Jill Rummages Among Her Books in 2023 - Part Three

I was looking at my own library's statistics here on LT and am pleased to note that I'm fairly well-balanced between male and female authors (with a small sliver of either non-specified or institutional/dual authorship).

Where do the rest of you sit in that regard? I'm kind of curious as to what might be most frequently encountered amongst this crowd.

Happy new thread! I took a look at my stats. So far this year I'm skewing slightly more male to female (7:5) though I don't know how they count when a book's author is a pseudonym for a husband and wife writing team. Also since I tend to read series, some of which can be long, I think my numbers could be unintentionally weighted depending on the series I've chosen for the year.

I wish you well with your new thread, and I look forward to receiving many more BBs from your posts.

>1 jillmwo: It looks like overall I'm skewed towards male authors, but a lot of my book's authors are "Not set." You can sort that chart by collections, so I checked for Kindle content only, which represents the bulk of my book purchases for the last decade. It says:

263 Female
209 Male
37 Not set
3 Non-binary

PS Happy New Thread.

>1 jillmwo: Happy new thread from me too.

You prompted me to actually look at my stats, which I very rarely do. Um, I have 1,067 male, 228 female, 177 "not set", 17 "n/a" and 1 "unknown) (the last one is the Beowulf poet, so probably accurate). BUT among the "not set" are a good few whose gender I believe i know (mostly male), some institutional ones such as government departments or committees, and a few I didn't recognise at all, like "Clifton Peter Noakes Manny", which turned out to be the combination of Peter Clifton and Manny Noakes. At least that was easy to fix, but what about "wartickstevenl", who is in the list but has no books catalogued at all?

I don't see the gender imbalance being rectified any time soon, simply because I could never afford to buy enough books to fix it.

PS: Among the "not set" was one "H F Glen". I thought I could probably assign you a gender fairly confidently, Hugh.

ETA: the enigmatic "wartickstevenl" turned out, not surprisingly, to have been Steven L Wartick, author of International Business and Society, which I do have. My catalogue entry is correct though — someone must have entered it incorrectly at some time. Hmm; there's only 3 copies on LT.

Female: 55.7%
Male: 40.0%
Non-binary: 1.3%
n/a (groups, pairs, etc.): 2.2%
unknown/not set/it's complicated: the rest

934 male
483 female
176 not set

I was disturbed to see a button at the top of the charts and graphics page which said: "Remove Joy." Why would I want to remove joy??? Where does this button remove the joy from? Does it turn a the graphics into numbers? Does it take out any books you have been happy with? Does it flow out into your world and suck the joy from your heart?!!!

Happy new thread, Jill. :) It looks like my library (which, admittedly, includes a hefty number of TBR books, not just books I own or have read) comprises about 58% female authors and 41% male authors. I have several series in the library that might impact the numbers a bit - those by J.D. Robb, Sue Grafton, J.A. Jance, P.D. James, and Anne McCaffrey, for instance. I don't deliberately select books based on the author's gender, although I'm putting together a spreadsheet of the shortlist entries for the Women's Prize for Fiction so I can work my way through it - so that might also skew it a bit!

Happy New Thread! Mine is 375 male to 80 female, with none 'not set'.

>1 jillmwo: Ooh, interesting question! I have 1988 female and 1186 male, with 245 not set. I may go through and set some of those that I know though.

>1 jillmwo: I have 2327 male, 828 female, 41 not a person. @Railwaysoc will horrify feminists: 661 male, 23 female, 35 not a person. On the other hand, how many women does one see in steam-loco sheds?

Happy new thread, Jill.

I looked first at this year: so far I've read 36 books, with 18 by female authors, 13 by male, and 5 by the team that writes as Ilona Andrews.

For all time, I've catalogued:
915 by male authors
896 by female authors
86 by not set (I'm puzzled by this category; perhaps there is a process for flipping a bit that has been omitted for some books? In some cases, the author's gender is set for some books but not all.)
34 by n/a (mostly multiple authors, such as Charles Todd and P. J. Tracy)
1 by non-binary (K. B. Wagers, from my wish list)
1 by other/contested/unknown (Human Bridge Errors, which is attributed to a computer author)

I see all the comments above and will follow-up tomorrow, but in the meantime:

Yesterday, I went from Manguel’s A History of Reading over to Ursula Le Guin’s The Telling. I couldn’t remember specific details about it, just that it had something to do with housing books in a cave as a means of protecting them. Of course, when I pulled the physical copy off the shelf, I found adhesive flags on a few specific pages, some post-it-notes on the front cover end page, and a hand-writtenl page of notes tucked inside the back-cover. Such detritus inside the dustjacket indicates that at some point in time I really DID read this.

The summary blurb I wrote was this: A trained professional seeking to collect field information leaves the modern sanitized urban environment and goes out a distance to a less forward-thinking village in the country. She gains the trust of local residents and gains exposure to a deeply spiritual but fragmented belief system which she studies. The displaced older culture imagined by LeGuin in The Telling is an important part of what is essentially a parable about cultural priorities.

The novel doesn’t offer any solution to the issue, but a brief phrase appears two (or maybe three) times. Belief is the wound that knowledge heals. As you can imagine, Le Guin is one of my favorite authors and books like this are why.

>2 Narilka: I had that same thought flit through my head. If you look at the top level chart for Author Gender, it look very binary. However, if you click through on the see more link, the system breaks it down further to accommodate the use cae you mention of husband-wife team.

>4 clamairy: Looks to me that you’re more skewed to female than male since you show a stat of 263 female compared with 209 male. The remaining 40 instances wouldn’t seem to reverse that.

>5 haydninvienna: You’re at the other end of the spectrum here. I haven’t a clue however as to how you should consider the case of “wartickstevenl”. I mean I would assume male if what was really intended was Wartick, Steven L. But what if it’s a pseudonym? There’s insufficient context.

>6 reconditereader: Nice balance

>7 MrsLee: I had exactly the same question about the Remove Joy button! I wasn’t able to find any documentation about it one way or another.

>8 PlatinumWarlock: I don’t select my reading on gender alone either. But ever since Ursula K. Le Guin noted (in an interview or in an essay, perhaps) the difference she felt in her own writing when she started to focus on literature by women as opposed to her previous habit of not considering it in her r4eading, I’ve kept an eye on my balance.

>9 Karlstar: and >11 hfglen: So you’re much closer to where haydninvienna is.

>10 Sakerfalcon: Wow. Based on how much you’ve been reading, you’ve got a bit more diversity in your numbers.

>12 Jim53: Your percentages are much closer to mine.

I haven’t the foggiest notion how to parse the significance of any of this. As I noted in my response to PlatinumWarlock, until Le Guin made her comment and the difference it made on her writing (it was before she wrote Tehanu I know), I had never considered whether I read more male or female. I just try to keep some kind of an even split. (Of course, since there are things I read that may not be captured here on LT, I may be living in a bit of a delusional state...) :>)

>7 MrsLee: >14 jillmwo: If you click Remove Joy the page will change to text only and the button will change to Add Joy.

Side note: it took me a while to even find Remove Joy because, in my browser at least, the button just says Text Only. I finally discovered Remove Joy by hovering over the button. The behavior is much like the 'Joined/Leave Group' button on group landing pages.

>15 ScoLgo: I was afraid to push the button. (Because what if it represented an irreversible shift in the cosmos?) So you have eliminated at least one point of anxiety from the flock of such things lurking nonsensically in my head. Thank you for that.

>16 jillmwo: & >15 ScoLgo:
I obviously must have removed Joy at some point as my stats were all coming up as text. I took a couple of days to realise that adding Joy brought back my charts.

>16 jillmwo: Yipes! I pushed the button not even considering the possible cosmic repercussions!

>1 jillmwo: For all my books I have 610 male (43.9%), 529 female (38.1%), 187 not set (13.5%), 59 n/a (4.2%), and 5 non-binary (0.4%). I think my reading lately and newer books skew to the female, but I don't track reading stats.

It would be interesting if you could weight it by numbers of books per author or filter it by tag.

>14 jillmwo: Whatever focusing on the genders of her reading may have done for Ursula Le Guin, I doubt that it would do much for my kind of writing. In case anyone's curious, I wrote this. It may be a humblebrag, but I'm quite proud of it.

>14 jillmwo: ...ever since Ursula K. Le Guin noted (in an interview or in an essay, perhaps) the difference she felt in her own writing when she started to focus on literature by women as opposed to her previous habit of not considering it in her r4eading, I’ve kept an eye on my balance...

Very interesting. I can see the value in that!

>20 haydninvienna: Wow, that's something! I'm not saying I read it, I didn't have time now to do more than read the TOC and 1.1.1 and 1.1.2.

>14 jillmwo: I pick up new authors to read from you folks here, so I'm likely to pick up new female authors as well, probably at a higher rate than I would have in the past.

>22 Karlstar: Just so you know, there's 15 pages of contents and 234 pages of text. I should add that I take little or no responsibility for the content, just for how it's expressed.

There's another one almost ready to be launched, and a third that I'm still working on.

>20 haydninvienna:
I do not think you should be humble in any way about writing a 252 page document that requires a fifteen page contents table.

I loved the ending. I knew it wasn’t the butler.

>16 jillmwo: Ditto!

>18 ScoLgo: You would probably be the brave soul who went around tasting mushrooms while the rest of the tribe watched.

>23 haydninvienna: The product we're installing now at work has an over 300 page install manual, so large PDF documents do not scare me! :) However, financial lingo is likely to go right over my head. Through my wallet?

>26 Karlstar: Re financial lingo: a lot of it goes straight over my head too. But over the years I’ve become pretty good at knowing just enough about a topic for as long as necessary, and then forgetting it. For the rest I just trust the people who actually do know.

ETA Now we should probably let Jill have her thread back. Sorry about the derail, Jill.

I have had to read reports prepared for postal regulatory bodies in the EU. These reports would be written and translated into all the official languages of the EU. The bodies writing them were economic consultancies. Now, I can plough through some pretty heavy material, e.g. government bills and EU directives, but there was one economic consultancy document I had enormous trouble with. We joke about documents putting us to sleep. Sometimes we talk about only being able to read a few pages before dozing off. Even some paragraphs can be sleep inducing.

With this document I could not get past the first sentence without my eyes closing. It was long, convoluted, and full of jargon and consult-speak, and that was economist consult-speak.

>25 MrsLee: Yep, I'm pretty sure it was my ancestor that first thought drinking cow's milk might be a good idea. ;-)

>14 jillmwo: A ha! Ok, the husband wife duo counts as N/A. I also had one as unknown in my list for this year so far. Interesting!

>13 jillmwo: Glad to see you mention The Telling in a positive fashion. That's one of those books that I have seemed to like better than just about anyone else does.

>31 Jim53: I wonder if that's because The Telling is so obviously intended as a social commentary rather than as a casual science fiction adventure. I know the first time I read it, it sparked up memories in my mind of the dangers cited by commentators looking back on the rise of Mao Tse Tung and the forced efforts seen in China's "Great Leap Forward".

