Tagged: books

Dreaming among the readers


Read in bed by revbean

In past years, getting the boys fully engaged in their school’s annual readathon has been a struggle. The temptations of LEGO sets, video games, and general goofing off, along with the time pressures of Scouts, swimming lessons, and various other organized activities, led to many battles over squeezing in extra reading time. This year, things are different.

It might just be that the start of the readathon coincided with their grounding from video games for some offense I can’t recall (Mom lays down the punishments; I just make sure they’re enforced). Or it might be that they’ve hit a sweet spot of reading ability, maturity, and access to the right books at the right time. In any case, it’s sleep that is getting the squeeze now: I find them reading far later into the night than I would like, but I also find it hard to lay down the law when they’ve got their noses buried between pages.

This reticence to enforce bedtime is partly because of personal history. When I was their age, in fourth grade, I went through a long phase of waking up at two in the morning to read. I hid under the blankets with a flashlight and a book, and in a couple months worked my way through all of the Hardy Boys books (at least through the first blue-spined series) and then launched into Tolkien. I was often bleary-eyed in the morning, and sluggish in the afternoon, but I couldn’t stay away from all those marvelous books.

Peter polished off The Hobbit last night, and is deciding between the Percy Jackson books or extending his stay in Middle Earth. Jack has been engrossed in the original Han Solo adventures: a little pulpier than Tolkien, but still good enough reading in my estimation. Discovering science fiction and fantasy at this age seems about right to me: it’s a good time for stretching the imagination, testing your possibilities, and dreaming of far-away worlds.

I’m not able to compete with the boys’ reading goals–projects, work, and chores make it hard for me to squeeze in as many pages as I’d like–but I’ve been in a science fiction world myself, Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress. It’s an appropriate world from which to watch two boys struggling against sleep with books propped on their chests. Kress imagines a time when sleep has become optional, at least to those whose parents are willing to risk expensive and possibly dangerous gene therapy before their births. Without having to throw away so many hours to coma and hallucination, the children of “Beggars in Spain” can spend their hours engaged in Olympic sports, stock market trading, and deep mathematical study. Interestingly, in this Objectivist/libertarian world which Kress posits, none of the children seem to spend their extra time engaged in the waking dream of novels. Watching Peter read “The Hobbit” from my vantage point of reading “Beggars in Spain” makes me think of my favorite quip about adolescent reading:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I’m glad that Peter has discovered Tolkien rather than Rand first. The world of “Beggars in Spain” is ruled by the myth of the “mutually beneficial contract”: if either side of the deal doesn’t gain as much as the other, then the contract is null and void. This ideology fuels the Sleepless children’s fantasies of seceding from the Sleeper society, and is also lurking behind much of the anti-government noise in the current U.S. political chatter. Tolkien, by contrast, posits a contract in which the terms are often far less than mutually beneficial, where indeed the hero (often a very unassuming and unlikely hero) is called upon to sacrifice much for a greater good. Had Ayn Rand written “The Hobbit,” Bilbo would never have left his comfortable hobbit hole: he’d have invested some of the Baggins wealth in gear for the dwarfs, perhaps, in return for a share of the dragon’s gold, but he would never have left without his walking stick and met elves, giants, and a skulking ring-bearer under the mountains. And don’t even think about slogging off to Mount Doom to toss away the most powerful artifact in the world: better to make a mutually beneficial contract with Sauron.

If I were one of the Sleepless, I think I’d spend the wakeful hours of the world’s slumbers with books. And that, perhaps, defeats the purpose, and is the reason that Kress’ Sleepless don’t: reading, especially reading a novel, is a state not unlike a dream. There is no time, there is no “here,” there is only the world that the words bring to magical and imaginative life. Our bodies crave real sleep so they can go about the business of repairing the damages of the day, but our minds and souls crave dreams for building new possibilities, and a book can be a pretty good substitute for the tangle of images our own brains conjure up.

a year in reading, 2010


photo by happy via

As 2010 comes to a close (with over a foot of snow and more coming down outside my window), I’m looking back over some of the books and such I’ve enjoyed; there have been some great and thought-provoking reads in the last year, and some that were pretty good but didn’t quite hit their potential. All in all, though, a good year for reading. Here are some of the books and articles that have made their way to these pages this year.

