Important Reading Update

I have much to catch up with online, but have been spending most of my non-work time either unpacking or reading.

I wanted to finish Neal Stephenson's  Reamde before I gave it back to the library whence it came. Which turned out to be a slight challenge, partly because it's over 1000 pages and I started it while we were moving, but also because I stopped reading it in the middle so I could read N.K. Jemison's The Kingdom of Gods, which I checked out of the library later but wanted to read even more.

So I wound up keeping Reamde a day late, possibly the first time I have ever had an overdue library book, because I really wanted to finish it (and couldn't renew it, since other people had it on hold after me).

I guess this speaks well for both books--I put all else aside because I couldn't wait to read The Kingdom of Gods, and I committed the grave misdeed of keeping a library book late because I couldn't let Reamde go unfinished.

Good work, authors, writing books I must read even when packing, moving and unpacking!

Now, all finished with these fine books, I should dedicate much more time to the unpacking, but it's also very tempting to play Mass Effect 3 instead. I was hoping to get through a significant portion of that before the baby, but it doesn't look as if that's going to happen, considering all the boxes everywhere, so I'll just have to do my best when I can. 

Wrapping Up

As the year nears its close, I thought I'd get a head start on the posts one tends to see in bookish and library-related circles detailing the books that were read over the year. (My last year's note is here.)

I'm not going to list all the titles, because that would be a lot of copying and pasting, but I can say that so far I have read 106 books in the course of 2011. This is precisely twice as many as in 2010!

I can't really say why that is, since I haven't been working extra hard to double up on my reading, nor have I intentionally cut back on my consumption of other media such as blogs, magazines, newspapers and video games.

I think I have watched somewhat fewer movies recently than in the past, since I don't seem to be in the free screenings loop quite as often, and we switched to the streaming-only package from Netflix, meaning that we don't get regular DVDs in the mail that then sit around all brightly in their red wrappers waiting for us to play them. Still, most of my reading is done on the train during my commute, so I'm not sure how huge an impact that has.

Anyway, of these 106 books, 56 were fiction, and 50 were non-fiction, so I'm keeping things fairly balanced in that department.

Of the total, 38 were by male writers, 65 were by female writers, and three were collections featuring both male and female writers (all three with female editors).

I went on a pretty serious Brontë/Austen kick over the summer, catching up on some classics I hadn't gotten around to reading before, and that increases the count for both women and fiction. This is clearly reflected in the numbers when I break it down by fiction/nonfiction and male/female: 41 fiction books by women (or with a woman editor in two cases), compared to only 15 by men.

In nonfiction, 27 books were authored (or edited in one case) by women, and 23 by men, so apparently this year I prefer tall tales from women, but am willing to accept my facts more or less equally from writers of either gender.

I would like to thank my iPod Touch, on which I read a number of these as ebooks (tiny screen is a bit squint-inducing, but super convenient for travel), and of course my local public library, from which I checked out the majority of the remainder.

In conclusion...mmm...I dunno. I read a fair amount, I guess, and moderately broadly. I'm not sure there's anything of broad interest to be discovered here.

In conclusion, write better fiction, guys!

Ha, just kidding. It's not your fault you're not a Brontë or Jane Austen. Maybe 2012 will be all Mark Twain.

Wicked Games

I have finished Assassin's Creed: Revelations, and it was enjoyable--I cherished nearly every moment of climbing up on tall buildings, running along meticulously detailed streets and rooftops, and striking terror into the hearts of the wicked*--but it didn't really reveal everything I had wondered about.

My final reaction was along the lines of "that's all very well, glowing dude, but how does this explain why you made me [do something to] [someone] at the end of the last one?"

What about [someone], game? What about that? 

I know. Play another game, that's what. And I totally will.

But this is the question that haunts me, and don't think I'm going to forget about it. (Another question that haunts me is, why did they change Desmond's face? But whatever, I'll deal with that as a non-story issue.)

I especially cherished the moments of beating up minstrels. And the moments I added myself where the cry was "Knives! Knives for everyone!"


I'm in the middle of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, about violence and how it's declined from levels seen at previous points in history, and it does make me feel a little curious about how fun it is to pretend to beat up and assassinate people. My real life is pretty calm, so let's add some pretend violence!

