Between the Covers

Kindling interest or apathy?

Most readers reacted to the advent of the e-book with resounding indifference, but  Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has not let that little fact stop his company from developing and selling Kindle, an electronic book reader that retails for $399 and will download books, newspapers and blogs over a wireless connection. It costs $10 to download a new release and can hold around 200 books at a time, and there's an amazon library of about 90,000 books from which to choose.

Considering the downward trend in the reading of books and newspapers, you have to wonder if this plan makes any sense at all. (Not that I won't be happy for everyone to rush out, buy one and download The Miami Herald on it to save my job.) Sure, it'd be nice to stop killing all those trees to make paperbacks, but the remaining readers on the planet have shown complete indifference, if not downright contempt, for the e-book; we tend to like actual BOOKS, not another electronic gadget for which we have to buy batteries. And even I don't need to carry around 200 books at a time, though I have been known to slog more than one novel to unlikely places, such as on backpacking trips down the Grand Canyon, when every ounce makes itself known in your back (so much so that one unnamed soul I know drills holes in his toothbrush handle, which, quite frankly, I believe makes me look sane).

In a note to customers at amazon.com, Bezos writes that Kindle "disappears like a physical book," but I think his idea that books vanish as you read them is faulty from the start. A book's physical presence is part of the experience, whether we're reading musty old paperbacks we picked up at a garage sale or a lovely, clean, signed first edition, its type and pages and spine as perfect as a summer day. A summer day someplace other than Miami, that is.

So good luck, Amazon. For now, I'm sticking to paper books, as unenvironmentally friendly as they may be.

Help me out here

I'm on vacation this week and taking the time to read solely for pleasure. I will be back to reading for work oh so soon...anybody have any suggestions on what I - or anybody else for that matter - should read just for the sheer joy of it?

As long as you don't suggest Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, I promise to at least consider it.

Read a book, stupid, Part II

Former Congresswoman and president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers Pat Schroeder has an idea about how to counteract this troubling NEA study about our growing nation of non-readers. Want kids to read more? Buy them books as holiday gifts, she suggests. She shrewdly points out that Young Adult book sales have never been better - and reminds us how destructive it is to remove good books from school libraries just because one or two parents object to them.

Not sure what to get the kids? The Herald's Sue Corbett weighs in with reviews on Y/A and childrens' books from time to time on Saturdays. Books & Books in Coral Gables has a big room solely for kids' books, and anybody you find working in there can surely provide guidance.

Read a book, stupid

So you know how you've been harboring a sneaking suspicion that people are just getting dumber? The latest report by the National Endowment by the Arts would seem to back you up. The Associated Press reports that the NEA is releasing a report Monday that indicates people - that's kids and adults - are reading less. Surprise, surprise. What are all those people doing in Barnes & Noble and Borders, then, buying coffee?

The report says that in 2002 only 52 percent of Americans aged 18-24 read a book voluntarily. OK, maybe the college kids are partying studying too hard to settle down with a good book. And there is some positive news: the report says 9-year-olds have improved their reading comprehension skills impressively, possibly due to a certain young wizard and his adventures.

But Harry Potter is grown up and married with kids of his own now, so it's time to move on. And apparently readers aren't: The scariest stat says the number of adults with bachelor's degrees who possess something called "proficiency in reading prose" dropped from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2002.

So don't blame the drunken exhausted college kids; they have an excuse for not reading for pleasure. If you're not reading, and you're not teaching your kids about reading, the problem is you. And don't give me that "I'm too busy to read" nonsense. If you like to read, you always find time. You may hit a period where you read less, but you always find time.

By the way, reading Television Without Pity doesn't count, no matter how entertaining it is.

 

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you

Just finished Jonathan Raban's Surveillance, and I'm kind of looking over my shoulder. The novel is about American-style fear and paranoia post 9/11, about a group of people living in a Seattle where anti-terrorism drills are the order of the day. Two of the characters function as mouthpieces for various right wing/left wing schools of thought, but the others - namely a freelance writer and her preteen daughter - are just like the rest of us: confused, anxious, sometimes positive their civil liberties are taking a beating and other times thinking that's not such a bad thing.

Everybody's watching everybody, and how much good it's doing us is anybody's guess.

Raban also refuses to spoonfeed us answers; Surveillance is the sort of book that forces you to think. For that, Mr. Raban: Thank you!

Children and Men

Warning: This post has very little to do with books.

I see that People magazine has named Matt Damon "Sexiest Man Alive." Now, I like Matt Damon. I like his movies for the most part, and the fact that he won an Oscar for his first screenplay is impressive.* And he's a nice-looking guy, no doubt about it.

But how does he rate Sexiest Man Alive when this guy over to the left is walking the earth?

To be fair, People did include a photo of Clive Owen in the Other Guys Who Look Nothing Like the Ones You Know category, one so smoking hot it scorched my hands in the Publix checkout line. It was so good I never got to see who else was included except for Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, nominations I fully support.