I closed 2009 and started 2010 with Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, the story of a German couple’s quiet but daring campaign against Hitler. The novel is gripping as both a moral exploration of the German people under Hitler, and as a police procedural; and even the back story of the novel, and of Fallada’s own life under the Nazis, is a harrowing tale.

In the Spring, I was inspired by a series of posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Atlantic Magazine’s web site to learn more about life under another repressive regime: the plantation system in the South during the Confederacy. Andrew Ward’s The Slaves’ War is drawn from the words of the people who survived the war, particularly from a rich collection of interviews with ex-slaves and their descendants from the 1930s. The slaves emerge as actors in their own liberation with some ambivalence toward both sides of the Civil War.

Also in the Spring I read Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges and Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, two books which complement each other well. Hedges’ book is a Jeremiad against a cruel, crass, and corporate-controlled culture, with an all-too-brief ode on the “human capacity for love.” Judt, in contrast, is largely level-headed and reasonable, offering a history of the decline of the welfare state, politics’ retreat from “the common good,” and the uncritical acceptance of a rhetoric of perpetual market growth. A combination of Hedges’ passion and Judt’s analysis, bolstered by the empiricism of The Spirit Level, seems a good, if unlikely-to-be-followed, way forward.

I also made a dent in my stack of New Yorker magazines, though they’ve crept up on me again in the last couple months. (The current blizzard might be a great opportunity to revisit that project.) Of the stories and articles I read–an Italo Calvino fugue, a report on free diving, and stories by Joshua Ferris and William Styron–I think it was Sherman Alexie’s War Dances that I enjoyed the most. Alexie is always true to his voice, and voice matters a lot.

Marc Jacobson’s The Lampshade also deals in voices–ranging from a blues historian to Holocaust deniers to museum curators to a Santaria priestess–to tell the story of a voiceless object, a lampshade that appears to have been made from human skin of unconfirmed provenance. Jacobson pulls together the Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Jim Crow South, and Mardi Gras to tell the story of this lampshade and his quest to find it a home.

Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is less a time-travel sci-fi tale than a family drama about a son searching for his secretive father’s inner life. It uses the tropes of science fiction in some interesting and original ways. But it has some stylistic quirks, tics, foibles, follies, that drove me a little nuts, batty, crazy, around the bend. Another round of editing might have helped.

The last book I’ll likely get up on this site this year, given my holiday and other obligations, is The Word for World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin. It’s a story of colonial exploitation not unlike “Avatar,” but without that movie’s colonial baggage: LeGuin’s exotic green aliens don’t require a human helper to stage their revolt; indeed, their only human ally turns out to be a bumbler who does more harm than good. A LeGuin novel, even a very short one like this (a slightly different version won the 1973 Hugo Award for best novella), lives up to the promise of speculative fiction: a rich collection of ideas, an extended thought experiment, and a human moral drama in an alien place.

Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store

Imagine the volume of a normal store turned on its side: It was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall. And the shelves went all the way up—five stories of books. The whole place was dim and dusty; you couldn’t even really see the ceiling.

Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store, available free to read at the previous link or free to listen to on Escape Pod, is a delightful story about mystery, immortality, and the fate of the book in the digital age. Set in the midst of our current recession, it straddles the worlds of a fanciful antiquarian bookshop and an even more fanciful Google Books project. There are dusty tomes, mysterious gentlemen, delicate robots, astounding technologies, and even a little romance, packed into a story that takes Stephen Ely less than 45 minutes to read. I haven’t read, nor do I intend to read, Dan Brown’s “Symbology” books, but I imagine that this story is what those would have been if Mr. Brown could write engaging sentences and created his own world rather than plundering hoary old Templar myths.

Mr. Sloan is working on a longer story set in the same universe as Mr. Penumbra’s shop; if this story is any indication, that story should be compelling, evocative, and thought-provoking.

the new #amazonfail: “Nineteen Eighty-Four” sent to the memory hole

nineteen eighty-four

He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past — for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Easter #amazonfail, in which an apparent “faux pas” had the effect of de-listing many gay-themed books, highlighted one of the risks of the Amazon.com monoculture in book buying. The most recent one, though, demonstrating the company’s ability to remotely purge purchased books at a third-party’s behest, is far more troubling.

