Tagged: reading

Evening Harvest: January 13, 2013

Somewhere to Disappear

Somewhere To Disappear, a film by Laure Flammarion & Arnaud Uyttenhove with Alec Soth

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Athair (Father) – Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

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Essay – My Backlogged Pages – John Feffer

By late Saturday afternoon, the organizers of the sale reduced the price to $1 for whatever you could fit into a bag or box. Even on my meager newspaper route savings, I could afford to splurge. I ranged far from my comfort zone of science fiction. I judged books by their covers. I stuffed any and all recommended reads into my sack.

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“Of Dolls And Murder” shows how dollhouses are used to recreate creepy crimes | Nerve.com

John Waters narrates Of Dolls and Murder, an upcoming documentary about the Nutshell Studios of Unexplained Death, which consists of crime scenes recreated in dollhouses to help police solve murders.

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The Neglected Books Page » Blog Archive » A Honeymoon Experiment, by Margaret and Stuart Chase

Their hypothesis was simple: with perserverence, they would be able to land jobs earning a decent wage and survive on solely on what they made. They gave themselves nine weeks.

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Grace by Christian Wiman

Is there not something supremely admirable, even heroic, here? To have inherited a fortune and an illness at the same time, to have fought off the latter in order to give away—perhaps by means of giving away—the former; to have transformed one’s own abstract and overwhelming unhappiness into the concrete and lasting happiness of others; to have done all this and asked for nothing in return? Depression intensifies, even as it poisons and deadens, one’s sense of self. Anyone who has experienced this, or even been around someone experiencing it, knows how excruciatingly difficult it is to make the least gesture toward the world. And here is a life of such gestures. Here is a heart that, though blighted with sadness, yet flowered in thousands of others.

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Book Review – ‘Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever – Stories,’ by Justin Taylor – Review – NYTimes.com

In 1981, Raymond Carver advanced a literary genre with “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” The movement wasn’t dirty realism or minimalism, but “vaguely titled fiction”: stories concealing their intensity and anxiety behind titles full of pronouns and ennui, signifying nothing much about their narratives.

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Telling Tails – Tim O’Brien – The Atlantic

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

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Gleanings: April 23, 2012

The Same River Twice by David Quammen

This spring creek was not one of the most eminent Montana spring creeks, not Nelson Spring Creek and not Armstrong, not the sort of place where you could plunk down twenty-five dollars per rod per day for the privilege of casting your fly over large savvy trout along an exclusive and well-manicured section of water. On this creek you fished free or not at all. I fished free, because I knew the two people inside the house and, through them, the wonderful surly old rancher who owned the place.

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Forest Service may blow up frozen cows in cabin

“Obviously, time is of the essence because we don’t want them defrosting,” Segin said.

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Locals fear mounting body count in idyllic corner of GTA – The Globe and Mail

That brings the number of bodies found dumped or left for dead in the Caledon area to eight in the last five years. It’s a rate double that of the much larger rural Durham on the other side of the GTA, and it’s a tally that is bringing unwelcome notoriety, and more than a little anxiety, to this quiet area of forested hills and horse stables.

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The Bathroom Library

“I’m convinced that a lot of serious thinking has always been done in bathrooms, and that it is an irreparable loss to humanity that the names and ideas of these philosophers are not known. No doubt Pascal was right when he said that most evils in life arose from “man’s being unable to sit still in a room.”"

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The Secret Life of Alan Z. Feuer

“I don’t like the phrase ‘reinvent yourself.’ I think what really happened is that when Alan got to England, whatever he found there allowed him to discover who he already was.”

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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, 2009

I didn’t do a lot of new-release reading this year: the budget didn’t allow for splurging on books, and the library hold queue for the season’s hot titles was often quite long. But the world of good books is timeless, and there’s no reason that an annual “best of” list should be confined to an arbitrary calendar year. Here are five books I read and loved in 2009.

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada


The best book I read this year was also the last one I read (indeed, it carried over a few days into the new year). Every Man Dies Alone was originally published in Germany in 1947, but only appeared in a U.S. edition, from Melville House Press, this year. It tells the story of a working-class Berlin couple who quietly risk their lives to resist the Third Reich by dropping anti-Nazi postcards around the city. It’s a grim and gritty book, full of brutal and nasty characters, but it’s also a story of great courage and decency, and highlights a chapter of World War II–life within the Nazi regime itself–about which precious little is told in the West.

Stoner by John Williams


Like Every Man Dies Alone, Stoner is a novel of resistance, decency, and dignity, but in a much quieter setting. It tells the story of a farm boy who becomes an English professor at a midwestern university; inspired by the love of language, he struggles with love, politics, and family, apparently accomplishing little of value to the world but much of value to the life of the mind.

