S. Worthen | Weblog

What exactly is a book? When it comes to all its edge cases, it ceases to be so clear. Is a burnt book still a book, for example?

I've been chewing over that question still further since seeing the Alice in Wonderland exhibit at the Tate Liverpool. One of the (physically) central rooms of the show is audible dominated by the persistent advancing of an automated slide projector. In a room of hard walls, it's a real sound barrier to hearing much else from any distance.

Also in that room, on a large grey carpet, were a series of abstracted pieces of solid furniture: a bright red square representation on a fireplace; different sizes of benches and tables, whose abstractions of decorate turnings showed they might well be Victorian in inspiration. On top of these were a series of A4-sized cardboard boxes, each partially-filled with photocopies of parts and pieces of books.

Over the sound of the slide projector, I couldn't hear what the guard had explained to the other person in that room at the time. I had to wait for my own explanation. She told me that the work was conceived as interactive with visitors. Entitled "The Never Ending Book", by Allen Ruppersberg, visitors were invited to take away with them their own curated selection of up to five A4 sheets from any - or a selection of - the boxes. This selection would be a book in its own right, the piles producing, therefore, an unending book.

Really? I would argue it was the photocopies which produced the "never ending" "book" of the installation. The selection of sheets was pre-selected by the artist, and unifying those sheets in a cardboard box is far closer to binding than the mere act of selecting sheets and carrying them - looseleaf, unbound, scrollable - away.

But ultimately, is any of it really a book, in anything more than title and source material for the photocopies?

The act of browsing through the selection of photocopied pages was moderately intriguing at least, seeing what the artist had selected in fragments of poetry or tables of contents or full-color photocopies of parts of covers or the handwritten dedication of what looked - from a fragment of copyright - like a Wellesley year book. I took four sheets with vague intentions of collage and, bookless, went on to a room undominated by the advancing of a slide projector.

The most exciting parts of the whole not-very-good novel I recently finished (see "telegram" and "magazines in chemists") were the info-dumps. They were gloriously, fantastically mismatched to their scenes, in such a well-intentioned way, that I kept hoping for more of them. (I sort of wish there had been far more of them than there were.)

They had their flaws, such as when the heroine, musing on how very old a barn is, observes that "This barn was a century old before most Europeans even entertained the idea of the world being round and land existing across the ocean to the west."

But here's my favorite. The heroine and hero are succumbing to their passionate attraction/lust for each other. They're solving a mystery together. It's around midnight and they're alone together. And he invites her back to his rooms to read some journals, part of the investigation. It's the first time that she's been in that wing of his excessively (and impractically) large house. She is astonished at the modernness of this wing of the manor.

(In case you'd forgotten, please do remember that they are succumbing to their passionate attraction to each other. You might have forgotten.)

( And he says... )

Once upon a time in my life, TSO stood for the "Toronto Symphony Orchestra". Today, it stands for "The Stationary Office", apparently. The English alphabet needs more letters; or perhaps English should just make more effecient use of its less-well-used letters to avoid so many duplicate acronyms.

I have barely flipped through a few pages of the Life in the UK book, and already I am indignant. Part of its required knowledge is an NHS phone number which has two digits too few to be valid as a current UK phone number. *sigh* The booklet is right. I have now fact-checked. But I am now indignant that NHS is messing with the telephone system by having a phone number which does not map onto a standard length. Also, I had thought I would briefly skim the book; now I am deeply certain that I shall sink into a morass of fact-checking because of things like this which seem too improbable to be true. And I already know some of it won't quite be true thanks to ambient media coverage.

It is never possible to proofread too much.

Lavinia is a much-improved retelling of Voices, both by Le Guin. I found this so distracting that it took me a third of Lavinia to really become involved in it instead of noting new elements from Voices as they cropped up.

The City and the City is an application of Althusser on ideology. (If I'd been reading a different theorist at the time, I might have thought otherwise.) It's other things too, but they would involve spoilers.

Rosemary and Rue reminded me of a (much less compelling) Lackey elves-in-L.A. novel which started at a Renn Faire - the same origin story with which the Sasharia en Garde books are built on. (The recently-read Sasharia en Garde books are, sadly, my least-favorite Sherwood Smith books to date; what killed their momentum for me was that they are in two books. The first ends at an emotional pause, but with plot bleeding all over the place. I would have given up there had I not already bought the sequel.) Of course, R&R and the Lackey novel are all elves-in-CA novels, so of course they would speak to each other.

