Recently in books Category

In comics as literature, part 1 GeekDad's Jonathan Liu is assembling a list of graphic-novel classics:

In the world of comics, just as with novels or kids' books, there are some stories that transcend the realm of "hey, it's just entertainment" and become Serious Literature. I'm not saying that they can't include a few laughs (though some are solemn), but that you can tell there's something under the surface, whether through the subject matter or the language or the artwork.

And here's the best part: there's a lot of them. I'll share some of my old favorites and recent discoveries with you over the course of a few posts, but I guarantee you that there are so many more that I haven't read (or even heard of) yet, and I'm counting on you readers to fill in the gaps on my own shelves.

He ventures a few of the classic graphic novels: Maus, Sandman, Watchmen, and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics trilogy. It's tough to disagree with any of those choices, but I'm curious to see what books he adds in future installments.

Salon asks if literary classics are obsolete, and looks at Dartmouth professor Daniel Rockmore's study "Quantitative Patterns of Stylistic Influence in the Evolution of Literature" (The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences):

The Dartmouth study analyzed multiple works by 537 authors who wrote English language texts published since 1550. Comparing them to each other, they found, not surprisingly, that authors from a given historical period have more in common with each other stylistically than they do with authors from the past (or future). They also found that the more recent a work is, the more "localized" its stylistic brethren are in time. [...]

Where the Dartmouth article makes a big leap, however, is in claiming that contemporary authors are less "influenced" by authors of the past than they are by those of their own time. Furthermore, they propose a reason: The explosion in the number of published books in the past century or so. Titles by contemporary authors are in the (vast) majority. By this logic, with "even more authors to choose from and selection dominated by contemporaneous authors," writers, like everyone else, are less likely to read the classics.

Then the author moves in for the kill:

There are so many wobbly assumptions built into these interpretations that they could be used as an illustration of the dangers of empirical hubris: Having a lot of numbers and equations is not the same as knowing what they mean, especially in such a complex and meaning-rich field as literature.

From the Twitter feed of Daniel Mendelsohn, I became aware of his 2009 Berkeley commencement address. After a pre-collegiate conversation with his mother about his desire to study the classics, he writes:

She took a deep breath and wearily ended with a sentence that--as she could not possibly guess, that May afternoon 30 years ago--would give me the title of a book I would write one day, a book about her vanished world, and how it vanished. "Plato, the Greeks," she muttered. "In a thousand years, it will all be lost."

Mendelsohn asks "what can it mean to devote oneself to a discipline that likes to think that it is timeless, that it has cheated the centuries, the millennia?" and uses Virgil's Aeneid to ruminate on the many losses along the way:

And even to think of the poem and everything it has produced over time is to be reminded, inevitably, of all the songs and stories and poems that didn't make it to the safe shore of "classic": the nine books of Sappho's lyrics, of which a single poem remains; the 75 lost plays of Aeschylus, the 116 vanished works of Sophocles, the 70 of Euripides; Aristotle's early dialogues, the banished Ovid's lost verse drama, Medea, the love elegies of Cornelius Gallus, the bosom friend of Vergil, which once comprised four whole books and of which 10 lines now survive; so much else.

Classicists, he writes, "bear the responsibility of being as aware of what we have lost as we are of what has survived to be studied by us." Mendelsohn later segues into discussing an "old Jewish woman [whom] I had been interviewing her for the book I wrote about the Holocaust:"

"So what happened when the war was over?" I asked softly. "What was the first thing that happened, once things started to be normal again?"

The old lady, whose real name had disappeared in the war along with her parents, her house, and nearly everything else she had known, was now called Mrs. Begley. When I asked her this question Mrs. Begley looked at me; her weary expression had kindled every so slightly.

"You know, it's a funny thing," she told me. "When the Germans first came, in '41, the first thing they did was close the theaters." [...] And I'll tell you something, because I remember it quite clearly: the first thing that happened, after the war was over and things got a little normal-the first thing was that the actors and theater people who were still alive got together and put on, in Polish, a production of Sophocles' Antigone."

