William Richards' e-books

"These devices together represent about one hundred books—so far. My library ranges from Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo to Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy to Walter Hunt’s A Song in Stone. (Forgive the shameless self-promotion as they are all open to my own book…).

Bit by bit—literally as well as figuratively—I am converting my library over to digital. My paper books have become worn out. Most of them are paperbacks. Many of them are so old, the paper has become brittle to the point where pages can crumple away when being turned. It is not uncommon for me to open a book and end up with half a book in each hand. Also, I tend to travel quite a bit and slogging across a city with ten pounds of books in my backpack is not pleasant. Gone are the days of trying to decide between underwear or one more book in the suitcases.  My physical library is spread among several boxes and crates, rather than on bookshelves, due to the lack of space.

Switching to digital books is not easy. It is very uncomfortable at first, much like switching from one computer operating system to another. I spent over forty-five years holding books in a certain way; getting used to holding an ebook reader took time before I found a comfortable position. Presentation of your library on an ebook reader is not as nice as looking at a bunch of books on a shelf and selecting one; you have to flip through a list of titles before you get to the one you are looking for. All that aside, reading on an ebook reader is just as enjoyable as reading a paper book.

It really isn’t necessary to have more than one ebook reader. The reason I have so many is I use them as guinea pigs to test out the layout of a book before releasing it for sale. While an ebook should ideally render the same on one device or another, invariably the differences in how each device renders the text makes it necessary to test an ebook on each device to ensure that it is really working correctly. The devices pictured are the Nook Simple Touch, Kindle Paperwhite, iPhone 5, and the Kobo Glo. (Note: the Kindle is showing the cover image of my book, not the text. That’s why it looks hazy compared to the others.)"

The Best Blogs of 2012

YouTube link. 

The voting is now complete.  The blogs listed below (in no particular order) have been selected as the Best Blogs of 2012.  Click on the video to hear Freddy Mercury sing you a celebratory song while you peruse the list.

Tank Hughes writes the eponymous TankHughes.com: "I write enthusiastic posts about the history of words, I create a comic every Monday, I make short music playlists based on themes, and I think up odd useless projects."

Flask is the author of furthermore, flask, which "is simply my own story or part of my story, or at least a view from my window or hints about what's on my worktable... really. soon i am going to tell about beans, beans, fritos and cheese, and there will be pictures."

ScottyMo's Double Features pairs up the movies in his 600+ DVD collection and explains "why they work together, and what they mean to me. Posts are usually succinct and amusing."

Tyler Hewitt has two blogs; his Lightbender is "'a journal of the creative process', which basically means that I show and talk about my work (both in-process and finished pieces) and occasionally post about other interesting art related things," and at A Photo A Day he posts original photographic work.

Setecq, by Seth, contains "largely my photos of things around NYC, along with interesting reading, creations by friends, and miscellany."

Theory Fighter is "a blog about video game design, theory, and criticism. We are focused on initiating intellectual discourse about games and other media of interests.  I mostly cover video game related events that I attend (lectures, seminars, workshops). There isn't much coverage of these events in the blogosphere."

Maia uses Traveling Maia to document her travels "(mostly to Europe and South Seas) by boat and bike, with snippets/curiosities/observations about food, science, snark, and other.

Zhoen explores the world One Word at a time, via "essays, meanderings and mutterings, lots of cat photos. That's all, really. No point, no agenda, very personal."

At Books As Portable Pieces of Thoughts, Anachronist presents "book and movie reviews, mainly for my own sadistic pleasure. I've also written several historical and cultural essays. It is a form of a treatment, I am weird, I know."

Tread Life, by Jerry Smith is the best motorcycle blog in this list: "It's about motorcycles, which I started riding in 1968, and now and then it's about writing about motorcycles for a living, which I've done since 1980. Also some stuff about dogs. Some curveballs, too."

forMYinformation, by trickpa, is an "accumulator" blog which "collects things off the net that interest me. Mostly humor and posts I'd like to refer back to."

Lady Aritê gunê Akasa is in the Society for Creative Anachronism (a living history group) and has a Sarmatian persona (one of the Eurasian steppe nomad cultures). Sarmation in the SCA is where she is compiling everything she learns about them plus her other experiences in the SCA.

The Town Scryer is described by jaundicedi as "a mixed bag of humor, socio-political observations and ephemera from the perspective of a eclectic Pagan veteran of the counter-culture."

Twelve Mile Circle is an appreciation of unusual places. It's all about spots on the map that just don’t seem to make sense. Highpoints, non-contiguous boundaries, latitude/longitude confluences, and other trivial geographic facts are all fair game for my adventures.

Frank Kasell reports "I'm just finishing up a trip through China to research a book about Chinese street food.  A Field Guide to Chinese Street Food, is the companion piece to the future book. The blog includes reviews of Chinese street food (I've now eaten the street food in 53 cities in 32 of the 33 Chinese provinces), information about travel in China, and other bits of mostly relevant information I find interesting."

At CascadeExposures.com Jan posts her "own photos Mon-Fri, with little or no commentary. They're mostly stuff from my garden, places around the northwest, or anything else that I see and like."

Dora is the author of My Idea of Paradise.   "Becoming a mom in recent years has brought a whole new perspective to my work as a pediatrician. This blog is my way of sharing those experiences with others. Most of the topics are child/family focused and are meant to help, inspire, or amuse its readers."

You can read James Comins' novels (!) and short stories at his Smashwords website.

Let's Go (いきましょう) is Beckey Mulkey's blog following her family's life and adventures in Okinawa, Japan.

Seth Wilson is an artist, animator, teacher, and blogger.  Inkfumes Sketchbook is his "personal blog for illustrations, doodles and sketches. No digital stuff, mostly scans from my sketchbooks and what not."

Offbeat Home, by Cat Rocketship, offers "homey inspiration and advice for offbeat occupants."

Another home-related blog is That Crazy American Housewife by Britney, which posts "recipes, crafts, activities, and.. well, its random."

Bradd Libby blogs about "PEER issues (Population, Economics, Environment, Resources), though occasionally about physics and chickens and Google and such."

David Crews – Essays, Poems, & Musings on Life, Spirit, Entheogens, and What Is Real is "a philosophical and arts blog for my writing, pro photography, travel, poetry, digital artwork, and more," including his experiences with Amazonian shamanism.

DeeSaturate, by Dee Cunniffe contains "bits and bobs about comics, toys, movies and process. I've recently become involved in the comic creation process (flatting and colours) - so I share the things I learn from being a newbie in comics world."

Tanveer Ahmed uses The Beachcomber's Delight as "a repository of tales, links , extracts,poetry, photographs and quotes I come across while surfing ( anything that could make people go hmmm.. or make them smile)."

