TBR piles: What’s in yours?

Where do you pile your books? My hubby and I have piles on our bedside tables mostly, then some in the living room, the kitchen, the dining room…and they all live in the basement library/movie/party room (technically the ‘family room’).

The other day I was tidying the bedroom, and emptied the already-read and not-going-to-get-read-soon books off the two bedside tables:

Putting books away...

Then, I pulled books from the living room and kitchen to complete the tidy:

More books being put away..

This post for your voyeuristic enjoyment.

Les bouquinistes

Are you a book lover? A bibliophile? Do you get no greater joy out of life than browsing a used bookstore? Do your knees get weak at the thought of a library book sale?

Have you been to Paris yet?

The Parisiens know books, appreciate books. You’ve probably seen the pictures of the book stalls that line the Seine, in their ubiquitous green carts. These are les bouquinistes, the legendary booksellers of Paris:

They are part of the Paris legend. 217 booksellers spread out their 900 stands along the capital’s 11 quays, which represent a three kilometer walk. The onlookers pass by their sides, rummage through the famous green boxes, buy a book here and there, a poster, a vintage print. But who are these men and women who brave the wind, the cold and the rain? Winter is here, but they are still at the task. Enter into the biggest outdoor bookstore.

The quote above is a translation of an audio piece from La Guinguette — a very good online French journal. I want to put a plug in for them, as they have great products, and the audio is free to listen to. (You can download it if you subscribe.)

This article is a great example. this is not French for the beginner, instead it is the French as it is spoken in the streets. Read this article in the English translation, but also play it, to get the ambient sound of the Paris streets as bouquinistes are interviewed at their stalls.

I can almost picture where each stall is, as it’s described in the article. On our honeymoon, we rented an apartment next to the Seine, on the rive gauche, with green stalls outside our door…

And the French are wonderfully book mad. Here’s a picture of me paying 2 euro for a book at a vending machine:

Another way to access books!

The Ubiquitous Pencil

As you may know, I have a weakness for cultural histories — “See the history of the world through this odd angle!”

So, the other day, when I was browsing the local 2ndhand bookstore, I happened upon a brilliant addition to my library — The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroksi. ‘Tis a delightful romp through the history of such an amazingly simple, obvious thing (at least to us today), in the hopes that the mysteries of engineering become clearer:

“If we can capture the essence of engineers and engineering through the most elementary and least abstract of examples, then we can more easily get to the heart of the matter when confronted with something so large and unfamiliar that we can barely conceive of what it really looks like, let alone hold it in our hands and think about it.”

I have only just begun Chapter 5, Of Traditions and Transitions, the start of which should give you a more fanciful sample of Petroksi approachable academic, sometimes poetic style:

“The history of the pencil, when it has been written down at all, is full of erasures and revisions.”

Accurate, and cute.

To my delight, he’s written more, including an upcoming book (due in October of this year), entitled, simply enough: The Toothpick How can one resist!?!

It’s on the wishlist.

Perfume

I wonder if it’s significant that two of the more memorable books I’ve read have to do with perfume…

Jitterbug Perfume is my favourite Tom Robbins book [not linking to any TR sites...there just seems to be Wikipedia and fan sites -- nothing definitive]. If you’ve never read any Robbins, then you don’t know that he’s got a bit of thang for many a topic, and will take on a major theme or two in each book, going on these wonderful rants that end up being rather heady, like a warm brandy. In Jitterbug Perfume, the main theme is, of course, the power of our sense of smell….and sex, but then it’s always sex….oh, and beets.

Anyway, the sense of smell.

On the same theme is the brilliant novel by German author Patrick Suskind, Perfume.  It’s an adjective-rich descriptive soup of a novel…where you can almost perceive the stench of Paris in the Middle Ages rising up from the pages. Imagine reading it in the original German!!

We watched the movie version of Perfume: The Story of a Murder last night — well done! It was so nicely done that it was almost scratch’n'sniff (a la Odorama of John Waters)! Fetid Paris streets, foul tanneries, odiferous breath…ick. And the most difficult detail of the novel was subtly portrayed: that the main character, John Baptiste Grenouille, with his superhuman nose, had absolutely no aroma of his own. It’s an odd detail, covered in much more detail in the book, but conveyed in some very interesting ways.

I wonder if it would have been harder to discern if I hadn’t been looking for it?

Two very good books. One rather disturbing movie.

“Merry Bookmas!”

Luckily, I’ve married into a bookish family, and my man is bookish, and his friends are…and my mother has been trained to give me a book gift certificate every year.

Books and consumables are the best presents (consumables…you know — wine, cheese, cookies, jam…).

This year was a nice mess of books:

I found The Art of Blacksmithing by Alex Bealer for Metro. He’s always talking about how he’d like to learn more about it, etc. Well, now he can.

Metro’s sister found him John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise.  An odd book of satirical essays and the like…perfect.  The same sister sent me the Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

I put a lot of browsing time to use in my local 2ndhand bookstore…made my husband a list of books that were there, that he could pick up for me. And he took me up on it, and bought me the rather unusual Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece by Joan Schenkar. I’ll have to blog on this book individually one day, soon.

Metro also got me two more books — I feel spoiled! The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls was one. New York Times bestseller, winner of various awards…I think that’s the next book I’m reading. He also bought me Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t be Made in the Blink of an Eye by Michael R. LeGault. The interesting thing about this book is that LeGault wrote it in reaction to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink…Blink essentially glorifies the decisions we make subconsciously, in the moment, while I believe LeGault’s point is that we need to put more thought into our decisions. I’ll let you know more when I’ve read LeGault’s book (I’ve already read Gladwell’s).

Funny thing, is that our friends sent us some books too…one is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and appropriately enough, Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels — from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe by Anthony Arthur. His sequel will have to include Gladwell & LeGault.

The final book on the list is Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This one is also from the same friends…and again, a good call. We bought this for Metro’s mother last Christmas, so it’s been on our radar for awhile.

So, leave me a comment to tell me what books you got for Christmas!!

Dystopian Literature

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…

A study of omnivores…

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.

Have I mentioned dictionaries?

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.

Online Beauty

I’m a reader, yes, but I’m also really just a bibliophile. I love books. Looking at them. Touching them. Holding them…

I love the utility of trade paperbacks. Modern hardcovers are annoyingly heavy, and all the same. Every once in awhile, some publisher puts out a book with a bit more Oomph, a different shape, some unusual look & feel, that changes everyone’s perception of a book…but that’s another post. Today, I’m talking about something else, an online pleasure.
Old books. They have their own appeal. The content is delightfully dated, the pages crackle a different way, the book smells…old. I don’t collect old books (“Thank God!” I hear my husband say…), but I do appreciate them.
So, today’s gift to you, spend some time in the British Library’s Turning the Pages site — where you can literally page through ancient manuscripts (with the help of Shockwave). The best bit is the magnifying glass to look closely at the illumination…

Apt reading

The book I’m reading right now, one I’ve mentioned before, is A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin, is utterly apt reading right now. The subtitle is: “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East” — I’m buzzing through it as quickly as I am able, because now more than ever it is important to understand what’s happening right now in Lebanon, Syria and Israel.

[Go to Cold Desert's blog to get the Lebanese point of view. See Metroblog for disgust at the Canadian PM's response.]

In this book, Fromkin is approaching the history of the area through the personalities of the European politicians making policy from 1914 to 1922 — essentially examining motivations, decisions, points of view and the like that lead to the parcelling out of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI.

Wow. A simplistic summary. Again, for in-depth analysis of the issues in the book, check out the discussion forum on BookTalk.org — some pretty intense discussion going on…good stuff. Very helpful to my reading.