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AIGA Voice has an interview with Peter Morville about his new book, Ambient Findability. A question from the interview that everyone responsible for a web site should be asking themselves (emphasis mine): “Can [people] find your content, products and services despite your website?” Love that.
Good review of Philip Tetlock’s new book about expert predicitons, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? “Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.” Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen calls Tetlock’s book “one of the (few) must-read social science books of 2005”.
If I remember correctly, Tense Present (published in the April 2001 issue of Harper’s) was the first bit of writing I ever read by David Foster Wallace. I didn’t fall for him immediately. I liked the article fine, but as I thought more about it in the following weeks — particularly in light of other nonfiction I was reading in magazines and newspapers — the more I liked it. A quick search on the Web revealed that not only had this Wallace written more nonfiction for magazines, he’d written entire books and was considered by some to be the best young author writing in America. A few months later I read Infinite Jest and it was love.
Tense Present is one of the essays included in Consider the Lobster, a collection of nonfiction by Wallace due out on December 13th. It’s included under a new name (Authority and American Usage) and is, like many of the other pieces in the book, the “director’s cut” of the original, but re-reading it brought back good memories about, well, how good it was to discover Wallace’s writing.
Several of essays in CtL I’d read before, including the title essay from the Aug 2004 issue of Gourmet (which according to Gourmet EIC Ruth Reichl almost didn’t make it into the magazine at all). I read The View From Mrs. Thompson’s in Rolling Stone shortly after 9/11 and remember thinking that it was the best reaction to 9/11 that I’d seen, but reading it again 4 years later, the impact wasn’t quite the same…until the last 2-3 paragraphs when you remember that he spends the whole essay setting the table so he can hit you with the whole meal in one mouthful and you then spend several hours attempting to digest what you’ve just read.
The View… and Up, Simba, a piece on John McCain’s 2000 bid for President that also ran in Rolling Stone (at half the length under the title The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub), were my favorites, but they’re all so good (if you enjoy reading nonfiction in Wallace’s signature style, which I very much do). A common complaint of Wallace’s writing is that it’s not very straightforward, even though clarity seems to be his purpose. I don’t mind the challenge the writing provides; I read Wallace for a similar reason Paul is reading surrealist poetry, to make my brain work a little bit for its reward. In The End of Print, David Carson outlined his design philosophy in relation to its ultimate goal, communication. Carson used design to make people work to decipher the message with the idea that by doing that work, they would be more likely to remember the message. I’d like to think that Wallace approaches his writing similarly.
Author Jeremy Mercer picks his top 10 bookstores in the world. Any personal favorites that you’d add to the list?
Cl1ff N0t3s for the millennials: mobile service will condense books into short text messages. “For example, Hamlet’s famous line: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ becomes ‘2b? Nt2b? ???’”.
Gallery of turn-of-the-century postcards from when Kodak enabled people to make postcards from any photo they took. From a new book called Real Photo Postcards.
Forthcoming books in the increasingly mature Harry Potter series. “Harry Potter and Some Seriously Bad Acid”.
A business book on teamwork called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (excerpt) has gained a following among pro football coaches and players.
Free 1200-page physics textbook, available online or for download. I have no idea if it’s any good or not. Is anyone using this in their high school or college classroom?
Introduction from Edward O. Wilson’s new book on Charles Darwin’s “Four Great Books”.
On the plane on the way back from Vietnam, I was reading this article about how bookstores are preferable to shopping for books online[1] when I ran across this quote from David Sedaris:
One thing about English-language bookstores in the age of Amazon is that it assumes that everybody has the Internet. I don’t. I’ve never seen the Internet. I’ve never ordered a book on it, and I wouldn’t really want to”
This seems almost impossible and might even be a joke, but it would go a long way in explaining how he gets so much work done. He’s got continuous complete attention while the rest of us have only partial.
[1] Which article was not very convincing since it included this passage:
[Odile Hellier, owner of the Village Voice bookstore in Paris] said that she thinks the act of buying books in a store rather than online is essential to the health of our culture.