Dan Lewis' Now I Know is an emailed newsletter "the purpose of which is "to share something new, interesting about the world, each morning. Like the fact that carrots used to be purple, or that Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service the day he was fatally shot, or that there's an island of hyper-poisonous snakes off the coast of Brazil."

Endomental and I {heart} Rhody are companion blogs, the latter focusing on the state of Rhode Island - "the smallest state geographically, but it has so much to offer in food, history, culture and natural beauty. We want to see it all and share it with our readers."

William D. Richards established A Writer's Chronicles as "a place where I could comment about the process of writing and publishing my books... It serves to help me clear my mind of miscellaneous thoughts before writing and I hope might be a point of reference and education for anyone considering following the path of becoming a writer."

In her spare time, when she is not managing Neatorama or writing for Mental Floss, Miss Cellania posts "funny found stuff, with a few serious links" at Miss Cellania; she has written over 4,000 posts in seven years - a remarkable and enjoyable archive to browse.

If you're interested in reviews of beer, you can find hundreds of them at cjemmott's Five Thousand and One Beers.

Madeline's blog is Octopuses - ""a humorous blog by a Virginia girl" (with a pinch of marine biology), though my camera skills have increased infinitityfold!"

Dr. Mieke and her family were among the first visitors ever at TYWKIWDBI.  Her "home blog" is The Grange: a small farm in the Northern Rivers area of NSW.  For her professional work as a social psychologist specialised in interpersonal & intercultural communication she set up a blog for Master's students focusing on the management of technological systems for hotels, conventions and events.

Criggo is a premier humor blog which is on my regular reading list and to which I have linked a dozen times over the years.  It highlights "bad newspaper articles/headlines/advertisements.

Teacher Rich maintains The Frustrated Teacher, a blog about "eduwars," politics, and lots of editorial cartoons, which I occasionally harvest.

Flippism is the Key, by Professor Batty, "has been exploring all things strange thought to be common and all things common found to be strange since 2004. Special emphasis on Icelandic culture, photo-illustrations, a weekly cartoon and serial fiction."

Lauren Villarama's blog, a wee i,  "is mostly about my life's little tidbits, nothing too serious. I have pages on my film photographs and sketches, just a few of my interests."

~im just only me~ maintains two blogs. "Caught in the Dawning is just a collection of my poetry from over the years, with links to some of my favorite blogs. What may be more interesting is my other blog Cabbages and Kings wherein I post random art and drawings from time to time."

Mikeb302000 is "mainly about gun control, but I post quite a bit about liberal politics and every once in a while something of general interest and amazement."

GDad is the author of Cranial Hyperossification.  "I started my blog as an exploration of the adoption process from the perspective of a gay man. Now, the posts are sort of all over the board."

bulletholes writes Bulletholes in the Mailbox - "a journal, a notebook and stories of things I’ve done and people I’ve met. I don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, but a lot of my stories need very little embellishment. I written about some hard things, and written myself out of some dark places too."

Once There Were Lions is teacher Scott Lilley's blog "about ecology, biology, education, natural history, technology, current events, environmental science, and other things that happen to fall into the large Venn diagram where those things occasionally overlap."

EMC lives on the island of Shikoku in Japan, and his blog, Tiny Reactors, "is about that, and about things I am reading or trying to read in Japanese, and the places I go in this out-of-the-way place, and the things I do."

Paperworker has created Regular Paper - "a visual blog with personal collage work."

"Language lover and linguist-in-training" Allison's blog is Polyglossic -"As a future scholar I'm particularly interested in endangered language preservation and revitalization, but as a person I'm also a little addicted to learning languages and to writing and literature, so all of these things get featured on my blog. I also have a weekly feature on Fridays where a native speaker gets to show off his or her language in a short audio clip and text."

Elly Vortex has had the good fortune to move to the majestic North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota.  This year she started Tales of the Witch of November in order to blog about about "my hiking, biking, and snowshoeing adventures. I'm planning to hike much of the Superior Hiking Trail this year, visit many state parks, and do some road races on my bike. I also write about weird and interesting stuff I find on the North Shore."

Bird in the Machine, by emj, is a chronicle of an American family's life in rural England.

Piera's "fandom-related" tumblr, This Tumblr Pwns N00bs, includes "the occasional sciencey, arty, history-y, or otherwise good-quality post."

Veuve describes Illustrated Obscurity as being "mostly about art, politics, culture, and random things that interest me. I also have a link to my art on the blog."

Cindy Kilpatrick, a K-12 librarian, maintains three blogs.  Going Beyond Survival in a School Library should be self-explanatory.  On and Over the Hills features her photography, and The Nature of the Hills is "more of a catalog than a blog as I attempt to record the flora and fauna specific to the unique high-altitude ecosystem of my home region" [in Alberta].

UrsaRodinia writes a newsletter (news, jokes, videos & links gleaned from the internet) rather than a blog; its contents are sometimes cited online in Eideard.

The Wild Edge is Kirk's blog about "my photography, and a little bit about my life in Maine and other things that occasionally gets my interest."

Every story at T. Purton's 200 Word Stories has 200 words, and when complete, the blog will also have 200 stories.  His accumulator blog is Disappointing Children.

Dietetic Sinners, by Heather, is a personal blog about "food I cook, the craft projects I mess up and the things I buy (candle sand storage containers) and my life in gen'l."

Sets of Nine is jonfen's tumblr in which the images of "contemporary art with occasionally smut, nature, memes and history topics" are arranged... well, take a guess...

It seemed like a good idea at the time is Funder's blog "about endurance riding with my Tennessee Walking Horse in the mountains of Nevada, but there's a healthy proportion of non horse stuff too."

Jonathan Holmes uses Crait's Lunchbox "to release my free programs and games that I program. I also post what influences my design and coding process...(and) I post about technology news, chickens, music, and I play rugby [on an undefeated state champion team], so I post about that, too."

From Finland comes Ennen oli paremmin- "about old photos and kind of funny little stories. Nothing too serious, I guess."

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann compiles "random thoughts about about Free Software, technology, and travel to the weirder destinations on Earth" in his blog.

Robs Webstek is "a kind of magazine style collection of things I like and subjects that fascinate me. It’s a mix of old photos (for instance daguerreotypes), paintings, maps, actresses, etc" collected by Rob From Amersfoort.

The posts in Philip Graham's eponymous blog "concentrate on issues of craft in the writing of fiction and nonfiction, and also focus on the creative arts in general... One recent post, "What Casablanca Can Teach a Writer," was a finalist for the 3QuarksDaily website's 2012 Arts & Literature Prize."

Buttonmashing is Tony's blog about video games.

Kat from California writes Kat's Almost Purrfect World, about Barbie dolls and to "share free vintage images, craft tutorials, recipes, images from my daily life and more."

Bill's blog, Practicing Resurrection, is "mainly about life on our farm [White Flint Farm, in Virginia], peppered with frequent quotes and poems from Wendell Berry."

