.

My projects for school will all be turned in by Thursday next week and I will then be free until my fall class starts on September 20th. The weekend of September 4th is a three-day holiday weekend here and I am so very much looking forward to it. I have decided to have a completely unplugged holiday. My computer will not be turned on once during those days. I am still planning my reading and other activities, but I am very much looking forward to it. I pre-ordered Jonathan Franzen’s new book Freedom and that should be here by then. Perhaps I will read that. Or maybe it will finally be time to read Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Or maybe I will finish some of the books I am in the middle of. Or maybe something else remarkable and currently unknown to me will sweep all other books away. Just thinking about it is absolutely delicious and is the only thing sustaining me through the tedium of my thesaurus which I now need to go spend some time with.

Posted in Library, Personal | 9 Comments

Reading and Brains and the Internet, Oh My

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Stefanie

It is a linky sort of day since I have more school to cope with than I would prefer.

  • A new look for ereaders: dual screens. They are mainly being marketed to students as a textbook replacement. Seem kind of pricey though.

  • Ebook readers and the iPad continue to elicit death of print prophecies from techno-evangelists. You know the saying, to wish to live in interesting times, or however it goes? Well, I think these are interesting times but I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t mind it to be a little less interesting now and then.

  • Because all this technology and time on the internet means lots of people worrying about the loss of deep reading. Poor Carlyle, he already isn’t read much, now he and others like him that require attention and concentration really may be doomed.

  • But is the Internet changing our brains and our ability to think? Some say no, not really things are the same as always the Internet just makes us more aware of all the bozos in the world. Brain scientists are skeptical, but even they found it hard to unplug and realized they gained greatly when they did.

  • But it could be that the rules of modern productivity which require us to put subjects in silos and to specialize instead of being “Renaissance” men and women might have something to do with it. We can see it in the ways the reading of our leaders have changed over time.

  • But maybe a website like Five Books will help us all expand our reading choices and somehow start to break down the silo walls and make connections again.

Or maybe trying to impress a librarian will help?

My cat Waldo says he really doesn’t give a tuna’s fin about all this as long as he can sit in my lap and have his chin scratched. He’s giving me the big “I’m so cute you have to scratch me” eyes. I’d better obey.

Posted in Books, Reading, Technology | 15 Comments

Sartor Resartus

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Stefanie

Ever since I read Emerson I have been interested in reading Thomas Carlyle’s “novel” Sartor Resartus because Emerson loved it, got it published in the United States, and it influenced New England Transcendentalism. If it weren’t for the Scottish Challenge sponsored by Wuthering Expectations, I don’t when I would ever have read the book or, when I did, that I would have finished it. It is a crazy book; a philosophical treatise in the guise of satirical fiction. Here is Carlyle’s description of the book from a letter to Fraser, his publisher. Carlyle had tried to get Fraser to publish it before but was refused, and now he is trying again:

It is put together in the fashion of a Didactic Novel; but indeed properly like nothing extant. I used to characterize it briefly as a kind of “Satirical Extravaganza on Things in General”; it contains more of my opinions on Art, Politics, Religion, Heaven Earth and Air, than all the things I have yet written.

[...]

My own conjecture is that Teufelsdröckh, whenever published, will astonish most that read it, be wholly understood by very few; but to the astonishment of some will add touches of (almost the deepest) spiritual interest, with others quite the opposite feeling.

I can’t say that Carlyle’s letter does much to recommend the book, but nonetheless, Fraser published it in installments from 1833 – 1834. It did not meet with immediate success.

The title of the book means the tailor retailored which will make a little sense in a minute. The premise of the book is an unnamed British editor presenting one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a German Professor of Things in General, and his philosophy of clothes. Teufelsdröckh, by the way, translates as “devil’s excrement” and he is from the town of Weissnichtwo, or “Know-not-where.” The clothes in the philosophy of clothes, are, of course, actual clothes and what they say about a person as well as a metaphor of the ideas and thoughts, manners and actions we clothe ourselves in.

The unnamed editor translates the philosophy of clothes,

endeavour[ing], from the enormous, amorphous Plumpudding, more like a Scottish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdröckh had kneaded for his fellow mortals, to pick out the choicest Plums, and present them separately on a cover of our own.

We are also given a pieced together biography of Teufelsdröckh which pretty much amounts to a spiritual journey from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea with some stops in between. When Teufelsdröckh gets hot under the collar about cant, the corruption of modern life and Utilitarianism he sounds just like Carlyle when he’d get going on a rant in letters to Emerson.

Carlyle, and later Emerson, are both heavily influenced by Goethe. Sartor has numerous references to Goethe’s works, especially The Sorrows of Young Wether. The only Goethe I have had the pleasure of reading was when I took German in college and we read the fantastic poem Erlkönig (gave me poetry stomach even in my halting German), and Faust. After reading Sartor I feel like I need to read more Goethe, only this time in English as I have sadly neglected my German.