>32 jillmwo: Yes, one can hear axes being sharpened in the background. In that sense it reminded me just a bit of The Word for World Is Forest, which I found more of a diatribe than any of her other books.

Reading a lot this weekend, but in the meantime, some of you may be interested in this piece dealing with audiobooks and associated usage stats. (https://goodereader.com/blog/audiobooks/10-audiobook-stats-you-should-know-in-2023).

>34 jillmwo: Interesting! "The audiobook market holds a revenue share of around 3.8% of book publishing in 2022." I wonder how long the 70% growth rate will be sustained.

Thingaversaries are fun – over the years, we’ve adapted the celebration practices in a variety of ways. We’ve egged each other on in acquiring books every year because to most of this crowd our books are a form of self-identification. If I tell you what I’ve read and how I’ve reacted to that experience, you feel more comfortable in knowing who I am, how our tastes coincide, and whether or not I’m one of those kindred souls that Anne of Green Gables always talked about.

My practice this year in celebrating my Thingaversary is going to be handled via providing you with a list of wonderful books. If I’d won the lottery pot of a bazillion tax-free dollars, these are the books I’d buy and distribute to everyone in my network, my community. Admittedly, what one reads is an intensely personal set of selections; not everyone is going to want to immediately acquire the titles that I feel are seriously worthy (and all too frequently undersold) titles.These are titles I’ve read and found substantive. Undoubtedly, each of you will scan this list and think quietly, Oh jeez, why on earth would she have picked that one? Or alternatively, define substantive… No worries. But maybe you’ll see something on the list, investigate the background and discover something new and wonderful. So here goes:

On the occasion of my 17-year Thingaversary

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers (because Miss Climpson and Miss Murchison)
Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien (Also the Silmarillion and the Hobbit)
Dracula - Bram Stoker (because everyone should have the experience of being thoroughly freaked out by something they’ve read. And because Frank Langella was a tremendously creepy/attractive vampire.)
Mansfield Park and/or Sense and Sensibility
Some book of poetry that includes such things as “Barbara Frietchie” “Gunga Din” “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” “Jabberwocky” “Father William”
The Last Chronicle of Barset (on the basis of Josiah Crawley as one of Trollope’s best literary inventions)
The Way We Live Now (also Trollope)
The Warden AND Barchester Towers (also Trollope)
The Moonstone OR No-Name (Wilkie Collins)
Kim - Rudyard Kipling (Also his short stories and poetry)
Silas Marner OR Tales of a Clerical Life - George Eliot
Cranford (or Mary Barton or North and South) by Elizabeth Gaskell because Charles Dickens was not the only Victorian author concerned with the economic gaps of the period.
The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson
The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin
Five Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (because again invasive species are scary…)
The Dean’s Watch - Elizabeth Goudge (Or you could also read Pilgrim’s Inn)
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Best of C.L. Moore
Black Amazon of Mars - Leigh Brackett
Now Voyager - Olive Prouty (Bette Davis in the movie was great, but the book itself has so much to offer women)
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Tales from 1,001 Nights
The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (because lifestyle is key)
True Names by Vernor Vinge (and you know I’m not big on video games)
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis – Even more than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Storming Heaven by Denise Giordina
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
Shardik by Richard Adams (much preferred over Watership Down)

I have spent the better part of the past two hours combing through the list of My Books here on LT and there are still some titles I have left off the above.

And before anyone inquires about bribing the enforcers, there have been PLENTY of books acquired this past month or so. Most recently, Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott and I think there's a Perry Mason due to arrive momentarily.

Edited to correct a touchstone, an author name, and fiddle with wording of a single phrase....

On-going reading and thoughts:

Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher – wasn’t crazy about the opening chapter of this one but warmed to the story as it went on. The characters were interesting and Kingfisher turns the traditional fairy tale on its head in any variety of ways while preserving some of the standard tropes. (Most particularly, the youngest of three siblings is always the one who has the smarts to work things out. Also, the goblin market was rather fun.) The point of the book is the emergence of different forms of competence and strength in women in the face of very real threats (spousal abuse, etc.) Interestingly, as a side note, Google’s artificial intelligence write-up provided five distinct content warnings for the book.

Murder by an Aristocrat - this one is a title included in Otto Penzeler’s American Mystery Classics. The question modern readers may have is why? There’s justification for it although impatient souls may roll their eyes at how long the significance of the suspense novel takes to emerge. This is Gothic stuff in some ways. A large gracious home where our sleuth (a nurse) arrives in the wee small hours of the night. She’s supposed to take on the care of a man who has suffered a gunshot wound. Within the space of the first 40 pages, the man is dead (albeit from a different gunshot) and Nurse Keating is uncomfortable with the eight family members who seem to have banded together to hide the truth of how and why. Working out the solution is complicated – tracking individual movements and positioning actual arrivals and departures. Eberhard may come down heavily at times on the had-I-but-realized approach but the reader senses the cords tightening around Nurse Keating minute by minute. And you aren’t sure of the killer’s identity until the very last page.

Uldor de Lacy (Short story) by Sheridan Le Fanu An interesting tale of the Fairy Folk (with much of the same cautionary concerns of Nettle and Bone). Half is plausible and half disconcerting. Be careful of the deals you make with the dead as well as with the Fair folk.

Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living. Is anyone still reading Walden these days or has Thoreau largely fallen off the college syllabus? Back in the nineteen-seventies, we read him in the context of the environmental movement. Gary Trudeau further contributed to the Walden mystique in his Doonesbury comic strip. This just published title (of less than 250 pages) positions itself as countering the perception of Thoreau as one of those dreamy transcendentalist types who removed himself from the work-a-day world in order to focus on impractical ideas. The authors point out that Thoreau did manage to cover his personal costs of living in any variety of practical ways. His lesson to the modern reader (as we appear to embark on another transformation of the workplace) is that what’s important is that the reader, the Gen X, Y and Z worker, identifies the work that best uses and fuels personal strengths in making a contribution. It is that sense of contribution that makes working for a living tolerable, even enjoyable.

Meanwhile, I am still dipping into Walt Whitman’s prose and I also have Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott because I want to compare how Whitman wrote about hospitals and nursing with how Alcott did.

Also in progress:
The Book on the Book Shelf (the author passed away earlier this month)
Killingly (fabulous and brand-new historical mystery)
Cat’s Paw (author is pseudonym of a female duo of writers, part of the American Mystery Classics series.

>14 jillmwo: I guess my post wasn't very clear. The numbers I posted were for Kindle titles only. I said my entire library was heavier on male authors. I posted the Kindle numbers because that's pretty much the only way I have read books for the last 11-12 years.

>36 jillmwo:
That is a very novel and worthy way to celebrate your Thingaversary. I am sure the enforcers will modify their standard operating procedures to incorporate this approach into the list of compliant behaviours. This, of course, could take a number of years to draft, test and implement. The process of implementing such a significant change could be accelerated by adding an appropriate amount of interesting cheeses, or an elephant. There is always an elephant.

>36 jillmwo:
BTW, what is the title of the Perry Mason you are expecting?

>39 pgmcc: and >40 pgmcc: The Case of the Baited Hook. But now that I think of it, of all the denizens here in the Pub, you might be able to tell me whether there's a particular case handled by Perry Mason book that involves an elephant?

>41 jillmwo:
I accept your challenge and will revert in due course. There is always an elephant.

New word I learned today - putsch
Encountered in a headline from the Financial Times reporting on the whole Russian thing this weekend. The headline read "A huge humiliation: failed putsch exposes deep flaws in Putin's regime"
Definition: A violent attempt to overthrow a government.

>43 jillmwo:
I remember that word from the news programmes in the 1960s. There were a lot of putsches in those days. Given you read it in the FT it could be a word used more frequently on this side of the Atlantic.

>41 jillmwo:
I have not found a “book” that involves an elephant, but I did come across a screen shot from the TV episode, “The Case of the Cowardly Lion” which has Perry Mason in conference with an elephant. See the picture I sent you in Facebook Messenger. As we know, the TV shows were not written by Earl Stanley Gardner but by the contract writers he hired.

I will continue my search for a Perry Mason “book” involving an elephant.

>36 jillmwo: That's quite the list, thanks for compiling it. A novel way of dodging the enforcers.

>41 jillmwo:
Might I ask what prompted this search for a Perry Mason/elephant collaboration? Do you have a half remembered plot, is there a memory bothering you as you try to go to sleep at night, or are you pondering some wild hypothesis that crept into the back of your mind as you were posting in the GD?

Of course, given the nature of Erle Stanley Garner’s books there are many virtual elephants in the room that people are not talking about as to do so would give away the answer to the murder mystery. I have assumed you are referring to physical elephants, whether in the room or otherwise.

Up there in >39 pgmcc: you said there was always an elephant. Since you had brought this concept up in various Pub conversations, I wondered somewhat off-handedly if in fact that held true w/r/t Perry Mason. This is the kind of pub trivia that drives conversation. I can think of books that have elephants in them, such as Water for Elephants for adults or Babar for children. But I had never considered whether there were apt to be elephants in book series. For the record, I am perfectly willing to acknowledge the elephant in the Perry Mason TV episode. However, based on what little I know of ESG, I wondered if he'd ever resorted to the use of an elephant in Perry Mason.

Let us now open up the conversation to others here in the Pub. (And if there are no responses on this thread, I'm willing to open up a whole new one to elicit greater participation in answering the query.) But can any of you think of book series with elephants? We can assume a series to consist of two or more titles. The elephant may be either a primary or secondary -- appear even as just a quick walk-on -- character. Actually, I now realize you can search LT for this kind of thing (https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=Elephants&searchtype=nseries&sortchoice=0)

OR we can always just go with the metaphorical "elephant in the room".

Sorry, folks, I'm sitting alone in the house during a rain storm while my spouse is out at a theater rehearsal.

>48 jillmwo:
Our “There is always an elephant” hypothesis came about when our children were young and we were on holidays. We would be driving somewhere and see a truck with an image of an elephant on the side, or a car wash would have an elephant image on its signage, etc… We would be in a shop or a garden centre and there would be elephant ornaments on sale. Newspapers and magazines would have pictures or cartoons with elephants. It was spooky how often elephants were present. If you look for the elephant you will find it.

When we were on the mechanical elephant ride in Nantes there were a lot of people on the ground taking pictures of the mechanical elephant as it walked across the park. One woman was using here i-Pad and was holding it up in a way that I could see its covers. On the front and back covers there were images of, you guessed it, an elephant.

Elephants creep up on you when you least expect them. You will be sitting on public transport and will suddenly realise you are looking at a billboard with an elephant on it.

And, of course, there is always something people will not talk about.

I am glad the elephants gave you something to think about during the rain storm.

Are there literal elephants in Elephants can remember, or just metaphorical ones?

Search: elephant detective series turned up three titles, none of them the one I was looking for. I remember reading an Indian detective story, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra. He was given an elephant.

>51 MrsLee: I am charmed. Apparently in that particular mystery series, the elephant becomes the detective's regular sidekick. I might have to read the whole set!!