As reported by David Pogue, Gizmodo, and others:

Apparently, the publisher changed its mind about having electronic versions of Orwell’s books. So Amazon removed them from the store and in the process remotely deleted the books from the Kindles of anyone who bought them, depositing a refund in their account in the process.

That the affected books were “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Animal Farm,” one dealing with the malleability of memory in a totalitarian age and the other dealing with different kinds of “equality” in an “egalitarian” society, makes the situation that much more interesting.

The back story is, as is always the case with the sort of thing, a bit more complicated. It wasn’t all e-book versions of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” that were purged, just those published by Mobipocket. The Kindle version of the Mobipocket edition is listed as “not yet available,” though the version on the Mobipocket site can apparently still be purchased. As the Mobipocket site and some other George Orwell sites make clear, there’s complexity in the international copyright status of Orwell’s books:

This work is in the public domain in Canada, Australia, and other countries. It may still be copyrighted in some countries. The user should determine whether the work is in the public domain in their own country before using it.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” is still under copyright in the United States and the European Union; editions sold in these markets must be licensed by the Orwell estate (who have defended their copyright against, among others, the reality show “Big Brother” and an Edinburgh Fringe Festival performance of “Animal Farm”). No doubt the back story on the Mobipocket Orwell has to do with an unauthorized edition competing with a licensed one in Amazon’s Kindle store. This particular dust-up, then, has its origins in two different issues: variations in copyright laws around in the world in a the international digital age, and the unprecedented control that a device like the Kindle gives to publishers and booksellers over what rights readers have to the books they’ve purchased.

On the international copyright side, this simply points to the need to rationalize and internationalize copyright protections across borders. If I read “Nineteen Eighty-Four” at George-Orwell.org from a computer in the United States, I’m violating copyright, though the site is hosted in Canada and therefore in compliance with local law. The laxer copyright laws in Canada and Australia, the absolute lack of enforced copyright in many Asian markets, and the Disney-driven extension of copyright further and further past the creator’s death, is a recipe for conflict and contradiction. A sane middle ground of limited protection, or perhaps a market-based copyright (want to extend Mickey Mouse’s copyright? pony up a few million dollars to a fund that helps to protect the rights of less lucrative properties; otherwise, it expires upon the creator’s death or at some reasonable period afterward), needs to be established for the Internet be a viable means of disseminating ideas, and not just a piracy tool.

More troubling, though, is that the Kindle has a kill switch. Think of how much easier Winston Smith’s job would have been in the Ministry of Truth if he could have used Amazon technology! No need to carefully excise words or rub out images from photographs, no environmentally-harmful burning of books and records (getting temperatures up to 451 degrees Fahrenheit just adds to your carbon footprint); the green way to censor is to do it electronically. This affair demonstrates how little power we really have over the devices that are replacing old-fashioned books on paper.

We’ve seen that Internet and communications companies are willing to cooperate, if not collude, with governments on a variety of issues that are hardly in the interest of liberty (e.g., warrentless wire taps, censorship in China). Because they are also participants in a market economy with lots of non-government pressure groups in play, one can imagine them giving in to calls for removing certain books that come from non-government sources. And if publishers can now yank books off a reader’s electronic shelf, then the reader’s rights become even more tenuous.

In light of Amazon’s power to pull books away from readers, some clear, public, ethical guidelines should be established as to how that power will be exercised. Books should be pulled only in certain narrow situations (copyright violation, libel, or egregious factual errors come to mind); there should be a public notice of the intent to remove a book, with an opportunity for affected parties to comment on the case; and there should be fair compensation to the reader. This is a mighty power for any organization to wield, and it needs to be practiced in the sunshine. Based on the past history of Amazon’s handling of these kinds of situations, though, I’m pessimistic of Amazon’s following any such guideline.

Without some way to harness the ability of publishers and booksellers to take away people’s e-books, the convenience that devices like the Kindle offer comes at far too steep a price. In a fully-wired world, where the e-book (at least as imagined by Amazon) has replaced paper, our freedoms to read are dangerously compromised. For now, at least, I’m going to hang on to my hard copies of Orwell (not to mention Marx, Gramsci, and Adam Smith): unwieldy as big fat books might be, they’re at least somewhat challenging to pry from my hands.