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  - 

The end.  Uff da!  I have visited all 71 of these blogs; they vary from the casual hobby blog to the sophisticated professional website, and the content is obviously all over the place.  Only the most uncurious reader will not find one or two links to explore.  I've added a couple to my bookmarks.

I'll close with some administrative notes.  First of all, bloggers, please proof-read the entry about you and notify me re any corrections needed on the typography of your blog's title (spelling, caps), any incorrect links, and any misinterpretations by me re your gender, nationality, or the nature of your blog.  No need to affirm correctness or to write thank-you notes.  Don't expect a surge of visits, because many readers of this blog will already have stopped by during this past week after reading your listing comment.

Now, about the title, video, and introductory sentence of this post... On a whim, I decided to convert the list of blogs to a list of "winning entries" in an imaginary contest.  Why not?  It's a little misleading, but I tried to make it technically correct by having "voting" on the outcome (one voter - me), and by eliminating one obviously inappropriate blog entry (thus making these the 71 "best" of the 72 entries). 

The other advantage of titling the post as I did relates to Google searches.  For whatever reason (probably related to links in and out), TYWKIWDBI posts often rank high in Google searches of words in the titles of the posts (less so re content).  I'm hoping that later on, after it gets indexed, if someone searches Google for the "best blogs" of 2012, this post will wind up on the front page, and you guys may continue to get some traffic for the rest of the year.  Perhaps not.  We'll see what happens.*

If I do this again next year, I may set it up with actual (and probably silly) "categories" (Best Blog about Farms in Virginia, Best Guide to Chinese Street Food, etc.)

These closing administrative comments will be erased next week.

*So far, so good.  A Google search for "best blogs" (in quotes) + 2012 shows this post as #7 out of 43,000,000.  For "best blogs of 2012" this is #1 out of 17,000.

The Weaving One's library

"This is my library - the room I promised myself when I was just learning to read and realized I wanted my own books, not hand-me-downs or loans from the library. The only change I made for the picture was to shift my reading lamp out of the way.

Fiction (the first four shelves) is sorted by author, by publication date, except for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series which are in best-guessed chronological Darkover time, and the Star Trek books where author doesn’t really matter. Reference, non-fiction, and YA are on the fifth shelf, and the sixth shelf holds books I haven’t read yet. I read one, decide whether I keep it or not, and then shelve it or send it away. I don’t buy many paperbacks any more - I find them too difficult to read since my eyesight is poor. It took a long time, but I can now not finish a book. I don’t have time to read bad books any more.

I keep books I want to revisit, and I rarely lend - I don’t think I ever got past the selfish “this is my book and you can’t have it!” stage of my development. Too many not returned, or even worse, returned damaged. I’ll buy another copy and send it to someone if I really think they’ll love it.

The chair belonged to my mom’s mother, the rugs belonged to my father’s. The shelves are filled with treasures acquired on travels, at auctions, or (in the case of the Star Trek ephemera) gifts from friends and family. It is the only room in the house that doesn’t have a computer, stereo, or working timepiece. The clock on the top right was rebuilt by my dad, but I’ve never been able to get the weights re-adjusted so it runs anything but slow, so I wind it once a year just to keep it exercised.

What most people don’t know about me: I’ve been poor enough to go hungry but still found money to buy books. I have books I read at least once a year. I can read a paperback a dozen times without anyone being able to tell it has even been open. I have another book shelf in my living room with several of those green grocer bags stashed next to it - the bags are so if the house catches fire, I can get the books on it out of the house before everything else goes. And yes, I’ve timed it."

---The Weaving One

Lars' bookshelves

"I live in the house my grandparents bought in July 1929.  It was already over 100 at the time of their purchase.  If there is any common thread to my bookshelves, it is this: built-in. 

The panels that form the room facing side walls of the bookcases were from a massive pocket door.  I recut it to keep as much of the original stain/varnish as possible, then stain-matched modern hardwood plywood and vintage oak to complete the shelving.  It now houses board games and a collection of comic collections and coffee table size books; the other end holds photo albums and some items still in boxes that we hope to home properly in the coming year.  Beneath is a leather seating area with 2 side cushions atop a twin mattress to accommodate 2 readers sitting feet toward each other with a view of the squirrels romping on the grape arbor out the window.

Nearby is the smallest bookcase - a little space formed between a recently installed  faux raised panel alcove sized for a 1916 upright piano and a pocket door to the stairwell/front entry.   Currently only holding a Finnish English dictionary, collection of DVDs, and a plaster sculpture my grandfather made and my mom modeled for.  Intent is to use the incomplete bottom space for housing some forward-facing children's books in reach for our granddaughter to discover when she visits.  The organic shaped shelves were cut from salvaged maple shelving units discarded from my work -  academic building - in a lab remodel.

Upstairs.  At the head of the stairs, a narrow floor to ceiling shelving unit that rests on a wall within the very solid structure of one of the main bents of the timber frame. this is inboard of the earlier bookcases my grandfather installed.   These shelves are very early IKEA units purchased from the first IKEA store located beyond the Nordic countries (Germany) and shipped to USA in the 1970s.  

This shelving system  holds many of my pop reading pleasures and a portion my brother aptly named "The Incendiary Bookshelf." Here I house some of the oddities that were among my grandparents' many books.  L Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, pamphlets on surviving nuclear attack, socialist & communist tracts, Anne Frank's Diary, U.S. constitution, my copy of Local Literary Hero Nabokov’s Lolita  and... trigger warning... texts of Adolf Hitler. Neither of those were from my grandparents collection, but rather turned up in boxes my mother received in her role as library book sale coordinator.  I culled these from that event to see what was inside.  Only made it 90 pages in before I was so repulsed I could no longer tolerate turning a page to read what was printed.  I did not want these to end up in locations/hands where they could be held in high regard. As such, I have them flank Anne Franks diary and sit adjacent to the Socialist texts in a “dead letter bin" of sorts.  

Lastly, the bookcase that faces into our bedroom and is similarly housed in one of the main timber frame bents of the house.  These shelves were built from a vintage cabinet that once was used for the faculty mail slots in the Cornell physics department near my offices.  The cabinet inner partition dividers were made of stained tulipwood with grooves to hold thin tulipwood dividers for each slot. Cut down, those now support glass shelves for display and solid wood ones for books.  Housed here edge of left side upper shelf is a book I found on my parents shelves.  Had never seen it until my 30s.  It was inscribed to me at my birth by my grandfather as the first of many books I might someday own.  Glad we opened that cover when going through their collection."

Searching text within books in your own library

Most web users are at least marginally aware of Google Books. I frankly had not been aware that the site has a "my library" feature, which allows you to import the books you have on your own bookshelves. You can do this by searching Google Books for the title you have and then clicking "add to my library," or you can go to your library list, click import books, and type in the ISBN. The video above also shows that with a handheld scanner (or using your computers webcam and appropriate software) to can rapidly add large numbers of books to the database.