>50 Sakerfalcon: No elephants make an appearance in that Agatha Christie novel. Unless you think of Ariadne Oliver and Poirot himself as being metaphorical elephants...

>49 pgmcc: It was a particularly disruptive storm here in SE Pennsylvania. News reporters were on TV this am speaking from our very own neighborhood. Overnight we got an inch of rain which we think mitigates some of the current concern over the drought. (I woke up with a tree branch peering in at my bedroom window where before it had always maintained a discreet distance. Additionally, we're having a tree surgeon in later this week to clean up one or two problems resulting from the high winds...) We're due another round this afternoon, but thankfully we never lost power.

>52 jillmwo:
I am glad you did not lose power or experience any water damage. Keep an eye out for elephants. There is always an elephant.

Will the tree-surgeon be cutting any TRUNKS?

>53 pgmcc: snort Srsly(*), you sank to that? I know you're capable of better puns.

(*) Did anyone else know that Wordle will accept SRSLY as a word? My faith in Western civilization is slowly being chipped away...

>54 jillmwo: Think of it this way. We have evolved enough to do without vowels and still understand what is being said. Soon we will need no letters at all.

>48 jillmwo: Do oliphants count?

How about the elephant-like aliens in Footfall?
Woolly mammoths in Opening of the World?

>56 Karlstar:
Of course they do. An elephant by any other name…

>55 MrsLee:
“ “

>54 jillmwo:
Wordle and Quordle accept many strange things. “Srsly” is particularly worrying.

>59 pgmcc: I agree. That's not a word!

>48 jillmwo: Ok, one more - the Raiel in Peter Hamilton's Void series are described as elephantine.

A new thread for this one might be better, if you still want to pursue the challenge.

And I noticed last night that the next Poirot in queue for my Amazon watching is Elephants Can Remember. Made me laugh last night when I saw it.

>61 MrsLee:
:-)
If it is the one I recall, there is a performing elephant in it.

ETA: Had I been an elephant I would probably be more definite in my recollection.

>56 Karlstar: Of Course! Variants such as oliphant and/or heffalump are considered to be valid. The Pub is always inclusive in its outlook.

dagnabbit, the spouse is bellowing again. Back as soon as may be feasible.

>61 MrsLee: Anything that makes you laugh these days should be embraced. Although I think the televised adaptation of Elephants Can Remember is better than Christie's written text.

As a side technology note, just now the Kindle Cloud Reader informed me that it was unable to open my digital copy of Christie's novel and that I was required to use a Kindle app (available from all the various "stores") to read that. I am currently working on an older Chromebook and actually aware that Amazon announced discontinued support for the Cloud Reader some while back.

I find this insistence on technology upgrades to be quite annoying at times...I am not persuaded that my needs, as a user, are being prioritized by the tech community. Call me cynical, jaded, grumpy, whatever.

*Jill gets up so she can cross the room to get an dedicated Amazon device in order to look at Elephants in the appropriate environment.*

>62 pgmcc: No performing elephants in the version I watched. However, in Poirot's apartment there was a statue of about ten elephants trunk to tail in a row as a background. Also the line, "There is always a memory." Which seemed to echo your line about the elephant.

>64 MrsLee:
QED!
There is always an elephant; at least one. You found ten…and where there’s an elephant there’s a memory.

Pretty sure the last line of Witches abroad is "But they went the long way round and saw the elephant." One of my favourite Pratchetts.

>65 pgmcc:



Sometimes there are two elephants.

>67 hfglen:
Now you are catching on.

#thereisalwaysanelephant
#thereisalwaysanelephantatleastone
#atleastone

>68 pgmcc: While searching for something to watch the other night, we watched an episode of 'Animal Kingdom', which is a show where they talk about caring for the animals at Disney's park of the same name. Of course, there was an elephant segment.

>69 Karlstar:
LOL

Well, this morning we had the tree guys in to saw off some hanging branches, trim back some ragged evergreens and (as long as they were around) generally remove the invasive "stuff". On the one hand, I'm murfling over the expense and on the other, I'm relieved to have it done.

I return to the Pub and to my thread to find elephants all over. For the record, I welcome the elephants and particularly love the photo brought in by @hfglen. Ever since Noah, multiple elephants are good.

And as one might have known, @pgmcc is proven right. There is always an elephant. at least one and sometimes more than one. I will have to pay more attention to this in future.

I have this vision of people around the world meeting and knowing they are among friends when they hear "There is always an elephant."

>72 tardis: I LOVE IT. Let's adopt it.

I am somewhat charmed by The Book on the Book Shelf, primarily on the basis of its Appendix. The author lists 25 approaches to imposing order on one’s books once placed on the shelf. For the record, I think the display settings provided by Tim here at LT include a good many of them. (Perhaps not any means of displaying them according to sentimental value…)

By author last name
By title
By subject
By trim size (height)
Horizontally
By color
By binding (hardcover, paperback)
By read or unread status
By order of acquisition
By order of publication
By number of pages
Dewey Decimal System
Library of Congress system
By ISBN
By Price
According to New or Used
By enjoyment
By sentimental value
By provenance (books grouped by how they came into one’s possession – author signing, ARCs, etc.)
By more esoteric means (truly weird)
Closet libraries
Dust jackets (the one omission I note in this has to do with the lack of discussion of slipcases)
Other problems

Published originally back in 1999, The Book on the Book Shelf is a little dated with regard to library shelving machinery, but beyond that, not bad at all. (I mean, I learned stuff from it. At one point in history, books were shelved with their page edges facing outward to the user.)

>74 jillmwo:
At one point in history, books were shelved with their page edges facing outward to the user.

That would have been in the mystery section.

>74 jillmwo: Closet libraries?

>76 Karlstar: Imagine a pantry sized room or closet with narrow shelves of pine holding smaller books (poetry), pamphlets, volumes of a smaller trim size. Petrowski was sharing the storage solution of a working poet in Chicago who had fitted out an apartment closet to hold his entire poetry collection, "a single subject in a single closet, in a single apartment on Lake Shore Drive". Petrowski thought the closet might well have held hundreds of books.

I've never had the closet space that I could afford to use in quite that way. However, we used to live in an apartment in New York that had a plate rack about 12 inches from the ceiling of the so-called dining room. We put all of our mass-market paperbacks up there. The book collection has mushroomed since those days and mass-market paperbacks no longer hav the same trim size they once had.

>77 jillmwo: Thanks! A friend of mine has always had that 'plate rack' kind of shelving around his den/library, I actually bought a shelf-thing (technical term) at a garage sale last year that is supposed to be mounted on the wall and now that I think about it, the groove in it is probably for plates, I was just going to put books or minis on it, if I ever get it on the wall.

Along the same lines, years ago I bought a brass wire thingy meant to 'display a plate' and for the last decade I have used it to hold my Kindle while I'm eating.

>79 clamairy: Mind. Blown. Why on earth did I never think of that? I would work for an iPad, I think.

>80 haydninvienna: Yup! I've used it for my tablet as well...

>79 clamairy: *blink* *blink* I have wanted something like that for years, AND I have several plate holders I kept thinking I should hold onto "just in case" I ever wanted to display a plate. Never connected the two in my brain until now.

Innovation abounds in The green Dragon.

>79 clamairy: This is brilliant!

>36 jillmwo: Thank you, Jill, that's quite a gift to all of us. I shall take it under advisement. I have read a good number of them, but still less than half. There are a few titles whose existence I did not suspect, e.g., Wharton's ghost stories. Well done!

>79 clamairy: A brilliant reading hack!

I'm going to get a swelled head if you guys don't stop... I had originally bought it not for a plate but to hold cookbooks open and upright so I could easily read them while I was cooking. It didn't work well because my cookbooks were all too large. But while it was in the kitchen one day it dawned on me to stick my Kindle Paperwhite in it. I never looked back...

>87 clamairy:
You are just too modest.

Recent Reading in Brief Bits

Cat’s Paw - Roger Scarlett. The actual murder and solution are really quite memorable. There is an awkward framing used for purposes of introducing the detective and sidekick(s). Otherwise, as an example of the traditional country house murder, this American version set in Boston is nicely handled with a solution the reader won’t see coming! An overly controlling uncle is murdered with an assortment of visiting nieces and nephews serving as plausible suspects. And, as the title might suggest, there is a cat. The mystery is a quite enjoyable logic puzzle.

Killingly - Katherine Beutner The opening premise is the disappearance of a young woman from Mt. Holyoke College in 1897. Where has this serious student gone? Is she dead or has she run away with a lover from the nearby mill town? The writing and narrative structure are both entirely elegant, but this is not a comfortable or reassuring read. A real heads-up to the potential reader – while there is no graphically delivered rendition of child abuse or sexual assault, the presence of both runs throughout the book. I want to pass this one on to Goodwill but honestly wonder if I ought to include a sticky note on the opening page that the novel is unsuitable for any reader under the age of 16.

One of the reasons I read so many of the older mysteries is because the murders are usually due to a limited set of the basic motives identified by P.D. James – loathing, lust or lucre. They don't dwell lovingly on the grimness of larger societal or psychological ills favored by modern crime writers but which I, the modern reader, am trying to avoid in my leisure entertainment. I want to focus on and root for the innocent in my reading of mysteries.

For some reason, my brain now dredges up the Dorothy Parker poem.

Razors pain you.
Rivers are damp.
Acids stain you
and drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful.
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.

Hmmm. I'm not much one for the farcical approach but a touch more gentle humor by those writing murder mysteries would probably be well-received.

>87 clamairy: You really are a clever woman.

>36 jillmwo: Happy belated thingaversary! Thank you for the list of titles.

I read Morality Play a few years ago and then never pursued any of Unsworth's other novels. Perhaps I should. I also have been told that I should give The Voyage of the Dawn Treader a shot, despite my dislike of the first Narnia chronicle. I've been wondering where to start with Goudge ...

In looking at your list, I wonder if you would like Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels.

>91 libraryperilous: I haven't read anything else by Unsworth either. I did Morality Play as part of a book discussion group for a bookstore back when I was living in New York City. I hadn't expected to particularly enjoy the book but was blown away by how well Unsworth wove together his plot of the troupe acting out the morality play for the community with the narrative structure needed to deliver a mystery. It was thoroughly enjoyable and I have never been quite sure why so few people are aware of it. I think when I looked at some of his other titles, I thought they might be either too grim or (as literary fiction) require more brain power than I could spare at the time.

As for C.S. Lewis, I think re-visiting his children's literature is always a bit of a crap shoot. But thankfully, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have both managed to survive for me as enjoyable reads. So much depends on the age when one encounters such titles for the first time. The question is what will resonate at any particular point with the individual's internal state.

With regard to Elizabeth Goudge, I first discovered Pilgrim's Inn on a business trip and read the whole Damerosehay Trilogy in a very fragmented way over something like a decade, but I think The Dean's Watch is actually my favorite of hers. Sentimental to some extent, which means that the reader's mood has to be considered, but soothing in its outlook. Not at all like Green Dolphin Country which you may have heard of because of the movie. Green Dolphin Street (a 1947 film with Donna Reed and Lana Turner, mostly notable for how they managed the earthquake special effects.)

