Review: Charitable Getting

I've put off reviewing this, which I don't normally do, and I'm not sure why. You know I find Sam Starbuck fascinating, and Charitable Getting deals quite directly with a lot of the things that make him interesting.

The story centres around SparkVISION Consulting, a company which runs fundraising campaigns and PR for charities. The company is headed by Bo Sparks, a charismatic and slightly unusual fellow. The employees of SparkVISION are our heroes, ordinary people though they may be. It's an eccentric sort of office, full of gossip, secret love affairs, dancing bananas, and the occasional chance to torment the interns. Tanya Montray is a journalist who believes that Non Prophet, a popular blogger, is employed by SparkVISION, and she's determined to find out.

Much of the book is concerned with life on the internet and how it interacts with life in the real world, and how blogging relates to journalism. As a blogger myself, this is rather interesting, even if I am only reviewing books most of the time and not talking about news. But the internet has always fascinated me, and I think it's good that there are books out there that talk about it. As is said in the Afterword, this is a book that in 80 years will be completely out of date, so rooted is it in the world of late 2009. Sometimes it's worth it to spend a whole book talking about the present, to not worry about whether a book "lasts". It captures history in a way other books don't. I imagine that when students in 2111 are writing their theses about extribulum and the emergence of blogging, this will be a crucial text.

Having spent years reading Sam Starbuck's blog, I know the story draws heavily on his life. In some ways this spoiled the mystery of Non Prophet's identity. For anyone less familiar with the author, though, I don't think the book is at all predictable. As a story, this is mostly just a cheerful office novel, full of the ordinary dramas of people's lives. It's very readable and funny. It does have greater depths, though, and for anyone interested in the internet this is an important book, both in terms of the story and in terms of the writing of the book itself.

A stocking full o' books

Here's the books I got for Christmas. That's the German translation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I know so well that it's easy to read in German even without a dictionary handy. That copy of Emma is also in German. Quite a German themed stack, given Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, which I'm about to start reading. A new Connie Willis to look forward to, and Miss Marple just for fun.

I'm super excited to finally own Sam Starbuck's two novels, and one of them is signed! I've already reread Charitable Getting since Christmas, so I'll have a review of it soon.

Reading in the New Year

I'm not really the sort for New Year's resolutions, but I am thinking about what I'm going to read in 2011, on this, its inaugural day.

My reading over the last year has been kind of haphazard. I've been reading books I know will keep my attention through my busy class schedule, because I was feeling like I'd stopped reading books purely for fun. I think the balance got a little skewed, though. I used to read classics because I felt like I should, because they might teach me something. I haven't done that much this year, and I think I've forgotten that classics are often classic because they are good. In 2011, I want to read a bunch of classics. I might use the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list as a starting point, not so much because I like the list as because it's got a fun checklist .pdf, and I love a checklist.

I've been in a very thinky mood, lately. I've been rereading old Copperbadge (Sam Starbuck) entries, which always puts me in the mood for study. I want to Be Scholarly about unexpected topics, and I'd like to do some reading in that vein.  And finish reading Invisible Cities.

2011 beckons. I'm about to start classes I'm super excited about, probably learning super interesting things (one can only hope). Other exciting plans are in the works. Here's hoping all goes as planned, except for good surprises. We like those.

Snow day reading

Suzzallo Graduate Library in the snow (and Hi there, crazy guy in shorts on the right)

The last time it snowed worth a mention, I wrote a post about books I thought should be read on a snowy day. Since the snow is here once again to inspire me, I figured I'd do another such post. They're chosen not necessarily because they're about winter, but because I think they'd be good choices for curling up with a blanket and a cup of tea on a snowy day.

Nameless by Sam Starbuck
This one actually does involve snow, but it also involves magic and mask-making and small town life, and it would go very well with a nice calm day. Read more here.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
I associate cosy winter afternoons with big dense books, and The Children's Book is probably the epitome of a big dense book. It's magical and historical and glorious. Read more here.

Farthing by Jo Walton
Alternate history plus murder mystery--you've got to have at least one mystery novel on the list of snow day books, and this is a particularly interesting one. Read more here.

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
This one certainly isn't big or dense, but if you wanted to spend your snow day reading a series of short books, this one and its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, would be perfect. Read more here.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
I realize this is mostly set in the summer, but I still think it would be a good book for a snow day. It's about books and history, which qualify as cosy for me, and it's an extremely satisfying story. Read more here.

