Reading Meme

Do you snack while reading?

No. I’m no multi-tasker.

What is your favourite drink while reading?

If it’s a good book I could be drinking urine and coke, and I probably wouldn’t notice.

Do you tend to mark your books while you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

I tend to write on postit notes – mainly because of this blog. These scraps of paper give me an endless number of completely unimportant things to blog about.

How do you keep your place? Bookmark? Dog ear? Laying the book open flat?

All of the above. I’ll only dog-ear a book if it’s already looking really old and decrepit. I can’t bring myself to fold down the pages of new books. Sometimes I amaze myself with the things that can function as a bookmark. Lolly wrappers, parking tickets, gum leaves, bills, a Cuisenaire rod, a piece of lego.

Fiction, non-fiction or both?

Both.

Do you tend to read to the end of a chapter or can you stop anywhere?

I stop anywhere. Reading ebooks promotes this, as does reading books with no chapters, or very long chapters, or very short ones. Very few books have the perfect length chapter for my attention span, so divisions feel arbitrary.

Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you?

I don’t throw stuff for fear of damaging something else which is valuable, but if I’d purchased the book that irritated me I might well put it in the recycling bin. I wouldn’t want to keep an unpleasant book as a reminder of irritation, staring out at me from the shelf.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?

Yes, if I’m reading an ebook, because it’s so easy to do. But most unfamiliar words don’t stick out as ‘I must look it up right away’ – instead, I guess I just guess their meanings from context. I’ll only look it up if it’s been bothering me… That’s right. Must look up the meaning of ‘immanent’. (It was used a lot in the last book I read.)

What are you currently reading?

I tend to have both a fiction and an non-fiction on the go at once:

1. Tim Flannery’s Here On Earth (which is not as religious as it sounds). Tim Flannery is an environmental scientist, and Australian of the Year 2006.

2. I’m listening to The Slap by Christos Ttsiolkas as an audiobook as I work – which I can only do if I’m working on something really mindless, or walking the dog. I feel like this is a book every single other reading Australian has already talked about to death. I already ‘knew’ this book before I started listening to it myself. But I don’t know how it ends, so I will definitely keep listening.

What is the last book you bought?

What Makes Us Tick by Hugh Mackay, for someone else as a gift. I haven’t read it myself, but book club reviews were very positive. I like to support the publishing industry by buying books as gifts.

Do you have a favourite time/place to read?

In the beanbag. Though today I couldn’t help but notice it smelt vaguely of kiddie pee. Note to self: Must get a bean bag for MY OWN use only! I tend to use reading as a reward system: Clean the toilet, read a chapter; stack some wood, read a chapter… That said, I don’t tend to stick to chapters… Maybe that’s why the wood pile isn’t shrinking.

Do you prefer series books or stand-alones?

Stand-alones. I don’t like the contrivance required when an author wants to tie up one story yet leave the reader wanting more. I feel manipulated as a consumer. This is why I don’t feel compelled to read the next in Larsson’s Millennium series even though I enjoyed the first one.

Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over?

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, to women who tell me they’re on a diet, and The God Delusion, to the Mormons who bother me several times per year. I tell them I’ll read their guff if they read mine. (They haven’t taken me up on the offer as yet.)

How do you organise your books (by genre, title, author’s last name, etc.)?

Every now and then I get into ‘tidy’ mode and I’ll sort the books according to type (text books, literary, SF etc) but they’re shelved two or three deep in a cupboard, and sod’s law dictates that when I’m looking for a book it’ll be one right at the back, on the last shelf I check. So I’ve given up trying to maintain order. There’s always the local library if I need to feel a sense of organisation wash over me.

 

Misery Memoirs

illustration by Stewf

I suppose it’s possible that the phrase ‘misery memoir’ is not always used in a pejorative fashion. I suppose.

I wonder if Mary Gaitskill’s own views come through when she writes here, on the importance of difficult subject matter:

I loved the Anne Frank show. It made me feel something for other people, an awful connection with dead strangers more intimate than any relationship I had with my living peers. It made me feel vindicated and angry and self-righteous. The television presentation padded it enough so that it induced a mild feeling of sorrow and sensitivity instead of actual pain.