The advantage of compiling "your library" in this fashion is, of course, that when you search Google Books for a keyword or phrase or topic, you can opt to search only the books you already have at home. Nice.

Info found at The Centered Librarian, a blog created by/for librarians but of interest to any serious bibliophile.

Blogging as a preparation for dementia

I believe I started "rating" or assigning "grades" to books and movies about 30 years ago, as I was reading my way through the Agatha Christie canon.

In the era before the internet, I was cruising the used-book stores in Lexington, Kentucky trying to obtain paperback copies of all the Agatha Christie murder mysteries (I eventually found all 66).  As I read my way through the series, I realized that while some were outstanding (Roger Ackroyd, obviously) and would be worth a reread in later years after I had forgotten the details, others were eminently forgettable (think "Tommy and Tuppence").  So, I kept a list, rating each book on a scale from 4+ (outstanding) down to 1+ (poor).  My plan was that when I was old and retired and had more leisure time, I would reread these, starting with the 4+ and working down from there.

I then extended this scheme to the books of the Time Reading Program series; I couldn't find some of the more obscure issues until the internet was created, but I finally read them all, and kept only the dozen or so that have "4+" pencilled inside the cover.  From there it spread to all the books I was reading, so I now have "Books Read" lists as far back as 1988.

Finally, in 2006, I decided to use the ratings for movies.  It's not hard to do; the system is crude but effective:

4+   Excellent, worth watching/reading again someday.
3+   Very good.  o.k. to recommend, but don't watch until finishing the 4+s.
2+   So-so.  Don't recommend and don't rewatch.
1+   Terrible.  Advise friends to avoid if they ask.

I've been doing this with movies for six years now, almost all of them viewed on cable channels or from library DVDs, rather than in theaters.  Of the 600+ on the list so far, there are about 50 rated 4+, about 200 rated 3+, about 250 rated 2+, and about 100 rated 1+.

In the 1980s, I thought doing all this was a way to get ready for a leisurely retirement, but now that I'm actually in my retirement, I find myself still reading new books and watching new movies and not using the ratings -- yet.  It was just in this past year that I've realized what the lists are really good for:  they will help me tolerate dementia if/when it happens.

This past year I've spent increasing amounts of time helping my mother cope with the new onset of dementia, manifested primarily as a loss of short-term memory.  She's 93 years old, so it's not presenile Alzheimer's, and presumably not hereditary, but the experience has keyed me in toward thinking more about my future several decades from now (should I be fortunate enough to live that long).

I've noticed that my mom can get great enjoyment out of reading a book, then will put it on a shelf or table, and perhaps a week later when I ask if I can take the book back to the library, she'll ask "What book is that?" "It's the one about pioneer settlement in the Midwest."  "Oh, that sounds good.  Can you leave it here while I read it?"  "Ummm, sure..."  And she'll get great enjoyment out of it again.

So now I have my lists, and I'm ready, if/when dementia starts to develop, to begin re-reading and re-watching my favorite books and movies.

But now there's one more consideration:  TYWKIWDBI.  For the last 4+ years I've been storing stuff here I thought was interesting.  Later this year the archive will reach 10,000 posts.  A lot of them now have dead links, and lots of the YouTube videos have been pulled.  Others are no longer of interest because the material was political or economic or dependent on a situation that no longer exists.  And some, frankly, just don't interest me any more.  But there's lots of good stuff.

So here's my plan:  If/when I start to sense the beginnings of dementia (or when my wife tells me it has started), I'm going to stop writing, and go through this blog to select out perhaps a thousand posts and reblog them into "The Best of TWYKIWDBI."  That would be reading material for about a month.  I'll read through that blog every month, again selecting the best stuff - perhaps a hundred - and when the situation warrants, I'll assemble them into a third blog of "the very best" material which I can then look at every week, thinking I'm seeing new material.

I just hope I never have to distill that last group down into the best dozen posts, to be looked at every day...


Addendum:  I wasn't going to list my 4+ movies in this post, because my ratings are totally arbitrary and dependent on personal interests and biases, and because my opinion might have been influenced by variable degrees of intoxication during viewing.  But... as I was proofreading this post I looked for my list of ratings for the Agatha Christies, and to my utter dismay - I can't find it!  And many of the books don't have ratings pencilled inside.  I'll keep searching, but for the moment this reminds me that everything important in life needs to be backed up, so I'll store my list of 4+ movies here for now.  You're welcome to browse.

84 Charing Cross Road, All the Kings Men (2006), An Affair to Remember, As Good as it Gets, Brief Encounter, Brother Can You Spare a Dime, Cinema Paradiso, Da Vinci Code, Das Leben der Anderen, Dirty Pretty Things, Everest (Beck Weathers interview), Face/Off, Fahrenheit 911, Fair Game (2010), Girl Interrupted, God Grew Tired of Us, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, Hot Shots, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Juno, Million Dollar Baby, Miss Potter, Nanking, Never Let Me Go, No Way Out, Once Upon a Time in the West, Pan’s Labyrinth, Pay It Forward, Peter and the Wolf (Templeton), Planet Earth series, Stardust, State of Play (BBC miniseries), Storm over Everest, Sunshine, Temple Grandin, Tender Mercies, The Bourne Identity, The CCC [Amer. Experience], The Civil War (Ken Burns), The Cove, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Departed, The English Patient, The Fall,The Kite Runner, The New World [Pocohontas], The Pat Tillman Story, The Polar Express,The Pursuit of Happyness, The Shawshank Redemption, The Turning Point, The U.S. vs. John Lennon, The Usual Suspects, The White Countess, Up, Why We Fight.

For librarians (and ex-librarians)

When I was in college I earned my spending money working as a librarian (and had a room quite
literally above the library).  So I was delighted to see a review in the Washington Post discussing a new book about... card catalogs.

This book about card catalogues, written and published in cooperation with the Library of Congress, is beautifully produced, intelligently written and lavishly illustrated. It also sent me into a week-long depression. If you are a book lover of a certain age, it might do the same to you.

“The Card Catalog” is many things: a lucid overview of the history of bibliographic practices, a paean to the Library of Congress, a memento of the cherished card catalogues of yore and an illustrated collection of bookish trivia. The text provides a concise history of literary compendiums from the Pinakes of the fabled Library of Alexandria to the advent of computerized book inventory databases, which began to appear as early as 1976. The illustrations are amazing: luscious reproductions of dozens of cards, lists, covers, title pages and other images guaranteed to bring a wistful gleam to the book nerd’s eye.

For someone who grew up in and around libraries, it is also a poignant reminder of a vanished world.

Now, waxing nostalgic about card catalogues or being an advocate for the importance of libraries is a mug’s game. You can practically feel people glancing up from their iPhones to smile tolerantly at your eccentricity. My response to this, after an initial burst of profanity, is to explain (again) why libraries are essential to narrowing the inequality gap, and why the Internet is not an adequate substitute for books or libraries.