(Note that I don’t feel at all hypocritical about having a Kindle e-book for sale. The Kindle has its place, and I’m comfortable with my story collection being on the disposable end of the spectrum, so long as you enjoy it while you read it. I promise not to yank it away from you if you buy it.)

Update: as I suspected, this was a copyright dispute, as reported by Brad Stone at the NYT:

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

This still doesn’t change the core problem of the e-book memory hole. And it also adds the wrinkle that most of the major breakers of the news didn’t bother to investigate the story behind the story, par for the course these days.

The Great Perhaps

The Great PerhapsAnything resembling a cloud will cause Jonathan Casper to faint. Jonathan, a quiet, middle-aged professor, suffers from an odd form of epilepsy; seeing the shape of a cloud–a cumulus, its appearance like a magnolia tree in bloom, a stratus, as bleary as a pigeon startled to flight, or a cirrus, with its vague, ghostlike veil–and he will immediately collapse, his heart beating irregularly in perfect terror, his breath slowing to a whisper, his arms and legs going weak.

The Great Perhaps, Joe Meno

Joe Meno’s The Great Perhaps is an inventive, startling novel that is equally comic and affecting. It tells the story of Jonathan Casper’s family in dissolution: his daughters Thisbe and Amelia in their struggles with adolescent sex and politics and ambition; his wife Madeline equally troubled by her research into the social behavior of pigeons and her marriage to a neurotic and unhappy man; his father Henry’s haunting by his memories of a World War II internment camp and his work designing war planes; and Jonathan’s own deep unhappiness with life and the thwarting of his dream of unlocking the secrets of evolution through the study of prehistoric giant squids. Meno weaves together squids, clouds, pigeons, airplanes, and radio dramas in subtle and fascinating ways; though his characters are realistic and squarely set in their middle-class Chicago neighborhood, he leaves open the door to the unknowable and the impossible.

The novel progresses through alternating chapters seen from each character’s perspective, and focused on each character’s private struggles. Disconnection and miscommunication abound; like Jonathan’s squids, the Caspers lead solitary lives, unsure how to interact, throwing up clouds of ink to conceal and protect themselves. Much is felt and left unsaid.

Though most of The Great Perhaps takes place over the course of a few weeks in 2004, leading up to the November presidential election, the most affecting section happens sixty years earlier, when Jonathan’s father is a young man. Henry is the son of German immigrants, equally uncomfortable in both his parents’ world and the larger culture, who finds meaning and escape in comic books and radio serials, particularly “The Airship Brigade,” a science fiction series with a dashing teen-aged hero. In this novel-within-a-novel, Henry spends the war years in a camp for German nationals and their families, and is the witness to a tragedy that becomes inextricably tangled with the work he does later as a designer of military aircraft.

Because Henry doesn’t speak, though, and never recounts his personal history to Jonathan and his family, the connection between his story and the other characters is left tenuous and unresolved. Jonathan and Thisbe can’t know the deep implications of gestures that come at the novel’s end, though the reader can make the necessary links and almost tie up the dangling pieces. Since miscommunication is such a central part of the novel, though, this is hardly a flaw; rather, it adds a layer of poignancy to the story.

Though many sections of the novel are painful, sad, even shocking, it follows the arc of comedy: there is attenuated redemption, contingent reconciliation, in the Casper family’s desperate reaching out to one another and to the world. That Meno’s writing is lush and vibrant, his characters rich and round, makes The Great Perhaps a thoroughly rewarding experience.

partisan reviews

Girl InspectorL’affaire de Botton, in which a bad review prompted some outrage on the part of Alain de Botton and some thinking about the ethics of the book review, led me to look again at John Updike’s rules for reviewers. And while I think Updike’s rules set the standard for the kind of book review done in the New York Times and most of the remaining newspaper book pages, they really only cover a particular genre of writing about books. There are other types of book essay, where these rules aren’t entirely applicable, and would in fact be an onerous strait jacket.

Book reviews are sort of like a “Consumer Reports” article: their purpose is to give an overview of a book, point out its most obvious features, and guide the reader in whether or not to select it. This is a pretty narrow contract, and as such most book reviews are ephemeral. Their usefulness is worn out once the reader has made that decision. In these short-form reviews, it makes sense for the reviewer to avoid books they are “predisposed to dislike” and not to be “warrior[s| in any ideological battle.”

