Posts Tagged: reading

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4
Jan 12

When I have the time, I want to read more science fiction. When I read more science fiction, I like it when someone has already given me a sense of what is worth reading and what is not worth reading. It’s not because I will follow their advice, but if I get part way into a story and find myself struggling to want to finish it, it’s nice to know someone else had the same reaction — and it’s just as nice to race through a story constantly saying “Wow!” out loud because the writing is so good and know that somebody also had that reaction.

In other words, I guess I don’t like to read alone. Well, I do, but I like to know other people are out there.

Somewhere.

And so thank you to Locus magazine for reviewing a month’s worth of science fiction periodical contents. Very cool. And so thank you to Slashdot to linking to the Cory Doctorow video that he himself linked to on BoingBoing but then that got me reading BoingBoing and Doctorow links to himself a lot and I actually clicked on one of those links, and while the link itself — the one about how to talk about the future that was in Locus magazine on-line — turned out to be really not worth reading — see, I have now returned the favor! — there was other stuff on Locus that was worth reading.

Doctorow, by the way, is a very smart guy, and prolific to boot. So if he occasionally publishes something that doesn’t quite hit the mark, he also regularly publishes stuff which is not only very smart but completely from his heart. In fact, he is not only to be admired for the way he conducts his career but to be emulated. And by that I mean me. I want to write more from my heart and less from the weird technocratic perspective that a lot of academic publishing requires.

And, sigh, that probably means that I will be less successful as an academic than I would like — I’ll admit it, I would like to be successful in terms of being cited and linked, but my editor at the University Press of Mississippi assured me that my prose is too novelistic for most academics. It’s not very quotable in the traditional, scholarly way.

And sigh again.

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29
Nov 11

Brent Simmons has a lovely post in praise of readability.

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20
Jan 11

Reading on an iPad during/as Prime Time

Apps like Read It Later do collect interesting kinds of data from their users. Interesting in the aggregate: it would appear that one of the things that iPad users are doing is spending their evening hours on the couch not watching television but reading. (Or perhaps both.) There are a variety of cool graphs and charts at the link.

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8
Dec 10

Portable Copy Stand

This morning’s ProfHacker, now part of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has a write-up by Konrad Lawson on his portable copy stand that lets him quickly set up his camera to photograph book pages in archives and libraries.

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8
Dec 10

I, Reader

Alexander Chee’s meditation on his collection of books and on how to shelve them in his new apartment makes for an interesting companion piece to Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Unpacking My Library.”

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7
Jun 10

Reading Ruskin

During one of my business trips to London in the late nineties I picked up two books by Ruskin. Bother were published by George Allen of 156 Charing Cross Road. I gave one of the books to Henry Glassie as a thank you for being my dissertation director. I kept the other book, which is entitled “The Two Paths.” I have picked it up now and again and read here and there, but as I focus more seriously on getting “The Makers of Things” written I thought what better way to start the enterprise than to read Ruskin?

“The Two Paths” is particularly interesting, I think, because it is subtitled: “Being Lectures on Art and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture.” Close to my topic, and here was Ruskin thinking, and talking about it, in lectures delivered in 1858-1859.

I’m happily reading along when I came across this happy character:

Laudun-2010-2

I liked him so much I have decided to make him my mascot for the time being. (I am fairly certain he must be in the public domain by now.)

Ruskin rules!

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20
May 10

Books in the Age of the iPad

Too much ink and too many pixels has been spilled of late about the state of reading or the state of publishing or the plight of books in the IT era. Craig Mod has a simple take on the matter: good riddance to all the ink and paper spent on books that simply don’t require it. By that he means mass market books, paperbacks we buy, read, and sometimes simply recycle or give away or shelve and never think about again.[^1]

Mod would probably include more books in that category, since he argues that any book that is almost all text and really doesn’t require any kind of design is probably best read on devices like the iPad or Kindle, where the text can be manipulated by the reader to their own preferences.

Reserved for valuable ink and paper in Mod’s world of future publishing are books that are designed with, well, design in mind. Books with lots of illustrations or books that have their layout as part of how you read them — I am particularly reminded of Joshua Mowll’s books.

That is, what the tablet opens up is the chance to read print books as print books and to read text books as texts. It’s an interesting idea.

[^1]: Please note that I am still a little worried about the ability to give away books in the digital era. Even as an author, I would rather see my work passed around and read than see its use limited only to one person.

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3
Sep 86

Reading Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”

Some old notes on a yellowed slip of paper that were in my copy of Being and Nothingness. I am backdating this entry to 1986.

  • Sadism – transcendence trying to incarnate other’s transcendence
  • Fat – superabundant facticity (521).
  • How does Sartre deal with “wanting to be desired”? I.e., making oneself incarnate in order to be possessed and free from transcendence.