Lori’s Book Nook

Today would be a good day to comment on the classic SF genre of dystopian lit. You know the books: 1984, A Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale…books about totalitarian governments that use media manipulation and torture, among other techniques, to control their populations.

Why today? If you’ve been sleeping the last couple of days, then you may have missed the scary news that the Shrub, and the USA, are well on their way to bringing the nightmare of the dystopian world view to reality…the Powers That Be can now torture to their cold hearts’ content. Here’s raincoaster on the topic, and Metro.

On a related note, here is Creatrix on the state of art education in the USA — a report that again makes me glad I don’t live there.

Dystopian literature is supposed to be a labratory for what should not be, not a blueprint for the way a government could function…

BookTalk.org, a wonderful on-line book club, needs an influx of new blood.

• Are you a discerning reader?
• Do you enjoy intellectual discussion?
• Do you write in full sentences with decent spelling? [Alternate question: Are you annoyed by the proliferation of 'text speak' on the Internet?]
• When you disagree with someone, are you prone to engaging that person in calm discussion?

Then BookTalk.org is great for you! Flames, ad hominem attacks, and irrelevance are discouraged, while intelligence, inclusiveness, and freethinking flourish. (Silliness is acceptable, but in it’s rightful place.) Tell ‘em I sent ya!
And you’re just in time for the next book discussion! This time it is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. [Buy it here, to support BookTalk.org]

I’m looking forward to this one, as it reminds me a little of Margaret Visser’s The Rituals of Dinner and Much Depends on Dinner, where she investigates the cultural history of manners and various foodstuffs.

Pollan, from what I understand of his book, is investigating how our omnivore status has changed over the centuries as agricultural & social concerns mutated. I’m involved with an upcoming conference on the topic of Food Security, and I believe that this will be a useful book to have in my repertoire.

Type “personal essay” into the Google search bar and you get pages upon pages of links to tips on how to write your college/university entrance essay…and lots of people linking to what seems to be the definitive book of essays, Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. (Oh, and if you’re of the Book Club ilk, you can even find a book club guide at Random House.)

Funny that. Pretty much exactly how I ended up with a copy of the book in my library. I was working on an application to a grad program, and wanted to write something more than the ‘this is what I’ve been up to’ style essay, so I picked up Lopate’s book, and lost myself in some of the essays. Used some of the rhetorical tricks therein, had a couple of grad student friends give it a vicious going over, and was pretty proud of the end result. (It landed me the interview, but I don’t think I was hungry enough for academia in person.)

I like reading personal narrative essays, in magazines, online…if, and only if, they are good. You all know what I’m talking about — I want meaty insight, intense story, thunderclap of recognition…no wimpy stories about lessons learned from your cat/dog/precocious child.

This ramble today was triggered by my StumblingUpon this essay site: Fresh Yarn: the Online Salon for Personal Essays. I haven’t fully delved yet, maybe you can all help me.

Of course we’ve all picked up a Penguin…those pesky little orange-covered books are ubiquitous. And yes, Penguin has a corner on a lot of the classics, unavailable anywhere else. I mean, this is a publishing house with an interesting history, and serious collectors!

But a list of the Penguins you must read before you die?!? A little over the top in the blowing-your-own-horn department, n’est-ce pas?

That said, it is an impressive, if daunting, list.

I’ve mentioned audio before, and classic lit delivered to your mailbox…and now I’ve found a couple more sites that relate.

LoudLit.org, being “literature for your eyes and ears”, has an oddly educational aspect to it:

Putting the text and audio together, readers can learn spelling, punctuation and paragraph structure by listening and reading masterpieces of the written word.

As an ex-ESL teacher, I definitely see the advantages, but it’s not necessarily something I’d put on my front page as a selling point. “Hey kids! It’s good for you!”

Ah, but you read a little deeper, and you discover that the aim is to help those with dyslexia — always a noble pursuit. Supposedly, up to 20% of the population suffers from some form of dyslexia. I know I have moments when I’m really tired and going buggy-eyed looking at numbers…Imagine feeling like that all the time. [Here's a link for the International Dyslexia Association, and another one for the Canadian Dyslexia Association.]

LoudLit.org has some great public domain works, read by named readers. I don’t recognize any of them (not that that means anything!), but finding a reader you like makes listening pleasurable.

The other link I wanted share today is another get-book-fragments-in-your-inbox, DailyLit. Poe, Plato, Nietzsche…it’s quite an impressive collection. And, you can pick what time of day your segments will be delivered to your box (is that an advantage?).

Enjoy.

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

And did you know how many books there are on the subject? Take a look at this Amazon.com page, to see a few beauties.

And if you’re still nervous, here are some tips, on the How to Talk Like a Pirate page.

I’m an amateur myself, so I like the English-to-Pirate translator, here.