The Music of Failure by Bill Holm


The Music of FailureWe lost Bill Holm, essayist, poet, and Prairie philosopher, in February, precisely at the time that we needed his particular perspective the most. His first collection of essays, The Music of Failure, sets the theme for much of his work; it approaches the American Dream from the experiences of Icelandic immigrants on the Minnesota prairie who have apparently failed in so many ways–they die poor, unsung, and forgotten–but turns the Dream on its head in celebrating their quiet strength. There’s a rootedness to Holm’s work, a there-ness and place-ness, that is a powerful antidote to blind ambition; if more people were strong and quiet failures, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

Four Stories by Sigrid Undset


These stories, published in Norwegian at the turn of the 20th century, are like a cool drink of water: graceful, clear, and spare. The subject matter is reminiscent of Henrik Ibsen, but is handled with a wit, tenderness, and generosity that is uniquely Undset’s.

The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno


The Great PerhapsJoe Meno deftly blends satire, fantasy, and realism in this story of clouds, squids, and an unraveling family; this was one of the most inventive novels I’ve read in a long time, peopled with believable, flawed, and compelling characters.

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.

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.

Tunneling to the Center of Earth

We started expanding, tunneling farther and farther underneath our town. We dug random patterns that looped in on themselves and spread from one edge of the town to the other. We dug tunnels high enough to let us walk upright that would quickly turn into tiny pinpoints, so small we had to wedge ourselves through to keep going, the earth scattering in pieces as we moved.

Kevin Wilson’s collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is full of strange wonders: a grandmother-for-hire, a trio of recent college graduates who spend the summer and fall digging tunnels, a doomed Southern family doing battle by way of paper cranes, a museum of obsessive collections, spontaneous human combustion. The stories are playful, inventive, and glib.

Perhaps a bit too glib. Most of the stories belong to what I think of as the McSweeney’s school of surrealism, a thin fabulism that descends more from “Saturday Night Live” than “Un chien andalou.” They are built around one or two strange images or situations, with the characters, resembling actors in sketch comedy, going through the motions to push the odd situation to its furthest limits. The stories are entertaining, but not terribly insightful.

There are a few moments, though, when Wilson rises above his material and delivers something poignant, interesting, and haunting. “Go, Fight, Win,” the story of a reluctant cheerleader and her strange relationship with a child pyromaniac, is a powerful story, with characters who are much more than props. And “Mortal Kombat,” in which two high school misfits do battle against a love they can’t comprehend, has deeply affecting moments. When the stories are driven more by character than by situation, they shine.

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.

A Whaler’s Dictionary

The knife, the lance, the harpoon, the pen’s nib, the sperm whale’s and the shark’s scythe-sharp tooth, do not create the wound they inflict. The wound is created by the space the cutting implement opens.

Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary

If Moby-Dick is the Torah of the white whale (and perhaps of the American novel), then A Whaler’s Dictionary is its Talmud, or at least an interesting and playful chapter in the rich commentary around the seminal (pun on the sperm whale acknowledged and intended) work in the modern American canon.

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, and approaches his discussion of Moby-Dick with the slipperiness and contingency of poetry. He sees within Ishmael’s story “an unfinished dictionary, specific to the science and art of whaling,” and in A Whaler’s Dictionary he teases out much science and even more art. This isn’t, though, a simple concordance on Moby-Dick with reference to Melville’s sources and more recent knowledge of whales; it “does not finish Ishmael’s failed cetological endeavor–it simply repeats the failure in a different guise.”

The book, which at over 300 pages is not much lighter than Moby-Dick, is organized into topics both philosophical and practical: “Doubloon,” “Experience,” “You/Thou,” “Omen,” “Jawbone.” Each topic is accompanied by a short essay related to Moby-Dick, and to whales in general, and to the practice of writing. And each section ends with a list of related topics; “Savage,” for example, points the reader to the headings “Accuracy,” “Justice,” “Tattoo,” and “Writing,” among others. Beachy-Quick recommends not reading the book straight through, which means that more than is normally the case, it is unlikely ever to be read the same way twice.

Literary critics might take issue with some of Beachy-Quick’s readings; he is given to Old Testament echoes and a touch of postmodernism. But the readings are rich and expansive, and taken together both illuminate and befuddle anyone who has tried to understand Moby-Dick. It’s best seen as one reader’s careful, contentious grappling with a great book, a collection of smart and challenging interpretations against which to push, and a rare piece of literature that revels in its ultimate failure to come to tidy conclusions.

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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