The Canoncial U.S. History List

David Sehat comes up with his list of 100 canonical U.S. history texts covering the period of about 1815 to the present. It's an interesting list. Hard to disagree with too many of the choices--Novick's That Noble Dream is a book I've always thought was popular because historians like to think of themselves as important. It's important for graduate students to have a sense of their profession's changes, but its value seems more or less limited to that. I'm not sure Herring's America's Longest War is really canonically important anymore, but maybe some will disagree. One might think we need more than 1 book on World War II, though Dower's War Without Mercy is certainly worthy. It's also really heavy on the antebellum period (20 books or so), which while covering slavery and a lot of other important issues, seems a bit too weighty.

I'd also like to see more than one book from my own field of environmental history, Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, but I'm really not sure what that book would be.

Anyway, it's a great reading list at the very least. I'd recommend most of the books on there that I've read

Lyrad's 15 Books in 15

Wow, am I actually blogging again? Ridiculous is the only thing to call my lack of attention to the blog, but I have a hard time concentrating on more than one thing at a time. We'll see if my concentration lapses now or not, but my big project is through (see below) and what better way to get restarted than a quality book meme. Having gone to Old White Male Writer College (St. Johns, that is), my list is unfortunately skewed by such, but this is something I'm trying to rectify, for as much fiction as I find time to read anymore. In any event...

1. Ulysses--James Joyce: Numbers one and two on my list are really 1 and 1a; I'll never choose one over the other. Ulysses is absolutely both the most difficult and the finest piece of work I've ever read. In college, during our third and fourth years, we actually had an elective, called our Preceptorials. Senior year, I spent eight weeks studying this damned book with sixteen others, while we came away with a ton of confusion, never were two months in study better spent. As obnoxious as it can be sometimes, the book is hilarious and the final chapter, those two sentences, punctuated brilliantly by "yes", are the most invigorating I've ever read.

2. In Search of Lost Time--Marcel Proust: It's hard for me not to call this the best I've read, and it's truly a tie. It was the first major work I read out of school and, compared to Joyce's obtuse difficulty, I found Proust downright breezy. I first fell in love by translating sections of Swan's Way in school and finally read the whole thing after I was out. The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain are my favorites of the seven books, but that probably has as much to do with when I read them as anything. It took me two years to finish the set and, no matter how rewarding it was, it convinced me that life is too short to spend such time on a single work. I haven't read anything of its breadth since and I doubt I will again. There are simply too many things to read, but I wouldn't give up my experience with it for the world.

3. The Defense--Vladimir Nabokov: Sure, there are plenty of more ambitious works in Nabakov's catalog, but this one always stood out to me as one of his best pure stories. It doesn't carry the same kind of literary weight as Pale Fire or Lolita, but his ability to turn the plot of a novel into a kind of chess match, along with his sporting descriptions of chess, make The Defense my favorite of his work. Honestly, the next four on this list could be Nabokov books, but I didn't want to double up authors.

4. Outer Dark--Cormac McCarthy: Again, not the popular choice amongst McCarthy fans and, again, maybe not his most spectacular work, but this one influences my work more than any other and is sheer existential brutality. His Appalachian setting is as claustrophobic as anything I've read and it's the only book of his that I can think of with a female protagonist...big stuff from McCarthy. Anyway, the big scene where Rinthy finds her child is one that makes my stomach turn to this day, and it's been years.

5. Story of the Eye--George Bataille: Bataille was a freak and I love him. His considerable body of philosophy doesn't really prepare one for his literature and poetry. Story of the Eye is, simply put, the best work of literate pornography ever written. Nothing tops it; nothing ever will. It smashes taboos with glee and revels in its filth with a beautiful literary flair. A film was actually made of the book, which I have yet to find, but making it took some balls.

6. Jurgen--James Branch Cabell: I'll never get away from obscenities, but Jurgen is a whole different animal. A near perfect farce and an innovator of the fantasy genre, Cabell is a near unknown outside of this work and, while it's all I've read of his, this is a hilarious, intelligent, and dirty book that will never leave my mind.