- from Two Girls, Fat And Thin, by Mary Gaitskill

After all, by writing this novel about two women who have been sexually abused and tortured in various ways, in some people’s words, Gaitskill has effectively written a ‘misery memoir’.

Any reader is perfectly entitled to avoid reading Misery Memoirs, in the same way anyone is entitled to bury one’s head in the sand. But fiction about misery is perhaps some of the most important fiction we have. Sometimes those who suffer don’t have much else.

We need the books that affect us like disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

- FRANZ KAFKA

“People don’t usually keep their happy thoughts as secrets. It’s the sadness in our hearts that we hide from the world.”

-  @ReveccaP, on the proliferation of sad PostSecret confessions

I’m pretty sure I don’t believe [this], but which I’ll simulate here anyway: contemporary short story writers have gotten too specialized/dark/mopey. They don’t have enough “real life” in their stories—that is, they’re not taking up the real concerns of real readers. They aren’t storytellers, really (in that around-the-campfire sense) but margin-dwellers, writing stories in response (not to life itself), but to other hothouse stories, and all these stories do, really, is uphold a certain knee-jerk, lazy, default humanist ethic, etc., etc. Where’s the joy? Isn’t there lots to celebrate in life? This model (as you can tell) is dangerously close to reactionary (“Just write something I can read and I’ll read it! Why so negative! You sure seem well-fed enough, mister!”), and I don’t buy it for a number of reasons, the main one of which is that sometimes joy can express itself in strange ways, and also because stories have always been dark (i.e., Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Crucifixion).

- George Saunders

 

I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.

COLUM McCANN

Related Link: The difference between biography, autobiography and memoir.

And in other news, I love a good disease flick.

BFF: Book Friends Forever?

it’s like people believe all you need to do is like the same bands in order to be soulmates. or books. omg … U like the outsiders 2 … it’s like we’re the same person! no we’re not. it’s like we have the same english teacher. there’s a difference.

- Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

In case you haven’t been there yet, there’s this place called LibraryThing where you can make lists of books you’ve read, write reviews, swap recommendations and make friends. One functionality of that site, compared to others such as Goodreads, is the Connections Tab.

If you click on that you can find your Top 50 Similar Libraries. Every now and then you find not just that your library is very similar to someone else’s, but that your response to those books is similar. Then you’ve found someone.

Philosophical Questions of the Week:

How many books in common would it take to foretell compatibility?

Can two people who disagree on the merits of every single book they ever read still be good friends?

I think books —  at least, personal response to books — is as good a way of predicting compatibility as any.

Related Link: What your favourite author says about you.

Are there too many books in the world?

I’ve heard it said a number of times lately: There are too many books around nowadays. (Context most often: There are too many crap books around nowadays.)

Is there any such a thing as ‘too many books’? Here are some arguments both sides.

ON DEVALUATION

AFFIRMATIVE

The sheer number of books devalues content. No one has anywhere near enough time to read them all. So there’s increasing pressure to keep prices low and to give readers more for their money. Authors find it harder and harder to make a living from writing – a select few will always make a lot of money, while the vast majority will hold down a different day job, even those who would be far happier and far more fulfilled if their writing income allowed them to be full-time writers.

NEGATIVE

From a consumer’s point of view, devaluation is not a bad thing. All things devalue over time. Books used to be so prohibitively expensive that only the upper classes could own their own libraries. Isn’t writing a hobby? Should people really expect to be paid full incomes for sitting at computers and making stuff up? Is this what we should value?

ON BUSY LIVES

AFFIRMATIVE

There are so many other things to do now. (Longer working hours, TV, internet browsing, computer games etc.) that the number of writers not only feels disproportionate (to the number of readers) but also a bit misplaced. If consumers would rather play with their smartphone apps, why shouldn’t would-be writers focus their attention on writing those instead, say?

NEGATIVE

But it shouldn’t matter how many other things there are to do – books add value to a culture in a way no other thing can. It’s so subjective anyway. How many readers does each book need? Apps come and go. Books are around forever. It’s quite possible more people will read your book after you’ve died than the sum total of those who read it during your lifetime. I’m not just talking about bestsellers here.

ON FINDING BOOKS

AFFIRMATIVE

As the volume of eBooks grows and grows, the task for readers to find good eBooks becomes more difficult.

