Category Archives: Books

March 17, 2011 · 6:27 pm

Technological changes may lead to “reading divide” | The Raw Story

Interesting article, but I don’t go along with the overall premise…

I think e-readers have the potential to equalize and expand the reading public…

I keep reading, at some point in the near future,  Amazon may give away Kindles for free.  Sounds crazy, but Kindle users read more books and it could drive the e-book market further along and make this a profitable move…

Plus, the younger generation seems much more likely to respond to technology than to “paper” books…

Being able to download a book from the airwaves only seems to increase availability.  And Amazon has a lot of classics for free.

And I love my Kindle….

I’ve always been a big reader, but now I read even more…

TOKYO (Reuters) – The rapid rise of e-books could lead to a “reading divide” as those unable to afford the new technology are left behind, even as U.S. reading and writing skills decline still further.

At particular threat are African-American communities where many students are already falling behind their majority peers in terms of literacy, said award-winning writer Marita Golden — and this despite the growing ranks of noted African-American writers, such as Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.

“My biggest concern is that the technology will continue to widen the gap,” she told Reuters. “It won’t just be the digital divide but also a reading divide if reading becomes an activity that’s now dependent on technology.

“If reading becomes dependent on technology that must be purchased, then I think we may see the literacy divide persist and even widen.”

Years of discussion on the future of books amid the sweeping technological changes, along with a desire to make sure black writers were included in that discussion, prompted Golden to pull together her recent book, “The Word,” in which African-American writers talk about how reading shaped their lives for the better.

Edward P. Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Known World,” said he felt that “reading and writing are the foundations for becoming a better person and having a better life.” Others said how reading about lives like their own helped validate their experiences and give them confidence.

In this sense technology, such as e-readers, can be both a blessing and a curse in terms of literacy, Golden said, with some readers who might have been intimidated by the number of pages in a traditional book eagerly reading on an e-reader.

In addition, with the U.S. African-American community owning more mobile phones and BlackBerries than the white community, potential exists to tap into a broad market, she added.

“But the problem is that you can either download games or download books, and we don’t know what people are going to download,” she said.

Despite undergoing some struggles with the idea of the new technology, Golden said that the need to emphasize the basics remains more important than ever.

via Technological changes may lead to “reading divide” | The Raw Story.

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March 15, 2011 · 9:49 pm

So You Want to Write a Novel

Posted without comment as this says it all….

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March 1, 2011 · 11:02 pm

Bristol Palin has book deal – Yahoo! News

Gag me…

Who is going to read this?

I guess the Palin Brand runs deeper than I suspected…

These hillbillies are going to milk it for every bit of cash they can, while they can…

Hasn’t their 15 minutes of fame run way over time?

NEW YORK – It’s official: Bristol Palin has a book deal.

The daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has signed with William Morrow to publish “Not Afraid of Life,” to come out this summer. Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, announced Tuesday that the memoir would provide “an inside look at her life.”

“Bristol gives readers an intimate behind-the-scenes look at her life for the first time, from growing up in Alaska to coming of age amid the media and political frenzy surrounding her mother’s political rise; from becoming a single mother while still a teenager to coping as her relationship with her baby’s father crumbled publicly — not once, but twice,” according to Morrow.

via Bristol Palin has book deal – Yahoo! News.

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February 13, 2011 · 9:25 am

What women want: Gay male romance novels – The Globe and Mail

Fascinating article…

I’ve noticed all these books on the Amazon Kindle list.  I’ve even read a couple.  You can really tell they were written by women and for a different audience than gay men.

More evidence that the “love that dare not speak it’s name” is becoming more and more mainstream.

I’m obviously going to have to think of something else to maintain my outsider status…

Trends in contemporary popular fiction can be as unpredictable as fashion fads. Nobody expected, for instance, that the gloomy, bespectacled Harry Potter would help resuscitate the ailing book industry any more than Lady Gaga’s bizarre looks would help motivate retail sales. Yet today’s newest publishing trend is as out in left field as Potter and Gaga once were.

Over the past year, man-on-man romantic fiction – books featuring two male protagonists engaged in a sexual or emotional relationship with each other – has taken a significant bite out of one of publishing’s biggest markets. Amazon’s Kindle has had such success with the genre that the e-book site has tripled its “m/m” stock since January, 2010. Even Harlequin – the most profitable and old-fashioned romance fiction house in the world – has recently started to publish same-sex love stories via the company’s digital imprint, Carina Press. What’s most surprising, though, are the types of readers the books have hooked: Straight, married women are among the genre’s top fans. That may be because the authors, such as Iowa’s Heidi Cullinan, a 37-year-old suburban mother of two, are frequently heterosexual females, too. Cullinan has penned such recent works as the popular gay romance Double Blind and the homoerotic fantasy Miles and The Magic Flute.