7. The Trial--Franz Kafka: Fifteen years have passes since I picked up Kafka, and his influence is still great in my life. Before Kafka, I hadn't ever really considered allegory, and his work has taught me a lot in that area and many others. His short stories are really what get me but, for the purposes of a full book, The Trial will certainly suffice.

8. Kiss of the Spider Woman--Manuel Puig: I can say that Proust was the last really difficult book I got into, but it's not really true. I fell in love with the film by Hector Babenco (director of the superior Pixote) long before I read the book, and was blown away by the way Puig layers fantasy upon reality. I liken this to my experience with Nabokov's Pale Fire (good thing I worked another one in), though I found Puig's work much more relevant.

9. In Our Time--Ernest Hemingway: There's been some complaining about Hemingway recently, and Sator Arepo commented correctly when he said that the guy's better in small doses. Look, don't read Hemingway's novels...they're garbage. He betrays himself with his extended language in his long works, but he is a master of the four word sentence. Hemingway taught me to write; taught me to consider how to cut my verbage down. He's the antithesis of the irritating David Foster Wallace-s of the world and intelligent modern writers could learn a lesson from Hemingway's terse language.

10. Paradise Lost--John Milton: Not only are we old and white, but we're Christian, too. Ordinarly, a piece like this would be anathema to me, but the beauty of the language is astounding and the questions he poses confound the most ardent of his fellow believers. I was exposed to this book originally in high school, for what reason I can't say, by Janice Stark, one of two good teachers at that prison. I don't know if she's still alive but, in exposing this book to me, she finally wrested me of my last Christian ties, and I couldn't be more thankful for such a gift.

11. Faust--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: No matter how hard I try, there is no way I'll ever be able to get past Faustian themes. Every story I write has them and I look for them in everything I read. Between science, poetry, literature, and philosophy, Goethe may be the best writer of the last three centuries, and the depth of Faust has proven near limitless for me.

12. Hard Times--Charles Dickens: I probably have some eyes rolling at this one, but I've always loved Dickens. I know that a lot of his verbage was based on his pay scale, but this is hardly his fault; I'd do the same thing. For whatever reason, however, Hard Times is a short, consise work that represents the best Dickens had to offer. In part a screed against the effects of the Poor Act of 1834, this is his most socially conscious work and, by far, his most readable.

13. Lone Wolf and Cub--Kazuo Koike (writer) and Goseki Kojima (artist): Now, like Sarah, it's comics time. I see this epic piece, some 2500 pages in its American release, as the War and Peace of graphic storytelling, intricate and nuanced in its storytelling but emotional in its characters. On top of it, the last few hundred pages, as an American reader, are near unfathomable to me in the way that enemies come together for a greater good. The Western esthetic has a hard time with such compromises but, ultimately, this is one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.

14. Stray Bullets--David Lapham: This is, by far, the newest entry on the list, and my final honest one, as well. It hasn't been long since I finished what exists of Stray Bullets, but few works have spoken to me as truly as this. He hits the lurid aspects that have always driven me to silent film and the novels of Hammett and Chandler, but the story of Virginia Applejack carries an emotional weight for me that few pieces ever had. Watching her watch her father die of cancer is not the stuff of your average comic. While unfinished (get with it, Lapham; to hell with Young Liars), Stray Bullets has everything I could ever want in a story.

15. Jewel of the Dragon Queen--Daryl Loomis: Sure, it's arrogant to place myself on a list with those above. Don't get me wrong, though, I don't actually equate myself with them on any level. At the same time, as the longest piece I've ever finished and the first I've written with a specific eye toward publication, this will stick with me for a long, long time. It will be a ten issue comic that is currently in storyboarding by the artist, whose skills I have the utmost faith in, and we'll just have to see. Worse comes to worst, it's a self-publishing deal, but plenty of good work gets published this way. All I can say is that I've never worked so hard on something in my life. Killing these characters after the two years I lived with them was one of the hardest, most guilt-ridden things I've ever had to do and is a big reason why I've had such a hard time focusing on the blog, my reviews, or anything else. It's done though, and the ball's in the artists court, so there's only hope ahead. Anyway, sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but the other books are good and, if you haven't read some of them, I certainly recommend them all.