I suppose this could be either the 'safety valve' theory (since there's always the strong chance that I would actually go out to beat up and assassinate people if I couldn't release my tensions by playing this game version instead), or, more likely, the theory that people can tell fiction from reality. A fictional story that resonates with a lot of people will often have some sort of conflict (many guides to storytelling say there has to be conflict), and that means that there will often be violence, which maybe is something we can enjoy in part because it's not something we would actually do.

Or that we have personal experience with, that might also help. I'd probably think it was less fun and more drudgery if I actually did have to climb towers and kill people for a living.

Siiigh...I do this all day and now you expect me to come home and pretend to do it in an old-timey setting? I want to play the Yardwork Simulator instead.



*And also into the hearts of all the random guards who crossed me. But look, if they don't want to die, they shouldn't try to keep me from running on rooftops and assassinating people. It's just common sense.

My Dark Forces are REAL

Ha!

Greta Christina has an interesting point about a comment by the Vatican's chief exorcist opposing the Harry Potter books because they "encourage children to believe in black magic and wizardry.”

Okay. Wait a minute. Let me get this straight.  

The Harry Potter stories encourage people to believe in black magic and wizardry.  

 And exorcists don’t.

Heh. 'Cause yeah, I guess if you believe in a valid need for exorcists in the world, you kind of have to believe in dark supernatural forces, and the distinction between 'black magic and wizardry,' and 'demons and evil spirits' (although I'm just guessing here that that's what exorcists might battle) gets a bit...fine.

I mean, yeah, there certainly is a distinction, and as a devotee of fantasy role playing games I am well aware of this and will happily discuss it at length at a nerd party sometime, but if you're going to go believing in one set of them, I'm not sure on what grounds you can rule out the other set.

And if you don't rule it out, then what does it matter if books encourage belief in something that's likely to be true?

Learnin' Stuff

I was at the 40th anniversary party/slash 9th edition book launch for Our Bodies, Ourselves, yesterday. There were a lot of amazing women from all over the world who spoke about their work in women's health as global partners of OBOS.

I was knitting an afghan square, not taking notes, and the event was streamed and will be archived, so I won't say much even though there were many cool moments I could highlight.

One thing that did strike me, and then made me wonder at how striking it was, was Miho Ogino, who edited the Japanese edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves (published in 1988 and now out of print, she said, but not before inspiring many other women's health books), mentioning that, unlike in many countries, there was no religious backlash to the book's content in Japan.

She said this was because Japanese society is not strongly religious, and did mention that there was some cultural resistance, as of course there may be anywhere.

"Imagine no religious backlash!" I thought.

And then I thought how unfortunate it is that the default assumption is that religious figures would naturally object to frank information about women's health and sexuality. Can't have people knowing stuff about stuff.

Speaking of frankness, another recurring theme was how tough it is in some languages and societies to even find words for some of these topics. There might literally not be a word for something, or the one commonly used might be inherently associated with shame or secrecy--obviously not what you're going for when you're trying to present facts about health.

Anyway, a very interesting day.

Banning It Just Makes Me Want It More

I think I'm missing Banned Books Week. Sorry! My bad. Go read some banned books, everyone!

I was not organized enough to get any out of the library ahead of time, and I don't actually think I own any of the better known much-banned books, but I'm totally reading them on the street in my mind right now.

Mmmm...wicked.

In my experience, you don't run into many of those book challenges in a medical library, so it's not right at the forefront of our minds.

We did have a copy of Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (a faculty donation from years ago) go missing, and I wondered if someone might not have made off with it because they felt it wasn't appropriately science-based, but it could just as easily have been mis-shelved, or maybe someone made off with it because they thought it was awesome.

In any case, there was no formal complaint about it, so I can't cite its disappearance as evidence for anything.

But yeah, that's my harrowing tale. I hope you can all manage to get to sleep tonight.

Wordly Musings

Some things stick with you.

Like, I haven't read (or had read to me) Winnie-the-Pooh since I was about, I don't know, 30 years younger than I am now.

It was never my super favorite set of stories anyway. I preferred Kipling's Just-So Stories.

But for some reason I have long remembered this bit from that one story where Pooh eats too much honey and gets stuck in the tunnel trying to get out of Rabbit's house:

"I thought at the time," said Rabbit, "but I didn't want to say anything,"said Rabbit, "that one of us was eating too much," said Rabbit, "and I knew it wasn't me," he said.