NEGATIVE

Or does it? Think of the internet. The volume of internet pages is growing all the time, but we can always find exactly the page we’re looking for because of search engine optimisation, keywords etc. The more internet expands, the more likely it is we’ll find exactly what it is we’re looking for – not less. Surely the same should apply to books, especially as we move into eBooks, which have metadata and keywords to direct them to an appreciative audience.

ON METADATA AND SEARCH ENGINES

AFFIRMATIVE

So readers should have no trouble finding books in theory. As one example, Amazon uses previous purchases to suggest future purchases. But it is a mistake to think that clicks and book metadata have much to do with helping readers to find books. Readers have always found books in other ways – mainly by recommendation and browsing in stores and libraries. Many big companies made the same mistake back in the 90s – putting too much faith in search engine optimisation as the only route to customers.

NEGATIVE

That said, if books go down in price (because of the sheer number of them) readers might change the way we buy books. We may make more impulse buys after following a network of links on the internet, for instance, as readily as we currently invest in a book after a recommendation from a friends. In this case, metadata and SEO may help very much in connecting books to their readers. As the internet evolves – which it will – searches will only become more tailored. (Look only at the evolution of Google search.)

ON MARKETING

AFFIRMATIVE

The volume of published books creates an overwhelming sense of constantly being sold to, which, when combined with the fragmentation of media, makes marketing increasingly difficult. No one likes being sold to. Worse, because of commercial pressure, there may actually be less cultural diversity than meets the eye.

NEGATIVE

No. By narrowing their audience, authors widen their audience.

We live in the time of the hyperniche. All this liking and information spreading has led us to build more paths that are all less taken.

If more books are published, more specialised books can be published, and marketing can be equally specialised. Research which shows consumers are stymied by choice hasn’t focused on books; rather, it has focused on grocery products. Luxury items like books may well be different.

ON BOOK REVIEWS

AFFIRMATIVE

There are fewer ‘official’ review sources these days. Newspapers don’t tend to dedicate the same number of pages to literature. Research has shown that consumers actually buy less when confronted with too much choice.

NEGATIVE

There may be fewer ‘official’ (paid) reviewers about these days, but there are far more blogs. (According to Technorati’s blog directory, there are more book blogs than film & television blogs combined.) Readers leave freewill reviews of books at places like Goodreads and Librarything, and many of those reviews are as insightful and detailed as those from a professional reviewer. Read a number of amateur reviews and you really do get a sense of a book.

ON CHOICE

AFFIRMATIVE

Some choice is good and more choice is better. Adding options is what economists call Pareto efficient: it makes no one worse off (because those who are satisfied with the options that are already available can ignore the new ones), and is bound to make someone (who is not satisfied with existing options) better off. Though this line of argument is normally applied to the world of material goods,it seems even more applicable to culture. People who aren’t turned on by graphic novels can still enjoy it – or benefit from it – when they see it. Those who really hate graphic novels can always stay away from them.

There is a point at which options paralyze rather than liberate consumers. (See The Paradox of Choice.)

ON CULTURal value

NEGATIVE

The proliferation of books enlivens the imagination of all members of a society. Literature enriches our sense of human possibility. It may even empower people to be producers as well as consumers of culture—to find their own, unique mode of self expression (enter NaNoWriMo and similar). A profusion of literature may be the most reliable measure of the health and vibrancy of our culture.

Times change. The truth is, not many people in the world are avid readers. Are efforts misplaced? As a cultural relic for future generations, isn’t a snapshot of today’s internet just as good as anything published in a book?

*

IN THIS DEBATE, ME AGAINST MYSELF, NEGATIVE WINS THE MEAT TRAY.

Now to shout myself a sherry. (I’ve still not ever had a sherry.)

I don’t think there can ever be too many books. I do think there can be too many poorly edited, poorly designed, generally slackarse books. Like any reader, I tend to go through phases – if I read a run of average/poorly chosen books, I start to feel a bit unenthusiastic about reading in general, and if this feeling is common to others (and I think it is), bad books do hurt the industry.

Related Link: Does the world need more books?

Should Novelists Answer Life’s Big Questions?

by fontplaydotcom

 

The author raises a lot of “big themes/questions” (identity, friendship, parenting, etc.) but never answers or addresses them more than superficially.

- from a reader review of Digging to America by Anne Tyler

The expectations we each bring to a book are as diverse as our reactions to it. The reader above expects novels to not only ask questions but to answer them as well.