But there are other genres where it makes sense for the writer to disregard these caveats; writing about literature would be no fun at all if one couldn’t occasionally skewer a book with which we disagree, or use a book as a missile in an ideological battle. I’m thinking of the long-form critical essays that are the meat of the offerings in journals like “The New York Review of Books,” “The Times Literary Supplement,” and “Commentary” (the “old guard”) or “Rain Taxi” and “The Complete Review” (the “young Turks”).

For these sorts of essays, Updike’s rules about fairness still apply, but not so much the rules about focus. “Review the book, not the reputation” wouldn’t be useful in Julian Barnes’ Updike overview, for example, or Sue Halpern’s roundup of books about success. This sort of essay uses the book as a jumping-off point, building an argument (whether in support of the book or opposed to it) that can pull in evidence from any source. A book review is bounded by the book under consideration, with little external context offered; the critical essay is all about context.

I’ve re-read Caleb Crain’s review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and I think I’ve solved the puzzle of de Botton’s outrage. While masquerading as a book review, Crain’s piece is really just the first half of a critical essay. Crain is engaging the ideas in the book, not the book itself, and he has some strong criticisms of them, and of how the ideas are executed. But because of the strictures of the book review form, the piece is weirdly truncated. Crain sets up his partisan take on the book, makes some hints at where it goes wrong, but cannot make his own counter-argument because he’s already out of space.

That makes the piece fundamentally unfair, both as a book review and as a critical essay. In a critical essay, Crain would be required to go further and build his own case, drawing on other sources than de Botton’s book and proposing an alternative understanding of work and meaning. Had Crain’s piece done that (and since it would almost certainly be much longer than the NYT Book Review would permit, he can’t), the reader could have fairly assessed Crain’s argument. This leaves de Botton with little recourse (though I still think “I will hate you till the day I die” is a bit much): Crain’s argument against the book might be good, or it might not; we can’t know from what is given in the review.

The market for the long-form critical essay is probably pretty small: certainly smaller than for the book review, which is already pretty rarefied. But they still have a place in the world of literary journalism; it would be nice if, in the larger space that online publishing permits, outlets like the NYT Book Review would augment its reviews with criticism: Crain’s essay deserves to be expanded, and de Botton deserves to have a better case made against his book.

rules and contracts: reviewers, writers, and readers

As a way out of the morass of hurt feelings, embarrassing outbursts, and grand posturing in the recent reviewer-writer donnybrooks, take a look at what John Updike had to say in his six rules for book reviews. “[S]haped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion,” they lay out a guide for civil, ethical, and useful criticism.

They insist first on fairness: “do not blame [the author] for not achieving what he did not attempt.” It would be unfair, for example, to criticize a pulp science fiction novel for failing to offer well-rounded characters, just as it would be unfair to criticize a literary short story for lacking tentacled aliens. Next, they insist on thoroughness and accuracy: let the book speak for itself, giving “enough direct quotation . . . of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.” And finally, they demand that the reviewer exhibit humility: “[d]o not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind.”

These guidelines imply a contract between the reviewer and the writer, and between the reviewer and the reader (of the review, and potentially of the book). Between reviewer and writer, the contract stipulates a fair and accurate review, without an agenda that poisons the well. The book, not its author, should be the focus, and it should be assessed on its own terms. Between the reviewer and reader, the contract stipulates an accurate assessment of the book’s interest, and its success in its goals; by providing evidence in the form of direct quotation, the reader has the chance to sample the book, and to judge whether the review is accurate.

Things tend to break down when the review fails on one of Updike’s points. In the Alice Hoffman case, her legitimate complaint against Roberta Silman’s review is that Silman gives away too much of the story. This is a fair complaint in a review of a plot-driven novel, and it breaks the contract not only with the book but also with the reader.

As for Caleb Crain’s review of Alain de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” the offense is subtler. On first glance, Crain appears to comply with Updike’s rules: he takes the book on its own terms, and provides ample quotation to make his points. And yet the review is scathing, and on occasion ad hominem: de Botton is accused of being superficial, mocking, and beset by class anxieties. It would appear that Crain has broken the fuzzy sixth rule that Updike proposes, “accept[ing] for review a book [he was] predisposed to dislike.” Crain appears to want a journalistic account with populist, or at least sympathetic, leanings, and that’s not what de Botton has delivered.