And I was unfamiliar with that particular book by Jill Paton-Walsh. The description is intriguing so thank you for bringing it forward.

I am fighting a serious impulse to re-shelve my books according to the publisher. Matching trim sizes would be the secondary consideration as I put different groups together. So Everyman's Library (Austen, Eliot, and Trollope) all together, all of the Library of America volumes side by side (Cather, 19th Century Poetry, Whitman, Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, etc.), various Folio sets, most of which are in their slipcases, etc.

This may just be a something of a control fantasy. Because adopting this approach would make all of the various unmatched titles from an assortment of trade publishers look that much more chaotic.

I also don't believe it would make one whit of difference in finding more room on the shelves. It smacks of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I have a lot of books of all kinds (old, recent, used, new, in print, out of print, etc.); they've got to go somewhere.

The house (built in the late '1940's) is recalcitrant in its construction and, despite various experiments in the use of a plastic sonic screwdriver, does NOT change into a TARDIS on demand.

I need to establish some serious goals to pursue in retirement.

>92 jillmwo: I seem to recall having a similar reaction to Unsworth: likely a smart but depressing set of novels. Re: Narnia, I didn't read much fantasy or sci-fi as a child, so I'm encountering well-known children's fantasies as an adult. I've noticed that I favor contemporary middle grade fantasies not classic ones. I'm not sure I would have liked Narnia as a child either. I'm glad they've held up well for you! It's always lovely when that happens.

>93 jillmwo: I actually have some of my books shelved that way. All seven (!) of my Everyman's Library are together, all of my graphic novels are together. Otherwise, by genre by author, with fantasy and scifi mixed.

>95 Karlstar: I generally just shelve books where they can be squeezed in. I recently put six of the Barset novels in Everyman's Library editions on a single dedicated shelf and they looked so nice. Of course, now it bothers me that my Everyman Library editions of Jane Austen (from the 1990s) don't match together AS nicely. This should not allowed to become a thing in my head; other Austen sets I own do display nicely. It's just that particular group that doesn't.

Really, if this is the worst problem that I face in 2023, the whining and moaning should be squashed.

Otherwise I am reading The Three Dahlias and I'm enjoying it immensely.

>96 jillmwo: Years ago I read several Jane Austen paperback novels and was not impressed enough to keep them. I have been wanting to read them again now that I have a bit more of life behind me and understand her subtle wit. I have several hardcovers given me recently by a friend from her mother's library. One of the reasons I am postponing reading them is that when I finish they will need a spot on the bookshelves and I am not sure where that spot will be. They belong in my bedroom with the British author novels, but that shelf is full. They could go in the livingroom with my other hardcover classics, but again, those shelves are mostly full. I have shelf space in the apartment, but those shelves are holding American history books, or my cozy comfort fiction that makes me laugh. I think this is a problem that won't get solved until I retire in September.

Instead I will go purchase the Kindle version of The Three Dahlias.

>93 jillmwo: Reshelving books is an activity I always enjoy. (Well, okay, reshelving my own books. Work is less pleasurable.) I have only a few LoA and Everyman editions, but they are shelved together. Many of my Viragos are together too, a beautiful display of green spines. And I recently made a shelf for my Fitzcarraldo, British Library Women Writers, and Handheld Press editions. So I completely understand your desire.

The Three Dahlias can be read as a light entertaining mystery. There’s a mystery weekend being held at an English country house estate to celebrate the books of Lettice Davenport and her wonderful lady detective, Dahlia Lively. The three Dahlias of the title are the three women who have (or will) play Dahlia on the screen in movies and/or television. There’s Rosalind, the renowned actress (a “national treasure”). There’s Caro, the active woman in her forties, who is restless looking about for what’s next for her own career. Finally, there’s Posy, a young woman who has spent her childhood and adolescence in front of the camera with all the complications that kind of experience can engender.. Posy is trying to establish herself as an independent adult on her own terms and she’s not sure who her friends are.

There is a murder during this organized three-day weekend and the victim won’t be particularly missed by those staying in the house. Rosalind, Caro and Posy each have their reasons for not wanting the police to muck up the case and work together to identify the murderer. Looking at the relatively limited number of guests at Aldermere who might have done it, who had the motive, the opportunity and the means of hastening the individual’s demise?

Katy Watson delivers a good story, reminiscent in some ways of Sharyn McCrumb’s Bimbos of the Death Sun. As mentioned in David Bordwell’s Perplexing Plots, “mystery novels yield a clarity of plot and motive, a solid structure, and a finale promising poetic justice”. The Three Dahlias delivers on all three expectations. It’s fun and I want to know more of what will happen in the lives of these women. It’s a good thing that there’s a sequel just out in July, A Very Lively Murder.

Spoiler Note: Before I hit the ending, I thought I knew who dunnit, but it turned out I hadn’t worked out all of the bits and pieces. Watson’s wrap-up was crafty and twisty, but entirely satisfying.

Heads Up to @pgmcc wherever he may be in France or Ireland. Go get yourself a copy of David Bordwell's Perplexing Plots. It complements Yorke's Five Act Journey book really well.

>100 jillmwo:
Thank you for the coolly delivered BB, or should I say, "head-shot"?

You know my weaknesses too well.

Ordered and due for delivery tomorrow. I am going for the paperback edition. I would rather the hardback, but the hardback is over €100.00. Need I say more.

So, you can chalk up another BB hit.

E.T.A. Arrived back into Ireland about midnight on Friday. Another trip to France is in planning with October in mind. I will be in Cincinnati in September for a couple of weeks.

>101 pgmcc: Yes, the hardcover price of USD 130 stopped me cold as well.

>102 jillmwo:
I checked out the prices from Irish shops and the paperback was €39 while the evil Amazon was selling at £23 which is about €28.

>99 jillmwo: Comparing a book to Bimbos is enough to send me looking for it immediately.

>101 pgmcc: Peter, I live about eight hours east of Cincinnati, and I know that Jill and several others aren't too far away. Do you think you might have time for a meetup, maybe in Pittsburgh or something like that?

Snippet from Chapter Six of Perplexing Plots which is proving to be a fun as well as illuminating read:

Why are hard-boiled plots so hard to follow, let alone remember? In part because of all the lying, but we get that in whodunits too. More markedly, hard-boiled plots tend to abandon the Golden Age tidiness of physical clues, timetables, and a closed circle of suspects. Instead we must keep track of secrets shared among a vast cast spread across an urban milieu. Authors revamped the nineteenth-century “city mystery” novel and the modernists’ montage version of it by presenting a network of characters who are entangled in crimes large and small. Cain’s Fast One introduces more than fifty characters, most with names. Sometimes key players never come onstage; call it the Floyd Thursby gambit.

That last sentence made me snicker quietly.

In a previous thread, @clamairy and I were talking about read-alikes for certain authors -- our specific example: If you want a reading experience similar to what you experience with Victoria Goddard or Katherine Addison, where do you turn?

I am currently reading Rosemary Kirstein's book The Outskirter's Secret for a book group discussion tomorrow and this author fits as well into that grouping. There are some sword fights, but for the most part, this is about searching out wisdom. I don't know how many of the folks here in the Pub have read this series, but it's a *really* well-done form of post-apocalyptic science fiction.

>106 jillmwo: Thank you! I'm going to add it to my OverDrive list.

ETA: That appears to be the second in a series, so I added The Steerswoman to my wishlist.

>105 jillmwo: The Addison read-alike is tough. Maybe Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion and The Spirit Ring fantasies? GG Kay, maybe? Someone will surely come up with a better comparison.

>107 clamairy: Yes, I should have said that in the original post. But I think you will enjoy both titles, m'dear.

>108 Karlstar: The original discussion was about identifying authors whose books have some degree of adventure, but which aren't rife with life's despair. The tone needs to be one of possibility, where the human beings face challenges and/or conflict but where they manage to overcome and/or come together. (is that incoherent?)

The reader wants to be able to go to sleep at night having enjoyed a story but not one where individual is left anxious. I liken it to watching black and white television episodes of Perry Mason just before you fall asleep. Yes, there's been an unfortunate event but that's no reason for everyone to forget their manners. Comb your hair, be polite to Hamilton Burger and Lt. Tragg, and don't forget to wear both hat and gloves in court. (Mink stole optional when taking the stand.)

>106 jillmwo: I love the (alas, still unfinished) Steerswoman series. The careful way Kirstein lays out the post-apocalyptic scenario is an example of writerly craft.

re: Addison, readers might try Martha Wells' new one, Witch King. The politics are not explored in as much detail, but I feel it's a similar reading vibe. Same with The Empress of Salt and Fortune, which is a much shorter book, but explores court politics and reminded me of Addison. Also, I'll plug Addison's Holmes pastiche, The Angel of the Crows. It probably owes more to her Kyle Murchison Booth stories (as Sarah Monette), but I loved the Holmesian Easter eggs and the way she played with some of my favorite Holmes stories.

>110 libraryperilous: I mentioned Witch King as being Addison-esque in my thread. I've only ever read Martha Wells' Murderbot series, so I was surprised at how different the story/writing was in this.

>106 jillmwo: have you ever looked at using the Literature-Map site? Might be helpful in instances like this. I used to, on occasion, use the music version and while it would throw up some weird selections at times it was usually not too bad.

>112 AHS-Wolfy: I am sure I knew of this (at least once upon a time) but clearly it had faded in my thinking of a resource. Here's the map of what that system came up with in terms of being close to Katherine Addison: https://www.literature-map.com/katherine+addison

Certainly >108 Karlstar: had mentioned Bujold as being somewhat similar in mood and/or style. But there are two other names shown who appear to be much closer. (Marie Brennan and Tasha Suri), so now I need to go see what they may have written.

(I should also probably eat lunch and get prepped for the afternoon book group.)

>113 jillmwo: It seems a little odd to me that they have Becky Chambers as a closer match than they have Victoria Goddard. We are relying on you to test the waters and give us a full report on these other authors, Jill. :o)

I’ve been thinking (in a rather off-hand and casual kind of way) about the transfer of story from one medium to another. Some of this came from my viewing of two movie versions of The Rains Came and then subsequently reading the full 800+ page best-selling novel by Louis Bromfield. I am also currently reading Perplexing Plots which is written by a film studies professor with an interest in how practices for constructing film narratives developed and shifted over the course of the 20th century. At any rate, over the weekend at some point, I had two older movies running in the background – specifically Bette Davis in The Letter and Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window – when it occurred to me that I’d never read either of the two stories on which those movies were made. I rummaged about to see if I could find the original source material.

The Internet Archive had a readily accessible version of The Letter, the 1924 short story by W. Somerset Maugham. It’s a very tightly told story – just the four characters of the lawyer, his legal associate, the accused and her husband. The 1940 movie expands events somewhat beyond the accounts shared in the short story, but primarily in the interests of showing the societal conflicts giving rise to the murder (racism, social class, etc.). The Maugham story was based on a 1911 trial held in Kuala Lumpur of British colonials. A married woman, Ethel Proudlock, was tried for shooting a man, whom she accused of attempted rape. She was found guilty but the British community raised such objections over the conviction that the reigning Sultan commuted her sentence. Maugham subsequently developed a stage play from the material which went to Broadway and subsequently came to Hollywood with William Wyler as director. Wyler’s film got seven different Oscar nominations. As much as I enjoy watching Bette Davis in the movie, I suspect the short story carries the greater punch.