10 Lauded Works/Authors I Hope to Read One Day

To bring the "book-posts" to a nice, neat trilogy, I thought it would be fun (and kill time at work) to also list some of the "great works" that I've never read, but would really, really like to get around to at some point. No doubt I'm forgetting some, and there are some serious gaps (no women authors?), so I'm open to suggestions from others as well. But here, in no particular order, are 10 "classics" I'm really eager to read (but will probably not get around to anytime soon).

1.) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time - This probably seems like the most pretentious possible pick, but really it's sheer curiosity - for all of the references and praise this work gets (including occasional hilarious pop-culture mentions), I've never met anybody who's actually read it and who can opine on it, and I'm really curious what the fuss is about. So hopefully, sometime in my life (probably post-retirement), I will be able to at least sit down and start Proust.

2.) Anything by Cormac McCarthy - I've heard so much great stuff about him, yet have never read anything; indeed, my only "McCarthy" contact is the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, and the consensus seems to be that's McCarthy's worst book. I'd probably start with Blood Meridian, but the whole border trilogy and the Road all seem equally fascinating.

3.) Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow - Because Pynchon's work seems like it might be something I really enjoy, and I feel like if I'm going to read him, I might as well start with what appears to be his most challenging work.

4.) David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest - Long before his suicide, this book intrigued me simply for its title and its girth everytime I handled it working at a bookstore. The praise heaped upon his writing-style (fiction and non-fiction) has only heightened my curiosity.

5.) Par Lagerkvist, Barabbas - A probing take on religion and the story of Jesus, narrated by a less-than-noble man who was present, written by a Swede? How could this not sound interesting?

6.) William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying - Because I somehow have avoided ever having to read Faulkner in my life, and this one sounds as interesting as any of his works does to me.

7.) William Styron, A Tidewater Morning - The themes, while far from unusual, can still be compelling, and, in an extremely random justification, my family used to vacation in that area every summer, so I'd like to see a literary treatment of the tidewater region of VA/NC.

8.) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain - Because I'm a dork, and a 700-page novel using a tuberculosis sanatorium as an allegory for early-20th century Europe really seems fascinating to me.

9.) Knut Hamsun, Hunger - Somebody once described Hamsun's work to me as "the literary equivalent of a Munch painting." While I'm not necessarily the biggest fan (or opponent) of German expressionism, the description alone has kept my interest piqued for years.

10.) Jorge Luis Borges, any collection of short stories - I openly admit that my familiarity with (non-Brazilian) Latin American literature is woefully inadequate - I've never read anything other than a few short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example. And while I know relatively little about the famous authors of South America, Borges's writings seem like as good a place as any to begin.

10 Lauded Books I Hate

To do the reverse of the lists below, I thought I'd put out 10 books that are generally highly lauded or canonical that I pure straight hated. Literary tastes are of course subjective, and I openly admit that I prefer 20th century literature over any other time period in general, so this list is appropriately skewed in that direction (though the 20th century isn't off the hook). So my 10 most overrated literary works, in rough order:

1) Pride and Prejudice - Words do not describe the contempt I have for this book. There are many movies you watch where you think, "I want those two hours of my life back." This is the only book I feel that way about.

2) The Bluest Eye - Some day, I will read something else by Toni Morrison, simply because I still can't believe my reaction against this book was so violent, and that there must have been something going on in my life at that time that made me hate it so much. But I'm not reading this one again.

3) Wieland: Or, the Transformation - Charles Brockden Brown is considered by many to be the first American novelist. You can make a strong case; what is not up for debate is how horrible the first American novels were.

4) Madame Bovary - She could not have died fast enough. Like Anna Karenina, only without any of the good parts, and an even more ridiculous dramatization of the worst parts. Oh, and spoiler alert - she dies. But not fast enough.

5) The Scarlet Letter - By now, it's probably becoming pretty clear that I'm just not that big a fan of pre-20th century literature. Still, I think this may be one of the most overrated books in all of American literature; useful for letting us get insight into a particular literary style, but god, it's an awful, boring literary style.

