Posts Tagged ‘reading’
Catching up on one’s reading…
As Labor Day draws near, your correspondent suspects that at least some readers are staring dolefully (as he is) at the list of still-unread books that were meant to be the meat of the summer. Well, thanks to Book-A-Minute, relief is at hand!
From Classics (“When even the Cliff’s Notes are just too long…”) through SciFi (“Your favorite science fiction and fantasy stories at lightspeed…”) to bedtime books (“Read to your kids without plodding through every last word of those eight page epics…”)– it’s all there.
By way of example, Charlotte Bronte’s heaving Jane Eyre:
(People are MEAN to Jane Eyre.)
Edward Rochester:
I have a dark secret. Will you stay with me no matter what?
Jane Eyre:
Yes.
Edward Rochester:
My secret is that I have a lunatic wife.
Jane Eyre:
Bye.
(Jane Eyre leaves. Somebody dies. Jane Eyre returns.)
(While condensation does have its costs, it can in some cases be– as this example demonstrates– an improvement on the original…)
Tick those tomes off the list at Book-A-Minute.
As we transcend Evelyn Wood, we might spare a thought for Kate Chopin, obvious fan of Flaubert and author of Book-A-Minute candidate The Awakening: on this date in 1904, she spent a long day at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where she suffered the cerebral hemorrhage from which she would die, aged 54, two days later.
So many books, so little time!…
Readers will remember David McCandless (e.g., here), proprietor of Information is Beautiful, champion of elegant, effective infographics, and (with Miriam Quick and Matt Hancock) creator of “Books Everyone Should Read,” as featured in his Guardian column:
click the image above, or here, for the full chart
Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics? I scraped the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100’s. Both popular and high-brow. They included all Pulitzer Prize winners, Desert Island Discs choices from recent years, Oprah’s Bookclub list, and, of course, The Guardian’s Top 100 Books of All Time. A simple frequency analysis on the gathered titles gives us a neat ‘consensus cloud’ visualisation of the most mentioned books titles across the polls. Do you agree with the consensus?
Check the data and analysis here: bit.ly/BooksEveryone
As we reorder our reading piles, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that Jim Bakker, beset by scandals both financial and sexual, resigned his stewardship of The PTL Club, a television, publishing, and theme-park empire that he had founded in 1975 with his (then) wife, Tammy Faye Bakker. In an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to avoid a “hostile takeover” that Bakker feared would expose his intimate (and allegedly coercive) relations with PTL employee Jessica Hahn, he arranged for PTL to be taken over by fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (source)
What’s Past is Prologue: The Future of the Book…
A guest post from Scenarios and Strategy (almanac entry added)…
“Special Glasses for Reading in Bed” source: Nationaal Archief
Much breath is being spent by the Chattering Classes predicting, debating, and otherwise worrying over the fates of the book, journalism, and publishing at large– broadly speaking: the creation, dissemination, storage, and use of knowledge itself. Lots of jargon, a wealth of acronyms, and liberal use of facile analogies and constructs– it’s all a little dizzying.
Happily, Tim Carmody has ridden to the rescue. While he has mooted his own manifesto for the future of the book (eminently worth a read), his most recent contribution to the Science and Technology section of The Atlantic blog, is just what one needs in a Babel-like time such as this– some context. In “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books,” that’s precisely what he provides as he recounts, for example, the move from rolled scroll to folded codex, the replacement of papyrus by parchment (and then paper), the shift from vertical to horizontal writing/reading, back to vertical…
It’s fascinating; it’s illuminating… and it’s a terrifically useful reminder that writing, reading– communicating– and the forms in which they’re done have always been in flux: “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books.”
As we pine for those iPads, we might recall that it was on this date in 1920 that radio station 8MK (later WBL, then WWJ) in Detroit became the first U.S. broadcaster to air regularly-scheduled newscasts. The station, founded by the Scripps family and housed in their Detroit News headquarters, had gone on air 11 days earlier; then, after a period of testing, inaugurated its service with election returns.
Memoir of 8MK’s first employee (source)
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