“My fear is that while the machine society that we live in is very functional, very practical, and allows for a certain communication, it is a linear communication that closes the mind,” she said.
She said that although Internet sites perform many of the functions of a bookstore - recommending similar books or passing on personal impressions of a book - nothing equals the kind of discovery possible when visiting a store and scanning tables covered with a professional staff’s latest hand-picked selection.
I always chuckle when someone (usually grinding an axe) describes the web as so flat and with little social aspect. I love bookstores, but in many ways, shopping for books online is superior.
100 notable books of 2005 from the NY Times Book Review.
Profile of Ray Kurzweil on the occasion of the publication of his latest book, The Singularity is Near. “This individualistic, mechanistic ethos, his critics argue, also blurs Kurzweil’s predictive power, because it ignores all the ways in which technologies are bounded by social forces.” Gotta love his quest for immortality though.
A list of the best and worst cookbooks to give people for Xmas (or Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or Festivus).
Works by Chip Kidd (from Chip Kidd: Book One) will be on exhibition at Cooper Union through Feb 4, 2006.
Good maps of Bangkok seem hard to come by. Before we left, we looked in several bookstores and decided on The Rough Guide to Bangkok. We’d never used a Rough Guide before but our usual (excellent) guidebook series, DK Eyewitness Guides, did not have a Bangkok-specific book, only a general Thailand guide. What a mistake…I’ve wanted to throw the RG right into the river about 10 times in the past few days. Meg promises me that once we get home, I can ritually set fire to it and cleanse ourselves of its crappiness.
On one of our last days here, we happened upon the Eyewitness Guide for Thailand and while it’s thick and heavy, the Bangkok section would have been perfect for our needs. Argh! Oh well…one of the difficulties in traveling is that you never know what you’re really going to need until you get to where you’re going, and that goes double for maps.
We ended up relying quite a bit on the free SkyTrain/Metro map they give you at the station, as well as a slew of free maps available at our hotel and various other places around town. None of them was very good, but depending on what we were doing, one of them had the appropriate information on it. After all this, I wonder if a good map for Bangkok even exists[1]. The city is so big and sprawling that it’s conceivable that no one has undertaken the effort to map it all.
[1] To its (possible) credit, the RG recommended a Bangkok map called Nancy Chandler’s Map of Bangkok. We found it in a small bookshop on our last full day here, and while we couldn’t properly evaluate it in its wrapper, it looked promising.
Leonardo DiCaprio set to star in movie adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Huh? (thx, matt)
Bobby Henderson, creator of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, has gotten an $80,000 advance to write a Pastafarian Bible.
Is it possible to use thin slicing (as detailed in Gladwell’s Blink) to make better bets about the outcome of NBA basketball games? The most important factors would appear to be FG%, turnover rate, offensive rebounding rate, and free throw attempts. (via truehoop)
Surowiecki on the economics of textbooks, i.e. why they cost so damn much. “You can often buy the same textbook abroad for significantly less than it costs in the U.S., so students have learned to buy directly from places like the U.K., and a host of small businesses have sprung up to import books.”
Paul Ford and alter-ego Gary Benchley in the NY Times. Paul Ford. Gary Benchley.
Survey: readers in the UK are buying books to look smart. “Some consumers hedge their bets by keeping two titles on the go — one an impressive book to show other people, the other an escapist work to enjoy.”
The memoirs of Winston Churchill’s bodyguard have been recently discovered. “Why, Thompson, did they allow the president [FDR], almost dying on his feet, to be there? All Europe will suffer from the decisions made at Yalta.”
George Dyson visits Google on the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer. A quote from a Googler — “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” — highlights a quasi-philosophical question about Google Print…if a book is copied but nobody reads it, has it actually been copied? (Or something like that.)
