The reader's lament: too many books
Dec. 1st, 2009 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteI've been gone the past 5 days celebrating U.S. Thanksgiving with my in-laws, and apart from having overeaten shamelessly, it was the usual pleasant escape from work and other responsibilities.
A particular pleasure was that I found time to read two short novels while I was away, which is a rare escape from reality these days. (Shoshanna reads about twice as fast as I do, and I like to read most of the same magazines she reads, so keeping up is a challenge.) Another problem is that I remain overcommitted, despite shedding many commitments; I also want to do more writing of my own, not limited to just this blog. As a result, freeing up time to read as much as I want is an ongoing challenge; new books are being cranked out faster than I have time to read them, and that doesn't even include a couple thousand years worth of classic literature that I also won't ever have time to read.
For example, I just finished reading the novel Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas, which was a ton of fun. Imagine, if you will, a mashup between Jack Kerouac's On the Road and H.P. Lovecraft's horrific world of insane elder gods in a pitiless and hallucinatory universe, with a little William Burroughs thrown in for good measure. It's a brilliant notion, a ton of fun (for the maybe 1000 people in the world who would potentially enjoy both writers), and for the most part, flawlessly executed. I now want to shove aside several other long-hoarded books to make room for On the Road. It could happen.
Reading faster would be one way to fit in more novels, but part of my pleasure in reading is to savor the prose and dwell over some of the details, which is something I can't really do if I'm blasting through the text at peak speed. One solution seems to be a more ruthless approach to skipping magazine articles that don't deeply interest me; for example, I think I'll largely stop reading the feature articles in Harper's, which I find poorly written (they ramble as if the authors are being paid by the word, and therefore become self-indulgent pieces that generally lack coherence). They're also depressing. A while back, I wrote to the editors and noted that if their goal was to demotivate their readers and prevent them from ever striving to make the world a better place, and thereby allow actively or passively evil government agendas to flourish, they were doing a great job. (Insert conspiracy theory here. Lewis Lapham as a secret mole for the Republican National Convention? Could happen... in fiction.) I didn't get a reply, which hardly surprises me.
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a better alternative, which is a great shame. There are so many really good books out there to be read, and so little time to read them.
A particular pleasure was that I found time to read two short novels while I was away, which is a rare escape from reality these days. (Shoshanna reads about twice as fast as I do, and I like to read most of the same magazines she reads, so keeping up is a challenge.) Another problem is that I remain overcommitted, despite shedding many commitments; I also want to do more writing of my own, not limited to just this blog. As a result, freeing up time to read as much as I want is an ongoing challenge; new books are being cranked out faster than I have time to read them, and that doesn't even include a couple thousand years worth of classic literature that I also won't ever have time to read.
For example, I just finished reading the novel Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas, which was a ton of fun. Imagine, if you will, a mashup between Jack Kerouac's On the Road and H.P. Lovecraft's horrific world of insane elder gods in a pitiless and hallucinatory universe, with a little William Burroughs thrown in for good measure. It's a brilliant notion, a ton of fun (for the maybe 1000 people in the world who would potentially enjoy both writers), and for the most part, flawlessly executed. I now want to shove aside several other long-hoarded books to make room for On the Road. It could happen.
Reading faster would be one way to fit in more novels, but part of my pleasure in reading is to savor the prose and dwell over some of the details, which is something I can't really do if I'm blasting through the text at peak speed. One solution seems to be a more ruthless approach to skipping magazine articles that don't deeply interest me; for example, I think I'll largely stop reading the feature articles in Harper's, which I find poorly written (they ramble as if the authors are being paid by the word, and therefore become self-indulgent pieces that generally lack coherence). They're also depressing. A while back, I wrote to the editors and noted that if their goal was to demotivate their readers and prevent them from ever striving to make the world a better place, and thereby allow actively or passively evil government agendas to flourish, they were doing a great job. (Insert conspiracy theory here. Lewis Lapham as a secret mole for the Republican National Convention? Could happen... in fiction.) I didn't get a reply, which hardly surprises me.
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a better alternative, which is a great shame. There are so many really good books out there to be read, and so little time to read them.
Too many books
Date: 2009-12-02 12:17 am (UTC)Re: Too many books
Date: 2009-12-02 01:16 am (UTC)Speaking of scrolls...
handicaps and disabilities
Date: 2009-12-08 12:53 am (UTC)I like your take on handicaps/disabilities, although I’m no fan of Deaf culture (note CAP--I’ve met some of these folks). They’re certainly not normal in any statistical sense, and while the hearing can enter their culture with relative ease, a process not unlike that followed by the British-born storyteller who moved to Japan as a young man and became a Living National Cultural Treasure, the Deaf can never completely enter hearing culture—think phone calls or movies. Even the best lip readers can get only about a third of what they see, and nothing of what they don’t see.
The other night the “Family Guy” crew did a TV special that included, among others, deaf actor Marlee Matlin. The show has occasionally joked about her oddly- accented speaking voice, and in this case, they made the jokes really cruel. Her obviously scripted response: the single gesture recognized throughout North America and much of the English-speaking world, along with her spoken version of the words. Oddly, in SEE (signing exact English), it requires two words of American Sign Language (ASL), the deaf language used also in both Canada and the Philippines.
I don’t know if you’ve encountered deaf sign languages, but they generally have language-specific or nation-specific vocabularies.For example, in ASL the sign for rich is the finger-spelling letter R shaken near the face, whereas in Spanish America, it’s miming smoking a large cigar. I imagine francophone Canadians use ASL since it was developed mostly by the French-born Gaulladet.
ASL also uses some non-PC signs, such as pulling the edge of the eye out with the pinky to indicate “Japan” or as part of two signs taken together meaning “Japanese.” Another is a hooked index finger next to the nose for “Jew” or “Jewish.” I understand PC signs have been coined, but the bad old ones are still in wide use.