He concludes "that was the story, and here is what I think it means:"

A lot of life gets lost--almost everything, in fact. [But] what remains means something--something very real, to real people, to people whose knowledge of suffering is derived from more than a book or a night at the movies. And so, I would ask you this: when you think of what it means to be a classicist, don't think only about your deconstructive readings of Homer, or post-structuralist approaches to Plautus, or Freudian readings of the Euripidean romances, or Marxist interpretations of the Peloponnesian War, the iconography of red-figure vases or the prosopography of the late Roman Republic. Think about Mrs. Begley; think about the people in Kraków, who, when they had very good reasons to believe that civilization had ended, felt that the first thing they needed to do was to put on a play by Sophocles.

Daily Beast's Marc Wortman asks, are books becoming too long to read? At a mere 630 pages, Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is nearly the shortest of the recent tomes he uses as examples:

Those weighty 11 printed books and the two linear feet or so of valuable shelf real estate they take up amount to an advertisement for compacting them into an e-book. [...] All 11 were produced by reputable writers, scholars, and thinkers. They almost certainly merit a careful read. But the same could be said for many other recent very long BIG books, often books that come out nearly simultaneously on the same subjects, from biographies to policy issues to histories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, all this reading is only for those who have the leisure or professional obligation to read at length.

He asks exasperatedly: "Why do so many writers feel compelled to write big books?"

In part, it seems that big now equates with importance and value. That substitutes form for function, and frequently evidences a writer's ego--or perhaps an editor's laziness--and indifference to a reader's limited time and attention. Life is a busy place, but don't tell that to those who write big books.

The opportunity cost of massive tomes is exemplified by Slavoj Zizek's 1000-page, $70 opus on Hegel, despite paeans to the philosopher like this:

"In the first 30 pages, Žižek free-associates his way through Alan Turing, Hans Christian Anderson, Hercule Poirot, Kafka, Kant, Wittgenstein, and God. We couldn't put it down."

See Verso's description of the book and this excerpt on Buddhism and the self for more. If one can't put the book down, though, perhaps one should avoid picking it up in the first place.

Slate looks at how the design of printed books will evolve in the digital age:

Luddites can take comfort in the persistence of vinyl records, postcards, and photographic film. The paper book will likewise survive, but its place in the culture will change significantly. As it loses its traditional value as an efficient vessel for text, the paper book's other qualities--from its role in literary history to its inimitable design possibilities to its potential for physical beauty--will take on more importance. The future is yet to be written, but a few possibilities for the fate of the paper book are already on display on bookshelves near you.

From illustrations by William Blake and Gustave Doré to modern formal experiments like Tree of Codes and Nox, the author makes a great case for books as art objects as opposed to commodities:

...the paratextually unremarkable, unimaginatively designed rows of paperbacks and late-edition hardcovers that line most of our shelves...are headed for the same place most manufactured objects go eventually--the scrapheap.

In why I love books, technophile Mark Pack proudly proclaims "I like my gadgets, but I love my books. There is no e-book reader in that monument to technology on the table." He praises their reliability, usability, and searchability, lauding books as "a permanent format for permanent ownership:"

No worries about future legal changes or technological discontinuities suddenly depriving me of books or making them unreadable. No fuzziness about whether you own or are just renting a book. Purchased and mine; simple and easy.

So it should be, for a book is far more than a mere transmission mechanism for words. It is a memory, an entertainment and a form. [...] The look, the touch, the smell, the convenience, the memories - they make books lovable.

Nick Moran asks if "total eBook adoption [is] really an ecologically responsible goal," noting that "the average e-reader is used less than two years before it is replaced:"

I used basic arithmetic and some minimal Googling to calculate the carbon footprint of the average American reading an average number of average novels at an average speed both in print and on an iPad.

I determined that it takes five years (32.5 books) of steady eBook consumption (on the same device) to match the ecological footprint of reading the same number of print books the old fashioned way.

Here's his graph:

"If you live in a household with multiple eReaders," he writes, "your family's carbon emissions are more than 600-750% higher per year than they would be if you invested in a bunch of bookshelves or, better yet, a library card."