Updike’s rules offer very helpful guidelines for approaching the issue from the reviewer’s perspective. They are less helpful, though, for the writer faced with a negative review. When Updike published them in 1975, authors had fewer recourse to vent: no Twitter, no blogs, just the letters column in the offending publication, or space in a rival publication, and the postal service. (Unless, of course, you were Norman Mailer and could punch out your critics, or Proust and challenge them to a duel, but those seem well outside any guidelines for civil discourse.)

It is reasonable for writers to hold their critics to these rules; when a critic strays, the writer is well within her rights to say so. But it would be wise to keep that sixth rule in mind, which implies that all three parties have a contract with something larger than this review and this book: do nothing that will harm the “presumption of certain possible joys of reading,” and keep your vitriol aimed more at the review than the reviewer.

Fifteen books in fifteen minutes

I’m not much into blog “memes,” but this one, by way of About Last Night, struck me as interesting:

Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

  1. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
  2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
  3. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
  4. 1984, George Orwell
  5. Dubliners, James Joyce
  6. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
  7. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
  8. Doctor Sax, Jack Kerouac
  9. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  10. Ulysses, James Joyce
  11. Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver
  12. The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Nathaniel West
  13. Possession, A.S. Byatt
  14. Island, Alistair MacLeod
  15. Stoner, John Williams

I cheated a little; some of these are the second book I thought of; for example, Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts sprang immediately to mind, but then I realized that the weird and haunting Dream Life of Balso Snell, with its journey through the guts of a Trojan horse, is what really sticks with me. And, of course, it’s an incomplete list of the books that have burrowed into my brain; there are many branches to travel down–books read in high school, books read over summer vacation, books read secretly at work–and so many things are left off by taking the first 15 or so. And it’s certainly not a list of the best books in my head.

I’ve arranged these more or less chronologically, after the initial dump. Where and when you read a book greatly affects whether it sticks. Lord of the Rings was my first “grown-up” book, read (if not quite understood) when I was eleven; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was from the first year of college, when I was just starting to realize how big the world of words could be, and the way Spark structured her story was a revelation. The order matter’s a bit, too; I’m not sure Doctor Sax would have been as memorable if Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man hadn’t already colonized my mind: Kerouac’s novel is very much a reaction to, if not quite a re-write of, Joyce’s Bildungsroman.

The young mind has better soil for books to take root (all the more reason to encourage good books for kids, to crowd out the weeds), but there’s always room for more books to squeeze in: Stoner and Island are recent additions, more appropriate to the middle-aged mind than Hobbits and elves, perhaps, but no less fantastic.

Steal Across the Sky

We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it.

Nancy Kress, Steal Across the Sky

Nancy Kress’s novel Steal Across the Sky feels like two distinct books. The first is anthropological science fiction in the tradition of Ursula LeGuin: twenty-one “Witnesses” from Earth are sent by an alien race calling themselves “Atoners” to visit seven pairs of planets where humans were placed 10,000 years ago; some change has been made to half of each planet pair, and the Witnesses need to discover that change and what effect it has had on the culture and society that developed. The second is a thriller, a pair of chases that happen in the aftermath of the knowledge the Witnesses bring back.

Spoiler warning: your enjoyment of the first half of the novel will be compromised by reading the following plot summary.Skip ahead to avoid disappointment.

The first half of the novel is the more satisfying as speculative fiction. Kress unwinds the story slowly, letting the reader discover along with the Witnesses what makes Kular A different from Kular B. The people discovered on the first planet by the Witness Lucca are gentle, incurious, and practice a disturbing and matter-of-fact ritual assisted suicide. On Kular B, a violent and strictly hierarchical society has developed, along with a philosophy of strategic deceit expressed in the game kulith.

The Witnesses to the Kular system determine that the difference between the two is that the gentle Kular A people are certain of life after death. While Cam, the Witness to Kular B, and Soledad, who stays in orbit during the investigation, believe that the people can actually see the dead, who stay on the “second road” among the living for a while before setting off for the “third road,” Lucca argues that it is more likely a stress-induced form of telepathy that causes the Kularians to believe the dead can be seen and heard. It is this tension that informs the second half of the novel.