OK, that was me writing it down from memory. Thanks to the wonders of books that have gone out of copyright, I shall find an online version and check my work, which we may do here here in Chapter 2.

And I got it pretty close to right, except it's "only I didn't like to say anything," instead of "but I didn't like to say anything" (which I might have known, since it's more English) and the original does not italicize "me."

Also, this version renders the line as "one of us has eating too much," but that doesn't really make sense even as an old-fashioned Britishism, so I'm going to assume it's a typo.

The point is, I kind of love this. I love the way the language keeps looping back with the "said Rabbit," catching the sort of jumpy way he's talking, and the way it finally wraps up by switching to a decisive "he said."

It's stuck in my head for years and years, I suppose because I always kind of liked it, and only now it occurs to me to remember it again and think about why I liked it.

I'm only slightly likely to go re-read the whole book to better appreciate any other bits of fun prose, but I guess I'll always have that nearly-accurate memory of that one deliciously choppy line. I mean, unless I forget it.


On a slightly related topic, I also see here in Chapter 2 a use of quotation marks that you do see in older books, where they put quotes around the idea of what a character is saying, rather than using them to signify the exact words used.

For example, here in chapter 2 of Winnie-the-Pooh we have Pooh asking if there's any more to eat, followed by the line,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, "No, there wasn't."

It doesn't actually make sense that he would say "no, there wasn't"--wasn't is past tense, as is the story as a whole, but the question "is there any more?" is present tense, so the answer really ought to match. We would expect Rabbit to say "no, there isn't" instead.

So today we would either leave the quotation marks out of that line and just write,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, No, there wasn't.

Or we'd match the tense to that of the question and write,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, "No, there isn't."

I just finished Jane Eyre (no, I had never read Jane Eyre before, yes, as a former English major my head was perpetually hanging in shame), and that book is bristling with this kind of "quotes around the general idea of what the person said" usage. (Hmm...what kind of usage were those quotes just there? Never mind that now.)

And either way we know what's going on, so it's really not a concern for readability, but these days we tend to assume that quotes are for setting off the precise words used by a speaking character, or an exact quote from another text.

These are the words that were used! I was taking notes!

I think it's interesting that there was a time when quotation marks apparently had a more general purpose, signaling that a character said something, and this was the main gist of it, but the author isn't going to worry about exactly transcribing the dialogue.

This was basically the information someone wanted to convey, but I wasn't taking notes, so don't expect a script!

It would be a good way to get around writing differentiated character 'voices,' not that I'm saying that's what Milne or Brontë was doing.

Also, if you don't want to write dialect or accents but they would make sense for your story? This could totally save you!

I'm going to remember this when I start working on a story full of dialects and accents for NaNoWriMo.

Easy, Breezy, Hat-Wearing

Check out the hotly anticipated (by me) book cover over on Our Bodies, Our Blog. As I expected, it's beyond awesome.

There I am right in the middle. Good thing I sent in the picture of me wearing a goofy hat. Nothing else would have been nearly as cool.

My grandmother knit that hat for me, you know. She'll be proud.

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'Cover Model' is So On My Resume

Many people are familiar with the women's health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves.

There's a new edition every so often, as a health book will tend to have in order to remain relevant, and for the upcoming 40th anniversary edition there was a call (on Our Bodies, Our Blog, which I have always thought is just a fantastic name for a blog) asking people to submit photos for the cover.

So I did, 'cause why not, and in fact it turns out I will be included on the cover of the next edition. I have not seen it, but from my vague understanding there's going to be a sort of tiled design with lots of small photos of lots of different women. And one of them will be me!

That's pretty much what I'm doing this year to maintain my notoriety.

Quick, hurry out (to your local bookstore, or to your computer, which you foolishly left in the yard) and pre-order your copy today so you can see what I look like on a book cover!

Tiny and awesome, is my guess.

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A Pause for Somber Contemplation

The Weeding Season has begun. Heavily laden carts make their way back into the Technical Services area, bearing their cargo of condemned books.

It's like harvest season for us back here, if you assume that what's harvested is "lots of work." Which is ever the case.