The NYT breaks the sad news that DC plans to defile the memory of Watchmen, one of the few generally recognized classic graphic novels. A group of seven mini-series under the collective title Before Watchmen "will expand on the back stories of the costumed vigilantes like Rorschach and Nite Owl." (h/t to Comics Alliance for linking to the official DC announcement.)

Alan Moore, author of the original graphic novel, calls the plans "completely shameless" and adds that he's not objecting for pecuniary reasons: "I don't want money. What I want is for this not to happen." Similarly, Wired's Scott Thill laments that such artistic necrophilia "has become indispensable in an culture industry that long ago stopped calling derivative a dirty word."

This is all that I have to say:

update (2/6):
Dork Tower had the same idea:

Kim Brooks' piece at Salon asking "Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?" contains my Quote of the Day:

There were courses I took in college, courses in Renaissance literature and the anthropology of social progress and international relations of the Middle East and, of course, writing, that will, in all likelihood, never earn me a steady paycheck or a 401K, but which I would not trade for anything; there were lectures on Shakespeare and Twain and Joyce that I still remember, that I've dreamt about and that define my sensibility as a writer and a reader and a human being.

Ted Rall posted a top ten comics of all time list, and asked for his readers' favorites. Over the course of several tweets, I mentioned a few that I have here categorized and alphabetized:

comic strips
Calvin & Hobbes (Watterson)
Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel)
Gasoline Alley (King)
Krazy Kat (Herriman)
Little Nemo (McCay)
Pogo (Kelly)
Prince Valiant (Foster)
The Spirit (Eisner)
Tarzan (Hogarth)

mainstream
Dark Knight (Miller)
Fantastic Four (Lee/Kirby)
Green Lantern/Green Arrow (O'Neill/Adams)
Nick Fury (Steranko)
Swamp Thing (Moore/Veitch/Totleben)
Walt Disney Comics & Stories (Barks)
Watchmen (Moore/Gibbons)

alt/indie/underground
American Splendor
Cerebus (Sim)
Cheech Wizard (Bode)
EC war comics (Kurtzman)
"Master Race" (Krigstein)
Maus (Spiegelman)
Moebius
Persepolis (Satrapi)
Raw
Ring of the Nibelung (Russell)
Zap

As with my favorite books, I'm lousy at making a list of n anything--my mind seems to gravitate toward a list of 2n items. I have a strong temptation to pull several anthologies down from the shelves, and spend the afternoon perusing them...

Although I've never read any Joyce--quite an oversight, given my love of wordplay--I always thought that the public reading of Ulysses on Bloomsday was an intriguing idea. Long reads--not that kind of longreads...this kind--is apparently a burgeoning activity in academia.

Literature professors are tackling not just the obvious candidates such as Homer for these marathon reading events, but also works such as Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Moby Dick, and even War and Peace. As long as such readings are focused on the text, and are more like events than stunts, this sounds like a great way to imbue students' lives with the classics.

Dirk Johnson's NYT feature on the dim future of marginalia rattled around my head for a few days until I came upon a sister piece. Sam Anderson wrote about wanting readers to be rolling around in the text. "[M]arking up books," writes Anderson, is "a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane:"

Today I rarely read anything -- book, magazine, newspaper -- without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is -- no exaggeration -- possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.

Writing marginalia never seemed quite right to me, so I took voluminous notes instead. Some books were only worth a single quoted sentence or a few paragraphs of copied text, while others required many pages. The act of copying the written word has led to the creation of a modern commonplace book (actually a collection of Word documents) that I can search through far more readily than the hundreds of books that have since been returned to various libraries or friends' homes.

Anderson writes later that "books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social -- and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states." That's an excellent point, and one that need not be restricted to the physical instantiation of a book. My digital commonplace book is, unlike my home library, immune from fire, from weather, and from misfortune. If the thousands of books in my home were destroyed, I would still be annoyed by Augustine, intrigued by Russell, amazed by Jaynes, inspired by McDougall, puzzled by Pirsig, entranced by Feynman, daunted by Ginsberg, awed by Sagan.