On returning to Earth, Cam O’Kane becomes a celebrity, spreading the “Atoners’ message” of life after death. The Witnesses’ reports cause upheaval, with an epidemic of suicides (the “Why Wait?” movement), violent religious opposition, and a rise in general hucksterism. The alien Atoners, meanwhile, have gone silent, though still occupying a lunar base that is the target of much interest from both governments and tourists.

The thriller story revolves around Cam O’Kane and Frank Olenik, both Witnesses and neither terribly bright, trying to retrieve a packet of hair from the Moon that Frank believes contains genetic material that could restore the ability to see the dead to humans on Earth. Soledad and Lucca, meanwhile, discover that the Atoners have not been uninvolved in human affairs after the Witness program. This section of the novel is less speculative and more plot-driven, though Kress does explore themes of regret, celebrity, and trust in interesting ways.

There. Spoiler-bits over.

One of the challenges in science fiction is avoiding the massive “info dump.” When a story depends on complex concepts, the temptation is to present long, unbroken blocks of explication. Kress avoids this by doling out background information in the form of memos, transcripts, and snippets from popular and scientific journalism; the story’s near-future setting helps, too, and her touch is light in letting the reader draw the connections and construct the concepts.

Science fiction also has a tendency to rely on stock characters who serve to move plot or explain concepts. Here Kress is less successful in avoiding the pitfalls of the genre, with cardboard cutout secret agents and scientists in the background, and even some major characters’ motivations and actions emerging more from plot than psychological consistency. Still, some of the characters–in particular Soledad, who tries to sink into anonymity after her Witness experience, and Cam, unhinged by her celebrity–are rich and real.

Steal Across the Sky isn’t quite The Left Hand of Darkness, nor even Ring of Swords, but it’s a solid novel in the anthropologically-informed science fiction tradition. The alien cultures (particularly Kular B) are richly imagined, and the central concept is played out in interesting and unexpected ways. It encourages the reader to think and to wonder, which is the highest function of good science fiction.

After the Fail: moving ahead from the #amazonfail

It’s been over a month since the #amazonfail brouhaha swept Twitter and the web, which is about a century in Internet time. Since then, the Twitterati have moved on to more pressing issues (“#3turnoffwords” and “Patrick Swayze” are trending to the top of the Twitterverse as I write this). The questions that the fiasco raised have largely gone unanswered.

I don’t live at Internet speeds, though, so I’ve continued to think about what Amazon’s flub means and what can be done about it. My own sphere of influence is pretty tiny, but I’ve finished up a little project that is my own practical response to the Amazon leviathan: a WordPress plugin called BookLinker that makes switching from the Amazon affiliate program, or at least augmenting Amazon with other resources, a whole lot simpler. You can read about all the geeky stuff that went into this plugin here; more important, though, are the reasons behind this project.

Why link to books?

Web sites that review books, or discuss books, or otherwise have a bookish nature, typically provide their readers to some sort of external link to the books in question. There are some good reasons for this:

  • The linked pages provide some additional context for the book: reviews, author biography, history, etc. The thing that sets a web review apart from a print review is that the context can be made richer by relying on external resources, and the review itself can be made leaner by leaving a lot of expository and extraneous information to those outside sources.
  • Readers should be able to get their hands on the book quickly if it interests them. Being able to buy the book, or request it from your library, while you’re reading the review, is a great service to readers; I can add an intriguing title to my reading queue with a few clicks of the mouse, and not have to scribble down notes on a 3×5 card.
  • The affiliate programs offered by Amazon, Powells, and IndieBound can be valuable for some high-traffic sites; these programs are a key source of income on really popular and successful book review sites. For the less popular sites, they don’t really offer much payment, though the occasional windfall is nice enough.

The web is all about linking, and so linking to book sites should be a key piece of Internet book reviews.

Why link to Amazon?