Owen's best film: the brilliant apocalyptic nightmare Children of Men, based - and when I say based, I mean loosely based, so loosely it's another thing entirely - on P.D. James' novel about a future world where mankind is threatened by a fertility crisis.**

* vaguely book and/or writing related comment

** another one

'Tis the season

Every copy editor I know just shouted: You've used it for the year! Now nobody else is allowed! (Sorry, insider copy editing humor is very complex.)

In Friday's Weekend section Herald movie critic Rene Rodriguez offers a sneak preview of the films that  will be released between now and the end of the year (or, if you live at the end of the earth, like, say, in Miami, possibly next January).  Shocked at how many are book adaptations? Don't be. This is the season for Oscar hopefuls to come roaring out of the woodwork, and plenty of those originated as books. Some began life as aching novellas and then inexplicably lost the Oscar for Best Picture because those knuckleheaded Hollywood leftists needed to soothe their liberal guilt (I still feel for you, Brokeback Mountain).

Here's a partial list of books taken from movies that are looming: The Mist, The Golden Compass, I Am Legend, The Kite Runner, Atonement. Do we count Sweeney Todd? And there are others: Just this weekend we review Love in the Time of Cholera (told you I'd link to it), and Rene has reviewed what is shaping up to be the movie of the year, No Country for Old Men. That's the one I'm looking forward to most: Coen Brothers! Cormac McCarthy! Javier Bardem! Tommy Lee Jones!

And then there's Atonement. I fear for Atonement. But look how cool Keira Knightley looks! I still think Ian McEwan deserved the Booker Prize for that novel, not his slight and ultimately forgettable Amsterdam. Which is so forgettable I fear I may have missed the point, since I'm still baffled by that win. But as I mentioned before, I am going to try and have faith in director Joe Wright.

Go figure

So because I am the sort of person obsessed with best-of lists, even as I recognize the inherent fallacy and subjective nature of such things, I was prowling the list of former National Book Award winners, and I am marveling all over again at some of the winners.

I can't argue with this year's winners at all, although I'm inwardly groaning at the thought of diving into Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (Vietnam, the length, aughhhhh!)  But by most accounts the book deserves the award.

But the judges were apparently hallucinating when they voted in 2003. Shirley Hazzard's routine old guy/young girl love story, set against the backdrop of (of course) war, The Great Fire, over Edward Jones'  brilliant The Known World? Are you KIDDING me? And that's not even taking into account the gorgeous Evidence of Things Unseen, Marianne Wiggins' mesmerizing story of love and radiation. I've read all three books, and The Great Fire isn't even close to the other two.

In nonfiction that year, Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havana won. Now absolutely no disrespect to Mr. Eire, but how did that memoir beat Anne Applebaum's masterpiece Gulag, her fascinating, intricately researched book on (what else) the Soviet gulag system. (Aside: I know none of you will believe I read it, but I did, and it was one of the most riveting nonfiction books I've ever read.)

Also a nonfiction contender in 2003: Erik Larson's ubiquitous The Devil in the White City, about the country's first known serial killer at the Chicago World's Fair at the turn of the century.

To join me in griping, view a list of winners since 1950 here: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba_winners_finalist_50_07.pdf

An honor just to be nominated

Miami's Edwidge Danticat didn't win The National Book Award for her searing memoir Brother, I'm Dying Wednesday night, but we love her anyway. The nonfiction award went to Tim Weiner for his well-received CIA history A Legacy of Ashes. Haven't read Ashes, but the buzz has been good on it, so congrats to Weiner (even though we were not-so-secretly rooting for the hometown hero).

And for once the fiction winner was the favorite: Denis Johnson's towering Vietnam novel Tree of Smoke. After taking one look at the size of that sucker, I pawned it off on the excellent freelance writer Andrew Ervin, who wrote:

"I'm not sure there's been a better Vietnam novel since William Eastlake's The Bamboo Bed. Honestly, I can't be sure that there's been a better American novel published in the past 10 years. Johnson understands the conflicts at the heart of the American psyche, and in Tree of Smoke he delivers the sort of historical novel that not only shows us where we've been but also shines a light on where we're going. It is a masterpiece."

Read Andrew's review here: http://www.miamiherald.com/215/v-print/story/232057.html

Other winners: Sherman Alexie won the award for young adult literature with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Robert Hass won for poetry with Time and Materials.

As if we don't have enough to read, Oprah

Oprah Winfrey has chosen Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth for her next book club pick, and while it is actually a shockingly entertaining novel - about one man's dedication to building a medieval cathedral, and yes, I know it sounds dull, but it is not - it's also roughly 14 million pages long. And in October, Follett published the sequel World Without End, which is roughly 15 million pages, so if you like the first one you're bound to want to read the second. So prepare to devote several years of your life to this project, should you choose to undertake it.