A Couple of Good Reads
March 10, 2010
It’s interesting to keep track of what one reads, and to see what others are reading and what they think of those books. Yes, I said books, thus consigning this post and its author to the dustbin of pre-postliterate history.
I’ve used a few different what-am-I-reading web services, and have settled on Goodreads. My profile/history shows mainly fiction. It excludes much of the nonfiction I pick up, because I refer to it rather than read it. It also excludes most of the books I read to my kids (6 and 3) because they are my kids’“reading” rather than mine.
I have recently made a couple of exceptions to this policy. One is for Stink and the World’s Worst Super-Stinky Sneakers. As those of you versed in the classics will know, Stink is the younger brother of Judy Moody.
In Stinky Sneakers, we find out that Stink is a discriminating sniffer as well as a smelly-sneakered source of scent. We also find out how he got the nickname Stink. This is not a book for the faint of heart or nose, but it is my favorite of the half-dozen or so Megan McDonald books we’ve read.
The other exceptional book is WordPress For Dummies. I admit that it’s not the first For Dummies book I’ve read, or considered good. Then again, I didn’t really read it.
As usual with tech books, I scanned it rather than read it, I was aware of the danger that it might already be out of date, and I know that a lot of the information is available online anyway. But if you want a book on WordPress, this one is pretty good. It sets a fairly gentle pace. At the same time, it covers a lot of ground: for example, there are chapters on setting up WordPress MU (multi-user).
I see that a new edition of WordPress For Dummies is due out later this year. I presume that’ll cover WordPress 3.0, which is due out soon.
Book Chapter on WordPress as Mass Customization
March 10, 2010
A couple of years ago, I submitted a paper about WordPress to a conference on Mass Customization. The paper was accepted and, in October 2007, I presented it at the conference at MIT.
A book based on the conference has just been published. I’m posting my chapter, A Mass of Customizers: The WordPress Software Ecosystem, here. I hope you find it interesting.
The fact that the book has just come out is a comment on the slowness of the traditional publishing system. There is a danger of bibliolescence: the book becoming obsolete. Indeed, I note that the chapter refers to Version 2.3 of WordPress, and we’re now on 2.9.
That said, the point of the chapter has become sharper, rather than duller, with time. WordPress is now a better example of mass customization. There’s more mass, in that there are millions more WordPress blogs. And there’s more customization, in that there are many more themes, plugins, etc.
Indeed, Table 2 of the chapter is a rather handy summary of the means by which WordPress can be customized. Take a look, and feel free to leave comments on the chapter at this post.
GK Chesterton and YA Fiction
March 8, 2010
The Quote of the Day gadget today shows me this one from G.K. Chesterton.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Then I saw (via Largehearted Boy) an LA Times article about adults reading young adult fiction.
Attracted by well-written, fast-paced and engaging stories that span the gamut of genres and subjects, such [adult] readers have mainstreamed a niche long derided as just for kids… Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children’s/young adult hardcovers were up 30.7%.
The same passage provides four examples of YA lit. I read The Book Thief a while ago. I recently finished The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) and have started on the sequel.
So I’m a pretty good example of a YA-reading adult, especially since The Hunger Games is on my wishlist. I won’t mention the fourth example from the LAT article: you can probably guess, and I won’t be reading it.
There are several links between the GK quote and the LAT article. First, the quote is an explanation of the article. But it’s only a partial explanation. The tired grownup who reads the first Percy Jackson often turns into the grownup who’s eager for the second – and possibly even more tired, having stayed up late to finish the first.
Even leaving aside the sequel syndrome, some YA novels are good enough to deserve eager readers.
A second link between GK and YA is that some YA writers are fans of GK: Neil Gaiman, for example. There are many more links, and much more to be written: but not by me, at least not right now.
Did the Lorax Drive a Prius?
February 19, 2010
I just read The Lorax to my son. Many of Dr. Seuss’books remain fresh, but this one seems particularly relevant at the moment. Here’s a quote. (Which character? See last paragraph for the answer.)
I meant no harm. I most truly did not.
But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.
I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads.
I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads.
The growth imperative features, not only in this 1971 book, but also in a 2010 story: Toyota sacrificed quality for global growth and got burned (as the Washington Post puts it). That’s particularly sad since Toyota is so strongly identified with the quality movement. If Toyota did indeed sacrifice quality for quantity, then it betrayed the very principle that made it one of the world’s great organizations.
For more on the current Toyota story, see… all over the web, but particularly my previous post and a professional PR perspective.
But back to the Lorax we started with: here’s his statue, in a sculpture garden I wish I’d visited when I lived nearer to it.
The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden is now open at the Springfield Museums in Springfield, Massachusetts, the city where Theodor Seuss Geisel was born and which appears to have inspired much of his work.
The Lorax is the shortish, oldish, brownish, mossy, and bossy environmentalist in the story that bears his name. The Once-ler is the industrialist quoted above.