But back to Carlyle. Sartor is often compared to Tristram Shandy (another book I haven’t read) in terms of technique. It is also considered by some to be an early Existentialist text.

I worried that the book would be hard to read and I would have no idea what it was talking about. I did have to look up a few things like Sansculottism, but over all it was not hard to follow. Sometimes the book was funny; sometimes it was just flat out weird. I can’t say the book was a pleasurable read, a good bit of it was a slog and it took me since May to read the final twenty pages. It was sort of like facing down the vegetable you like the least. You know it is good for you but you just can’t bring yourself to like it no matter how it gets dressed up. But once you’ve eaten it there is a certain sense of accomplishment and satisfaction as well as relief. How’s that for a recommendation? Read it if you dare.

Posted in Books, Challenges, Emerson, Nineteenth Century, Reviews | 13 Comments

And the Winner Is…

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Stefanie

Iliana!

Thanks for playing along everyone. I wish I had more copies of Barnacle Love to give away.

I put together a list of all the books everyone recommended about the immigrant experience. Here it is, sorry I didn’t link to the books but I’m feeling lazy.

  • In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

  • Cockroach by Rawi Hage

  • The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poetry) by Margaret Atwood

  • Shanghai Girls and On Gold Mountain by Lisa See

  • Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clezio

  • The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

  • Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

  • Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky

  • Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska

  • The Visitor (movie)

  • House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

  • Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande

  • Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

  • Typical American by Gish Jen

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Posted in Book Lists | 8 Comments

Jonathan Franzen, Nice Guy

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Stefanie

I read the Jonathan Franzen article in Time today and I must say that I now feel much better about Franzen. I was under the impression he was sort of snobby but that is far from the case. In fact he seems rather humble and unassuming.

The article, if you haven’t read it yet, isn’t a blow you away sort of thing but a pretty standard author profile. I suppose the big deal about it is that it is in Time and Franzen is on the cover. It is not unprecedented but presidents and business executives show up on the cover far more often than writers do so it’s something.

Here’s a paragraph from the article that I thought you all would like:

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we’ve created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful,” Franzen says. “The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.”

We are being socially useful when we read a book. How about that?

The article also talks a little about Franzen’s new book, Freedom, and I am definitely going to have to read it because it is set in St. Paul, Minneapolis’s not as hip and cool twin. The book comes out at the end of the month. I now have to decide, do I buy it or do I wait in line for it at the library? I’m tempted to buy. I can call it a reward for finishing my summer school quarter. Heh.

Time was kind enough to make available online the five novels that have recently inspired Franzen. I like that they are recent inspirations and not an all time sort of list. And it is always interesting to see what well thought of writers read. He made me laugh when he says you can safely skip whole chunks of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater.

I’ll be drawing a name for a copy of Barnacle Love about this time tomorrow night. Enter the giveaway while you still have a chance.

Posted in Authors, Books | 10 Comments

Midweek Reading Notes

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Stefanie

I wrote this last night and pressed “save” but not “publish.” Evidence that my brain is on overload?

My school quarter is drawing to a speedy close and two large projects are coming due in addition to the regular day-to-day work of class. So If things get spotty around here that’s why.

I finally finished the last 20 pages of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus but have not the focus or time in the evening to think about it and put together a coherent post or two. I will make an attempt over the weekend to sort it all out so I suppose that is something to look forward to.

Mansfield Park moves apace. What a curious book it is. I am not loving it but I am not hating it either, I feel rather neutral about it while at the same time I appreciate how different and interesting in it. So that is an improvement over how I felt about it previously. I am jut over halfway. Fanny’s brother William is visiting and Henry Crawford is falling in love with Fanny but Fanny only has eyes for Edmund but Edmund only has eyes for Mary Crawford who does have eyes for Edmund but is very disappointed in her inability to change his mind about his second son profession of clergyman. He will soon be taking orders and she is doing her best to make him change his mind because he loves her and she could never marry him if he is a clergyman with only 700 a year. Poor Miss Crawford.

I haven’t had much time to read anything else these last few days. We get Time Magazine at work and I plan on reading the Jonathan Franzen article in it at lunch tomorrow. I would have read it today but I was distracted by the cover article from last week about animal intelligence.

I should be free from school in about two weeks. I get a short break of only a week (though I hope I am wrong and it is actually two weeks) before the fall quarter starts up and I am daydreaming in idle moments about what books I might be able to cram in during my brief freedom. So many to dream about!

Off to go work on my thesaurus project.

Posted in Books, Library | 10 Comments