6) For Whom the Bell Tolls - The lesson I learned from this book? Hemingway's method and subject-matter is much more effective in short story form than in 400 page novels.

7) The Fountainhead - Only as I grew older did I realize just how horrible the "philosophy" behind Ayn Rand's "books" was. Fortunately, even as a teenager, I could recognize the stupid "plot," ridiculous preaching, stilted writing, and just general awfulness of this book, thus sparing me from also trying to plow through Atlas Shrugs (or anything else by her).

8) Romeo and Juliet - No doubt, this is because of the over-hype this play and story have gotten over the last 400 years. Still, over-exposure makes me hate it even more than Shakespeare's worst plays - at least their novelty makes them interesting.

9) The Good Earth - I may read it again someday, because I suspect it may not be as bad as I felt it was when I read it. Still, few books have left me caring so little about what happens to the protagonists, and unimpressed by either the story or the style. It's not much different from Nectar in a Sieve, but I thought the latter was way more successful at what it did than Buck's work.

10) Lust - OK, so Elfreide Jelinek isn't exactly "lauded," but she did win the Nobel Prize in literature a few years ago. No question, her wordplay is top-notch. Unfortunately, the meme of "sex is a horrible repressive system that denies women any agency, and death is the only escape" simply is not worth being repeated over 250 pages (not to mention that I just don't buy it - but hey, I'm a man, so I guess Jelinek would expect that response from me as another example of my male authoritarianism.).

Trend's 15 Books in 15 Minutes

Liking Sarah's post on books below, I figured I'd go ahead and do mine, too. Having basically spent 4 years of my life during grad school reading no fiction, it's really sort of "things I read in high school/undergrad," and "things I've gotten into recently." Here they are, in no particular order.

1.) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - one of the few pieces of fiction I've actually read more than once. I think a lot of the "counter-culture" stuff is horribly overrated and dated, and I realize a lot of people could level the same charges to this book, but it's still one of my favorites ever. Mercifully, I read the book before the movie, so that I have my own version of McMurphy in my head, rather than Jack Nicholson.

2.) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - another of the rare "worth reading more than once" books for me. Carson McCullers is one of the most underrated American authors, and should be included in any discussion of "greatest Southern writers."

3.) Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - I love a lot of Philip Dick's work, but this may be his best to me.

4.) Heart of Darkness - It's probably cliche, but what Joseph Conrad did with English while not being a native-born English speaker is still mind-blowing.

5.) Catch-22 - had I read this before and not after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I would probably feel about it the way I do about Kesey's work. Still, it's one of the 15 best things I ever read, and definitely contributed greatly to my sense of humor.

6.) Her Smoke Rose Up Forever - fortunately, James Tiptree's (Alice Sheldon) work has recently been re-published in an anthology, and it's some of the most powerful science fiction of the twentieth century, with an added bonus of bringing in gender in ways that few sci-fi authors really do.

7.) Native Son - This was one of those books in high school that everybody but me absolutely hated.

8.) The Ghost Writer - while I like all of Philip Roth's Zuckerman books, this is probably my favorite of the Roth books I've read thus far (though I haven't read a lot of his "great" works, specifically American Pastoral).

9.) East of Eden - Grapes of Wrath is a better social work, but I just love the biblical grandeur combined w/verbal simplicity of East of Eden.

10.) God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - I went through nearly all of Vonnegut's works as a teenager (which seems like a very teenager-thing to do in retrospect), and while I may have liked a few others more at the time (Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle), for whatever reason, this is the one that really stuck with me.

11.) The USA Trilogy - literary and narrative experimentation can fall flat, or can be outstanding; Dos Passos' trilogy is probably one of the best of examples of experimentation and innovation at its finest.

12.) Grande Sertao: Veredas - the greatest piece of literature in Portuguese, ever (including Saramango). Unfortunately, Guimaraes Rosa's innovation and playing with language and narration (600 pages, no chapters, no breaks) also makes it damn-near untranslatable.