For the removal from the shelf is only the first step in this hallowed process. Now the titles must be removed from the catalog, and from our WorldCat holdings, and only then can the books finally be laid to rest in the recycling bins and go on to that sweet afterlife of whatever happens to recycled paper.

It really makes you think. About how long it's been since our collection was weeded, and therefore how very many books are no longer needed.

Also about the opposite of data entry, which I suppose would be data removal.

These things shall cease to exist for us. Nevermore darken my OPAC search results, outdated oral surgery textbook!

We put books into the catalog. We take them out of the catalog. We see them when they are shiny and brand new, with all their pages clean and their binding sound, and we see them when they are feeble, frail, and barely held together with disintegrating tape.

We are both midwife and undertaker to the books.

That's why Tech Services is awesome.

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What Book Goes There?

Hey, you should check out s.e. smith's first entry in a project to read and write about books that have frequently been the subject of challenges: The Year of Challenged Books.

The first post is on 1984. I should probably read that again. It's been a while, and I wasn't really paying attention to the artistic details and so forth. I didn't read it for a class or anything, so there was no formal discussion.

I was homeschooled, so the closest we had to book challenges was when my mom thought we didn't need to be reading Anaïs Nin's erotica quite yet and caused a couple of books to disappear. This is not so much a challenge, as that 'parental discretion' we're constantly hearing is such a good thing.

She was too late, anyway. We'd already thoroughly discussed the weird and juicy bits. By which I mean, pretty much all the bits.

Thanks anyway, mom. It was a nice thought, to try to keep me from being warped for life.

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Keeping Up

Someone I know was working hard (and successfully) over the holiday break to finish reading 50 books for the year.

Fifty seems like a good, round number, doesn't it? Inspired to look back, I find that I myself read 53 books in 2010, or just barely more than one per week. I must give credit to goodreads for encouraging me to keep track of them all, since otherwise I would certainly have no idea of the number.

I must also give credit to a kindly co-worker, who frequently lends me books to read (especially YA fiction), and, of course, to the South End branch of the Boston Public Library, where I checked out many of the others.

It's been a group effort. Hooray for all of us!

I also watched I don't know how many movies (at least one a week) and TV shows (ditto), read probably 25 or so issues of various magazines, played four video games, and read many thousands of blog posts (to hazard a guess based on my subscribed feeds and a tentative average for number of times each posts weekly, maybe 25,000?). Also there were the online news stories, the daily free paper on the train, and the backs of some cereal boxes.

I'm trying to consume my fair share of media here.

Although I do notice I'm not keeping up with podcasts. I just haven't gotten into them, despite regularly intending to.

My consumption of web video, while not non-existent, is also rather puny. Usually I just can't be bothered to wait 10 seconds for a clip to load.

I demand that my media be instantly available!--or I'm off to grab a book.

My attention span is a harsh environment.


Edited 1/1/11 to add that Jessamyn at librarian.net has a much more detailed list of books read last year, including such interesting information as the percentage of books by male/female authors, the percentage of fiction/non-fiction, and the percentage she liked/disliked/was ambivalent about.

Now that's informative!

Inspired once again, I went back to count my own books, and find that I read almost equally male and female authors (25 and 28 titles, respectively), and slightly more fiction than non-fiction (31 and 22, respectively).

In case anyone wants to plot this on a nice four-way table, of the 22 non-fiction titles, 14 were by women and 8 by men, while of the 31 fiction titles, 14 were by women and 17 by men. Given this distribution, I can only conclude that I prefer to have facts presented to me by female writers, and to enjoy tall tales by male writers.

I mean, I have to conclude something, right?

Another year's worth of data may shed new light on this question.

I did not feel up to quantifying the degree to which I liked or did not like each of these books (there are so many levels of enthusiasm to consider!), so I'm leaving that number out.
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A Terrifying Vision of Things to Come

I was at the movies the other night, reading a regular old paper book, and the person sitting next to me asked "Have you considered a reader?"

He said this in the tone one might use to inquire "are you aware there's a treatment for that troublesome condition you have?"

Say, if I'd been wearing obvious wrist braces, and someone asked "have you considered carpal tunnel surgery?"

It's come to this already, has it?

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Guilt. Guilt!

I share the sad and slightly guilty feelings of many about the disappearance of small bookstores driven out of business by chains and online sales. I mean, it's really too bad, isn't it?

