Odyssey Online

…with Bill Fox’s inauguration at hand and the air of celebration much about the autumnal scenes here at St. Lawrence, I thought it would be in the spirit of things to point to books written by our faculty that are home here in the St. Lawrence University Library Collections.  These folks are great teachers, they’re fine writers.  This is not a comprehensive list, but, rather, a sampling for an inauguration weekend:

• Rabbit (un)Redeemed: the Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction by Peter Bailey
• The Springfield Story: A Satire by Roy Caldwell
• El Interticio de la Colonia: Ruptura y Medicion en la Narrativa Antisclavista Cubana by Ilia Casanova-Marengo
• Los Corridos en la Memoria del Migranta by Martha Chew Sanchez
• Dream Season: A Professor Joins America’s Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team by Bob Cowser Jr.
• The Good Society: An Introduction to Comparative Politics by Alan Draper and Ansil Ramsey
• Shaping the Upper Canadian Fronteir: Environment, Society, and Culture in the Trent Valley by Neil Forkey
• Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: the Austrian Perspective by Steve Horiwitz
• Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myths of the Nuclear Family by Val Lehr
• African Studies and the Undergraduate Curriculum edited by Patricia Alden and David Lloyd
• The Sky is Not the Ceiling: An Astronomer’s Faith by Aileen O’Donoghue
• Freedom’s Promise: Ex Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation by Elizabeth Regosin
• Memory from a Broader Perspective by Alan Searleman and Douglas Herrmann
• Scraping by in the Big Eighties by Natalia Singer
• Economics as Moral Science: the Political Economy of Adam Smith by Jeffrey Young

…this just in, Atlantic Magazine has posted it’s list of the five essential cookbooks for anyone/everyone.  I’d add to the list several by the Frugal Gourmet…

…Anne Fadiman is an essayist, and is, simply put, a lot of fun to read.  She wrote a book titled Ex Libris about her (and her family’s) life long love of books.  It’s a great read, and in the last essay in this volume she recommends her favorite books about books, reading, and book collecting. This is a sampling of those titles that are here in ODY:

• Reading in Bed by John Wieners
• History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
• Kingdom of Books by William Dana Orcutt
• ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter
• A Gentle Madness, Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and an Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas Basbanes
• Size of Thoughts by Nicholson Baker
• The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Read on!

….this is banned books week…locally the Rensselaer Falls Library has organized an event for teens to think about what this means, and our friend Jessamyn West who writes the blog Librarian.net has a list of things on the web about banned books. Very useful.

The slogan over at Librarian.net is putting the ‘rarin back in librarian and for that reason alone you’ll find a link here under Other Blogs to Note…

…ah Friday and autumnal rain.  It was widely reported last week that Facebook has now a membership close to the population of the United States and for the first time, it turning a profit as a company (here is the CNN version of the story). And moving from social networking to social reading, Nina Siegal has offered an interesting essay call Thoughts on Bestsellers, which is about reading, readers, and the future of literature. It’s an analysis of the New York Times Best Seller list over the later part of the twentieth century, and this essay (which is long) is an usual but engaging mix of optimism and pessimism on the future of literary fiction.  Great reading for a rainy September Friday…

…while I spent much of the summer running up and down the shelves looking for books to recommend, it didn’t mean I wasn’t near obsessive about following blogs…couple of interesting pieces from that sphere…firstly a nicely titled Are Kindles and iPods the End of Culture Snobbery? which investigates…contrasts…books with content.  The piece also has an interesting take on how we translate people by what they read.  On a like topic the author of that piece, Derek Thompson, reports on Amazon’s trials and tribulations establishing the user-license that will to Kindle content bring. One of the elements to Kindle that may substantively change the human relation to discourse is whether, if the Kindle becomes norm, one will in fact own the book, I mean content, once it has been Kindle-ized.

Also, to file under knowing blogging, before retiring from Obsidian Wings Hilzoy (pen-name) wrote blogged Good to Know, a narrative about how an unsubstantiated report moves around the blog sphere. For all that is good about the “new journalism” which blogs create/inspire they are still a buyer beware market that beg critical reading…

…in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Steven Johnson says all things bibliographical will be possible with a Kindle and coming Kindles (while acknowledging that sustained linear reading might not be likley when reading by a Kindled fire…) and in todays New York Times Noam Cohen describes web content translated to paper. The result is an “opt out:”

In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as               artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers. This is print book as vinyl record — admired for its look and feel, its cover art, and relative permanence — but not so much for convenience.

…of course, one can make the case that ituned music listeners today don’t understanding what listening to an album meant…

…a couple of days ago the Boston Globe published a photo essay on used book stores in Boston. Glory.  With summer inching closer and closer the thought of old books a beach day reading is, well, enthralling.  Thoughts of Kindles and commentary on Kindles brings to mind, among other things, going to the bookstore. The experience of browsing in a bookstore, the mood, the drowsy anticipation, as one fingers books and decides how to spend an upcoming portion of one’s life as a reader.   Books out for sale across the north country soon, and from a card table on a lawn to one’s hands by the beach, used books are a great summer time thing.  Updike spoke on books and bookstores, lucidly, (of course), not too long ago…

…while Odyssey Online refrains from promoting products, a new aersol has come out that allows you to spray the small of old books on something. Something like a Kindle. So, for a few bucks, you can make your Kindle smell like a book. The sensory nature of reading has been beautifully documented by writers like E.B. White, Updike, Birkerts, Neal Postman, Eudora Welty…to name a few. It does rather raise the question about if one wanted to read something that smelled like a book…why not just simply read a book?

…more along this line tomorrow…

…over the last week or two there have been quite a number of articles (that is, quite a number in the streams of news through which I wade) on e-books. Notably the viability and curious lack of traction that e-books have had up until this point and time.  E-books are curious in that they evoke such strong reactions in some people. Even twenty-somethings I’ve met who invest a huge amount of time in Facebook, e-mail, and such might very well react with a wince when faced with the prospect of e-books–I’m not going to suggest that we don’t have our share of nonreading twenty-somethings, but a number I’ve met who’ll invest time in reading just don’t want anything to do with e-books. Could this change? Rob Horning in his blog makes the case that Kindle may not kindle any excitement, largely because ripping e-books doesn’t make sense in the way ripping music does. His point is that hard copy books are just to easy to lend…Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian makes the case that the Kindle’s slow development (and market share) have to do with the fact that noone is hacking it, and on Britannica Blog Nicholas Car worries that Kindles will make writing history “provisional” not “permanent.”

Google books has also been in the news. In a long New York Times Piece Robert Darnton thinks about the role of libraries and the public good in the age of Google Books (and for Mr. Darnton it’s pretty clearly a history dominated by Google books). He looks back to the enlightenment to suggest ways in which libraries can continue to have a role, be a public good (good Sunday morning reading!) Paul Courant responds to the article by cautioning that Google’s domination may be a monopolistic one, and, in a like vein, on “Books Do Furnish A Room” the case is made that Google now holds all the cards in the wake of their recent copyright settlement. Google has the arbitor of all digital books is, to say the least, an unappleaing idea…

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