13.) The Big Sleep - Chandler has better works, perhaps (Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbye), but this was the first I read, and the first that got me into good noir fiction from the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

14.) Vidas Secas - Another great Brazilian work about a poor family in the dry backlands of Brazil - just a great, simple, beautiful, and heart-breaking story.

15.) The Tin Drum - To this day, I have no clue what at least half of that book was about. But damn if I didn't love it from start to finish. I may even go back some day and give it another go, just to see if I can make more sense of it than I did when I was 16.

15 books in 15 minutes

In keeping with the literary theme of my last post, I'm stealing this meme from Natalia because I love her. And because I love you, and we have good discussions about books on this here blog. So!

Instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you — the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you. (In the interest of staying true to the exercise, I listed the books first and then went back and wrote descriptions)

1. Les Miserables. This book more than any other has been a huge part of me. I was a kid when my parents went to see the musical and brought home the soundtrack, and I became obsessed. My grandmother, the one who always wanted me to put down the books that I read obsessively at meals and in bed, bet me that I couldn't read the book. I was 9. She brought me a huge hardcover unabridged copy--I'm not quite sure where that copy is now--and I read it in 3 days, at meals, in bed, in every spare second. Of course at age 9, 90% of it went over my head, but I go back to it over and over. I tattooed a quote from it on my back. I find something new and beautiful every time I read it. One day I'll learn French and read it in French. I swear.

2. Ulysses. I guess I already blogged about it once, so I don't know if I have to say much more than it pushed the boundaries of what fiction and language could do in my mind. That said, I too have not read Finnegans Wake.

3. The Thief's Journal I came to Jean Genet because of a silly goth magazine's photo spread with quotes from Funeral Rites. Funeral Rites is a seriously fucked-up book, and an amazingly beautiful one, but The Thief's Journal has stuck with me longer. Genet makes the hideous and abject beautiful, and makes the beautiful abject. More people probably know his plays, but I love his fiction. Another reason I need to learn French.

4. The Savage Detectives. I read this last summer after hearing an NPR segment on Roberto Bolano. I came away from the book staggered, like I hadn't been by an author in years. His fierce devotion to his artistic and political ideals reminded me that art is as revolutionary as politics, and writing fiction is a worthwhile occupation.

5. Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Hunter S. Thompson is like Jesus, in that the man is pretty awesome, but I can't stand most of his followers. No, seriously, I hate people who start immediately talking about the drug references in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, because they miss out on the real reason Thompson was so fucking great: the man could WRITE, and he could see through hypocrisy no matter how out of his mind he was on whatever substances he could smoke, drink, or snort. The best political journalist America's ever seen?

6. Lolita. Is also a cliche, but I don't care. No one should've ever tried to make a movie out of it: Lolita is the consummate novel, from a man who spent plenty of time messing around with the idea of a novel, stretching it to its limits and beyond (Pale Fire). The story in Lolita can't be told properly in any other medium but the written word.

7. The Sound of Waves. I also came to Mishima from that same silly goth magazine--so my goth years were good for something. The first book of his I read was Forbidden Colors, probably his best book, but the one that hits me like a ton of bricks is this one, a deceptively simple first-love story.

8. Written on the Body. Jeannette Winterson is a whole lot of awesome as far as I'm concerned, but Written on the Body is a standout for many reasons, chief among them that it's a love story in which you never know the gender of the main character. You know that the lover is a woman, but the "I" who speaks is so perfectly concealed that it becomes a game within the book, trying to find a clue. And yet it doesn't compromise the story a bit.

9. Namedropper. Emma Forrest's first novel, written when she was maybe 19; I read it when I was in college and it was the first time that I really saw myself in a character. Normally, I read books to get out of my own life, but this one was so much like me.

10. The Sound and the Fury. So Faulkner might be another cliche. So what? I still love him, and always will. I love the way this whole book revolves around Caddy and yet she is only a ghost; that everyone thinks they know her and yet it's so immediately clear that no one does.

11. Shanghai Baby. Wei Hui's first novel, I think, I bought because it was "banned in China." It's not very shocking at all, but it was the first book that I read where I thought, "I could do this."