I wonder if readers sometimes underestimate how difficult it is to get readers even asking certain questions.

I wonder what proportion of readers expect answers, versus readers who feel preached at when those answers are provided.

I wonder if novelists set out to answer questions, or simply to raise them, or if any questions raised are actually beyond the power of an author, because of what readers each bring to a book (which is outside authorial control).

I wonder if certain readers really think anyone has the answers to life’s big questions (identity, friendship, parenting, etc.), because last I heard, we were all still arguing about that.

Yep. We expect a lot from fiction authors all right.

What Was Your High School Reading List?

photo by Sarah Ross

YA or Adult Books?

At school, were you asked to read books from the young adult genre, or were you guided through novels aimed at adults? This probably depends on where you went to school, and more importantly, in what decade. From what I’ve noticed, YA literature is now taught in many high schools, whereas once English curricula was made up entirely of more weighty work, chosen purely for its literary merit, and not because teachers thought their teenaged students might empathise with the main characters.

Male to Female Balance

I have heard from American readers in particular, that the male/female author balance of their high school years was woefully in favour of males. That wasn’t the case for me. I do wonder if this is because during my five years at high school I spent two years under the tutelage of strong middle-aged women, and the other three by gay males. (Out and proud and very politically aware gay males, I might add.)

This was the 1990s, at a large New Zealand high school.

Of course, it’s not just an author’s gender that’s important. Balance also depends on the ratio of female/male characters in those books. Some books are genderless. I wouldn’t call Shakespeare a ‘male writer’. He’s just Shakespeare, after all, and he wrote about women’s issues as often as he wrote about men’s. (I’m tossing that in for argument, by the way.)

In junior high school my teachers had us read:

• Ring Rise, Ring Set by Monica Hughes (female, English-Canadian, 1982)
• The Pigman by Paul Zindel (male, American, 1968)
• Z for Zachariah by Robert O’Brien (male, American, 1973)
• A Mangrove Summer by Jack Lasenby (male, New Zealander, 1989)

Two out of the four are out-of-print or hard to source, and not because they deserve to be. The other two (Pigman and Z) are still taught in schools year after year after year. When I went back to teach (at a completely different high school) some years later, what do you know, I was stuck teaching those very books which had already been terribly outdated even when I was reading them myself the first time.

The reason they were still doing the rounds?

Funds, or lack thereof. I guess those editions of Pigman must have been of sturdy binding. Despite the fact they had been bandaged up with cream-canvas tape, were dog-eared and slightly smelly, those books were still in print, so the annual lost ones were easily replaced.

None of the above are very good reasons for an English teacher to expose a class of students to a book. Teachers need to be so very careful about that choice, because — in my own case, at least — those books stay in our minds for the rest of our lives. Books are powerful. They will not only shape our reading influences, but also shape our life experiences. Perhaps all books do this during the impressionable teenage years. But more so those that we’re forced to read… and discuss, and analyse… and memorise… and write about in exams.

In fact, ‘textbook funding’ is a bloody dismal reason for choosing a book. As a young teacher I wanted to teach a different book – a personal favourite and one for which I would not have needed to fake my enthusiasm — but our school couldn’t afford money for a new class set. Also, the older teachers said that every now and then they got a new teacher to the department who loved a certain book, so they spend all their budget on a new class set of that, and none of the other teachers want to teach it, even after that teacher has long since departed.

I happen to know that a nearby private school on the hill had found funds for Pride and Prejudice, though. I’d be surprised if a class set of that would’ve gone to waste in any girls’ high school.

Anyway.

I hope this eBook and tablet revolution will broaden high school reading choices before my own toddler gets to that age. Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with either The Pigman or Z for Zachariah, I don’t believe they deserve ‘classic’ status and I’ll be spitting tacks if she brings home a tattered old copy of that.

More to the point, those books were taught in the 60s and 70s because they were hip and modern and high school aged students could relate. The Pigman, in particular, has not aged well. (Z for Zach has aged slightly better, perhaps, being SF.)

I think junior high school students of English do best when introduced to a mixture of true classics (Austen, Bronte, Shakespeare etc.) and contemporary YA fiction. There’s really little value in recycling the same old YA from 30 years ago. That’s no way to motivate reluctant readers. (Trust me, I tried.)