Music, Books, and Death
December 30, 2009
I Shot a Man in Reno is: a quote from the Johnny Cash song Folsom Prison Blues; a A History of Death… in Popular Song; a blog by Graeme Thomson, author of said book.
Graeme and I have a few things in common; that’s one of the reasons I use his first, rather than his last, name. It’s obvious that he and I share an interest in songs about death, since he decided I write a book on the subject and I decided to read it. We’re both white, dads, not too far apart in age (although I suspect I’m slightly older and closer to death), and British (although I haven’t lived in Britain for decades now). Given that, it’s not surprising that we are both huge fans of Richard Thompson.
I found myself thinking of the book as an album. It has 12 tracks (Introduction, Chapters 1-10, Epilogue). By the time I got to the end of Side 1 (i.e., the intro and ch. 1-5) I was thinking that it should be possible to buy tracks individually, since some are a lot better than others. The strongest track, Teenage Wildlife, starts with a 14-year-old Graeme listening to The Cure, then travels through teenage time to visit Shakespeare, emo, and many points along the way to present a coherent and well-illustrated account of teenage response to music, and music’s messages to teens.
But Teenage Wildlife (ch. 2) is preceded by two tracks (intro and ch. 1) rather too general to make much of an impact. They must have seemed necessary to some combination of Graeme, his editors, and his publishers, and some of the material probably does belong up front, but they get things off to a slow start.
The first side also includes the track I found to be the album’s weakest, the one about the 1960s (ch. 4). It must have been hard to come up with a fresh account of the previous century’s most over-analyzed decade; I don’t think that Graeme succeeded. Lest it seem that there was no way that this chapter was going to please this particular reader, I’ll point out that my favorite non-fiction music book is about the 1960s.
Side 2 worked much better for me. It includes the Gansta Rap track (ch. 7). This for me was the freshest, if not the best, on the album, partly because of my ignorance of the genre. It’s not exactly Graeme’s area of specialization either, and he leans fairly heavily on his interviews with Ice T (who currently plays a cop on TV).
But the heart of side 2 is the sequence of three tracks (8-10) that follows the rap. The first deals with the way singer/songwriters respond to the death of loved ones. The second starts with a list of songs often played at funerals, and goes on to discuss the more general role that music plays in mourning. The third is about how musicians regard their own impending deaths, and how this affects their music.
The last track (epilogue) is a list of 40 death cuts. Graeme took the time to come up with a thoughtful and well-annotated list. I disagree with it, but that is of course part of the point of such a list.
I disagree in particular with Graeme’s choice of Richard Thompson track. He goes for “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” and so would many other RT fans. He went with a different RT song when he put together a book-related playlist for Largehearted Boy; that shows how difficult the decision is.
I go with yet another RT song: “When I Get to the Border.” It’s a song I prefer, and it’s from my favorite album. It’s the opening track, and it opens my playlist inspired by Graeme’s book. It’s also my favorite example of RT as a musician both contemporary and traditional (listen to the interplay between electric guitar and “archaic” instruments in the coda/fadeout).
RT plays on most of the tracks of Graeme’s album: that is, he’s quoted in most of the chapters. (Am I now beating the “book as album” metaphor into the ground?) Other extensively-featured musicians include Ice T (as already mentioned), Neil Finn, and Bob Dylan (although I don’t think that Graeme has talked directly with the latter).
Graeme varies his own tone rather deftly. For example, he gives credit where it’s due, and finds it frequently due to RT and a few others. He acknowledges the occasional greatness of Paul McCartney. He is also good on musicians who aren’t any good, such as Marilyn Manson: “simply the media’s most willingly complicit hate figure… He relishes this… because the alternative is to be judged on his music and then he would really be in trouble.”
That’s more than I meant to write. Now it’s all over bar the rating (4 stars out of a possible 5) on Goodreads, and… oh yes, my Reno-inspired playlist. I was going to embed the playlist in this post, as I’ve done with other Lala playlists in other posts, but for technical reasons, I won’t do so here.
I’ll just link to the playlist at Lala, announce my intention of extending it beyond the initial three tracks, and state what I regard as the main omission. Loudon Wainwright’s The Last Man On Earth is a response to the death of his mother, and a great album. I’m surprised that Graeme didn’t mention it. I’m a little upset that I can’t find my CD. And it’s an omission from the playlist, because Lala doesn’t offer it. I’d probably have gone with “I’m Not Gonna Cry.”
The Ask and the Answer, and Other Goodreads
December 27, 2009
The Ask and the Answer is the second book of Patrick Ness‘s Chaos Walking trilogy. The first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, impressed me.
The distinctive feature of the Chaos Walking world is telepathy, with the interesting twist that women don’t broadcast. Crucial to the second book is the further twist that some men don’t broadcast either. One such is the evil and manipulative President Prentiss.
That word manipulative is particularly important, because it brings me to the main way in which Ask didn’t work as well for me as did Knife. The main characters Todd and Viola are manipulated by Prentiss and by his arch-enemy, Mistress Coyle. That would be fine, had the author’s manipulation of these and other characters not seemed intrusive.