12. Jazz. I did not properly appreciate Toni Morrison in school, despite going through several of her books, a few of them repeatedly. It wasn't until I took an audiobook of Jazz from my local (tiny) library for a road trip that I realized why people love her. What most of my favorite books have in common is a love for and experiment with language, and this one is no exception. It reads like music.

13. Blonde. Joyce Carol Oates does Marilyn Monroe, and I melt and want to cry just thinking about how heartwrenching this book is. Another one that someone unfortunately tried to adapt to the screen, and another one that should only be read.

14. The Sandman. Because I am me, I have comics on this list. I only have comics that were written by one person for their span, and the Sandman counts. I cannot make a list of books I love without including Neil Gaiman, and I cannot be honest and say that I like any of his prose novels more than Sandman. The Sandman comics are about stories and storytelling, about the nature of fiction and characters and myths and of course dreams, and they will change your life.

15. Local. Another comic, and my favorite since Sandman, I think. It's a collection of short stories about one girl, and when put together (in a gorgeous hardcover that I still don't have) it's a story of a life told in the moments that define it. It is also the perfect comic for people who don't read comics. Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly are wonderful.

(OK, it took me a lot more than 15 minutes to write blurbs about all of these, but I did come up with the list in less than 15. Your turn, now...)

Joyce

Call me a philistine, but Sarah's post on Joyce reminded me that I've read very little of him. I just don't have the patience or tenacity to work as hard as I would need to in order to get through Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake.

It does remind me though of an argument I used to have with people. If it took one a whole year to get through Joyce and understand it, would it be worth it? Is it worth a year of someone's life to understand any book at all? I generally say no, though I suppose for all the religious, social, and cultural references, the Bible might be an exception. Anything else, I don't know.

And again, feel free to call me a philistine.

Bloomsday!

In the midst of lots of other important news, why am I taking time out to celebrate James Joyce?

Well, aside from the fact that I just like to point out that I'm a member of the august group of people who've not only read Ulysses, but read it more than once and ENJOYED IT. Loved it, really. I love Joyce's willingness to play with language, to toy with its history and its future and the way it can be changed and manipulated and made to say several things at once.

There's a dissertation in me somewhere on Joyce and Yeats and the feminization of the Irish people by their colonizers and how it impacted their writing, referencing all sorts of theorists on colonialism and feminist theorists who talked about writing. Maybe if I don't get a job I'll go get an MA and then a PhD in literature just to be a nerd.

But even if I never get the degree, I'll keep writing about that last chapter in Ulysses for a long time, because among many, many other things it's a lush celebration of female desire.

why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

Molly Bloom is just a figure in the background for most of the novel, but here we dive straight into her mind and her thoughts, of course, are of sex. The building, heightening repetition of the word "Yes" is dirtier, hotter than any of the more lurid descriptions in the chapter, and I wonder if those who would have banned Ulysses were more put off by Joyce's pleasure in prurient description or in the triumphant declaration of Molly Bloom at the end?

I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

And so today, June 16, is the day that Leopold Bloom took his famous walk around Dublin, and book nerds the world over celebrate. I certainly don't have a Bloomsday party to go to, but I'm blogging it, in the midst of revolt in Iran and war supplementals here, because books have power. If they didn't, no one would try to ban them.

Legitimate Technological Concerns

I think Josh Marshall is right on about some of the problems with embracing new media technologies. In particular, he expresses his concerns about electronic books:

The common book requires a threshold level of eyesight and literacy in the given language. Given those two abilities in the owner, once a book comes off the publisher's press, it takes on a life of its own. And as long as it's kept on a shelf, relatively free of moisture and out of reach of small children, even a cheap pulp book can easily last a hundred years. Quality bound books, meanwhile, can last many centuries. Today, though, I can't easily access even papers I wrote in college, which is a touch less than twenty years ago, because they're on floppy disks that few computers can any longer read and written on programs (remember Word Perfect?) accessible only through imperfect conversion utilities. If big swathes of book publishing go the electronic route, how many 'books' will have only a short window of existence before they get marooned in derelict and outmoded technology? Tomorrow's equivalent of Betamax, 8 Track and and now videotapes. Physical books, for all their other shortcomings, can still be read today and tomorrow regardless of technology progress or, as the case may be, regress.