As for Rear Window, it was based on a Cornell Woolrich story entitled “It Had to Be Murder”. Again, it has a far more limited roster of characters – Hal Jeffries who is the hobbled narrator of the story, Lars Thorwald, Sam (Hal’s healthcare attendant), and the detective, Boyne. (Hitchcock replaced the character of Sam with two female characters, Lisa and Stella, the one being a romantic interest and the other being the day nurse. The perception was that they’d be more vulnerable in making the risky visits to Thorwald’s apartment, thereby heightening the movie’s suspense.)

Both short stories are worthwhile reads and the links below take you to versions of the full text.

Rear Window: https://www.sjsu.edu/people/edwin.sams/courses/c5/s0/woolrich.pdf

The Letter: https://archive.org/details/maugham_w_somerset_1874_1965_letter_short_story

Thank you! I am definitely interested in the Rear Window story. It is one of my favorite older movies. Although I admit when I watched the last time I was a little annoyed by the age difference between Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly.

>115 jillmwo:
Fascinating. Like Clare, The Rear Window is one of my favourites.

By the way, I am not sure if you are aware of it, but Umberto Eco’s book, Mouse or Rat: Translation as negotiation, contains a chapter on translation from one medium to another, in particular from book to screen.

>117 pgmcc: Thanks for the pointer on Eco. I want to read and review the relatively recent translation by Jack Zipes of The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest by Felix Salten. (Not a single bit of Disney animation to be found, but seriously gorgeous artwork by Alenka Sottler.) In my experience, Zipes always views things through a political lens and the write-up on the Princeton University Press site suggests that this is the case with Bambi as well. (I can't get to the right touchstone so see https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691197746/the-original-bambi)

>106 jillmwo: The steerswoman is such a great series! I really hope Kirstein is able to finish it some day.

Movie-goers may enjoy sitting down with David Bordwell’s recent book, Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder(Columbia University Press, 2023). Similarly, devotees of the British Libraries’ Crime Classics series are likely to find Perplexing Plots a fun read. Just how might the structure of Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case be relevant to modern movie-making?

A quick tour of the book’s index indicates an exciting scope of discussion. Yes, there are the standard “brand names” of 100 years of detective fiction – Christie, Chandler, Highsmith, Hammett, etc. – but there are also less well-known creators, such as Barbara Meredith, Richard Hull, and Frances Iles. The same is true of the films mentioned. Bordwell opens with a quick analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, but also discusses directors Alfred Hitchcock and Christopher Nolan. The crossover between modern crime fiction and movie-making is analyzed by a thorough discussion of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling Gone Girl, film and novel.

There are brief obligatory references to film works by Jean Cocteau and Orson Welles, but Bordwell is primarily interested in how creators deliver meaning in the context of popular culture – think multiplex rather than art house. He monitors how creators convey the passage or shift of time, play with points of view,and juxtapose narrative blocks while delivering an immersive experience. Bordwell writes self-deprecatingly that there will be those who find his examination of narrative craftsmanship “plodding” but his prose is entirely accessible to a general readership.

This is one that is highly recommended. My husband stole it as his bedtime read before I was even halfway through the review process.

And huzzah! New books (print copies) arrived today, all from Persephone Books in the UK. The regular postage needed to get them across the Atlantic was nearly a deal-breaker. OTOH, they got here in exactly one week from the date of initial order and honestly, I hadn't thought they would. Two by Dorothy Whipple and one by Wilkie Collins.

>121 jillmwo: High Wages has been on my TBR for a number of years. I enjoy department store fiction.

>122 libraryperilous: I went to the page for High Wages over on the Persephone Press site and saw there some additional titles by Dorothy Whipple. I had no idea she was so prolific. (I have to work through this most recent haul of her titles before I order from their shop again. Postage was a killer and not everything they offer is available from Amazon.)

World Fantasy Award Finalists Announced
https://www.tor.com/2023/07/26/announcing-the-2023-world-fantasy-award-finalists...

I hadn't read much listed there -- Babel by R.F. Kuang.

>125 jillmwo: Interesting. I haven't read any of the novels, and only one of the novellas. I'm usually better than that. With the Hugos, I've read all but one of the novel nominees and several of the novellas. A few of the Hugo noms are actually fantasy (Nettle & Bone, for example).

>125 jillmwo: I haven't read any of those, and Babel was the only title I recognized.

>126 tardis: Saint Death's Daughter was amazing.

>128 reconditereader: I haven't read that one but Spear was wonderful. A rare 5-star rating for me, and I'm not that big a fan of Arthurian legend.

By contrast, I rated Babel 3.5 and Siren Queen 3 stars.

>128 reconditereader: I second that!

I own but haven't read Babel and The ballad of Perilous Graves. Siren queen and Spear are on my wishlist. Unusually, I haven't read any of the stories or novellas.

>129 ScoLgo: Thank you for the bullet. Spear is going on my wishlist.

>131 clamairy: I hope you like it. It's a very short book but Griffith packs a lot into those 167 pages.

Gifted Article from yesterday's Washington Post. Michael Dirda's 29 Rules of Reading
https://wapo.st/3QnHxhw

Quite honestly, his stated rules are more to do with his personal preferences than anything else, but you know headlines tend to get written with click bait in mind. There's also a lovely photo of Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins in his library to add to the loveliness.

>133 jillmwo: Thanks for that. Obviously everyone has different rules and preferences. Doesn't everyone hate the stickers on the covers/spines? But - down with marks! The horror! I won't write in a book, that's what LT is for, making notes, if necessary.

>134 Karlstar: I'm in the same boat. For me the big benefit of the new Kindle Scribe was the screen size rather than the functionality of their "sticky notes". Why would I ever solely store my notes in a single online space? That's why I keep opening up books and finding pieces of paper with sometimes cryptic thoughts scribbled on them. What the heck is on page 297 that I thought was noteworthy? Because I read that page now and can't for the life of me see anything that jumps out at me....It's the on-going mystery of that page in that book! (Maybe one day it will come to me but I have my doubts.)

And yes, the sticky labels left by libraries are annoying as heck. Although using lighter fluid to dissolve the adhesive creates its own legacy problem.

>134 Karlstar: >135 jillmwo: A hair dryer, half a cup of patience, and baby oil takes care of those stickers.

>129 ScoLgo: and >131 clamairy: I don't know if you're aware of it but Spear was shortlisted for the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. (See https://electricliterature.com/announcing-the-2023-shortlist-for-the-ursula-k-le... ) But I see nothing in that coverage that indicates when the winner might be announced.

>136 ScoLgo: Good to know.

>133 jillmwo: Strong agreement with most of them, and no disagreement with any. Screens do indeed impose homogeneity, but anyway why would you put your reading in a place where it can be removed without your knowing?

>133 jillmwo:
Thank you for gifting this article. It is very interesting. I would share many of his views, but would compromise on some.

I underline interesting pieces in my books and will put a not in the back of the book as to why I underlined a particular piece on a given page.

In relation to Perplexing Plots, your surgically delivered BB, I see it begging out for highlighters. Highlighting is something a used extensively in college and in work when trying to extract knowledge and meaning from my books and reports. If I only had screens at college I would probably never have achieved the qualifications I did. The tactile prompts from my physical books were key in my efficiency level when digging out information and preparing essays or doing exercises. I could never develop the same level of familiarity with a text in an e-reader as I managed to do with physical books. It must be very difficult for students who only use screen-based devices when they are studying.

>133 jillmwo: As with the others, I enjoyed that article. Agreed with most and wouldn't argue with any.

>136 ScoLgo: Does it work on paperbacks?

>142 Karlstar: Mostly yes. It should work well on any book or dust jacket that has a plastic coating. Use the low setting on the hair dryer to heat one end of the sticker. Start peeling up the edge and keep heating it as you go. But don't rush. Going too fast or not heating enough will likely result in a torn cover. Once the sticker is removed, I use a cotton ball with a few drops of baby oil to clean up any remaining residue followed by a dry tissue to remove the baby oil.

One caveat... it's easy to overheat your fingers but worth it to get rid of those annoying stickers.

>143 ScoLgo: Thanks, I will try it! That reminds me of a book repair question I wanted to ask, but I'll ask on my own thread and not hijack this one.

>144 Karlstar: You are mistaken. Allow me to clarify. Your chat with >143 ScoLgo: constitutes useful exchange. It doesn't meet the Pub's criteria for "hijacking a thread". That usually involves as least six highly detailed posts from multiple parties about something nerdy or unrelated to books, etc. Some hijackings go on for at least 18 consecutive posts. Now if the two of you had gone off on a long series of posts about #Barbenheimer or about the price of tea in China, I might have agreed with you.

>145 jillmwo: Then with your gracious permission, I will post my question here too:

Question for you smart folks:

I was recently given an old hardcover edition of Rip Van Winkle, and the shipper sent it in one of those plastic envelopes with no padding at all. It was clearly bashed during shipping and a decent sized chunk 'crumbled' at the top of the front cover. It didn't break off or anything, but you can feel that it is crumbly under the cover material.

The question is: it feels like that part of the cover is now compromised and might get worse. What's the best way to contain the damage? Is that at all possible, short of reinforcing it with, ugh, tape or something?

Sometimes you see a book with such lovely artwork that you just buy it for the pictures. The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest from Princeton University Press is just such an edition. The book had been included in the 2023 AUPresses Book,Jacket and Journal Show (it’s the third title shown here – just scroll down: https://design.up.hcommons.org/2023-poetry-and-literature-selections/). At any rate, I knew at a glance that the press had done a tremendous design job. My immediate reaction was that I wouldn’t necessarily want to read it because the death of Bambi’s mother on screen was pretty traumatic for a whole generation of children who watched the movie on television. But the artwork was compelling. (Alenka Sottler is a European artist and illustrator of some reputation.)

(As noted in >118 jillmwo: above, I can't get to the right touchstone so visit https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691197746/the-original-bambi )

If I read Bambi as a kid, I’m sure it was some bowdlerized version drawn from the 1942 Disney movie. However, the actual narrative, in this instance one translated by Jack Zipes, is quite striking on any number of levels. You can, as Zipes does, view Salten’s novel as a political commentary for adult readers, an allegory on the experience of minorities living in Vienna in between the two World Wars.

Other recent translators, such as Damion Searls, emphasize the environmental aspects of the story. Library catalogers working on classification assign it as being a coming-of-age story or as Deer Fiction. (Note that I wasn't able to find any other novels that fell under that classification, but I may not have been looking properly.)

Reading the full text is an unexpected literary experience. Yes, there are some similar incidents here that Disney included – Bambi encountering a butterfly for the first time – but the book is not saccharine. The dialogue of the animals has been anthropomorphized, but there is dignity to them. It’s not Disney's Thumper you meet here. It’s an older Hare. (There is no skunk named Flower. Skunks are not indigenous to Europe.)