“The Card Catalog” is a heady antidote to the technophilia threatening our culture. The book is especially illuminating on the powerful, if overlooked, properties of the humble catalogue card, some 79 million of which were printed annually at the system’s peak in 1969. Each one is a perfect melding of design and utility, a marvel of informational compression and precision.

After college, while I was in graduate school, I started my own "card catalogue," visiting a university library weekly to transcribe references in professional journals onto literally tens of thousands of 3"x5" lined cards, which I filed in cabinets in my office - a handy source for information in the preparation of lectures.  Then the internet arrived...

I'll close this post with a quote from Annie Proulx:

I mourn the loss of the old card catalogs, not because I’m a Luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitous surprise through encounters with adjacent cards, information by chance that is different in kind from the computer’s ramified but rigid order.

I've requested this new book from our local library (only 4 people ahead of me on the wait list).

Photo (of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Library card catalog) via Librarianista.

Summarize your life in six words

That is the premise of a book published by the editors of Smith magazine. I had heard the book discussed on the BBC one morning and had to wait months to get it from our library, but it was worth the wait - a delightful read. The editors/authors asked famous and ordinary people to sum up their lives in exactly six words. The results range from humorous to clever to sardonic to frankly poignant. Herewith some of my favorites:

Followed yellow brick road. Disappointment ensued.
I thought I was someone else.
Wanted world, got world plus lupus.
Tragical childhood can lead to wisdom.
I recognize red flags faster, now.
Nothing profound, I just sat around.
Found true love, married someone else.
Macular degeneration. Didn’t see that coming.
As a child, nomadic. Now static.
No words can describe my life.
Afraid of becoming like my mother.
Two boys, my life, conquering autism.
Lost and found, rescued by dog.
Can’t tonight, watching Law and Order.
My life’s a bunch of almosts.
Thought I would have more impact.
At the end of normal street.
Found great happiness in insignificant details.
Still lost on road less traveled.
Everyone who loved me is dead.
The car accident changed my life.
No wife, No kids. No problem.
Boys liked her. She preferred books.
Never really finished anything, except cake.
Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends.
I fell far from the tree.
Alone at home, cat on lap.
Educated too much, lived too little.
Full life; impossible to summarize in…
My second grade teacher was right.
Became my mother. Please shoot me.
Can’t read all the time. Bummer.
I wrote a poem. Nobody cared.
Working with what God gave me.
Same mistakes. Over and over again.
Still trying to impress my dad.
So devastated, no babies for me.
Thank God the suicide attempt failed.
Made labor-saving software: thousands unemployed.
Unfortunately, there was no other way.
Expected prime rib. Ended with hamburger.
Father, son, both hit by cars.
Veni, Vidi, but haven’t vici yet.
I came, I saw, I concurred.
Dead mom watching. I’ll be good.
Type A personality. Type B capability.
Carries flask for unsociable social events.
Polio gave me my happy life.
Loved home. Left to make sure.
There will be no beautiful corpse.

The book is “Not Quite What I Was Planning; Six-word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.” From Smith magazine (edited by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith).

Addendum:  Found this 2008 post while searching for something else; decided it was worth a bump to the front page.

Reposted from 2020 for the same reason.  Readers feel free to summarize you life in six words in a comment.

Ionut's books

"First of all, I know this it's far too affected to name these three books a "library," but that's what they are for me. Poor them, they don't even have a place of their own yet.

I relocated from Romania to the UK three months ago and unfortunately books aren't among the things you can bring with you in such an exodus. However, in accord with the radical change of scenery, language included, I have decided to start a new library from scratch. I too am devoted to that catchphrase that the library is the window to a person, and it is a wonderful and exhilarating feeling to start a new library in a new place.

For the moment, it contains just a Romanian-English dictionary, the only book I had brought with me from Romania, and which I sometimes beg to no avail to show me some light in this bizarre language of yours; then Richard Wilhelm's I Ching, which I constantly study; and The Waste Books of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. The other two, Genghis Khan by John Man and Tropic of Capricorn by Simon Reeve are some "easy non-fiction" from the local library, and which is my version of escapist literature in the afternoon or evening, after strenuous mental activity in the morning.

It will be a pleasure to watch this new library grow, with impulsive additions as well as some necessary, well calculated "adornments" (meaning those books I will not read with urgency, but which have to be there) and everything fitting in like pieces of a puzzle, creating in time some kind of mirror in which I can look and always see my true self. Next on the list is a beautifully illustrated edition of H. C. Andersen, who will always be one of my favorite writers; van Gogh's letters; and some Borges."

---Ionut

"I'm proposing to make my school a prison"

A only-slightly-tongue-in-cheek suggestion by Nathan Bootz, superintendent of public schools in Ithaca, Michigan.

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!

His full, open letter to the governor of Michigan is here.  Via Daily Kos.

The joys of exploring the OED

My acquaintance with the Oxford English Dictionary began in college when my part-time job was in a house library, manning the checkout desk. Near my desk was the multivolume, red-bound 1960s version. When students weren’t using the library (which was quite frequently), I had the satisfaction of being paid $1.50/hour while browsing through the OED.

It was probably 5 years or so later that the compact edition was released – 16,000 pages compressed using such an unimaginably small font that I needed the magnifying glass even when I was younger. It was one of my first book purchases when I was in graduate school, and I have kept that compact OED in my office ever since.

So it was with some interest that this year I encountered a flurry of online reviews of a book entitled Reading the OED. One Man, One Year, 21,730 pages, by Ammon Shea (Penguin Books, NY, 2008). Our library had 4 copies and only 6 requests, so it was available rather quickly.

I'm probably one of the few reviewers to offer an unenthusiastic assessment of the book. As a scholarly work, it's frankly underwhelming. It's a quick read - only 223 pages in a relatively large font, with a dozen pages left totally blank (when I see that I always suspect publishers of padding, but perhaps there’s a typographical reason for needing to start each chapter on the recto rather than the verso.)

The book is formatted into 26 chapters (you can guess the chapter titles), each with 3-4 pages of seemingly random thoughts about books, dictionaries, lexicographers, or the author’s often curmudgeonly approach to his personal life. If you want to learn about the OED itself, there are better sources, including Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, or perhaps his The Meaning of Everything.

The principal value in Shea's book is his selection of interesting words – again 3-4 pages per chapter with a couple dozen words accompanied by abbreviated definitions. Even here the author inserts a rather misanthropic view of interpersonal relationships, especially with regard to children. But the words themselves are a joy to encounter. As Shea acknowledges, these are not words to “know” in the sense that one would want to use them in conversation or even in writing; there’s satisfaction enough in just knowing the words exist.

Herewith some of my favorites...