Anderson has an "ultimate fantasy of e-marginalia [that]would be something like a readerly utopia:"

It could even (if we want to get all grand and optimistic) turn out to be a Gutenberg-style revolution -- not for writing, this time, but for reading. Book readers have never had a mechanism for massively and easily sharing their responses to a text with other readers, right inside the text itself. Now, when the Coleridge of 21st-century marginalia emerges, he should be able to mark up the books of a million friends at once.

links:
See here for a selection of Anderson's marginalia

Andrew Sullivan discussed culling his personal library, and mentioned an essay on deep cleaning that contained this observation:

Clutter is about aspirations unmet; unspoken feelings of loss; relationships we can't let go; old injuries; and lack of self-esteem. For academics, four shelves of books, double-shelved, that you have never read says: "I'm worried I'm not smart enough!" Or, "Maybe if other people see these books, they will recognize that I am smart." Meanwhile, the books sit there looking at you, sending another silent message: "You bought us, now you are stuck with us. Before you get to your own writing, or any reading that would give you pleasure, you have to make good on the promise to read us. What -- you don't" (sniff!) "want us any more?"

Palmer would suggest that you sit down and have a chat with these books, thank them for the time they have spent in your house, apologize for not reading them and explain to them that you want them to go somewhere that someone will really appreciate them. Then box them up and take them to the library sale.

I nearly always try to find a good home for my unwanted books, but some volumes filled with exceptionally low-value content (e.g., religious apologetics, wingnut politics) that have found a temporary home on my shelves may do more good through recycling than through being read be someone else. (Yes, some authors deserve the insult that their books' paper is more valuable than their words.)

This series of what Dr Seuss books were really about is wonderful:

Karnazes, Dean. Run! 26.2 Stories of Blisters and Bliss (New York: Rodale, 2011)

In contrast to his earlier books Ultramarathon Man and 50/50: Secrets I Learned from Running 50 Marathons in 50 Days, Dean Karnazes' new book Run! 26.2 Stories of Blisters and Bliss is--as the subtitle indicates--a pastiche of incidents rather than a cohesive narrative. A major portion of the book details his participation in the 4 Deserts race series (Atacama, Gobi, Sahara, and Antarctica), but there's more in here than just racing stories. Karnazes writes in Chapter 12 about training Topher Gaylord for the Western States 100, and Gaylord tells his WS100 story in chapter 15. In Chapter 14, Karnazes' wife Julie describes what it's like living with an athlete, and their kids Alexandria and Nicholas present their takes in Chapter 18.

Running Badwater for the eighth time while his father (nicknamed "Popou") recuperated from quadruple-bypass surgery, Karno had an early-morning revelation about "all the emotional deadweight we carry around with us." He and his running partner stripped down to their reflective vests (runners are required to wear them at night) and streaked down the road:

For the first time in days, nothing was chafing me. I had nothing but the shirt on my back (er, the reflective vest on my back), and it felt great. We come into this world bare, and we leave the same way. It would happen to Popou; it would happen to me. Such is the cycle of life.

The best we can do is cherish every moment. If we hold close those we love, their memories will live on within us even after they're gone. It was all about stripping away the complex layers we construct around us and accepting the truth. This revelation set me free. (p. 63)

This freedom makes our limited lifespan all the more precious:

There will come a day when Popou can no longer swing a golf club, just as there will come a day when I can no longer run. But, thankfully, today is not that day! (p. 66)

When a trip-and-fall incident at Leadville hyperextended his knee, Karnazes wrote about his encounter with an orthopedic surgeon at the UCSF Medical Center:

The doctor I was scheduled to see came highly recommended as a sports specialist. After all, he was the team physician for the San Francisco 49ers football squad. When I entered his office, he took one look at me and said, "You're a runner, you're going to have horrible knees."

After seeing me and taking some X-rays, he informed me that I had a torn meniscus. He gave me some pills and told me to stop running. He instructed me to schedule a follow-up appointment in two weeks. I walked out of his office, threw the drugs in the trashcan, and went running.