Amazon is by far the biggest player in the book link world, for some good reasons:

  • The depth of selection is astounding; most books that are in print are available on Amazon, and through the relationships that Amazon has forged with used book retailers, lots of out of print books are easy to find as well. If you want to review it or read it, Amazon probably has it.
  • For the reviewer/blogger, Amazon’s tools are the best. The link-creating widgets are nicely integrated into the site, so in just a few clicks you can generate a nicely-formatted affiliate link to a book and paste it into your page. By contrast, IndieBound has one link format that can be created from the book pages (easy enough for an HTML-savvy writer to tweak, but not as intuitive as Amazon’s options), and Powell’s requires you to enter your affiliate ID and the book’s ISBN on a separate screen, making two-tab browsing an annoying requirement.
  • Amazon is ubiquitous. For better or worse, it’s the default on-line shopping destination not only for books, but also for CDs, toys, electronics, and household goods, and a huge player in digital downloads as well. Most people who are going to buy something on-line probably have an Amazon account already, and are more likely to buy from Amazon simply because they’re familiar with it. Getting someone to buy a book from Powell’s, or go through an independent bookseller through IndieBound, is an uphill struggle.
  • Amazon has economy of scale. Its prices are low, its discounts are deep, and its shipping policies make it easy to buy an extra little something on impulse for the “free” postage.
  • The Amazon web site is very rich in content; there are lots of reviews (some better than others), links to related books, and information about authors and publishers. Most of this content is in service of selling books, of course, but that doesn’t detract from its usefulness to the reader.

That’s a lot of inertia, which makes the lack of serious change after the #amazonfail fiasco unsurprising.

Why NOT link to Amazon?

For some people, the #amazonfail event–the sudden, apparently accidental, de-listing of a whole range of gay and lesbian titles–was enough to make them stop linking to or buying from Amazon. It’s the sort of issue that a small number of people feel strongly enough about to change their behavior, like not buying lettuce during the Chavez boycott or steering clear of Coors beer (and not just because it’s a lousy beer). But it’s not sufficient to get enough people exercised to really shift the marketplace in on-line book buying.

For me, there are two other compelling, and related, reasons to avoid buying from Amazon. And though I thought that the #amazonfail event was badly handled by Amazon, and the arbitrariness of the flub was offensive, I think these are more important reasons.

First, Amazon represents a monoculture in the book marketplace. They’re not really a monopoly–there are other places to get books, and they don’t get any particular government largess (that I know of, at least) to support their business–but they are so gigantic that they set the tone for everyone else. Indeed, their ubiquity gives them incredible power over how we read. The danger with a monoculture, though, is that it makes the entire ecosystem vulnerable to the ailments of the big player: when Amazon de-lists a whole class of books, or promotes certain kinds of books more than others, or introduces proprietary technology (like the Kindle) that locks users into a particular stream of content, the quality of the entire book world suffers.

We saw a similar invasive monoculture in the book world in the 1990s, when the big chain stores–particularly Barnes & Noble and Borders–started to squeeze independent booksellers with their low prices and deceptively wide selections. (Full disclosure: I was a Barnes & Noble bookseller myself for about five years, though I remained a lowly floor walker for my tenure.) The sheer mass of the chain stores shifted the way publishers worked with retailers, and affected the kinds of books that got attention on the sales floor. But once the wonder of the big box book store wears off, most readers will discover a numbing sameness to them all.

And that’s the other, related, reason that I’m now starting to steer my readers toward IndieBound rather than Amazon. IndieBound is an umbrella site for the American Bookseller Association, made up primarily of small, independent bookstores. Unlike Amazon, IndieBound directs your dollars to a store near you, a store run by local people who know and love books and readers. Rather than “crowd-sourcing” books through Amazon’s ranks and comments, independent booksellers are hands-on matchmakers, trying to connect readers with books based on human interaction. At an independent bookstore, you’ll be offered suggestions based on insights rather than algorithms.

I’ve also included, in my WordPress plugin, links to the other way to get books: your local library. My book “shopping” lately has been confined to the library, and I’ve been very happy with how that’s worked out. My local library is an easy walk away, and the online book ordering system means that I can get books delivered there from any branch in Hennepin county or, with a little more effort, from a good number of places around the country. And if the book isn’t in Minneapolis, I can probably find it across the river in St. Paul. WorldCat links the catalogs of many libraries and makes finding the books you want almost as easy as Amazon does. And if you think independent booksellers are book people, just wait until you meet your librarian.

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