The thematic question of the book, arising from conversations with the Old Stag is whether Bambi is capable of, has the maturity for, being alone. The maturation process will be completed only when that determination is made. When the individual learns that he need not be reliant on the false primacy of the unnamed Him (the hunter possessed of the weapon). That Bambi need not accept as the hunter as being his superior or as having authority.

Bambi (if read as a political allegory) is bearable; those who read it as a story of innocent animals hunted by the anonymous Him may not like it. The human hunter is not villainized or personalized here, but there are disturbing instances where the animals are clearly vulnerable to his technology (guns, traps, etc.). The hunter is simply one part of the dangerous world in which the deer and other animals live. The real danger lies in misinterpreting the character of man, as one character discovers. (Note that this is not a character that made it into the Disney film.)

This Bambi deserves to be read.

>147 jillmwo:
You can, as Zipes does, view Salten’s novel as a political commentary for adult readers, an allegory on the experience of minorities living in Vienna in between the two World Wars.
Very interesting.

I see what you mean about the artwork.

>140 pgmcc: I feel the same way about highlighters, Peter - used them heavily in school. My son, however, always prefers e-texts in college... I find it puzzling, but it may be a generational facility with screens.

>133 jillmwo: Thanks for sharing the article, Jill!

>133 jillmwo: Bit late but hopefully still relevant: a response to Michael Dirda by Molly Templeton on Tor.com. Looks like she agrees with most of it. I agree with most of what Molly says too (especially nos. 7 and 9).

>150 haydninvienna: No, I hadn't seen that response from her at all (and I agree particularly as you note, with 7 and 9. Don't pick up the puppy...)

I need to sit down and wrestle with doing a similar response.

>150 haydninvienna: Thanks for the link. I'm more in agreement with her list too, particularly 4 and 16 and of course, 19. I love going to the Drs office because I'll get to read.

14 though, the organizer in me is horrified, but, it might be really cool if I organized my books by the order I read them, even though for many books, it would have to be a very rough estimation. I have some children's books that would come first, then A Wrinkle in Time, then the Tripods series by John Christopher. then...

>152 Karlstar: I am imagining the bookshelves thus arranged. All the skinny picture books in one left-hand corner of a bookcase with subsequent volumes increasing in thickness as one goes along.

I finished Wolf Hall yesterday, just in time for the Folgers book discussion last night. As I said to one of the other participants, I feel as if I should go back now and re-read it to see how she did WHAT she did. I don't care for the use of a first-person-present-tense narrative in a novel; I usually find it tedious. But I didn't find it annoying in this book so I want to work out why.

In particular, her humanizing of Cromwell as an individual was good, particularly when one considers how we went through whole decades where he was always painted as the villain. (I mean, we all knew the rhyme of Divorced-Beheaded-Died-Divorced-Beheaded-Survived. And remember the television mini-series The Six Wives of Henry VIII and the movie with Genevieve Bujold playing Anne of a Thousand Days and the play, A Man for All Seasons? Although Tey's The Daughter of Time didn't present Thomas More in any kind of positive light. I also remember reading Norah Lofts' The King's Pleasure which presented poor Katherine of Aragon in a much more positive light than one usually got. )

At any rate, I read Wolf Hall in a Kindle edition rather than in print (probably because I didn't want to wait on delivery or otherwise have to balance the chonk-sized volume). But again, now I feel as if I want to revisit it. (I do still have a gift certificate from the Folio Society that would cover the bulk of the cost.)

At any rate, I know everyone else read years and years back, but I only got around to reading it in 2023. Part of the challenge is that you can read it in so many ways -- a fictionalized biography of Cromwell, a story of an ordinary man rising to extraordinary power, a discussion of power in a period of destabilization (Church vs. State). Lots of ways to look at it. What was this book *really* about? What did Mantel think her message was? (And again, why did she choose to tell it in that way?)

>150 haydninvienna: This is awesome. But, what is "hate reading?" LOL I don't believe I have done this. If I am not enjoying it I generally don't finish it.

This one is my favorite:

16. Having books in your house is great. Reading books from the library is great. Having a digital library is great. Putting all your books in little free libraries is great. What’s not great is being a dick about anyone else’s reading choices, book hoarding habits, and the like. (That said, I admit that despite my best intentions I remain gently suspicious of people who don’t appear to have a single book in their home.)

>155 clamairy: I am suspicious (and not in any particularly gentle fashion) of those whose homes don't display them. I mean, I always wonder.

>154 jillmwo: I LOVED this book. I did the Audiobook version, and was completely blown away. I also enjoyed Bring Up the Bodies, but for some reason I have had trouble finishing The Mirror and the Light. It isn't any darker than the others, as far as I can tell, but I am having trouble with that darkness this time around.

>157 clamairy: So I will ask you the question used to launch last night's discussion. What would you say this book was about?

>158 jillmwo: Good question. I'd say it's more about the corrupting influence of absolute power than anything else. I'll have to talk about the first two books in the series since I can't recall where one ended and the other started. It starts with Thomas and his roll in Henry's reign. In in my memory Thomas went from believing in what they were doing once he came into power, because Mantel paints him as a closet religious reformer. He ended up giving Henry almost every crazy thing he asked for, just to stay alive. I found it enlightening and horrifying, because it is so historically accurate.

>150 haydninvienna: A good list! At least amusing to read, at best a reminder to be kind to other readers, no matter what form or frequency their reading is.

My personal favorite? Number 21.

>155 clamairy: This was one of the few I couldn’t relate to. I don’t believe I’ve ever done it either.

>155 clamairy: & >161 haydninvienna: I think there is only one book I've hate read. It was a miserable excuse for a cookbook that I read incredulously, then hated because it wasn't a joke.

Two relatively inconsequential mysteries this past week or so:

Nothing Can Rescue Me by Elizabeth Daly. Nice conventional house party mystery set in upstate New York – one of those big ol’ mansions overlooking the Hudson. The story takes place in 1943 so it’s wartime. Antiquarian book dealer Henry Gamage is invited for the weekend to see (and reassure) old friends. There have been anonymous notes left in awkward places and things are just a bit “off”. People are resorting to planchettes, Ouija boards, and spirit writing to learn what’s going to happen to them. Before the end of the weekend, there have been two murders and a variety of newly formulated wills. Someone benefits from the chaos, but who? Enjoyable.

The Castlemaine Murders by Kerry Greenwood. The Phryne Fisher books are in some ways forgettable but that makes them all the more soothing when you circle back to revisit one. This one has to do with the gold rush in Australia back in the 1850s and various shifts in specific groups that make up the general population – immigrants, social pariahs sent away from England, etc. There are awkward difficulties in both Phryne’s household and in the household of her Chinese lover, Lin Chun. There are also threats against individual lives. As always with Phryne, this was a fast and light read.

>155 clamairy: and >162 MrsLee: I rather think that a "hate read" is one of those instances where you read a book, knowing full well that the author's world view is not going to fit at all well with your own world view, but you read it just to find out where they're coming from.

I read (twice) a book with the dreadful title of Miss Marple: Christian Sleuth. Now, Christie didn't push religion of any sort in her novels. How on earth was this woman going to persuade me that Jane Marple was in any way the personification of an evangelical belief system? I knew the author was wrong from the get-go. I got half way through the book the first time and then, metaphorically speaking, flung the Kindle against the wall. The second time I got myself under control and really tried to follow the author's thinking. I still didn't buy her basic premise or the arguments she thought bolstered her case, but I could at least then say I'd given it a fair shot. I think I read one or two bestsellers that fell into the same category -- theoretically written by celebrity names that have no real talent or expertise but you read them just to see how perfectly awful the end product could be.

>163 jillmwo: I am somewhat intrigued by the Elizabeth Daly title, especially since it is 90 years old.

>164 jillmwo: I guess I've done that with some non-fiction. Though several times I am sure I skimmed quite a bit.

>164 jillmwo: I'm sure there's at least one or two books I've started, knowing I most likely wouldn't enjoy it, but the book was either a classic or recommended by someone. Most often I quit part way through.

A brief reading project for those who might be so inclined. (All titles are somewhere between 160-250 pages in length (so short) and the list consists of one work of non-fiction and two novels. The thematic tie is man as part of the larger ecosystem.)

Walden by Henry David Thoreau. A couple of things about Walden. Thoreau thought we really only needed four essentials for human life – shelter, food, fuel and clothing. Despite himself suffering from tuberculosis, he doesn’t make any reference in this book to the need for access to medical care. Very 19th century outlook. Nature is relatively benign and man should find a way to fit in with his world.

The Original Bambi by Felix Salten and translated by Jack Zipes. Not quite as closely observant of nature’s details as Thoreau but still pretty good. Written between the two World Wars, Bambi doesn’t present life in the forest as anything other than survival as governed by tooth and claw. There can be little trust between man and other species.

The Fell by Sarah Moss. This one is set in the 21st century. Breaking free of COVID lock-down confinement, a woman goes out for a walk too near nightfall. She injures herself in a fall in a deserted area and others must come to her rescue. Along with the injured woman, there is an older neighbor, the woman’s son and an emergency rescue worker who collectively tell the story. There’s a tremendous gap between the way Thoreau presents human engagement in his village and the way Moss presents modern day interaction. Note: This one was a book bullet from (I think) @Sakerfalcon.

I doubt anyone ever takes advantage of these occasionally-proposed reading projects I share here on LT, but there’s a lot of substance to be found in this one. All kinds of discussion of isolation, mutuality, and life in common.

Edited to add a note about having Joni Mitchell on in the background as you read as she sings Big Yellow Taxi.

>166 Karlstar: I sometimes quit (as I did initially with the Miss Marple book mentioned), but then something drives me to go back and see what it was that threw me off. What did I miss? Publishers don't just fling things at the wall; they honestly publish stuff that they think will have value for the marketplace. They expend effort to polish it up and shove it out the door.

Thus, I always feel that I owe it to someone to at least figure out what the contribution of the book was perceived as being. (This is more likely in the case of non-fiction than in fiction; I'll admit that sometimes publishers don't really put much time into the fiction side of things...)

>165 clamairy: I've got a few of the Elizabeth Daly mysteries tucked away. One of the women in my fiction reading group really loves Henry Gamadge and the 1940s-1950s vibe.

>167 jillmwo: I'm intrigued... I'm not signing on... yet. Let me think about this.

>167 jillmwo: Do these reading projects come to you as you realize connections between books you are reading anyway? Or are you finding them from a third party, or do you think up the project ahead of time and then hunt down the books to go with?

>167 jillmwo: >170 clamairy: Also put me in the intrigued club.

>171 MrsLee: They come to me as I make connections between what I read. I don't necessarily choose a theme when I'm figuring out what to read next, but serendipitously, there sometimes emerges a commonality. I had read Walden earlier in the spring/summer and Bambi just this past month. When I pulled out The Fell trying to decide whether to keep it or pass it along, I skim read it and the lightning bolt fell. There was a lot about finding one's place in the environment in all of them.