I never returned. (p. 105)

Whether this is foolhardy bravado or the justified confidence borne of repeated experience likely depends on the reader's own perspective on--and relationship with--running. Prompted by his previous books, Karnazes is sometimes quite eloquent when discussing his love of the sport:

The ultramarathon doesn't build character, it reveals it. It is here that you get an honest glimpse into the soul of an individual. Every insecurity, every character flaw is open and on display for all to see. [...] There is no hiding behind anything; the ultramarathon is the great equalizer. (p. 202)

What's next for Karnazes? He began a Run Across America last Friday, and estimates that he'll arrive in New York City on 9 May. At 2900 miles, this will be more than twice the distance covered in his 50/50 event, with only half again as much time...an average of about 40 miles per day. Next year's planned event is even bigger:

Starting in November 2012, I'm planning on running a marathon in every country in the world in a one-year period. Yep, to embark on a global expedition to hit every country on the planet in 365 days... [...]

There are currently 204 independent nations but there's only one world, and my desire is to have others join me along the way in a show of global solidarity. Regardless of the language one speaks, the god one worships, or the color of one's skin, we can all run together. Let's. (p. 256)

Running with Dean Karnazes may not be "like setting up one's easel next to Monet or Picasso"--as one NYT book review put it--but he seems like an interesting enough guy that I wouldn't pass up the chance to spend a few hours running alongside him.

JL Wall reminds us at League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that of the nine books of Sappho's poetry that once existed--in the Library of Alexandria, of course--we have but a single complete poem and a smattering of fragments. Whether or not her works were actually burned, their loss is still keenly felt.

This collection of twenty-eight different translations has intrigued me enough to put Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho onto my TBR list.

Philip (Golden Compass) Pullman passionately defends British public libraries against the misguided "austerity" measures that would force them to bid against other social service groups for a portion of public funds. This competitive culture, he writes, "always results in victory for one side and defeat for the other. It's set up to do that:"

It's imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market. Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. [...]

That branch - how much money did it make last year? Why aren't you charging higher fines? Why don't you charge for library cards? Why don't you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books - you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there - what's on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.

He closes with this plea: "Leave the libraries alone. You don't know the value of what you're looking after. It is too precious to destroy." ED Kain agrees, observing that "this, like so many other privatization schemes, is hugely regressive and undermines the entire purpose of a public sphere to begin with:"

Public education, public libraries - these are essential pieces of our society that we can't put a price tag on. In the red and black ink-stained columns of our little theoretical ledgers, all we can see is their cost, not the value they create. Which is why education is one of the first places we see cuts, then healthcare for the poor, then libraries and other 'non-essential' public services. And this worries me deeply. [...]

...libraries, health clinics, public schools, labor unions, collectives, public parks, public transit [are] all integral pieces of our democratic, civil society. Of our future and the future of our civilization. [...] I would mourn the loss of my public library before I would mourn the loss of any number of corporations.

In "Off the Books," Paul Waldman writes about the popularity of American public libraries, pointing out something that Benjamin Franklin (responsible for America's first lending library) wrote in his Autobiography:

"These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges."

Waldman observes that "demand for what libraries provide has increased at the same time that lowered tax revenues have meant cutbacks in state and local services:"

Libraries may enjoy some limited measure of protection from the budget ax, because they're still considered a benefit we all can enjoy -- as opposed to many kinds of government spending, which can be dismissed as taking "our" money to give to "them," some allegedly unworthy group like the poor -- and because for so many people, libraries are associated with children.

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert argues at Spiked for a vision of libraries resisting incursions from the bookstore ethos:

I believe it's wrong to cut public libraries, but I'm also less than enamoured with most of the arguments being made in their defence. Too many libraries are already transforming themselves into centres for a range of social activities - web surfing, book clubs, information on local services - as if providing 'mere books' were not enough. [...]

...the trend today is for libraries to invite the outside world in - and rudely shove the diminishing number of books to one side to make space. If libraries are merely another location to provide what already exists elsewhere, it does become harder to defend them against cuts. Libraries should not be justified by morphing into community centres or providing any provision other than that for which they are made: to make a wide range of books available in an atmosphere conducive to their enjoyment.