*

From senior high school I remember:

• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach (male, American)
• A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute (male, British)
• Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (male, British)
• Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare (male, British)
• Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame (female, New Zealander)
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (female, British)
• The Janet Frame autobiography (to go with Owls Do Cry) (female, New Zealander)
• The Bone People by Keri Hulme (female, New Zealander)
• Te Kaihau by Keri Hulme (short story collection) (female, New Zealander)
• various short stories by Witi Ihimaera (male, New Zealander)
• various short stories by Katherine Mansfield (female, New Zealander)
• Oracles and Miracles by Stevan Eldrid Grigg (male, New Zealander)
• Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (male, British)

If you happen to be a New Zealander and you went to high school during earlier decades, you may well have been asked to study texts from England. By the 1990s, the curriculum was heavily New Zealand-centric, probably as a backlash, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

That said, I remember my Bursary (Year 13) exam required us to translate Maori words (that was the 1995 paper), which threw me completely, because I had lived in the South Island my entire life, and had not yet absorbed the meaning of many Maori words which have since well and truly made their way into New Zealand English. (And which I since learned as a matter of course, simply from working in the North Island.)

Looking back this was an interesting high school reading list, leaving me with great, gaping holes in my reading. I never even read (let alone studied) Romeo and Juliet, for example, which seems to be most people’s introduction to Shakespeare. You’ll notice other omissions without me pointing them out. I wasn’t a great fiction reader as a teenager, and I fear I’ll never catch up.

I’m not sure I was ready for all of those books at the time. I remember the day Sons and Lovers was handed out. My English teacher sat on a desk at the front of the classroom, as he always did (because this was Christchurch, and the Maori taboo against sitting on desks was yet to happen down there), and he said, “I hope all of you have been in love at least once.” I was sixteen. I hadn’t. I spent the next month of English lessons scribbling down all the sexual imagery to regurgitate for my exams, but I thought the whole thing was crazy and that my English teacher was sex obsessed. (He was, I think, but that’s another story.) There’s no way I’d have picked all that imagery out for myself.

What about you? Do you remember your high school reading list? Do you agree that those works were particularly influential? If you could go back in time and recommend books to your teenaged self, what would they be?

And if you’re still a teenager, I do wonder what you’re reading in class.

The Canon

Christchurch City Libraries (one of them)

(I scheduled this post three days ago, before the Christchurch earthquake. Something tells me those books have since scattered.)

I heard some highly literate person speak of The Canon the other day, as in ‘When I was at university and reading The Canon…’ and I wondered what The Canon is, and if I’ve read it.

(I almost certainly haven’t read any of it.)

Then I happened across this particularly thoughtful comment on an unrelated article by Geoff Dyer. Emphasis mine:

In the medieval period, the canon was a solid base the education every member of the intelligentsia could expect to have. Knowing Homer or Seneca or Boethius was never frivolous because you could expect to encounter them at every turn. But since the invention of the printing press and the university system, and at an accelerated rate since the 19th century, we’ve moved into a post-canon age, where there’s no longer any absolutely essential corpus of literary fiction. Anyone who tells you otherwise is mostly stumping for their own personal favorites.

Nevertheless, we continue to behave as though there were some mutually-agreed upon bare minimum for entrance into literary society. The result is a mosaic of competing and overlapping mini-canons. Enforcement is lopsided and ineffective. Someone might be effectively excluded from one clique for not having read Nabokov or Borges, but that exclusion won’t prevent them from traveling without hindrance in some other literary circle.

It’s the internal toll that weighs most heavily, though, and Dyer’s piece is a testament to that burden. Many of us are hamstrung by the feeling of obligation to a tradition and community that, for the most part, simply isn’t there. The digital age didn’t write that ghost story, and it’s even possible — though no one has quite yet mapped this terrain — that the digital age could help us overcome it.

by someone called The Mad Architect

So, what, there is no Canon? I feel like there is. If you’re an English teacher in New Zealand, The Canon comprises Katherine Mansfield, Witi Ihimaera, Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame et al.

If you’re part of the young adult writing community your canon is different. You’re probably expected to know the early YA books like The Outsiders, The Pigman etc. You’re also meant to have a conversational knowledge of the super-popular modern YA such as Twilight and Harry Potter, and everything in between.