That said, I found Ask engrossing, and Ness does move the pieces into place for a cliffhanger even more dramatic than the one on which Knife ended. So I’m looking forward to Monsters of Men, the third book, which is due out next year.
I gave Ask a four-star rating, while I gave Knife the maximum five. I refer to ratings at Goodreads. I’ve just resumed activity there thanks to prompting from uberbibliophile Nicholas Whyte.
Bookstores and the Graveyard
November 17, 2009
Clay Shirky posted today an interesting ramble around the plight of local bookstores. Here’s his most telling point.
The local bookstore creates all kinds of value for its community, whether its hosting community bulletin boards, putting rocking chairs in the kids section, hosting book readings… value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books.
Combined with the most familiar point about bookstores – that Amazon is in many ways a superior transactional warehouse – this frames the all-too-familiar problem for bookstores. It also sees Clay on his way to suggesting ways of monetizing the actual value created by bookstores.
In other bookish news, I actually went into my local bookstore and bought a couple of books. One of them was Ivy & Bean Break the Fossil Record (Ivy & Bean, Book 3). We bought the first Ivy and Bean book for Maddie on the recommendation of one of the store owners. She’s loving the series. Max also got a book, and likes to play in the kids’area of the store. So good for Village Books.
Yes I did just link to Amazon in the middle of a paragraph praising a local bookstore. I also paid with an Amazon credit card. Perhaps I’m not the best champion of local bookstores.
Neil Gaiman is certainly a better champion than me, as you can see from his account of judging the Graveyard Book Halloween Party Contest. Perhaps bookstores need more parties.
Middle East: Two Perspectives
October 5, 2009
I just finished Dreamers of the Day, Mary Doria Russell’s story of a schoolteacher who visits Egypt in 1921. Agnes meets T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and others trying to define the states and borders of the Middle East after the Great War.
This isn’t a review, but it is a recommendation. Maria Doria Russell‘s prose is, as always, a pleasure to read. My main reservation about Dreamers is that I was enjoying her writing, rather than Agnes’, and the book is written in the first person.
So one perspective on the Middle East is that of Agnes/Maria. It might be more accurately called a collection of perspectives, since Lawrence and others offer Agnes their differing perspectives.
The second perspective is an Imperial History of the Middle East, in the form of a map. The map (which I found via reddit) changes over a minute and a half to reflect five thousand years of empires.
You don’t need to tell me that there are more than two perspectives on the Middle East, but most other comments would be welcome.
The Free Bestseller
August 3, 2009
The bestseller in question is Free: The Future of a Radical Price. It’s by Chris Anderson, whose earlier book, The Long Tail, I posted about a couple of years ago.
Chris recently posted that Free made the New York Times bestseller list (number 12 on the nonfiction charts, to be specific). That of course means that there have been rather a lot of copies of the book exchanged for money. People seem willing to pay money in order to read about things being available at a price of zero.
There are ways of obtaining Free itself for free, within limitations of time and space.
The ebook and web book will be free for a limited time and limited to certain geographic regions as determined by each national publisher; the unabridged audiobook will be available free forever, available in all regions.
Whereas the unabridged audiobook is free, the abridged audiobook isn’t. Audible.com presents a “time is money” argument for the abridged audiobook being worth $7.49: it gives you the good stuff in half the time (3 hours rather than 6).
This may arouse the suspicion that the full Free is padded. My experience has been that business books often are. On the other hand, I found The Long Tail to be a book with a book’s worth of book.
So I’m going to read Free. The questions are: when? in what form? at what price? In a sense, I started reading Free over a year ago. I also started writing about it: one of the more successful posts on this blog applies Chris’framework about free to WordPress.com.
I expect that Free will come out in paperback some time next year, with a new chapter or afterword. At that point, I’ll probably buy the paperback, just as I bought The Long Tail paperback.
Hardback publication is seen as perhaps the major event in a book’s lifecycle. In terms of my reading of Free, it’s the halfway point in a process that spans more than two years. No, that’s not because I’m a slow reader. It’s because the two most interesting publication dates are that of the Wired article (in 2008) and of the paperback book (in 2010?).
In case it isn’t already obvious, I find the Free project interesting in many ways, including its subject matter and publication process. And I like those old-fashioned things that tend to cost money: books.
Avoiding Infinite Reproach
June 24, 2009
There are many books I should have read, but haven’t. Among them is Infinite Jest. I recently found Infinite Summer, a project based on the challenge: “Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd.”
IJ is currently in my Amazon shopping cart, but I’m inclined to remove it. I’m more inclined to do so after reading an NPR blog post about The Shelf Of Constant Reproach: “that shelf filled with books you meant to read or, more likely, fully intend to read some day.” I suspect that many people have IJ on their reproach shelf, and I don’t think I’ll join them just yet.
So, on with The Little Book which is a lot longer than its title, but rather shorter than IJ.