MORE:   What women want: Gay male romance novels – The Globe and Mail.

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February 10, 2011 · 11:03 pm

Remembering “The Great Gatsby”

Since Mia Farrow is 66 years old today, it seems a good time to look back to the early 1970’s re-make of “The Great Gatsby” where she played Daisy.

It was a beautiful, but flawed film.  Mia Farrow was gorgeous and Robert Redford was at his peak.  The art direction was impeccable.

And Nick Carraway, the character I always related to, was beautifully played by Sam Waterson.

F. Scott Fitzgerald has always been my favorite American writer.  I’ve had many Nick Carraway nights in my life and I always think of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose and elegant observations.

Here are a few quotes from “Gatsby”…

  • “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
  • “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age…”
  • “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
  • “Can’t repeat the past?… Why of course you can!”
  • “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.”
  • “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
  • “I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool… You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow… And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
  • “He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
  • “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
  • “It takes two to make an accident.”
And my two favorite non-Gatsby Fitzgerald quotes:
  • “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”  (From “The Rich Boy” in the “Sad Young Men” collection.
  • “There are no second acts in American lives.”
There sadly wasn’t for Scott Fitzgerald- at least while he was alive….all his books were out of print by the time he was 40.  His beautiful, destructive wife Zelda was mad and institutionalized.
He died of a heart attack at 44 in Hollywood trying to churn out film scripts for a living…
Anyway, time for a glimpse of the beautiful, flawed film of the one perfect novel Fitzgerald wrote in his beautiful, flawed life….

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February 9, 2011 · 6:55 pm

AMERICAblog News: Bristol Palin’s ‘memoir’ comes out this summer? FOX’s discusses future ‘President Bristol’

I’ll post without comment…

John at Americablog.com says it all….

Pity a political party that embraces the Palins as a dynasty. The TV show ‘Dynasty,’ perhaps. But the ongoing hagiography of this trashy family doesn’t speak well to the future of the Republican party. What are the party’s hopes and dreams? Where does it want to see the country head in the future? And does anyone seriously believe Sarah and Bristol are going to take us there?

Yes, so Bristol, the one who got pregnant (though let’s not forgot that Bristol’s family-values mom has never explained why her first child was reportedly born eight months after she got married), is reportedly going to be publishing her memoirs this summer at the ripe age of 20. Oh, you hadn’t hear about Palin’s first pregnancy? This is from the NYT during the campaign, it was overlooked by most everyone:

The Palins eloped on Aug. 29, 1988, and their first son, Track, was born eight months later, a fact that Maria Comella of the McCain campaign, declined to elaborate on. “They were high school sweethearts who got married and ended up having five beautiful children together,” Ms. Comella said.

Yeah, not a denial at all. And these are family values religious right folk we’re talking about. If the baby were simply born early, wouldn’t we have been told the baby was simply born early? Would the McCain campaign really want this hanging over their heads if there was a simple non-controversial explanation? It matters because people like Palin would be the first to criticize the values of a Democratic White House contender who got pregnant out of wedlock.

Not to be topped, via Media Matters we learn that FOX is now talking about whether Bristol is going to be President.

More:   AMERICAblog News: Bristol Palin’s ‘memoir’ comes out this summer? FOX’s discusses future ‘President Bristol’.

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January 27, 2011 · 8:35 am

Steve McSwain: Are We ‘Nones’ Becoming a Virtual Congregation?

I’m not quite sure why I’ve been so fascinated with religion lately…

It may be because I am reading so many interesting articles from people who share some of my thoughts and concerns with organized religion…

I’m particularly enjoying Steve McSwain’s articles on Huffington Post.  I actually bought his book and have it on my Kindle.

Now I just need to find time to read it…

It just occurred to me that what this is becoming is a kind of virtual congregation. I never planned on this happening, but I cannot say that I am displeased either.

I left the pastorate nearly two decades ago, broken and disillusioned. Some of the pain I experienced was the consequence of my own life choices. The rest was the consequence of my disillusionment with organized religion. In my estimation, the church had become — and almost universally remains — critically ill. In fact, as I say in my book:

“If the current decline in church attendance were the medical case history of a hospital patient, the diagnosis would read: ‘Chronically ill; resistant to change; on life support; likely terminal.'”

“The church itself is the one institution most in need of the very thing it proclaims to the world — salvation. It boasts of knowing God, but by the sheer numbers who have given up on the church, it is right to question whether the church knows God at all.”(The Enoch Factorhttp://stevemcswain.com, p. 56).

So, I left, in terms of personal involvement and interest. In that respect, I was one of those whom researchers today call nones. The difference is, unlike most, I was a religious leader and a none — that is, a former pastor who had walked away from the ministry. I took up consulting with churches and parishes, Catholic, Evangelical, and Protestant alike. While clearly disingenuous, I didn’t know what else to do. All my professional training was in religion. Besides, I didn’t hate the church. I was just disillusioned by it. Deep within, I held out hope the church would change. I remain hopeful to this day.