Ingrid Rowland writes at NYRB about that most revered library, the Library of Alexandria, which is seemingly safe from the demonstrations in Egypt:

The Library of Alexandria has burned twice before, once, partially, when Julius Caesar made his landing in Egypt in 48 BCE, and again, with devastating effect, in late antiquity. The first burning was probably a mistake, the second the result of religious fanaticism, most probably the same fanaticism that killed the Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia in 415 CE for daring, as a woman, to profess philosophy. [...] Blind rage cannot understand anything as complex or beautiful as Rome, or a library, or even a person, an animal, a book, a tree, a work of art--but blind rage can make these intricate systems stop, and the ability to make things stop has served many of our kind since time immemorial as a fine substitute for learning, experience, scientific method, artistic creation, philosophy.

Rowland quotes the library's director, Ismail Serageldin, announcing that "The library is safe thanks to Egypt's youth,"

...whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters. I am there daily within the bounds of the curfew hours. However, the Library will be closed to the public for the next few days until the curfew is lifted and events unfold towards an end to the lawlessness and a move towards the resolution of the political issues that triggered the demonstrations.

Tomorrow, Tom. Too Much Crazy (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2011)

Under the pseudonym Tom Tomorrow, cartoonist Dan Perkins has spent the last twenty years skewering various political foibles and fallacies in his strip This Modern World (website, Wikipedia). His previous collections (including 2008's The Future's So Bright, I Can't Bear to Look) have just been joined by his ninth book: Too Much Crazy. It covers the period from mid-2008 through mid-2010, with Obama's election serving as prelude to the, well, craziness that the Right has foisted upon us since. (The Left's craziness has largely been limited to wishful thinking that Obama is anything but a centrist, a belief that the author ridicules several times.)

In his introduction, Tom Tomorrow laments a prominent crazy component of today's media, "The constant unending refrain, the low keening wail that just seems to grow louder every day:"

Obama's a Marxist, a fascist, a Muslim; progressives have a century-long plan devised by Woodrow Wilson to overthrow capitalism itself, blah blah blah blah--if you're paying the least little bit of attention, you've heard it all out there. [...] There was a time when we might have been able to at least politely pretend that most of the people around us had some tenuous connection to sanity, but thanks to chat boards and comments sections and Tea Party tallies and those aging standbys, talk radio and Fox News, we have all been thoroughly disabused of that notion. Now we know all too well just how much crazy there is around us at every moment. (p. xxiii, Introduction: When the Levee Breaks)

Here are links to a few of my favorites from the book, beginning with a memento from the early 2009 "post-partisan" moment in "Wrong about Everything" (1/7/2009, p. 35):

Glenn Beck's conspiracy theories take a hit in "Democrats Are Fascists" (4/15/2009, p. 48),

along with double standards on political rhetoric in "Then and Now with Goofus & Gallant" (9/9/2009, p. 63),

Tom Tomorrow examines anti-abortion self-righteousness in the "Rightwingoverse" (6/10/2009, p. 78)


and his "All the Rage" is, sadly, as relevant as ever (4/6/2010, p. 93)

Sparky the Penguin asks "WWSAD?" (4/26/2010, p. 96)

and Obama is exposed as a "Far-Left Radical" (6/8/2010, p. 104)

If this sampling intrigues you, please visit the cartoon's archives at This Modern World and Salon--then go out and buy some of his books. Independent newspapers don't support political cartoons like they used to, so it's up to readers to pick up the slack!

This lamp from Studiomeiboom (h/t: Bookshelf Porn, photo by Amy) is a fabulous idea:

It's gorgeous, but the price of €105 (including postage from the Netherlands) makes it a bit too spendy for an impulse purchase. Maybe I'll get one for my dream library...someday...

I owe a big h/t to Kathy Ceceri at Wired's GeekDad for posting this clip of the coolest pop-up book ever--it's about CERN's LHC:

The book is called Voyage to the Heart of Matter, and you can read more about it at the ATLAS store.

John (Wingnuts) Avlon writes about the Obama-Haters' Book Club, observing that "Hating President Obama has become its own industry--and here's a new stat to prove it:"

To date, there have been at least 46 anti-Obama books published. I'm not talking about thoughtful criticisms of his policies, but detailed demonizations of the president. These screeds cannot help but have an impact on the typically low-turnout, high-intensity midterm elections that will take place Tuesday.