Agathokakological – “made up of both good and evil.” Which prompted me to look up the “agatha” part, because obviously the “kako” part was the evil (think “caca”). And sure enough, there it was in Greek: alpha/gamma/alpha/theta/omicron/sigma = good. From which an “agathodemon” is a good deity, and “agathism” is the idea that everything tends toward a good outcome [interestingly, not the same as “optimism” which implies that all things are CURRENTLY for the best – I never knew that]. And of course this new knowledge gives me an appreciation for Agatha Christie’s parents’ naming skills.

Ambisinistrous – “having two left hands; clumsy.” The literal (but unappreciated) opposite of “ambidextrous” which is used as “skilled with both hands” but etymologically means both hands are right hands.

Apricity – “the warmth of the sun in winter.” Because “apricate” is Latin for “to bask in the sun.”

Atrate – “one dressed in black.” One dressed in scarlet is “coccinate” and in purple is “porpate.”

Balaamite – “one who is religious for the sake of monetary gain.”

Bayard – “a person armed with the self-confidence of ignorance.” I certainly would like to work this into a blog post. Wish I had known about it during the pre-election season.

Consenescence – “growing old together.” A wonderful term applicable to marital bliss if one ignores the second meaning of “general decay.”

-ee suffixes – a "beatee" is someone who has been beaten, boree is one who is bored, a "flingee" is a person at whom something is flung, a "gazee" one who is stared at, and a "laughee" someone who is laughed at. With Thanksgiving coming later this week, remember that a “sornee” is “one who has been sponged upon by others for free food or lodging.”

Gobemouche – “one who believes anything, no matter how absurd.” Definitely blogworthy.

(more later. It's getting late)

Reposted from 2008 (!) to add information about this book:

Sarah Ogilvie is a linguist and lexicographer who currently teaches at Oxford University.  She wrote this book in part to fulfill James Murray's 1892 request that "lovers of our language will not willingly let die the names of those who, from unselfish devotion and service to that language, have laboured in the cause of the Dictionary."

Twenty-six chapters (of course) present brief biographies of the "ordinary people" around the world who sent in the little slips of paper that Murray and his team in the Scriptorium compiled into the OED.  Those readers included vicars, lunatics, suffragists, murderers, and New Zealanders.  Herewith some interesting anecdotes:

"If we define best contributor or OED Reader in terms of number of slips, then the outright winner was a mysterious character called Thomas Austin Jnr who sent Dr. Muarray an incredible total of 165,061 over the span of a decade.  Second place goes to William Douglas of Primrose Hill [151,982/22 years]... Third to Dr. Thomas Nadauld Brushfield of Devon [70,277/28 years]... with Dr William Chester Minor of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum coming in fourth place with 62,720 slips.  Dr. Minor was not the only one in a mental asylum - all four were, for some period or another, suggesting a connection between word obsession and madness."

"Writing in his journal, [Arctic explorer] Richardson recorded that they soon ran out of provisions and had to survive by searching for small amounts of tripe de roche (lichen), even resorting to eating their moccasin boots... They scavenged for old bedding made of deer skins that the indigenous peoples of the region had discarded the previous winter... but most of them are rotten... those that contain the larvae of the oestrus [warble fly] are most prized by us, and eagerly sought after..."

"... as [Teena Rochfort-Smith] struck a match, the head flew off and set fire to a needlework mat.  Teena threw it down and stamped on it.  She put out the mat but did not notice that the bustle of her dress had caught fire, and, as she moved, it lit the lace curtains.  She first tried to put out the curtains, and then her own dress.  When this failed, and being unable to undo her corset, she raced downstairs and ran outside.  The was fully alight and her dress was melting into her skin and flesh... She suffered fits of delirium and agony for six days [before her death]."

"... the gigantic verb take... took up forty columns and was the longest entry in the Dictionary at the time. (Though it was overtaken by set which was published two years later; and today, at 586 senses, take ranks as the third longest entry after the verbs go (603 senses) and fun (654 senses)."

Lots of stories, plus lots of diversions to discuss groups of words, and where these readers found them.  This is not a book for everyone, but those who enjoy the OED will take much pleasure from browsing it.  

It's not the large-print edition - updated

It's a facsimile version of the original (Diet Mt. Dew for size...)

I last read this book back in 1996 and had it on my mental list of books to reread "someday."  As I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog, as one gets older the possible choices of "someday" start to narrow, so I've decided it's time.  When I looked at our library listings, I was delighted to find that this reproduction of the 1937 edition was available...

... with all of the original illustrations.

There is a waiting list, so I have just this month to consume the 871 pages.  So I'd better get started...

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night..."

Addendum:   It took me two months of very intermittent reading, but I've finished the book (and thoroughly enjoyed it).  Herewith some excerpts, memorable passages, curious turns of phrase, and interesting words:

"We accordingly went up a wonderful old staircase; with a balustrade so broad that we might have gone up that, almost as easily; and into a shady old drawing-room, lighted by some three or four of the quaint windows I had looked up at from the street: which had old oak seats in them, that seemed to have come of the same trees as the shining oak floor, and the great beams in the ceiling. It was a prettily furnished room, with a piano and some lively furniture in red and green, and some flowers. It seemed to be all old nooks and corners; and in every nook and corner there was some queer little table, or cupboard, or bookcase, or seat, or something or other, that made me think there was not such another good corner in the room; until I looked at the next one, and found it equal to it, if not better. On everything there was the same air of retirement and cleanliness that marked the house outside." (Chapter 15 at the Wickfield residence, describing a room I would love to live in).

The word "picnic" is recurrently hyphenated as "pic-nic."  Wiktionary indicates that the etymology is from a hypenated French word: pique-nique, from piquer (to pick) and nique (small thing) to refer to a meal eaten outdoors.  The seque there is a bit obscure to me.

"... made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs' window."  (Chapter 1).  "Pair of stairs" was a term for a flight of stairs, so the reference appears to be to a second-floor window, not a pair of windows.

"I sat looking at Peggotty for some time, in a reverie on this suppositious case: whether, if she were employed to lose me like the boy in the fairy tale, I should be able to track my way hone again by the buttons she would shed."  Based on supposision; imaginary.

"Our old neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Grayper, were gone to South America, and the rain had made its way through the roof of their empty house, and stained the outer walls. Mr. Chillip was married again to a tall, raw–boned, high–nosed wife; and they had a weazen little baby, with a heavy head that it couldn't hold up, and two weak staring eyes, with which it seemed to be always wondering why it had ever been born."

'There now!' said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight. 'Didn't I know it! But how little you think of the rightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness - not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. "Be umble, Uriah," says father to me, "and you'll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it's what goes down best. Be umble," says father," and you'll do!" And really it ain't done bad!' [classic Heep]

"Under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil—I allude to spectacles—and possessing myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate pretensions." [classic Micawber]

"Often and often, now, had I seen him in the dead of night passing along the streets, searching, among the  few who loitered out of doors at those untimely hours, for what he dreaded to find."