Years ago when I first started doing book discussion groups up in New York City, I always did a thematic list that would allow working mothers some choices. Titles on those lists were usually a mix of long vs. short, new vs backlist, fiction as well as non-fiction, etc. Working womens' schedules (back in the 80s and 90s) could only meet perhaps quarterly across a year. Offering a book list from which to choose allowed a whole lot more flexibility in permitting them to participate in the discussion group. Sometimes they'd read more than one book, sometimes barely make it through the shortest one there.

Working with the local libraries here, they wanted to keep things simple -- one book per month. (Although I did do one library book group where the theme over a six to eight month period had to do with gossip -- starting with benign engagement of women just keeping up with each other as friends on up to truly toxic behaviors.) That one was kind of fun. (I wonder if I still have the list upstairs in a file box.)

>170 clamairy: and >172 Karlstar: I was only throwing out the idea for individual pursuit, not suggesting that we do a whole group thing. (Although I'd be willing to set up a Zoom event if people really did want to go down that track.)

>173 jillmwo: Thank you. That sounds like a fun book group activity.

I would suggest that the book you expressed interest in on my thread, The Sea Runners, would fit into your theme nicely. :)

>175 MrsLee: I haven't read it yet, but another book group of which I have been part is reading The Mountain in the Sea in August and that one might fit in as well. (That would have the benefit of adding a future-looking science fiction perspective to the list. The downside is its length -- it's nearly 500 pages.)

>174 jillmwo: I'd prefer to type rather than Zoom, to be honest. My brain runs a lot faster than my tongue, and then other things tend to come out of my mouth.

I found my copy of Walden from graduate school, and I am amused to see it full of microscopic chicken scratch marginalia. I'm not sure I want to reread this book, but I might be inclined to read the 40 year old scribblings. And then possibly Bambi, followed by The Fell. But I'm not making any promises...

>174 jillmwo: I am also intrigued about the idea of a Zoom event. I knew you were throwing that out for us to pursue individually, but I wouldn't mind a group either.

I just finished Bambi. I have no memory of it being that brutal, and now I'm wondering if I ever actually read it as a child. I'm thinking I must have read an abridged edition. I borrowed a Kindle version and read it... only to find I had an illustrated hardcover on the bookshelf in the basement where I keep some children's books. Good thing the illustrations are black and white!

>179 clamairy: I suspect none of us growing up read the actual text of Bambi. Whether we fully blame Disney for that requires exploration. He sweetened so much of the story up for American kids in the 1942 movie. Back in the 'fifties, I suspect the whole point was to soften realities. The fact that Whittaker Chambers was the translator who did the original English probably also was a factor in not being encouraged to find the original. (Lots of confusion as to where he stood as a former communist.)

OTOH, if you read one of the most recent translations, you do see Zipes' point about it being essentially a political/social commentary for adults. But there's lots of room for interpretation.

As to Thoreau and Walden, I find him most readable when he's writing about the natural world around him (so the chapters on Sounds, on Ponds, on Winter Animals). He finds the world more pleasant generally than Salten. His journals and the books written for publication are even more oriented towards the naturalist in him.

And as far as The Fell goes, it's kind of a mix of both Salten and Thoreau. Moss doesn't give as much space to or write quite as lyrically about the natural world as described in Thoreau, but she writes about the same urge to survival that Salten sees. She also doesn't see our neighbors as being quite as understanding as Thoreau imagines them. (Of course, Thoreau doesn't really deal much with illness or its constraints either.) Honestly, her book isn't as positive as one might prefer, but it does reflect the real world experience.

>180 jillmwo: Aside from Alice we don't actually meet any of the neighbors in The Fell, or really know what they think. We only get second and third hand looks at what three of our four characters think those neighbors might do. But you're right, from their perspective it sounds like they won't be so understanding.

As someone who lived in an area where I was allowed to walk outside as much as I wanted during the lockdown I have a hard time grasping that some areas* of the world fined people for being outdoors. The book setting sounds like a relatively rural area, too. I could understand a bit more if was a congest urban place.

* I know China was harsh with its citizens.

>181 clamairy:
During lockdown here no one could be more than 2km from their home unless they were essential workers who are working or travelling to or from work, or they were travelling to or from their nearest food store. Essential workers included people working in food transport & retail, medical staff, utility operatives, and a few other categories. As someone working in the postal sector I was deemed to be an essential worker. That was very reassuring. :-)

>182 pgmcc: Yes, you were/are definitely essential. :o)

In most places one can get a fair amount of walking done in a 2K radius of one's home. The implication in this book was that that there was a hefty fine for simply leaving one's house unless you were headed to a grocery store or work. Unless I am misunderstanding, (given that the entire book is stream of consciousness, I wouldn't be surprised) and the only reason she would have been fined was that she was under quarantine.

>182 pgmcc: and >183 clamairy: My read was that she -- a character living in the UK -- would be fined on two scores, one being breaking quarantine after testing positive, but the second (more expensive) fine would be tied to the cost associated with sending emergency workers out to find her. Need to go back and look for details.

>184 jillmwo: But she hadn't tested positive. She'd only been exposed at work to someone else who had gotten sick. She and Matt were quarantining because of exposure. I do understand the fine for breaking quarantine. And I think this was the days before home testing kits were available.

>167 jillmwo: This is an interesting set of connected books. I found The fell to be a gripping read; I've enjoyed everything I've read by Moss so far. I read Bambi as a child and it certainly wasn't a cute and fluffy version! I'd rather not revisit it! I am fine with nature red in tooth and claw; I've been involved in conservation projects involving predators and prey, but I don't need to read novels about it. I've only read excerpts from Walden and I feel like I should read the whole of it. I think you have prompted me to do so sooner rather than later.

>184 jillmwo:, >185 clamairy: The rules in England during Covid at that time were that if you had been exposed (or hadn't but had symptoms) you were expected to quarantine for 10 days, even if you didn't test positive. If you did test positive during that time, you had to keep quarantining until you tested negative. I think >185 clamairy: is right and the book takes place before home test kits became available so you were supposed to act as if you had the virus to reduce potential spread. For non-key workers if you hadn't been exposed and didn't have symptoms you could leave home to go for 1 hour of exercise each day. It sounds unbelievable now I look back, but we really did live that way for months.

>185 clamairy: You're absolutely correct about her situation. I went back and found the original context. But at some point, I wish you'd share some of the thoughts Grad Student Clam had about Thoreau. In some ways, I admire him, but I don't think I could live with him...

>186 Sakerfalcon: I have not yet posted my more formal review of Bambi to the industry blog (as released via Princeton Univ Press) but I have to agree with you. Read as an adult, I am not sure I'll ever want to go back and revisit it.

Re-visited How To Read A Novel by John Sutherland today. It was originally published back in 2005 or 2006 and I think might have been intended for the college or grad student audience. (I could be wrong on that.) Some elements are a bit dated because he wrote it before the initial launch of the Kindle and ebooks for the masses became more of an accepted "thing". But for the most part, it's fairly sound as a reference, a reminder of why certain things are done the way they are in trade publishing.

>187 jillmwo: I haven't looked too closely, but I can share these.

I found this underlined bit hilarious:


And in the margin of this bit I wrote "pathetic fallacy - man above yet part of nature."

>188 clamairy: When it comes to his essay "Solitude", I find myself torn as well. Parts of it I like and other parts just don't fit in with daily existence (unless you are a single male living in a cabin in the woods of the 19th century with no office routine or family obligations to accommodate). But at least he was one who took the time to observe the natural world around him.(Somewhere I read that we should really primarily remember Thoreau's greatest achievement as his journals. Because of his powers of observation.)

Re-reading Walden was necessary when I was reviewing this book: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/08/07/thoreau-and-the-office-cubicle/

Lots of reading to do this weekend. Not sure how much will actually be gotten through...

From the New York Times (gifted article) on the essential Ursula K. Le Guin. https://www.nytimes.com/article/ursula-k-leguin-best-books.html?unlocked_article...

As a flavor of the article, here's a clip of what they say regarding The Dispossessed:

The subtitle of “The Dispossessed” (1974) is “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and it is Le Guin’s most philosophical novel. Set in the Hainish Universe before the advent of intergalactic real-time communication — a key feature of the other six novels — it follows the physicist Shevek, who has grown up in the anarchist society on Anarres. (Anarchism here refers to a society organized horizontally, with no enforcing power.)

Last night, I added a review (written way back in the dark ages) for the book, Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America by Gail Pool. I tell you this so that you can skim my review and then decide whether you want to buy the Kindle edition at the rock-bottom price of $4.99. (Truly a bargain. I paid 6x that when it first came out in hardcover.) It's a worthwhile read that didn't get sufficient attention when it first came out in 2007. The University of Missouri Press is no longer making it available in print format, even as a print-on-demand.

Just a marker. My post on Bambi went up live today: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/08/22/bambi-for-the-serious-reader/

Next week (I hope) there will be one about Jane Austen...Then I want to do a post about annotated editions, specifically an annotated publication of Dorothy Sayer's Radio Plays. It's so nice to write about something that doesn't need to be carefully couched in diplomatic language.

>192 jillmwo:
I enjoyed your Scholarly Kitchen review of Bambi. Tempted I am, but have not succumbed just yet.

>192 jillmwo: Great review. I'm guessing that will be hard to find.

>192 jillmwo: Excellent review. The violence was startlingly vivid, compared to my memory of the story.

I just happened across this piece that originally went live this past July (last month). The author is a former VP of publicity at a trade publishing house: https://kathleenschmidt.substack.com/p/book-publishing-is-broken. I'm not even including key paragraph from it because you should really read all of the words. You'll know more when you're done.

>196 jillmwo: Interesting. Maybe consumers, in general, are still in 'I may not have another chance to do this' mode when it comes to spending and things will be a little wonky until that settles down?

Concert ticket prices are out of control. We look at the prices and just decide not to go, lately. That won't change until attendance drops.

For any lurking Jane-ites out there: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/08/28/fashionable-goodness-authors-choi... .

>197 Karlstar:. Yes, we're all still recuperating from the effects of the pandemic and adapting to shifts in behavior. But I think that article was valuable because it reflects the many variables that impact on the commercial publishing environment. The book industry is trying to fix some significant existing supply chain issues while also trying to find ways to make the physical book more sustainable. (When I hear production editors talking about whether paper made from sugar cane is a viable option, I know that they're wrestling with some serious concerns about what the next decade might demand of them.) I thought she made good points about what the fragmentation of social media as a marketing tool means for the success of reaching the market. Publishing is a very risky business. (Which is why some authors move towards self-publication which is what my Jane Austen post in 198 is about...)

>199 jillmwo:
When I worked for one of the Big-Four Consultancies I was heading up a supply chain consultancy group. One of the assignments we got was review and strategy development for the book supply chain in the UK. That was a fascinating project. At the time The Net Book Agreement had been declared illegal some years previously, and new disruptive innovations were appearing and the industry was anticipating a lot of difficulties ahead.