By way of comparison, he notes, "At this point in Bush's presidency there were only five anti-W books"--which were of far greater factual accuracy. This multitude of anti-Obama misinformation, writes Avlon, joins with "fear-mongering emails, right wing talk radio and partisan cable news" to explain why "pathetically large numbers of Americans are ready to believe the worst about our president:"

...because of the rise of partisan media, the intensity of the Obama Derangement Syndrome at this stage in his administration may be unprecedented. [...] All this is evidence of an acceleration of the impulse to demonize the duly elected president of the opposite party. We are cannibalizing our body politic. We need to stop this cycle of incitement before it destroys our ability to unite as a nation absent a disaster.

Not everyone, however, wants our nation united around a common purpose. Asking "who" desires such a disconnection (and "why") may lead to interesting discoveries.

Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury (website, Wikipedia) turns forty today--not a longevity record, but a significant accomplishment nonetheless. This nearly-700-page retrospective hits bookstore shelves today,

and another by scholar Brian Walker is due next week.

Is it possible to OD on satire?

I love books, I love bookshelves, and I love clever wood-working designs. This piece combines all three:

Looking at data from publishers and booksellers, the NYT's Julie Bosman proclaimed "Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children." The picture book, "a mainstay of children's literature with its lavish illustrations, cheerful colors and large print wrapped in a glossy jacket," has apparently been suffering from disappointing sales. Bosman suggests that due to "increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools" parents have "accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books:"

Many parents overlook the fact that chapter books, even though they have more text, full paragraphs and fewer pictures, are not necessarily more complex.

Jonathan Liu at Wired's Geek Dad worries that kids of these parents "will miss out on some of the world's best artwork, some of which you can't truly appreciate until you're older:"

I bet they won't go for comic books, either. It's like making the mistaken assumption that because Pixar movies are cartoons, they're only for little kids.

The experiences at Borders and Barnes & Noble typify the no-picture-book attitude:

Other retailers have cut shelf space devoted to picture books while expanding their booming young-adult sections, full of dystopic fiction, graphic novels and "Twilight"-inspired paranormal romances.

Lea Carpenter at Big Think, however, takes a broader attitude--writing that:

...a love of reading, whether genetic or learned, is less about the number of words on a page than the quality of the experience of the story. Adults can wrestle with Chris Ware alongside Salman Rushdie, and appreciate the diversity of experience.

update (10/12):
GeekMom weighs in as well. She understands the argument against illustrated books, but doesn't buy it:

Picture books are seen as something for little kids, a minor step on to bigger and better things. I understand the pressure parents are under to keep their children moving forward academically. But letting go of picture books too early is not the answer. [...] By reading picture books to my son I'm exposing him to all types of art and artists. He gets the value of an illustration on a much higher level than a preschooler ever could.

I have an ongoing love affair with Library of America, a publisher dedicated to--what else?--keeping our nation's foremost historical, literary, and cultural works in print. The past few years have seen a broadening of the LoA canon, which now includes Kerouac, Lovecraft, and Philip K Dick (with Vonnegut on the schedule for 2011) in addition to the old standbys. The wordless woodcut novels of Lynd Ward are the newest additions to the literary stable in a two-volume slipcased edition:

Given the LOA's usual attention to detail, as well as the stature of Ward's work, I expect this set to be a remarkable literary experience as well as an unusual one. To whet your appetite, the opening sequence of Gods' Man is here, and a long essay from fellow graphic novelist Art Spiegelman is here.

Harlan Ellison (website, Wikipedia) has apparently bid farewell to being a convention guest at MadCon 2010 this past weekend, writing that he is not long for this world:

"The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying," says Ellison, by phone. "I'm like the Wicked Witch of the West -- I'm melting. I began to sense it back in January. [...] "An old dog senses when it's his time -- dogs have that capacity; nobody doubts that. Nobody. But everybody doubts when you say, 'I'm dying.' They think you're being a Victorian actress. They think you're doing Bernhardt."

[...]