"I sit down by the fire thinking with a blind remorse of all those secret feelings I have nourished since my marriage.  I think of every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life."

"I now approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so bound by an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it, in these pages, that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have seen it growing larger and larger as I advanced, like a great tower in a plain, and throwing its fore-cast shadow even on the incidents of my childish days."  A literal usage of "forecast" as throwing something forward.

"I don't believe in colleges and universities" - updated

From a 2009 New York Times article about Ray Bradbury, then approaching 90 years of age:

"...among Mr. Bradbury’s passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. His most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” which concerns book burning, was written on a pay typewriter in the basement of the University of California, Los Angeles, library; his novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes” contains a seminal library scene...

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

He is not a fan of the Internet, however: "“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.” More at the link.

Reposted from 2010 to commemorate Bradbury's death today.   Interestingly, I also found Bradbury's sentiment echoed by another SciFi legend, Isaac Asimov:

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Asimov quote via A Writer's Ruminations.

Addendum:  Reposted from 2012 to add this observation by Bradbury on how to use a library:

I use a library the same way I’ve been describing the creative process as a writer — I don’t go in with lists of things to read, I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don’t fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book, and fall in love with it. You can only go with loves in this life.

And this:

I try to keep up with what’s being done in every field, and most children’s books are ten times more enjoyable than the average American novel right now.

Text from a public television interview in the 1970s, posted at Brain Pickings.

Scott Adams puts his cat down

Scott Adams is the creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip. He began a blog on typepad about two years ago, then moved it to the dilbert.com website.

Today's blog entry is particularly sad. In it he details the putting down of his 19-year-old tuxedo cat Sarah. Here are some excerpts:

In the past month she had been letting me know the end was approaching. Maybe it was the way she moved or just some sort of animal ESP. I just knew. And so I spent as much time as I could with her, extra petting, in just the ways she trained me. Recent visits to the vet confirmed that there was no cure for old. We tried to enjoy the time we had...

I opted for the injection, and hoped for the best. Sarah still had some fight left in her, as we learned minutes ago while the vet checked her vitals. But somehow she knew this was different. She knew it was time. After 19 years of fighting veterinarians, she let the vet shave her leg without the least resistance. And in so doing, she told me I made the right decision. I looked in her eyes as the life drained out of them. I was devastated.

But today I am happy, even more than usual. I think about how much Sarah enriched my life and I am grateful. I think about how much I learned from my relationship with her, and even from her passing, and I am thankful for it all. Today everyone in my life seems more precious. I'll always carry Sarah with me, and I know I am better for it.

The full blog post is here. You should read it if you have ever had to put a pet down. It reminded me of a similar essay written years ago by Harlan Ellison entitled I think "Don't Leave Me With Strangers," about his need to put down his pet dog Ahbhu. I can't find that essay online, but here is an excerpt from notes I have stored on my hard drive:

At first they thought it was just old age . . . that they could pull him through. But finally they took X-rays and saw the cancer had taken hold in his stomach and liver.
I put off the day as much as I could. Somehow I just couldn't conceive of a world that didn't have him in it. But yesterday I went to the vet's office and signed the euthanasia papers.
“I'd like to spend a little time with him, before,” I said.
They brought him in and put him on the stainless steel examination table. He had grown so thin. He'd always had a pot-belly and it was gone. The muscles in his hind legs were weak, flaccid. He came to me and put his head into the hollow of my armpit. He was trembling violently...

I cried and my eyes closed as my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his head in my arms because we hadn't done much crying at one another. I was ashamed of myself not to be taking it as well as he was.
“I got to, pup, because you're in pain and you can't eat. I got to.” But he didn't want to know that.
The vet came in, then. He was a nice guy and he asked me if I wanted to go away and just let it be done.
Then Ahbhu came up out of there and looked at me...

Ahbhu looked at me and I know he was just a dog, but if he could have spoken with human tongue he could not have said more eloquently than he did with a look, don't leave me with strangers.
So I held him as they laid him down and the vet slipped the lanyard up around his right foreleg and drew it tight to bulge the vein, and I held his head and he turned it away from me as the needle went in.

Out of fairness to the author, I'll stop there; you should be able to find the full essay at the library (I think it was in Deathbird Stories). Or perhaps someone who knows of an online source can post a link. It's a heart-wrenching and unforgettable essay, and a perfect companion piece to Scott Adams' blog post today.

Laura's bookcases

"Our three-part library starts here, in the bedroom, on our fancy Home Depot particle-board shelves. They bow a bit, 'cause our studs aren't ideally placed, and we have too much media. Our books are mostly contemporary fiction, with some literary nonfiction and my grandmother's poetry books thrown in. These shelves have the first part of the alphabet: Louisa May Alcott to Carl Hiaasen, as well as some photo albums. You can see Shelly, my childhood Cabbage Patch Kid, staring at you benevolently from above. The shelves on the right have our CDs"

"Above is the weirdest thing in the house: my grandmother shrine. My grandmothers were both admirable ladies, so I decided to non-obviously memorialize them here. The white cloth is a khata, a Tibetan ceremonial scarf. I presented it in greeting to a lama, who blessed it and gave it back. The riding crops belonged to my maternal grandmother and are from Libya, where the family lived when my mom was young. The one in front has an iron spike in it. The silver coin purse belonged to my paternal grandmother. Inside are some Tibetan blessing pills given to me by the lama; I was supposed to swallow them, but I decided to do this instead. What does a secular humanist do when presented with sacred pills? She uses them to build a grandmother memorial.

To the right is the middle part of the alphabet: Homer to Jhumpa Lahiri, with heavy representation from John Irving and Stephen King. The bookshelf belonged to a former roommate. Note the attractively displayed cans of cat food.

This final section has the rest of our books. John LeCarré to Jeanette Winterson, as well as some reference and travel guides. The shelves were a wedding present from my mother-in-law; they're custom made by a local craftsman. Rob the cat, looking weirdly huge, supervises."

The legacy of Abd-ar-Rahman III, Emir and Caliph of Cordoba

From the Wikipedia entry:

"Abd-ar-Rahman was a patron of arts, especially architecture. A third of his revenue sufficed for the ordinary expenses of government, a third was hoarded, and a third was spent on buildings. After declaring the caliphate, he had a massive palace complex, known as the Medina Azahara, built some five kilometers north of Córdoba. The Medina Azahara was modeled after the old Umayyad palace in Damascus and served as a symbolic tie between the new caliph and his ancestors. It was said that Cordoba contained 3000 mosques and 100,000 shops and homes during his reign. 

Under his reign, Córdoba became the most important intellectual centre of Western Europe. He expanded the city's library, which would be further enriched by his successors.