I wandered, however, and wondered for many years whether a church existed anywhere that remotely resembled the teachings and practices of Jesus. I found most taught their traditions and practiced them with rigidity. They seemed lost in the madness of their differences from each other, as well as their dogmas, doctrines, and endless debates.

via Steve McSwain: Are We ‘Nones’ Becoming a Virtual Congregation?.

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January 26, 2011 · 8:34 pm

Revisiting The Renaissance In ‘Harlem Is Nowhere’ : NPR

This sounds fascinating…

Also from NPR:

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has had Harlem on her mind since she was a high school student in Houston reading the work of Jean Toomer, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and others. In 2002, a recent Harvard graduate, she moved into an apartment without a kitchen on 130th near Lenox. Her first book, Harlem Is Nowhere, is a tender, improvisational memoir of several years spent exploring the myths of this capital of African America and the realities of its 21st-century incarnation.

Rhodes-Pitts spends hours in a branch library on 135th Street, reading of the beginnings of Harlem as a farm suburb settled in the 1880s, its transformation in 1905 when the black migrations from the South began to fill its borders, and the point in 1925 when Alain Locke defined Harlem as a physical center that “focuses a people,” and set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance. She goes on a walking tour with tourists, attends community meetings about rezoning and muses on African street vendors, empty lots, chalk messages scribbled on sidewalks and relics of times past, like James Van Der Zee’s formal Depression-era photographs and the overstuffed scrapbooks of the early 20th-century eccentric Alexander Gumby.

From an older woman named Ms. Minnie, who lives in her building, she learns how to be a caring neighbor. Ms. Minnie is from a black town in South Carolina and at one point confides that her maiden name was Sojourner. “She looked me squarely in the eye before continuing,” Rhodes-Pitts writes. “That’s not a slave name.”

The author borrows her title from Ralph Ellison’s essay about post World War II Harlem as a metaphoric space in which “the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustration of social discrimination.”

More:   Revisiting The Renaissance In ‘Harlem Is Nowhere’ : NPR.

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January 23, 2011 · 11:10 am

Twelve Concrete Ways To Live A ‘Compassionate Life’ : NPR

Interesting article about a new book from NPR…

From Confucius to Oprah, people have preached compassion for centuries. But how often is it put into practice? Karen Armstrong believes religion, which should advocate for compassionate living, is often part of the problem. In Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life, she describes ways to add kindness to daily routines.

AND

“The religions,” she says, “which should be making a major contribution to one of the chief tasks of our generation — which is to build a global community, where people of all opinions and all ethnicities can live together in harmony — are seen as part of the problem, not as part of the solution.”

Despair is a dangerous thing, because once people lose hope, they can resort to extreme measures.

The golden rule, a commonality throughout religion and guiding force for compassion, “asks you to look into your own heart, discover what gives you pain, and then refuse under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anyone else.” It’s tricky, because each situation and individual must be evaluated differently.

But making space for the other “in our minds and our hearts and our policies” is essential to Armstrong. “We are always talking about the importance of democracy. But I think in our perilously divided world, we need global democracy, where all people’s voices are heard, not just those of the rich and the powerful.”

And Armstrong willingly answers the charge that her prescription is naive. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., of Gandhi, of Nelson Mandela, she says. “One sees what one person can do,” the tremendous impact a decision to seek reconciliation, not revenge, as Mandela chose. “You have to be optimistic,” Armstrong says. “Because when optimism fails and despair takes over … then you’ve got a problem.”

MORE:   Twelve Concrete Ways To Live A ‘Compassionate Life’ : NPR.

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January 15, 2011 · 8:51 am

Reagan Had Signs of Alzheimer’s While President

To some of us, this is not news…

 

Ron Reagan claims in his new book, My Father at 100, that former President Ronald Reagan had signs of Alzheimer’s disease as early as his 1984 re-election campaign, Washington Whispers reports.

“Watching the first of his two debates with 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, I began to experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true. At 73, Ronald Reagan would be the oldest president ever reelected. Some voters were beginning to imagine grandpa — who can never find his reading glasses — in charge of a bristling nuclear arsenal, and it was making them nervous. Worse, my father now seemed to be giving them legitimate reason for concern. My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered.”

“My father might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be. As far back as August 1986 he had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names.”

The younger Reagan also reports, for the first time, that his father underwent brain surgery after falling off a horse six months out of the White House and that doctors “emerged from the operating room with the news that they had detected what they took to be probable signs of Alzheimer’s disease.”

via Reagan Had Signs of Alzheimer’s While President.

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