"My wife has instructions that the instant I die, she has to burn all the unfinished stories. And there may be a hundred unfinished stories in this house, maybe more than that. There's three quarters of a novel. No, these things are not to be finished by other writers, no matter how good they are. [...] If somebody wants to take the unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story, which has now gone into the public domain, and write an ending that is not as good as Poe would have written, let 'em do whatever they want! But not with my shit, Jack. When I'm gone, that's it. What's down on the paper, it says 'The End,' that's it. 'Cause right now I'm busy writing the end of the longest story I've ever written, which is me."

Check out the Dreams with Sharp Teeth documentary for a taste of Ellison's persona:

Craig Fehrman's Boston Globe piece "Lost Libraries" notes the dismay among fans of author David Markson when his "personal library, about 2,500 books in all, had been sold off and was now anonymously scattered" following Markson's death. Fehrman asks, "How could the books of one of this generation's most interesting novelists end up on a bookstore's dollar clearance carts?" and finds similar incidents involving authors ranging from Melville, Crane, and Hemingway to Updike and Mailer.

When reflecting on how much time and effort we bibliophiles spend assembling personal libraries that reflect our enthusiasms, I was reminded of an American Scholar tidbit from William Zinsser entitled "One Man's Library." The widow of author James Norman Hall (Mutiny on the Bounty) said this about his library in their home:

"I was always jealous of the books-they took so much of my husband's time... He once asked me what I wanted to do with them when he died-maybe give them to a library? I said, 'Why, Jimmy, it wouldn't be my house if it didn't have those books.'"

Zinsser suggest that "no such library will ever be assembled again," and asks:

Does any architect still design a house with a "library"? Does any interior decorator advise a client to decorate a wall with bookshelves? Does any carpenter remember how to build a bookcase?

I certainly hope so, as I hope to one day employ just such an architect, interior designer, and woodworker.

Primitive lizard-brain reactions--one hesitates to elevate such behavior to the realm of thought--abound on the reactionary Right whenever their xenophobic buttons get pushed. Thus, Fred Phelps is eager to step in to burn some Korans (and American flags, to boot) on today's 9/11 anniversary if pastor Terry Jones has a change of heart.

In the face of this predictable-yet-sad display, these words from Leonard Pitts' Miami Herald op-ed (h/t: Andrew Sullivan) are my Quote of the Day. Pitts laments how people have "often resorted to fire to purge themselves of that they fear and misunderstand:"

The Nazis did it in the 1930s, throwing books into flames as a way of killing the dangerous ideas on their pages. Southern whites did it in the 1950s, throwing rock 'n' roll records into fire as a way of denying the cultural miscegenation the music proved.

There is in the act of burning something primitive and tribalistic, something that appeals to the lizard brain which has no ability or desire to reason, no comprehension of ideals and abstract concepts, that knows only that it lives in fear of a world it cannot understand and will do anything to send the fear away.

The process of becoming a truly human being is the process of conquering that lizard brain. Unfortunately, some people never do.

On Saturday, some of those people will gather round a bonfire to watch pages blacken and curl and turn to smoke. You listen to the hatred spewing from respectable leaders in prominent places, you think of how normal that has become, and one thing suddenly seems starkly clear:

We're burning a whole lot more than books.

Jillian Rayfield mentioned at TPM that some Teabaggers plan to read the Constitution. (The president of Let Freedom Ring, Colin Hanna, said he expects that "90% to 95% of the people who attend will not have read the Constitution before.")

So many possible jokes, so little time...You can even visit their I've Read It! page to fill out a form to receive "a certificate that identifies you as a Constitutional Patriot."

It will be wonderful for them to find out that our Constitution is vastly different from O'Reilly's rants, Coulter's screeches, and Beck's scribbles. (I wonder how many Teabaggers will get through the Preamble without calling the Founders closet socialists..."All that stuff about 'We the People' and 'the general Welfare' doesn't sound like anything I've heard on Fox Noise!")

And yes, I'm just obnoxious enough to suggest some supplementary reading

Rakove, Jack. The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence

Monk, Linda. The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution

Lipsky, Seth. The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide

to counteract their obvious choice of either the Heritage Foundation's Guide to the Constitution or Regnery's Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. (Offering extra credit for reading the Federalist Papers would probably indicate an unrealistic optimism.)