He also reinforced the Iberian fleet, which became the most powerful in Mediterranean Europe. Iberian raiders moved up to Galicia, Asturias, and North Africa. The colonizers of Fraxinetum came from al-Andalus as well. Due to his consolidation of power, Muslim Iberia became a power for a few centuries. It also brought prosperity, and with this he created mints where pure gold and silver coins were created. He renovated and added to the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba.

He was very wary of losing control and kept tight reins in his family. In 949, he executed one of his sons for conspiring against him. He was extremely tolerant of non-Muslims and Jews and Christians both were treated fairly."

Added to the blog because of this quotation, which I've had in my commonplace book for 40 years:

"I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honours, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to Fourteen: - O man! place not thy confidence in this present world!" 

Hallam's family's bookcases

"The first image is a very poor-quality scan of a print showing my late father, Charles 'Bud' Payne, a self-described 'steam-age horticulturalist' in his office in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe with an unnamed colleague, and roughly one third of his library on deciduous fruit. It also clearly illustrates the pack-rat gene common to many of the male members of my family."

"The second shows him in front of about one-fifth of his and my mother's general non-fiction collection. He was an amateur archaeologist, among many other things, and she a professional ornithologist and later a high-school biology teacher. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of his extensive (around fifteen metres of shelf length) fiction collection, which included a great deal of Penguin paperbacks, hence the Christmas present from my sister. The shelves are homemade and rather utilitarian, but travelled with my father through three successive households

Further images of family members with the pack-rat gene (and one rather hidden bookshelf, or rather bookpile), are in an article written by my brother Brett, the historian of my generation, in his vintage photography blog."

Roy's bookshelf

"I do about two-thirds of my reading electronically or through using books on audio (nothing is better than going on a long bike ride while enjoying a good book). Over the last couple years, I have assimilated a rather odd collection of books. About half of these came from garage, library, or bookstore clearance sales.

 My favorite book on here is The Princess Bride. I loved the movie, but had no idea that the book existed at all. As in most cases, the book is far superior to the movie. It is both excellent to read to children, and delightful to read as an adult.

The far left shows my recent selection which I read to my two boys. I had to purchase new copies, as those that I devoured during my childhood were completely tattered. We're about halfway into the Fellowship of the Ring.

The far right shows my push to develop a little more self-sufficiency. We're in an area that I can do a bit of gardening, and we tend to lose power due to winter storms, wind damage, and tornadoes Much like myself, the book selection is a tad eclectic."

A teacher's lifelong battle with dyslexia

Excerpts from a thought-provoking story:

And then in the second grade we were supposed to learn to read. But for me it was like opening a Chinese newspaper and looking at it - I didn't understand what those lines were, and as a child of six, seven, eight years old I didn't know how to articulate the problem...

By the time I got to the fifth grade I'd basically given up on myself in terms of reading. I got up every day, got dressed, went to school and I was going to war. I hated the classroom. It was a hostile environment and I had to find a way to survive. By the seventh grade I was sitting in the principal's office most of the day. I was in fights, I was defiant, I was a clown, I was a disruptor, I got expelled from school...

I could write my name and there were some words that I could remember, but I couldn't write a sentence - I was in high school and reading at the second or third grade level. And I never told anybody that I couldn't read...

So I graduated from college, and when I graduated there was a teacher shortage and I was offered a job. It was the most illogical thing you can imagine... I taught a lot of different things. I was an athletics coach. I taught social studies. I taught typing - I could copy-type at 65 words a minute but I didn't know what I was typing. I never wrote on a blackboard and there was no printed word in my classroom. We watched a lot of films and had a lot of discussions...

I was reading to our three-year-old daughter. We read to her routinely, but I wasn't really reading, I was making the stories up - stories that I knew, like Goldilocks and The Three Bears, I just added drama to them.

But this was a new book, Rumpelstiltskin, and my daughter said, "You're not reading it like mama." My wife heard me trying to read from a child's book and that was the first time that it dawned on her. I had been asking her to do all this writing for me, helping me write things for school, and then she finally realised, how deep and severe this was...

So one Friday afternoon in my pinstriped suit I walked into the library and asked to see the director of the literacy programme and I sat down with her and I told her I couldn't read. That was the second person in my adult life that I had ever told.

The rest of the story is at the BBC.

Thoughts upon rereading T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"

I recently found on my bookshelf a half-century-old copy of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.  I must have purchased it during or shortly after my years as a collegiate English major.  I had read it, deemed it a "keeper," placed it on a bookshelf, and then it had accompanied me through various moves to new cities and careers. 

As I looked at the cover, I realized there was only one passage that I could remember from the entire book:

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
                                 (Little Gidding)

I decided it was time to give the book a "goodbye read" and donate it to the library.  Almost immediately (at the start of Burnt Norton) I found another memorable passage:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past,
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable."

But what did it mean?  It's lyrical and clever - but I can't grasp the concept.

I kept reading, finding some interesting turns of phrase in Burnt Norton -

"... human kind
Cannot bear very much reality." 

- and in East Coker:

"... There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment..."

In this short work there was an abundance of unfamiliar and undoubtedly interesting words: suspire, behovely, sempiternal, chthonic, sortilege, scry, haruspicate, ineffable, appetency, tumid, periphrastic, hebetude, grimpen.  I'll need to look those up later (grimpen has an obvious connection to a certain Sherlockian mire).

By the time I finished the book, I realized Four Quartets is no longer "accessible" to me.  I can't consider myself successful to finish a book and wind up with just a handful of harvested quotes and interesting words if I don't also have a sense of what in the world I just finished reading.  This book took Eliot years to write and was meticulously crafted to encompass some of his deepest thoughts about religion and the "meaning of life."  But I can't for the life of me extract any of that for my own use.

It's not that I dislike T. S. Eliot.  I love Prufrock (see Spooning - and Prufrock - updated and Prufrock in cartoon format), and I fully intend to give The Waste Land (April is the cruellest month... Hurry up, please, its time...) a goodbye read.  But I expect it will be more of a dutiful read rather than an eager one.

And if T. S. Eliot is now beyond my ken, do I have the energy to read through The Canterbury Tales again?  Or Lord Byron's Don Juan, or Milton's Paradise Lost?  I consumed them eagerly as an undergraduate, secure in the knowledge that I was reading classic, perhaps immortal, literature and sharing an experience with dozens of generations of other readers worldwide.  If I had any hopes back then that I would be sitting with friends in my retirement to argue whether Byron's incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh influenced his writing of Don Juan, or to what extent Milton's blindness is reflected in his works, those hopes have long since faded.  Nowadays when I reach for something to read, my hand will bring down from the shelf something less challenging.

Image cropped for size from the original at Genius.

Addendum:  See also the 2023 post "...human kind/cannot bear very much reality"  Both of these seem related to Frost's The Road Not Taken.