Links

New York City map quilt. Found via Say Yes to Hoboken.

The second draft of Charitable Getting, one of Sam Starbuck's extribulum novels, is now posted.

Eternal Earthbound Pets. I'm not even going to try to say anything about this one.

Pumpkin rice pudding recipe. I used to love rice pudding as a kid, and anything pumpkin flavoured tends to be a win. Somebody else linked this, but I can't remember who.

The Dead Isle

You know I love Sam Starbuck, and find his unusual process fascinating. I read Nameless and Charitable Getting and all that's available of Valet of Anize, but I can't believe I hadn't finished reading The Dead Isle until now. Its' first draft has been sitting in my Firefox tabs for months, which is absolutely not to say that it deserved to be put off. It is a story of adventure, fantasy, alternate history, steampunk, and revolution, and it is fabulous. It made me want to learn about all sorts of things, which is a reaction that I associate with all my favourite books. And how often to you get to read the whole first draft of a novel? The final, paper version is not yet available, but some day it will be, and I'm sure it will be a fascinating exercise to compare the two. And though I know major revisions are planned, this story is already wonderful. I'm sure rewriting will make it even better, but don't be afraid to read it as it is. I won't review it properly, because it somehow doesn't seem fair to review a first draft, though I wouldn't really have any serious criticism to make.

You can find the complete first draft of The Dead Isle here.

Library: An Unquiet History

I heard about Matthew Battles's Library: An Unquiet History from Buried in Print, who read it for the Bibliophilic Books Challenge (for which it is also my fourth book). Somehow the book struck me enough to immediately go and order it from the library. It thus arrived, and I have now read it.

My first three books about books this year were stories (the Christopher Morley books and 84, Charing Cross Road), so it's a nice change to read a nonfiction book about books. Every single time, I forget how much I love this kind of nonfiction. Matthew Battles divides his story of libraries into more or less chronological chapters, beginning in ancient times, ending with the Internet. Apart from this chronological framework, each chapter has certain themes, such as book burning, library controversy, public libraries, and the destruction of books. The whole book is tied together by its constant questioning of what a library is, what people throughout history have believed to be the ideal form of the library, and what kinds of collections, intended as such or not, can functionally be called libraries.

Library sometimes feels disjointed, and I believe parts of it were previously published separately. It comes across as everything Battles wants to say about libraries (he's a librarian at Harvard), collected into one place, whether it entirely belongs there or not. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it's all very interesting, but the book could have used a little more editing. Despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Battles writes well--sometimes a little fancifully, but this is never dry nonfiction. As the book's subtitle suggests, the story of the library is really very dramatic, full of wars, burnings, bombings, political and social prejudice, and literary controversy. Despite this, one suspects that in the wrong hands, a book about libraries could still come out very quiet and dull. Matthew Battles's are not the wrong hands. There are stories here of the impressive lengths to which people will go to read, and to prevent people from reading, and it's all very often surprisingly moving. Books and libraries are powerful, and Battles clearly understands this and has managed to transmit it. Helpfully, he obviously loves libraries and is well read on the subject.

Near the end of the book, Battles discusses how the Internet fits into the story of the library. He says, "The digital objects of today are the incunabula of a not-too-distant tomorrow..." (pg 212). Thanks to Sam Starbuck we have a word for such digital incunabula--extribulum, which you can (and totally should) read about here. I get rather a lot of glee out of connecting other things to Sam Starbucks' work, so it was lovely to see this in Library. It's fascinating to me to consider the relationship between books and the Internet, and it's always good to see writers treating this subject well, since it's so often written about with a certain amount of histrionic the-world-of-books-as-we-know-it-is-ending/the-internet-is-making-us-stupider sentiment. Plus, I like to think my blog is an extribulum.

So, I thought this book was fun, informative, and intelligent, and I very much recommend it.

Musing

Yes, I missed Friday's Ephemera. Yes, I have not reviewed (or finished) a book in three weeks. I blame this failing partly on the start of a new quarter, partly on my recent preoccupation with, basically, thinking about what I want to be when I grow up, partly on simple laziness.

I have been reading, somewhat. I finally got back to the Obama book I was supposed to have read last quarter, and I'm even getting towards the end of it. I started one of the books I bought around Christmas, Mary Wesley's A Sensible Life, though it's been over a week since I read any more of it. I've also been reading the first draft of Sam Starbuck's new novel, Charitable Getting, which is being posted here chapter by chapter. It's very good, and very different from Nameless (which I reviewed here) and his other novels. And very entertainingly influenced by real life.