I like dictionaries. I have a number of them:

• Canadian Oxford (a must-have for any Canadian. Includes entries on ‘eh’ and ‘touque’…and one of the best sentences in the history of dictionaries: it’s way out in the suburbs, eh, so I can’t get there by bike)
• Gage Canadian (two copies, actually. Different editions,combined in the marriage)
• Websters
• Collins Cobuild (designed for ESL students, it defines words in full, clear sentences!)
• Longman Dictionary of Language & Culture (another ESL dictionary) I used this one to help me write my book in Korea
• a rather cool dictionary called Shakespeare’s Words by David Crystal and Ben Crystal. (Check out the link, as this is the online version, which you can play with for a 7-day free trial!)
• any number of language dictionaries: Greek, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Welsh, Italian…
• and, the pièce de résistance, the Oxford English Dictionary, lovingly known as the OED to those in lexicography, and dictionary-philes around the world. My copy is the Compact…20 volumes in 2 books, complete with magnifying glass (here’s a pic of how small the print is!)

Years ago, K.M. Elisabeth Murray wrote the story of her Grandfather, James Murray, editor of the original Oxford University dictionary project, in the book Caught in the Web of Words. It’s a detailed, respectful look at a man, and a process, that took years, and resulted in the most amazing historical document of the 20th Century. (I read it on a memorable trip across Canada by train.)

If you’ve never seen an OED entry, check out the word of the day from the OED website. You’ll see examples of the word used throughout its history, in different contexts, with quotes from historical writings.

Imagine the process. Pick a word. Read as much as possible, as far back as possible, to find the earliest example of the word in written use, and examples of new meanings of the word, tracing its history through the centuries of written English. Gather example sentences that illustrate the word’s meaning clearly, in context. They needed a lot of readers to help. And people did, from all over the world, in English speaking countries. Including one interesting man who submitted more than 10,000 words-in-context — who was also an inmate of an asylum for the criminally insane in the USA. Simon Winchester, author of a number of rather torrid cultural histories, wrote The Professor and the Madman, putting a lot of spin on this man, Dr. W.C. Minor.

Dictionaries. Talk to me of dictionaries.

In yesterday’s mail, I received a copy of Penguin’s new book Beneath a Marble Sky: A Love Story by John Shors.

“Why you?” I hear you ask. Why am I entitled to free books in the post? ‘Tis not special priviledge, I am merely a member of BzzAgent.com and was involved in what they call a ‘bzzblast’ this summer for Penguin books — I, and countless others, read excerpts of a few upcoming books, and commented on them. Now, some of those books were silly, not my style at all, and imminently forgettable. Isn’t that how it always is with books?

But, one book appealed to me, or at least its first chapter. Set in 17th Century Hindustan:

…where the reigning emperor, consumed with grief over the tragic death of his beloved wife, commissioned the building of a grand mausoleum as a testament to the marvel of their love. [from the back cover description]

Lovely prose, without being over-written (in that ‘trying hard to get a Booker Prize nomination so use lots of adjectives’ way). I’m looking forward to reading this one.

So, thank you very much for the book, BzzAgent Jono. Did I get the one I liked by choice or accident? Either way, a lovely surprise!

You’ve heard about it, you’ve maybe seen the BBC mini-series, you may have even thought it was classical literature…but the Robert Graves novel published in 1934 is really just a wonderfully fun book to read.

I picked it up to join in on the BookTalk.org discussion, inhaled it, and went out and bought the sequel Claudius the God. My copy of I, Claudius has to be stolen from my husband’s nightstand now if I want to get involved in the discussion.

Anyway, if you want poison gossip and wine, intrigue and deceit, brazen backstabbing and lies, read this book. Is it historically accurate? In the main, probably. But what is so fascinating about this book is the motivations ascribed to each of these classical figures.

Okay, so I’m an avowed bibliophile…I love printed books, beautiful books especially. But, I also have a weakness for audio books, well-read.

A couple of years ago, I discovered Audible.com, and ’sucked in’…and enjoyed every minute of it. At the time, I was commuting 40 minutes each way every day, so it was worth it. If I didn’t get a seat on the train it was fine, ’cause I didn’t need to sit down to ‘read’ comfortably.

One of my favourite things is to listen to poetry, read well. One year with my annual book gift card from my mom (what else do you get a book lover for Christmas?), I bought Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath. Wow. Three CDs with a big book…here’s a glowing review. Silvia Plath’s palpable anger reading “Daddy”…Dorothy Parker being sardonic…Ogden Nash and his amusingly nasal voice, perfectly suited to his poetry. And the real treasure, a wax cylinder recording of Lord Tennyson reading part of the “Charge of the Light Brigade”.

Then, I found Seven Ages: An Anthology of Poetry with Music…poems grouped by the Seven Ages of Man from Shakespeare, read by various British Actors. John Cleese reading “The Owl and the Pussycat” is one treasure in the midst of a lot of great stuff.

Readers are important. Not everyone can read well. The difference between listening to a book being read and experiencing a great story is all in the voice. On Audible.com, my favourite book was Pride and Prejudice, read by Kate Reading, a British woman with a truly great voice. I could not stop listening to this book, and I’d read it numerous times already. Hearing it was an utter joy!

So, tonight I came across ThoughtAudio, some free audio downloads…which has prompted this long post. I’ll try some out, but I don’t know about the quality of the readers. Maybe someone out there has checked it out and can let us know?

Thanks.