Posts in the topic "Reading"
NYT returns to SF/F
Posted 04 Sep 10
It’s been a few years since the New York Times Book Review tried a regular science fiction review column. Dave Itzkoff’s tenure was notable for the criticism directed at his column from the SF/F community. Whether or not you agree with the sort of vitriolic assessments Itzkoff attracted, it was striking how few of his columns actually reviewed, you know, new science fiction novels.
But that’s in the past. Sam Tanenhaus has apparently signed up Jeff VanderMeer for another go, and his first column — called “Science Fiction Chronicle” — appears this week.
Five books reviewed, from Ian McDonald’s latest to a French author I’ve never heard of (Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud) to a visual compilation of mid-century space-tech advertising (ANOTHER SCIENCE FICTION). I’m impressed: a wide range, and all interesting.
Furthermore, VanderMeer is an accomplished author in his own right, someone whose qualifications and energy cannot be doubted.
High hopes! And credit where it’s due to the NYT, which has struggled with genre fiction for a long time. Now if only they’ll open a column devoted to romance titles – which, after all, are the single largest segment of books published in the United States …
This post indexed as: Reading, Writing
How to Raise Tom Sawyer
Posted 12 Feb 10
I happen to be reading The American Frugal Housewife this week (I found it at the library, but a Project Gutenberg version, nicely formatted, is here). First published in 1833, the handbook was popular throughout the nineteenth century. Not just a window into how people lived 150 years ago, it also has advice that anyone might find useful today.
Not the recipes, I’m sorry to say; most begin with some variant of “Boil three hours.” Nor the medical recommendations (though I do like this one: “the constant use of beer is a preservative against fevers”).
But Mrs. Child does have relevant advice for modern society in one area: parenting.
In this country, we are apt to let children romp away their existence, till they get to be thirteen or fourteen. This is not well. It is not well for the purses and patience of parents; and it has a still worse effect on the morals and habits of the children. Begin early is the great maxim for everything in education. A child of six years old can be made useful; and should be taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not been done to assist others.
Children can very early be taught to take all the care of their own clothes.
They can knit garters, suspenders, and stockings; they can make patchwork and braid straw; they can make mats for the table, and mats for the floor; they can weed the garden, and pick cranberries from the meadow, to be carried to market.
Provided brothers and sisters go together, and are not allowed to go with bad children, it is a great deal better for the boys and girls on a farm to be picking blackberries at six cents a quart, than to be wearing out their clothes in useless play. They enjoy themselves just as well; and they are earning something to buy clothes, at the same time they are tearing them.
As I announced at breakfast this morning, things are going to change in this household!
This post indexed as: Personal, Reading
Learning to Walk and Shoot Guns at the Same Time
Posted 11 Feb 10
Good policing relies on training, which depends in turn on institutional experience and wisdom – just like good lawbreaking.
I’ve been reading Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies, a thoroughly researched account of the great gangsters of the 30′s: Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, etc. (It was the basis for last year’s movie of the same name.) What’s most striking is just how incompetent everyone was: cops, the FBI, the criminals themselves.
Bank robberies go awry because no one bothered to case the bank beforehand. Getaways nearly fail when cars run out of gas, or get stuck in the mud. Innocents are gunned down by panicky, tommy-gun wielding amateurs.
But law enforcement comes off even worse. Obvious leads — fingerprints, phone records, eyewitness accounts — are ignored, while enormous effort is expended on worthless rabbit trails (finding the house were kidnapping victim Bremer was kept, for example). Over and over gangsters are caught, only to shoot their way free because the G-men left their cars a mile away, or failed to cover the back door, or simply failed to recognize who they had cornered. Dillinger’s escape from jail, using nothing but hutzpah and a carved wooden gun, is classic.
This isn’t to poke fun at Hoover’s incompetent agents, however (even if Melvin Purvis was truly and remarkably unfit for the task given him). The problem was that no one had any experience conducting complicated, wide-scale, geographically broad investigations. Even something simple, like firearms training, was ad hoc and uncertain — an agent might be taken out to plink at cans in an empty field for an hour, then sent into action.
Good guys, bad guys: they were all just making it up as they went along.
Police culture is certainly open to criticism (DWB, the blue wall, defiance of rules, and so on). But sometimes it’s easy to forget that over the decades law enforcement has gotten better at its job — and just like any process, much of that is learning from past mistakes, then institutionalizing the lessons.
Whatever happened to tommy guns, anyway?
This post indexed as: Crime, Reading
You can’t crowd-source cultural criticism
Posted 25 Jan 10
Everyone knows that online reviews — of anything — suffer from grade inflation. Just like Ive League undergrads, everyone is (far) above average.
Which makes me wonder, again, why anyone thinks something like Amazon reviews can replace print-venue literary criticism. If you want a reasonable plot summary, sure. If you’re interested in the opinions of political trolls on books deemed controversial, yup, got that. If you’d like a long list of complaints from everyone whose order was late or screwed up somehow, look no further.
But thoughtful commentary, setting a work in wider context, that’s well-written to boot? All too rare.
A viable, internet-based model may emerge. But so far, the loss of print literary culture is just that — a loss, with no replacement yet.
This post indexed as: Reading, Writing
Naked Truth
Posted 12 Jan 10
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal featured, on the front page, a photograph of a young woman in her underwear. The online link is here, but the picture they include shows the entire group of protesters, of which only one is semi-clad and female; for the front page, the Journal’s editors cropped it down to highlight her.
No one really expected better from Murdoch, did they? So okay. (Anyway, there are far more substantive complaints one could make, like how utterly, conventionally wire-service-like the WSJ’s international reporting has become. For example, despite a couple of good-length articles about the recent resignation of Japan’s finance minister, you’d have to read The Economist to discover the real reasons for his departure.)
Furthermore, Murdoch is, of course, only giving his readers what they seem to want. A friend of mine manages much of the online presence of a trade magazine well-known in its professional niche. He says that far and away their most popular articles are those featuring underdressed women (a topic only distantly related to the profession in question). Or celebrities. Or best of all, underdressed celebrities.
Again, that’s no surprise. The tracking tools available even to casual bloggers are remarkably powerful. Suppose you pay close attention to what draws your readers, and adapt your offerings accordingly. Pretty soon, natural evolution will lead to … well, you can imagine.
This blog will try to resist the temptation. However, I must note that when I tweeted about the underwear-protestor yesterday, the bit.ly link received more click-throughs than any other so far (in my admittedly rather brief Twitter history). What to do, what to do …
This post indexed as: Reading, Writing
Fear the vook?
Posted 19 Nov 09
Coming to this a little late, I know. A vook is text plus video, merged into an iPhone app — the latest incarnation of our long-promised “multimedia book.”
So, the death of literacy? (Again?) Actually, I can’t get too worked up, this time. A ‘vook’ is just a hyped-up comic book, really, and even graphic novels never managed to kill the real kind.
To me the larger problem is that words-on-paper is, in itself, perfected. The reading experience is never going to be better than that, because it can’t be. So any bells and whistles added on only degrade the experience, however slightly. And that, in the end, pushes people AWAY from books, it doesn’t draw them in.
Or rather, more hopefully, it pushes people away from vooks, and back to real reading.
This post indexed as: Reading, Technology