Once again I find it interesting how my reading comes in waves. Periods of inhaling books followed by barely reading anything, occasionally a steady plodding through one book (as with The Children's Book) in between. I know not everyone reads like this; for some, no amount of life can prevent always working on a book. I used to be one of those people. I think part of this change is that I relate to books differently than I used to. While books are still very important to me, I don't think reading is so integral to my personality as it once was. I'm made up of more parts now. I don't mind that aspect of the change, having more hobbies and interests and facets, but I do mind that I'm not such a voracious reader as I used to be. I often feel like I'm wasting time that could be spent reading. I kind of wonder if I'm reading the wrong books, if my interests have changed but my reading choices haven't caught up.

Enough musing, though. There's a nice comfortable bean bag chair in my room now, and one of those pretty star-shaped lamps above it, so I've finally got a good place to read without having to go too far afield. And maybe that's what I should be doing.

Books of a Year 2009 - The Second Rank

I'm waiting on posting my actual books of the year, because I want to do a lot of reading over the break and I don't know whether I'll read something that merits a place on the list. I do have a list in the making, though, and in that process I've come up with another list, of books that have faded from my memory a little (which is why they're not on the best books list), but which I wanted to remind myself of because I did like them very much.

On Borrowed Wings, by Chandra Prasad, was the story of a girl who dresses as her brother to go to Yale in 1936. I'd forgotten this, but from my post about it in August, it dealt very interestingly with questions of gender.

Marking Time was the sequel to The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Both books were quite excellent, but I especially liked how Marking Time expanded on what we already knew about the characters and made them all even more interesting. It was, also, a well-done view of World War II. I originally posted about it here. I need to get around to reading the rest of this series.

Nameless, by Sam Starbuck, is very near and dear to me, being one of the 2,500 the dedication mentions. As I said in my original post, it was originally published online, giving readers the opportunity to critique and improve it. It is a very self-contained, lovely story. I need to reread it some time.

The Story of a Marriage, by Andrew Sean Greer, cropped up by chance in February (which was a very long time ago, it seems). According to my review of it, it was very good at evoking images, of San Francisco especially, and associations, and I found it slotting very nicely into my own life and thoughts at the time I read it.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, was one I got for my birthday with no previous knowledge of it. It's translated from French, and conveyed very interestingly both French and Japanese ways of looking at the world. All the characters were quite interesting, too. My original post was here.

Looking back on what I read this year, I find there are definite trends. All of these books have somewhat of a mood in common. And Marking Time was World War II, On Borrowed Wings pre-war, and The Story of a Marriage post-war. I've read a lot of other books set in that era this year, too.

I wonder what sorts of trends I'll see in my reading next year.

I read this book on the internet and now I really want the hard copy

After reading Farthing, I read the Wikipedia article about Jo Walton, curious both about her and about the other books she's written, and she's now doubly interesting to me because it seems she's an advocate for professional writers' work being available on the internet. In 2007 Howard V. Hendrix stated his opposition to professional writers posting their writing for free on the internet, his idea being that this makes them effectively strikebreakers. Jo Walton named April 23rd International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, when writers are meant to publish their writing freely online all at once. Not necessarily whole books, even, just a few chapters.

What do you think of books being available on the internet for free? To me, it seems that if people haven't stopped buying paper books just because they can pay to download lots of books to a Kindle or similar, they're not going to stop buying paper books just because they can have them on their computers for free. It's less convenient to have to sit in front of a computer to read a book than to have a more-or-less pocket-sized book you can carry anywhere, whether or not you have to pay for it. Anyway, I like it when authors put their work up on the internet because to me it says that they're willing to come into closer contact with their readers, which always seems like a good thing. I wouldn't be surprised if this Howard V. Hendrix fellow is the sort of author who's afraid of that. Also, I have personal proof that this sort of thing isn't going to stop sales--I read Nameless on the internet and now I really want to order the hard copy and am determined to do so at some point.

I think maybe I've been reading too much of Sam Starbuck's thoughts on internet-publishing--you can find most of this here, though you might have to dig a little for the really interesting stuff. (And I recommend his blog in general as both interesting and very funny--that link is just the publishing stuff, click on the recent entries link at the top of the page for the rest of it.) However you look at it, it's a fascinating and very immediate topic.