I’ve been reading a fair amount of fiction lately, which is not typical for me. My usual regimen of nonfiction followed by even more nonfiction has been wearing on me and I read so much news and short nonfiction pieces in keeping up with kottke.org that I’m getting a little burned out. My latest foray into fiction has been great, a welcome reprieve from a schedule that has been a little brutal recently.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was especially good; I burned through it like I used to do with books when I was in high school. The lives of the characters in the book start out fairly normal but get more and more strange and unsettling as the action proceeds. But from my point of view as a reader, I was overcome by a growing sense of calm as I read. Maybe it was Murakami’s quiet storytelling style, but I was especially struck by the duality of self theme running throughout the book. Many of the characters either had two distinct personalities (not in a schizophrenic sense…usually one personality before a dramatic event in their lives and a different one afterwards), talked of leaving their body & looking back on themselves, or had vague feelings that they should be someone else, that some other personality was inside them and couldn’t reveal itself. This all ties into Japanese history & culture, eastern religion & philosophy, and Murakami’s own experience[1], but I found it all personally reassuring, a reminder that you could change as a person and still essentially be who you were before or that stepping outside your normal self for a look ‘round can be a healthy thing.
[1] I knew next-to-nothing about Murakami before picking up this book, but when I finished, I did a little poking around. Via Andrea Harner, here’s an interview with him from 1997 in Salon. In it, you can definitely see how he feels disconnected with Japan, other Japanese writers, and from his past:
Because it’s my father’s story, I guess. My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories — not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it. What I wrote in this book, though, I made up — it’s a fiction, from beginning to end. I just made it up.
Select one-star reviews from Amazon of books on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923 (discussion).
I got an email this morning from a kottke.org reader, Meghann Marco. She’s an author and struggling to get her book out into the hands of people who might be interested in reading it. To that end, she asked her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to put her book up on Google Print so it could be found, and they refused. Now they’re suing Google over Google Print, claiming copyright infringement. Meghann is not too happy with this development:
Kinda sucks for me, because not that many people know about my book and this might help them find out about it. I fail to see what the harm is in Google indexing a book and helping people find it. Anyone can read my book for free by going to the library anyway.
In case you guys haven’t noticed, books don’t have marketing like TV and Movies do. There are no commercials for books, this website isn’t produced by my publisher. Books are driven by word of mouth. A book that doesn’t get good word of mouth will fail and go out of print.
Personally, I hope that won’t happen to my book, but there is a chance that it will. I think the majority of authors would benefit from something like Google Print.
She has also sent a letter of support to Google which includes this great anecdote:
Someone asked me recently, “Meghann, how can you say you don’t mind people reading parts of your book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?”
I replied, “Well, it seems to be working for Jesus.”
And here’s an excerpt of the email that Meghann sent me (edited very slightly):
I’m a book author. My publisher is suing Google Print and that bothers me. I’d asked for my book to be included, because gosh it’s so hard to get people to read a book.
Getting people to read a book is like putting a cat in a box. Especially for someone like me, who was an intern when she got her book deal. It’s not like I have money for groceries, let alone a publicist.
I feel like I’m yelling and no one is listening. Being an author can really suck sometimes. For all I know speaking up is going to get me blacklisted and no one will ever want to publish another one of my books again. I hope not though.
[My book is] called ‘Field Guide to the Apocalypse’ It’s very funny and doesn’t suck. I worked really hard on it. It would be nice if people read it before it went out of print.
As Tim O’Reilly, Eric Schmidt, and Google have argued, I think these lawsuits against Google are a stupid (and legally untenable) move on the part of the publishing industry. I know a fair number of kottke.org readers have published books…what’s your take on the situation? Does Google Print (as well as Amazon “Search Inside the Book” feature) hurt or help you as an author? Do you want your publishing company suing Google on your behalf?
Instead of emphasizing the animal, nature photographer Art Wolfe takes photos that show how animals have evolved to blend into their surroundings. Copies of Wolfe’s book featuring these photos can be purchased on his site. (Also, what a perfect name for a photographer who takes artistic photos of animals.)
Time magazine has a list of the “100 best English language novels from 1923 to the present”. I’m not much for novels, but I’ve read 11 of the works on the list.
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