This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Jargon watch: “book” as a synonym for “cool”. Sample usage: “That YouTube video is so book.” As books are decidedly uncool, you might wonder how this usage came about. Book is a T9onym of cool…both words require pressing 2665 on the keypad of a mobile phone but book comes up before cool in the T9 dictionary, leading to inadvertent uses of the former for the latter. (thx, david)
On the site for his new novel, The End As I Know It, Kevin Shay is blogging pre-Y2K internet postings. “On This Day Pre-Y2K is updated daily with one or more verbatim quotations drawn from a variety of online sources, from today’s date, eight years ago.” One of my favorite posts describes “the great geek exodus from the cities late next year”.
A list of the hardest novels to film. Ulysses tops the list. How about The Mezzanine?
Ethics books gets stolen more often than non-ethics books. “Missing books as a percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1.” (via mr)
Booksquare surmises that turned sideways, the iPhone — with its bright 160 ppi screen — will be pretty decent for reading books and such. (via o’reilly)
Back in the late 60s and early 70s, the New Yorker serialized the first chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the theater listings for long-running productions. “In 1970, New Yorker edidor Gardner Botsford explained to Time magazine that he began the serialization of Ulysses because he got bored writing the same straight capsule reviews week after week.”
In case you were wondering, here’s a list of the almost 1000 books that Art Garfunkel has read since 1968. (thx, dave)
Nice interview (particularly the last half) with Steven Johnson about his books and “interdisciplinary zeal”. His next book will be about “creativity that will involve the long zoom idea: thinking about creativity that’s not necessarily something that happens between you and your notepad, but everything from the neurons in your brain all the way up to the city you’re thinking in the middle of”…which sounds great.
Interview with Ben Schott, author of the Schott’s Miscellany books. It sounds like we have a lot in common, job-wise. “One of the metaphors of what I do that I like is a sort of curator. Often it’s a question of finding information that might’ve otherwise been undiscovered or neglected or not focused upon. What’s fun — and I think this is one of the great joys of curating — is making juxtapositions.” I liked this bit too: “I think it’s easier to be snarky than it is to be decent. Anything to get a smile. It doesn’t last. And actually, it does date.”
Hillel Cooperman purchased a small autograph book dating from the 1940s in a Hong Kong shop and has posted scans of the book online in hopes that people will help translate it. A commenter says: “This book is used to leave comments — quite popular at graduation time when your classmates left you good wishes of your future. The owner of the book is named ‘Xi Rao’, and the college he graduated from in Spring 1942 is ‘Jiao Tong’ university.”
Over the holidays, Mike Monteiro discovered there was a Nacho Libre game for the Nintendo DS. Thinking that an arbitrary choice for a movie tie-in game, he started the DS Tie-In Games I Wanna Play group on Flickr to showcase other possible odd media tie-ins for the DS. Some of my favorite submissions so far include: The Passion of the Christ, Birth of a Nation, Empire, Remains of the Day, My Dinner with Andre (Bon Mot controller sold separately), Super Mario Bros, Learning GNU Emacs, Requiem for a Dream, The Cremaster Cycle, and Getting Things Done.
Here’s a couple of ones that I’ve done: Dancer in the Dark and The New Yorker Draw Your Own Cover Electronic Entertainment (with noncompulsory coöperative mode), pictured below.
If you join the group, there’s a Photoshop kit you can download to join in the fun.
People with low self-esteem don’t like surprise endings in mystery novels while the self-confident did. (via mr)
John Hodgman reports that the audiobook for The Areas of My Expertise is available for free at the iTunes Music Store.
Update: From what I can tell from the first 3:34, THIS IS THE WORLD”S BEST AUDIOBOOK!1!!
The proprietor of the Book Design Review blog picks his favorite book covers of 2006.
What would happen if poets and playwrights wrote works whose titles were anagrams of their names? Here’s one by Basho called Has B.O: “Swamp mist, eyes water- / Why is that monk still wearing / Winter robes in June?”