A latter-day incunabula

Here's a book fascinating as much for the means of its creation as for its contents. Nameless, by Sam Starbuck, is a book that was meant for hardcopy publication but was originally published digitally, on the internet. The author has coined a word for such a book--extribulum. A completed draft of the book was posted chapter by chapter online, and the author's 2,500 readers posted their comments, suggesting edits, providing the reader's perspective on how best to get the book's meaning across. All the sorts of things we might say in a book review, but before the book reached its final published form. In short, the readers had the chance to make Nameless a better book and Sam Starbuck a better writer, before it was too late to make changes to a printed and bound book. Nameless is now self-published and can be ordered in paperback or downloaded as a .pdf here.

It is exactly the kind of book I write and will probably always write, so I have a special fondness for it. An ordinary location--in this case, a small town in Illinois called Low Ferry, ordinary people, and extraordinary events. Masks are crucial to the story, both the plaster Carnival sort and the sort that everyone has and puts on for different occasions. There's a sort of dichotomy, too, between Low Ferry and Chicago, the different speeds and personalities of small town vs. big city. Christopher Dusk is the narrator, a bookseller in Low Ferry who is friends with the whole town and is a profound skeptic. The story really begins when Lucas moves to town, extremely shy and uncomfortable with the nosy, caring Low Ferry inhabitants, and in many other ways the equal and opposite reaction to Christopher's reaction (actually, it's often Christopher who must react to Lucas). These two characters lead the story, though there are many others around the town and in Chicago who we meet and can't help but be fond of.

This is not a calm story, certainly not compared to some books I've read, or even entirely a quiet one, but it is very self-contained. It doesn't stray from its set purview, doesn't venture into the wider world, doesn't try to say too much. What it does say is fascinating and profound. What magic is and what belief means are questions that sometimes in a busy life one doesn't stop to think about, but reading Nameless slows you down long enough to think about them, and for that reason I'm quite thankful to have read this book. Plus, it's rather wonderful to have been part of the fledgeing phenomenon of the extribulum--we've already taken reviewing into our own hands on the internet, I wouldn't be surprised if publishing becomes the next step.

War and Post-War and Background War

My reading seems to be hovering around the '40s and '50s, lately. I'm not sure how that happened. I'm still working on Someone at a Distance, which is set in the '50s, I think, and also The Dud Avocado, '50s. Yesterday, not being in the mood to read either, I started The Story of a Marriage, set in 1953, and then The Camomile Lawn came home from the library, and that's set during World War II, and of course I had to start that too, so here I am, lurking about in England, France, and San Francisco with air raids, rations, and the ends of them.

I just finished The Story of a Marriage, which is by Andrew Sean Greer. It was one of the books in Dovegreyreader's Christmastime book draws, which I entered, and at some point late in December or possibly early in January it came in the mail, all the way from England. It took me a while to get around to it, but now that I have I love it totally. I think this is one of those books that I just so happened to read at the perfect time, where I felt in reading it as though I could insert my own muddled thoughts into the story and they would not be amiss.

It's set in San Francisco in 1953, and that's another way in which this is well timed--I was in San Francisco briefly six months ago, and it was a city that made a strange impression on me, and it helped me see the backdrop of the story perfectly. Even had I not known what it looked like I think the book would have provided the feel, but it was doubly clear (or foggy, as the case may be in that city by the sea) having been there. It's not one of those stories where the setting is it's own character, but it is a story that would be vastly different had it taken place somewhere else.

Pearlie Cook is a wife and a mother, and she begins her story by saying, "We think we know the ones we love." She spends the rest of her story discovering how much she doesn't know them and they don't know her, although she doesn't always find out entirely what she doesn't know. It is a book full of very powerful images and associations, the kind of book that can, with a sentence, bring to mind a strong feeling of something, even though it is an indescribable and inexplicable feeling that cannot possibly be summed up in just one sentence.

The book didn't just bring up those kinds of associations though--though it is definitely its own book and quite an individual one, it reminded me a lot of other authors in certain places. In the beginning, the characters sounded a lot like characters Sam Starbuck would write, something in their speech patterns or their personalities. He's a writer who is currently only self-published, mostly online, whose writing I love vastly. His original novels live here. Later on in the book, I stopped being reminded of him, and began to be reminded for completely inexplicable reasons of Geek Love. Something about the mood, I think. Sunlight.

Anyway, I'm very glad this book came my way; it's lovely.