If you’re a short story writer, I believe The Canon includes Chekhov, Mansfield, Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne, Irving, Raymond Carver and Alice Munro.

This list has little to do with who I’ve actually read, mind. It’s just this vague idea of a ‘Canon’ that I have in my head, and I will never feel qualified to say much of consequence about literature until I’ve read all of it.

I also feel obligation to read Raymond Chandler, Tolstoy, the complete works of Austen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gaitskill and Carol Shields.

And although I’ve taught high school English, I’ve never read Lord of the Flies. Maybe I should just shut up about that and read it. For some reason there’s a battered copy on my shelf. But then I’ll have to stop boasting about that hole in my education, and people will have to stop wondering how I was ever employed. (No one ever asked.)

Does every reader (or non-reader) have some idea of a Literary Canon? What’s yours?

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.

- Mark Twain

Related Links: In Which It’s Called The Western Canon For A Reason and Nathan Bransford asks Which books should be removed from the canon? 10 of Literature’s Most Notoriously Incomprehensible Classics from Flavorwire.

Where the hell is my house?

I don’t have much sense of geography. This is inextricably linked to the fact that I once listed ‘No sense of direction’ on a workplace disability disclosure form. For me, it is not at all unusual to visit a foreign city and still be hard pressed later, if asked to find that very place on a map.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not asked to do that much. Except when playing Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit, in which case it’s rather embarrassing.

My particular disability isn’t as ridiculous as it might have sounded, 200 years ago, when in order to GET somewhere, travelers needed to actually understand topography, constellations, waterways, plus how to coax a horse and the general workings of a compass. (I was once entrusted with a compass on some team building exercise through a dark forest at midnight. We weren’t supposed to be out there at midnight.)

These days most travelers can rely on pilots, bus drivers, timetables and the lie of pre-laid train tracks and not give a jot about much else except being on time to board.

Penelope Lively’s character feels similarly, in The Slovenian Giantess. Eleanor is an Englishwoman, reluctantly in Slovenia:

Eleanor felt disembodied, only tenuously present, on loan to this place for a few hours, courtesy of British Airways. She had felt much like that throughout the conference. Occasionally the map of Europe would form itself in her head. She would see the familiar outline, pay tribute to the distances. This place was nearly a thousand miles from London, but of course it was not that. It was as far as the half-hour in the airport and the wander round the duty-free shops, the three-hour flight with the read of the papers and a book, the meal, the brief doze. That was the realit, not this eerie sense of an elsewhere in which she was present only as a transitory ghost.

Yes, well, maybe I’ve never compared the feeling to transitory ghosts, but beautifully put, don’t you agree?

Then there’s Nina (slash June) in Wenlock Edge by Alice Munro:

She had been to Japan, and the Barbados, and many of the countries in Europe, but she could never have found those places on a map. She wouldn’t have known whether or not the French Revolution came before the First World War…

… which makes me wonder whether a poor sense of direction is related to a poor sense of time.

To remedy my failings, I’ve decided to spend 2011 ‘Working On My Map Skills’, since my own geography lessons at school had nothing to do with world maps and everything to do with throwing sticks into the tide at Birdlings Flat, and calculating coastal drift. (That hasn’t come in handy either, by the way.)

COFFEE HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH A NEW ADDICTION

This year, whenever I read a book or enjoy something on TV, I will find its setting on the map and stick a pin in it. This may sound like a nuisance of a job but it’s strangely addictive.  Google maps allows users to zoom right in to street view, and really imagine where a story is set. Before now, I didn’t care. Now I find myself wondering where a story is set. I can’t wait to find it on the map.

I’m turning into a map geek.

So far this year I’ve not traveled widely in my fictional worlds, and already I’m thinking of remedying that. (I’m not the only one who gets cheap thrills out of Google maps.)

created with Note Hub for iPad

This would be a great exercise to do with kids, too, as a fusion literacy/geography exercise.

Naturally, it won’t work for SF fans. Someone needs to make an app for that.

On Reader’s Block

At twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty.

- Geoff Dyer.

Full excerpt here.

(Is there such a thing as a ‘full excerpt’? Course there is.)

Fiction as ‘Escape’

She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word “escape” used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

- Alice Munro, from Free Radicals