I really agree with this. Now, I'm far from the most technologically adept person writing at this site, and I'll be curious for Sarah and Karthika's opinions on this. But the lack of a universal technology and that new incarnations of particularly technologies have made older versions not only outdated but unusable worries me greatly. I'll be sticking to my real books, tree killing or not, pretty much forever. Maybe that makes me old and out of touch. But I know that I can go back in 30 years and read the same books I have now. I like that guarantee.

A Ratings System for Children's Books - Dumbing Down Literacy

Apparently, national and international publishers in England are preparing an age-based ratings system for books, similar to ratings systems for movies, to let children and parents know if the books is "appropriate" for them.

This is, quite simply, one of the stupidest things I've heard of all year (and that's saying plenty). And while all of the arguments against this system mentioned in the article (death of local bookstores, or establishing a precedent for some kind of moral code that can and will be easily hijacked by overzealous parents) are strong, the dumbest part of this to me is the presumption that there are easily-classifiable "age ranges" for books. Some kids can't even read at 5 years old, while others are pounding through novels intended for children 10 or older. I remember reading Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game in 3rd grade (probably an appropriate age-level for Card's stuff, given how terrible it's gotten), while other kids were struggling with picture books (and I'm certain I'm not, nor ever was, some kind of prodigy). It's hard enough to get kids to read anyways these days; to try to predict if a kid is at the "appropriate" age level is just tilting against windmills.

And if parents and adults don't know how to pick an "age-appropriate" book for a child (one of the major reasons companies are trying to justify this system), let me offer a few suggestions, such as: look at what the kid is reading and go from there; open the book to see if it looks right for the kid who's X-years old (I'm pretty sure the entire Harry Potter collection isn't for a 4 year old, nor is a picture book for a 10 year old; go from there); and, if you're still really not sure, then get a gift-card for a bookstore, and let the kid pick out their own damn book.

I really hope authors' efforts to quash this ridiculous idea are successful, and that parents (and even non-parent adults) and teachers hop on board to end this silliness.

How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read

There is something really tempting about assigning Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Of course, we all don't really read most of the books we read. This is something any academic has to learn to survive. But it's not really talked about at the late undergraduate/early graduate level. Luckily, I had a great advisor in my master's program who worked with me on this skill, but a lot of people just had to figure it out yourself. I resisted at first, thinking this wasn't really reading. That changed after I spent my entire Thanksgiving break my first semester reading Irving Bernstein's Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941, which clocks in at about 800 pages. I realized I simply could not survive without learning how to read without reading everything.

The problem with teaching this book, or the ideas within it, is that it could easily be interpreted by undergraduates as an excuse not to read at all or to just do a quick skim before class. Such an experiment could be a major disaster.

On the other hand, a lot of my students do some version of this anyway. Teaching them how to do it right could, in theory anyway, go a long ways toward creating really good discussions. Plus I think one of my jobs as a teacher is to help my students build useful skills for the rest of their lives. Given that something like 2/3 of graduates at my school go onto to some kind of advanced work, I could easily justify teaching this book as skill-building.

Still, the prospect of complete and unmitigated disaster scares me too much to probably go through with it.

Jay McInerney has an amusing review of the book here.

Absurd Texts of American History (VI)

Today's absurd text comes from an unnamed Georgia state legislator who sponsored a bill in 1925 forbidding any public library or country school to purchase or accept any book except the Bible, the hymnal, and the almanac.

Said the legislator:

"Those three are enough for anyone. Read the Bible. It teaches you how to act. Read the hymnbook. It contains the finest poetry ever written. Read the almanac. It shows you how to figure out what the weather will be. There isn't another book necessary for anyone to read, and therefore I am opposed to all libraries."

The bill failed in the Georgia House of Representatives by the uninspiring count of 57-63.

God Bless Georgia and God Bless America!

PS--I hate it when books don't have footnotes. It's why I don't know who sponsored this bill.