But, as Aunt B describes in this post, in the old days when all we had was small bookstores, a lot of people had no access to bookstores at all. How can you really lament the fact that people living far away from bustling downtowns with thriving and well-stocked bookstores can now go online and order whatever they want?

And yet, how can you not lament the loss of those character-filled independent shops with book loving owners who talk to about the various titles and know their stock backwards and forwards?

If only everyone had access to said shops...but they don't. Of course, that doesn't let me off the hook. Living in a metropolitan area with plenty of access to independent bookstores, I should still feel guilty about buying from Amazon.

I love these lines, which pretty much sum it up: "It’s sad that Davis-Kidd is closing. But the reason why is a pretty spectacular life improvement for a lot of people."

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Meanwhile, In Other Nifty Challenges--

Here's an interesting project by s.e. smith at This Ain't Livin': The Year of Challenged Books.

The author notes,

I’m not going to limit myself to only reading challenged books, but I am going to try to read at least one challenged book every month, preferably a book I have not read before, and write about it.

...

As part of each writeup, I’ll also do some research into the challenges filed and talk about the controversial material in each book.

It sounds promising, and I'm eager to see what insights result.

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Exciting Weekend Plans

Here's what's been on my to-do list:

Read Let the Right One In
Play some Bioshock
Watch some Doctor Who
Drink some wine

Things are proceeding very nicely according to plan so far.

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Reach a Little

One must acknowledge Banned Books Week (even if a little late), and I found this inspirational post on RH Reality Check noting that with book bannings "It's (Almost) Always About Sex."

Obviously it's not entirely always about sex (remember Huckleberry Finn), but there's no denying that seems to be the issue in a large percentage of cases.

This inspires me to want to come up with a new reason to get challenged. I want to write a book for children or young adults that will feature shockingly casual drug use, socially threatening witchcraft and extensive, detailed advice on effective ways to challenge authority and commit various types of white collar crime, and see if I can get challenged on those grounds.

Because honestly, sex panic? So overdone.

It's like zombies. A classic, sure, but there's got to be something more interesting to worry about. Maybe my challenged children's book will be about killer robots.

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Wild Books

I'm following Aunt B's book-publishing saga at Tiny Cat Pants. She's working on publicity for a book of ghost stories she's self-publishing, and says,

This is where things really differ between a self-published book and a “real” book. If I had a publisher, I think my media list would easily be 100 places that should at least get a press release. As it is, I have about 20. Folks are very clear that they don’t want to see self-published books.

Which is fine. I just wonder how long they can continue to do so.

This is an interesting question for people into future-of-the-book musings. Can media that addresses books refuse to address self-published books forever? See this article for more.

Ooh, what about self-published e-books?

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Protect the Books

All librarians have surely heard of the school that banned a dictionary for containing inappropriate words.

talulahmankiller at Life Under a Rock has also heard of this, and offers an interesting perspective. As she says, "I could rant and rail about how ridiculous this is, but really–we all know how ridiculous this is."

This is pretty much why I haven't said anything. (That, and being too desperately busy with other hugely important things like eating, reading other peoples' blog posts, playing Dragon Age, etc.)

Anyway, that's not the interesting perspective--what I like is that she takes the opportunity to imagine how it happened that it occurred to someone to ban the dictionary, and concludes that some child probably pointed out to a grown-up that they'd found a 'naughty' definition, thus spoiling things for all the other children who might have enjoyed reading it.

Someone told!

There follows an entertaining tale of the author's own childhood experience with telling on a book.

I don't have any similar incident in my history, so this inspired me to reflect on how else it might have happened, which could be that some kids were talking in hushed excitement about the naughty words, and a grown-up overheard. That's what happened when I was a kid.

The naughty books we'd so enjoyed reading, puzzling over, and discussing mysteriously disappeared once my mother realized we'd been reading them.

The lesson: make sure you're not being overheard by the grown-ups before you start talking about that finer points of that weird thing those people were doing in that story.

Or by the other kids who'll tattle on you, of course. Trust no one!

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Stuff to Read

If you have any time to read, I've been meaning to check out this list of Free Ebooks and Where to Find Them from the blog Paper Not Included.

I haven't gotten around to it, you know, since I haven't even been keeping up with the print reading on my book plate (ha!), but I've meant to.

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