Books

I read…a lot. Here’s where I ramble about books and printed media.

Books, Books, Books, and More Books!

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We have so many books in our apartment!

For a few years now, I’ve been using LibraryThing to track my book collection. Ever since Prairie and I moved in together, we’ve been occasionally talking about adding her books to the listing, but it always seemed like such a monumental undertaking that we never actually did anything about it. However, with us both on a bit of a holiday break, we decided that the time had come, and we’ve been plugging away at the collection, putting about a shelf a day into the database on my computer and then uploading the day’s entries into the LibraryThing database.

And now, the project is done: our entire library — all 1,465 books — is cataloged!

It’s a fun library, too. Between Prairie’s years in English Literature classes and love for the classics, my science-fiction collection, our mutual love for good children’s literature, and many other influences, we’ve ended up with a collection that goes all over the place.

This also gave us a good chance to get a look at how we’re doing with those authors we’re making a point of collecting: Agatha Christie, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Roald Dahl, Stephen King (a full set, we believe), and others.

We do love our books!

Secrets of the 2008 Campaign eBook

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Over the course of the week, Newsweek has published a fascinating seven-part series called Secrets of the 2008 Campaign, an “in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.”

Since I wanted to read the whole thing, but have also been experimenting with reading eBooks on my iPod Touch, I figured this was as good a time as any to play with seeing what it would take to create an eBook. As it turns out, it’s not terribly difficult at all, at least as far as the .epub format goes. After some time with this tutorial and a little bit of minor troubleshooting, I had it all set up.

If you have an eBook reader that supports .epub files and would like to take a peek, here it is. It’s been working fine for me in both the desktop and iPhone versions of Stanza, but I can’t at this point vouch for any other eBook reader.

Obviously, seeing as how the only thing keeping me from breaking copyright criminally (rather than simply flagrantly, which is were I stand now) is that I’m not charging for this, so should Newsweek decide to give me the smackdown, this will be disappearing faster than Sarah Palin leaving the stage after McCain’s concession speech.

Still, it was a fun exercise in figuring out eBooks.

An Ode to the Short Story

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Following up, in a way, to a quote from Stephen King that I posted a couple weeks ago, comes this essay by Steven Millhauser, The Ambition of the Short Story.

Of course there are virtues associated with smallness. Even the novel will grant as much. Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the short story can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the novel — after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that’s left.

(via Kottke)

Stephen King on Short Stories

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I’ve always been a big fan of short stories, will happily snap up a collection from any author I know, and have often found some wonderful gems in various “Best of” collections. In the introduction to Skeleton Crew, Stephen King has a nice little bit on just why they’re so fun…

…most of you have forgotten the real pleasures of the short story. Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair. I can remember commuting between Maine and Pittsburgh during the making of Creepshow, and going mostly by car…. I had a reading of The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough, on eight cassette tapes, and for a space of about five weeks I wasn’t even having an affair with that novel; I felt married to it….

A short story is a different thing altogether–a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.

You Win!

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On this day, 60 years ago, The New Yorker published “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson.

People flipped…out–cancelled subscriptions, wrote bags of hate mail. The story was banned outright in South Africa and, according to Wikipedia, ranked seventeenth on Playboy’s list of books most banned by public high schools in the U.S.

This was the only Shirley Jackson story I’d read until I met Prairie, who is a huge Shirley Jackson fan. I was probably in high school when I read it last, so I re-read it a couple of years back, and it’s still an incredibly powerful story.

If you haven’t read it, you can do so here.

(via The Slog, who really should have chosen a different title for their post — there are people who might not have read the story yet, after all.)

Birthday Presents!

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Birthday Presents!

Birthday Presents!, originally uploaded by djwudi.

A couple of birthday presents showed up in the mail today. Cool! Thanks to Phil for Mark Twain’s Roughing It and to Fernando for the sci-fi anthology The Starry Rift!

Medieval Fanfic

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A short discourse on fan fiction in the Middle Ages…

Chaucer seems to have attracted this sort of activity more than other writers–or possibly, we modern readers are more interested in tracking down this sort of thing when it’s done to a writer we admire as much as Chaucer. Chaucer left a lot of gaps in the Canterbury Tales, and other writers stepped up to fill them, writing tales for the poor Ploughman who never got one in the original, an extra tale for both the Merchant and the Cook, and a whole story about what the Pilgrims did once they got to Canterbury. Robert Henryson, a 15th-century Scottish writer, went so far as to write a sequel to Chaucer’s earlier work, Troilus and Criseyde, in which he punishes Criseyde for all the things Chaucer had her do to poor, noble Troilus.

(via Boing Boing)

Another Valentine’s Day Present

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Valentine’s Day morning, as I was puttering about the house and getting ready for the day while Prairie slept in, there was a knock at the door. When I answered, I was handed a package from Amazon by one of our landlords. This was a little confusing, as I didn’t remember ordering anything, but it was definitely addressed to me. Okay, whatever…

The Cult of MacWhen I opened it, I was quite pleasantly surprised to find The Cult of Mac, which I’d put on my Amazon Wishlist not too long ago. On the shipping invoice was a nice little note from ‘Liz in Pittsburgh,’ who reads this site and decided to send me a Valentine’s Day present — cool!

So, many thanks to Liz! I got about halfway through yesterday as I was bussing around town, and have been enjoying all the stories of the Mac über-fans (and, unsurprisingly, seeing elements of myself in more than a few of the stories). I hope your Valentine’s Day was a good one as well!

Badass Bible Verses

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Cracked has a list of the top nine ‘badass’ bible verses. Just for fun, I’ll list the verse citations here. Any guesses at what stories they’re referring to (before looking at the linked article or clicking through to the linked NIV versions, of course)?

  1. Exodus 2: 11-12
  2. II Kings 2: 23-24
  3. Ezekiel 23: 19-20
  4. Judges 3: 16-23
  5. Numbers 16: 23, 31-33
  6. Deuteronomy 25: 11-12
  7. I Kings 18: 24, 38-40
  8. Judges 15: 15-16
  9. I Samuel 18: 25-27