One of the key principles in developing a supply chain strategy is to look at the demand, where it is, how big it is, who is the demand coming from, what is demanded, etc..., and then, for each customer/product segment, identify the best way to service that demand. Once you have identified the optimum (based on the evaluation of the options open to you against the critical success factors - which you have, of course, established at the start of your study) approach to meeting the demand, then you have to plan how you will implement that approach. Trouble is, the "AS-IS" situation is often tweaked to implement the new approach rather than building from the ground up, or making big changes to the AS-IS. (Some people say that change involves getting up of your AS-IS and doing something different.)

The big problems for the book industry in the UK started with the removal of The Net Book Agreement. The publishers could no longer control the prices their books were sold at. In addition, they had a new range of powerful retail customers, the supermarkets. Supermarket had sold some books before, but now they were becoming very demanding. They wanted only the big mover books. They wanted to charge half price, hence they wanted the books from the publisher at a very low price.

Then there were the on-line book sellers. They were selling low and undermining the sales in traditional outlets, i.e. the professional book sellers selling through traditional bookshops.

Technology was having an impact as well. At the time, print-on-demand was coming along, but it was in the form of a digital printer in a bookshop. Customers browsed the shelves for a book they wanted, or they knew the one the wanted, and they would order it at the counter and it would be digitally printed in a matter of minutes, and provided to the customer. The trials of this innovative approach to bookshops did not result in a major take up of the technology. (Anyone who owns a printer, digital or otherwise, could tell you this would be a profoundly challenging enterprise.)

The big technological challenge was e-books. We are still in the turbulent transition period in which some form of equilibrium between the "e-" and the "physical" books can be achieved. This is, however, being further disrupted by influences such as environmental issues; inequalities between the stakeholders in the book industry, i.e. who gets how much from book sales; pirate copies of e-books in particular; ...

I started this ramble with the intention of stating that customers are demanding products that are different from what the traditional book trade was providing. They want e-books. They want books to be cheap. They want their books immediately. When they want physical books they want to order them on-line. They want the books in different formats. Identifying an optimum supply approach for the multitude of customer/product segments is not an easy task, and it is difficult to change. The new technologies mean that what is demanded has changed, how to provide the demanded items has changed, and people do not like change. Changing to a totally new industry model will be difficult, and there will be casualties along the way. The article talks about losing some of the experienced editors and other veterans of the industry, and this is typical of what happens. Very often corporations focus on the dollars/pounds and ignore elements such as quality and ethos. The natural business focus on money always results in the loss of the vital disciplines that make an enterprise great. Every action is driven by cost accountants who are charged with ensuring their company's share price looks good. What can be measured is cost, so they cut cost. It is more difficult to measure the other factors that make an enterprise sustainable and worthwhile.

Apologies for my little rant.

E.T.A. I just looked at the earliest orders on my Amazon account. Of the first six books ordered, four of them are supply chain text books. :-)

>199 jillmwo: I thought some of her ideas about 'collective brands' might have merit. Weren't some of us just complaining about missing the excitement of the big Harry Potter releases? Is that because no books merit it lately, or because the publishers haven't figured out how to generate the same excitement? Is it because some people don't want a giant hardcover, which is/was the format for big new releases, but instead different people want different formats and one of them is an e-book and another is an audiobook (as >200 pgmcc: pointed out), neither of which require people to leave the house?

I don't know the answer, that's for sure.

>200 pgmcc: I keep coming back around to Trollope and this line: We hate an evil, and we hate a change. Hating the evil most, we make the change, but we make it as small as possible.

>201 Karlstar: I don't have any answers either. I think she made some really good points, but no one wants to be responsible for making any change that might blow up in their faces.

In that Jane Austen post, I suggested that it might be time for people to revisit the idea of penalizing authors who take the route of self-publication. Someone privately suggested that, by doing so, I was implying that publishers add no value. I just meant that good content can arise from any number of environments. (I did say "out loud" that I am not a big fan of print-on-demand paperbacks...)

I continue to read The Mountain in the Sea which is interestingly complex. Apparently it has already won a Locus. (LT Common Knowledge says it was part of UC-Berkeley's summer reading list this year, but I can't corroborate that claim.)

>202 jillmwo: I suggested that it might be time for people to revisit the idea of penalizing authors who take the route of self-publication.

Isn't the fact that their books may sell abysmally enough punishment? Why would you penalize them? Because they are not supporting publishing houses? I am not following the argument closely, haven't time at the moment to follow links and read long articles. I apologize if I have missed something crucial.

I don't know about penalizing self-published authors. That seems like a cruel thing to do. But I agree with her statement that way too many books are being published. (And too many movies are being made. And too many television shows are being made. Etc.)

>203 MrsLee: and >204 clamairy:. The penalty has to do with the lesser likelihood of a work being found in a library. Libraries are averse to buying self-published books on the grounds that the work won't have gone through the appropriate process of someone vetting the content, editing, formatting, etc. If libraries aren't gathering and preserving self-published books in their collections, then the book in all likelihood will fall into obscurity. That's not a problem if you take the position that a GOOD book would have been snapped up by a publisher and that therefore only BAD books are self-published. But that's not the case.

Another thing -- if your book isn't included in someone's digital collection for licensing to libraries, then that too limits the reach of your book. Self-published titles are less likely to be included in those provider collections. If the reader can't find a book through Overdrive or Libby, that's a problem.

In the instance of the Austen-related title, the author had done all the right things in her self-publishing process. She'd done extensive research insofar as the content went and it was solid. But she'd also spent time on the production and distribution elements. There was an ISBN, she'd had a copy-editor go over it, the pages were properly formatted for print-on-demand, all those elements were in place as well. The book is a useful reference book and libraries should be willing to include it in their collections.

There is a shift underway (IMHO) regarding self-publication. I think rising populations of readers are much more accepting of the idea. The post I'd written was intended to send the message that it's inappropriate for a library to reject a book solely on the grounds of it being self-published if the content itself is good (as the Austen-related book was).

OTOH, pushing books through the traditional formal publishing process is hard work and it is time-consuming. Which means it can become costly. When self-publication is broadly accepted, then publishers understandably worry that their enhancements to a work are not perceived as being of value. At the same time, they also haven't the resources to publish every good manuscript that comes down the pipe. Self-publication -- to some extent -- should be viewed as a reasonable approach for a researcher to adopt. And libraries should give such work a fair shot.

>205 jillmwo: Thank you for that explanation. I have thoughts on the inevitability of change and how that affects the old guard, but no time to post them.

>205 jillmwo: The only self-published books I ever saw at the library I was working in were all about local history. I don't know how other libraries make choices about these things, but I wouldn't imagine too many of them have any disposable budget at all to waste on self-published books that aren't directly related to the local area. (Or were written by library staff. LOL)

>207 clamairy: Our local library (Kloof, Durban) has one or two self-published books of fiction by local (same part of town) authors. At least one is reasonably good.

>206 MrsLee: Don't we all have thoughts about change? Sometimes I find myself to be horrifyingly backward in my thinking...There's a joke about how many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb. The answer is six -- one to change the light bulb and five to talk about how much better the old one was...(I say that as something of a lapsed Episcopalian. Substitute whatever group one might prefer. Elephants might do. As @pgmcc has told us time and again, there is always an elephant.)

>207 clamairy: and >208 hfglen: Local history tends to be self-published because it doesn't scale for larger publishing companies in terms of sale revenues. Demand for a local county history is primarily situated in that local county.
Librarians (for a variety of reasons) have historically emphasized the local community and therefore it makes sense to be sure that local authors are represented. (Sometimes, and I have heard librarians gripe about this IRL, it's very hard and rather time-consuming to decline a poorly written title from a local author because so much diplomacy is required to ensure feelings aren't wounded.)

>209 jillmwo:
I am delighted to see that Elephant Awareness is strong in you.

>209 jillmwo: The older I get, the more I understand youth's desire that the older generation shuffle off this mortal coil so the younger generation can Get On With Things. I also understand that the older generation's resistance to change may help refine and temper the new ideas if only because the younger generation has to think about them longer.

>210 pgmcc: I have absorbed your teaching. Oh, and I have started reading The Fine Art of Invisible Detection as my bedtime book. It is going well thus far.

>211 MrsLee: You are a wise woman.

>212 jillmwo:
I am delighted “The Fine Art…” is going well so far.

>211 MrsLee: Beautiful and succinctly said.

I was participating in a book group discussing The Mountain in the Sea and one woman at the very beginning of the discussion asked a very important question – “What was it I just read?”.

Now I respect this particular woman’s intelligence and her ability to engage with an author’s narrative and logic and find the existing flaws. I had sped through an initial read of the book (‘way too rapidly), but thought I’d had the general sense of the story. There was lots of stuff about artificial intelligence and robots; there was also at least one octopus (I’d like to be under the sea in an octopus’ garden in the shade) and multiple occurrences of corporate evilness. Human skulls get piled up. There were scattered allusions to Jack London’s book, The Sea Wolf. Given Steff’s exasperation and some of what others offered up in the discussion, I decided to go back and revisit the book to get a better handle on the author’s intent. Moving slowly through the novel in limited page batches over the course of the past week or so, I have absorbed a great deal more.

This 2022 novel is really well-thought-out speculative fiction – not too dissimilar in some ways from The Dispossessed or Out of the Silent Planet. It’s a narrative cleverly constructed to examine various facets of a complicated set of ideas. Metaphors, symbols, and meaning...

At the same time, it’s a science fiction novel that could easily be adapted into an action film. There are drones and submersibles and one or two battles at sea. You are in the ocean depths upon occasion but you’re also in a lab on an archipelago off the coast of Vietnam. You’re following as protagonists a female scientist, a hacker, and a naive young man who falls into the hands of human traffickers.. There’s an android and a massive woman who is in charge of network security. (My second read-through had me taking notes.)

The themes however are great honkin' ones – the prioritization of artificial intelligence in a highly competitive and mechanized society,, the vulnerability of organic life forms living in such a society, the violence of a dystopian world that has exhausted its resources, and the value of the human self. But the author has a point -- and you know how I love an author who makes a point. (For the record, I have not revealed the novel's main point in this write-up.)

The construction of the narrative was painstaking. Each of its 48 chapters is preceded by a paragraph of text from a fictional scientist’s work. (The reader is well-advised to pay attention to those.). About mid-way through, the attentive reader is wondering which characters are real and which might be simulacrums. You may think you know who to root for, but there are plenty of opportunities to be proven wrong.

I think this is a worthwhile and thought-provoking read. You’re not reading a 1950’s space opera; there is sophisticated substance here with possibly unfamiliar vocabulary. If you try to speed through The Mountain in the Sea, you’ll experience mental indigestion. (The author’s acknowledgements are revealing.)

ETA: Fixed embarrassing misattribution of authorship of Sea Wolf; Item originally posted on Aug 31 at 8:05 pm.

>215 jillmwo: Welp... that's a BB. The Mountain in the Sea was already on my radar but you have just cemented it as a book to read sooner instead of later. Overdrive wait is 14 weeks though so it might end up as an early 2024 read.

Starting a new thread as this one is getting a bit balky