Prospect Magazine lists the most overrated and most underrated books of 2006. Top 3 overrated are The God Delusion, The Blunkett Tapes, and Everyman. I so agree about Everyman…it’s the only book I read this year where I genuinely wanted my money back at the end of it. (via mr)
Michael Crowley wrote an article for the New Republic back in March criticizing Michael Crichton’s views on global warming. Crichton has responded by writing Crowley into his new novel as a child rapist. WTF? (via rc3)
At The Art of the Book event last week, the panel was asked why there were so few female superstar designers. Milton Glaser took a shot at answering the question (many women choose family over work during the crucial superstar career development years) but judging by the reaction afterwards online, his comments were not appreciated by some. To be fair, Glaser’s comments were taken out of context, I think, and what he said is a part of the overall answer to the question. On Design Observer, Michael Beirut, who was the moderator for that evening’s event, takes a closer look at the issue. “The real question was the unspoken one: ‘Why is it that you guys up there are always…guys?’” Oh, and here’s a list of women speakers for your conference.
10 Zen Monkeys has an interview with Gina Smith about iWoz, her book on Steve Wozniak. “Another misconception that bothered him was the idea that he and Steve Jobs had designed the Apple I and the Apple II together. The sole designer of both those computers was Steve Wozniak. The sole designer.” (thx, david)
The bestselling book at Amazon for 2006? Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer.
Update: Browse the top sellers by cover.
The unabridged audiobook for War and Peace spans 51 CDs, runs for 70 hours, and is highly recommended.
Bookslut lists the best book covers of 2006. (via lists 2006)
An increasing number of novels contain bibliographies, once the domain of the nonfiction book. I love bibliographies…bring them on.
Took in The Art of the Book lecture at the 92nd Street Y last night. Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd (“a modern day Truman Capote” I heard him described as afterward), Dave Eggers, with Michael Beirut moderating. One of the most interesting comments came late in the proceedings from Dave Eggers, who described one of the main goals of the McSweeney’s design staff as attempting to design the books as well and as beautifully as they could as objects so that people would be compelled to save them. That way, even if people didn’t have time to read them soon after purchase, they couldn’t bear to throw/give the book away and would instead put it on their shelf in the hopes — McSweeney’s hopes, that is — that the buyer would at some point pull it down off the shelf and give it another try.
This design goal runs counter to the design process behind most contemporary book jackets, which are engineered almost entirely for the purpose of eliciting in the potential buyer a “buy me” reaction within two seconds of spotting them. McSweeney’s, as a champion of authors, wants the writing to be read while most major publishing companies, as champions of their shareholders, want books to be purchased. People buying books is important to the goal of getting the writing within them read, but McSweeney’s emphasis on designing books to last in people’s homes is a clever way to pursue that goal after the sale.
How to choose a good book to read, a tip from Marshall McLuhan: turn to page 69, read it, and if it’s good, you’ve got a winner. (via snarkmarket)
Update: A kottke.org reader writes, “It’s known (although perhaps not well) that he often only read the left-hand pages of books. It’s one way that someone could get through as much as he did and apparently he thought there was usually too much redundancy, anyway.” (thx, steve)
The Whine Colored Sea issues a challenge: which directors, musicians, artists, authors, etc. followed a masterpiece with a bomb. Spielberg’s Schindler’s List followed by Jurassic Park 2 is a good example.
Design Observer’s 2006 holiday reading list. Lots of good gift ideas.
Penguin is releasing a series of books with blank covers with the idea being that the reader fills them in. The first books in the series include Crime and Punishment and Emma. Penguin has a gallery of reader submissions…send in your best shot.
A copy of OJ Simpson’s If I Did It sold for $8300 on eBay. The book was recalled and won’t ever be available for sale.
Update: Looks like the sale didn’t go through: “Both Seller and Myself Agreed NOT to COMPLETE Transaction…..” (thx, susan)
Socials & More