River of Gods (read thanks to coalescent's regular recent mentions) resonated with a minor, second-rate romance, Gambler's Woman, by Stephanie James, who can write much better work than this. (Give how old it is, I thought of it as juvenalia.) Both follow the plot, not the gaping wounds of half-seen story glimpsed along the way. Both have more sex scenes than I felt each needed, plot- or story-wise. Both featured major plot threads wound around inadequate communication. Both contrast luxury and artificial worlds with mundanity and "reality". Other than that, they have very little in common; but I keep thinking of them together.

Amazon recommends me Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. So too have various friends via LJ posts, recently. Amazon, however, unlike those friends, I suspect, recommends it on the basis of my having once bought The Oxford Companion to Wine.

At fjm's recommendation, I read Shards of Honor a couple of years ago. It gave me no incentive to keep reading the Vorkosigan series. Neither did reading excerpts from the companion volume, which I browsed last year as a Hugo-nominated non-fiction book. It was the cumulative recommendation of friends who were particular Bujold fans which led me to request Barrayar from the library. It has that same inner stillness, despite all the action, that Shards of Honor had, but with a much more coherent plot to hold it all together. It really is quite good, for quite a number of reasons, particularly its compelling doing-what-needs-to-be-done in a pragmatic way approach to resolution. I liked it enough that I recommended it to C., who has now also read it. He's not sure it passes the Bechdel test, however.

I'm always charmed that one of the libraries in Essex with good science fiction collection, and thus one from which my requested books sometimes come, is the Tiptree library.

The problem with being a completist about finishing books is that I rarely feel I can put my academic reading down on my list of books-I-have-read, unless I have really read the book entirely, all chapters, all appendices, and made good inroads on the notes and bibliography. Research-reading, excerpting chapters and relevant selections, is pratical and necessary - but doesn't come with that moment's satisfaction of feeling the book is really, truly Read.

Last year, I had my hair trimmed at a local place. The hairdresser was an Engilsh lit grad, and I'd just finished Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls raised by Wolves. She's an impressive writer, but the joy in them, for me, was in the beauty of her language. The stories barely were, more vignettes than happenings. The hairdresser, a fan of short stories, hadn't read it, but did recommend a favorite of his to me over the course of my trim: Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

If ever I had read Calvino - and I don't know that I have - it would have been an excerpted chapter in Survey of Italian Lit II. Or possibly my parents read me folktales he had written when I was young. I'm not sure. In any event, I knew I hadn't read this rather famous collection, and idly added it to my mental list.

Several months later, C. had his hair cut, at the same salon. He came home with titles written down on a scrap of paper, one recommendation for him, and one recommendation for me. It was the Calvino again. I knew I really needed to read it now. My hair needed trimming and, as accident would have it, someone else did the work that time. But surely, for the next time, I would need to have done my homework.

Months passed. Late spring of this year, and I'd been taking good advantage of interlibrary loan at the local public library to bring me the Hugo novel and BSFA novel shortlists. The requests were easy, habitual, convenient. I added the Calvino to the list. Several of us had. Months passed.

Three weeks ago, a letter came from the library. My book had arrived. Mission creep set in, and I came home with eight library books instead of simply If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. I read some of the others first, returned them, checked out others.

A few days ago, I began the book. It was fitful, intense, and after two chapters, I took a novella-reading break. I often feel that way about short stories: they are small worlds of intensity, to be dabbled in, one or two at a time. The day after I began, however, I found that I had a single library book due. I'd returned the others or they weren't due yet. No, inevitably, yesterday, the Calvino was due, and another reader had requested it. No extensions.

So today, my major task, fractious and piecemeal, is to finish the Haircut Book. This forthcoming trim now costs me 10p extra in late penalties.

I didn't used to be the sort of person who could be in the middle of more than one book at a time. One book at a time, in sequence, that was me. Yet, here I am, in the middle of half-a-dozen. Some are non-fiction, which I normally read in sections, rather than all at once. Sometimes I don't even count non-fiction as books I'm reading, but these are good, thought-provoking, well-written ones. I often don't count non-fiction this way because I don't feel as if I've really read a book unless I've truly finished it, ideally appendices and all. Some of the books I'm stranded on are fiction, broken off before a trip and left behind, about-to-be-finished, but haven't been yet. Often, a book's too big to bring on a trip if I'm nearly done with it and will need to bring another one too; so I start a new one instead, forget I'm reading the first until I find it, abandoned in a pile, waiting.

My attention was wandering enough, the other day, that I went to the library, to help avoid buying more books. I came home with seven, nearly all of them of different styles and genres, the better to fill whatever it was I was looking for. It's not that I don't want to read; I do. I've been reading a lot lately. It's not that I'm giving up on these partially-read books; I rarely - sometimes - do, but not in these particular cases.

Sometimes, I wonder if it's the lack of furniture. We only have one reading chair, still, although we're intending to order a sofa before the end of the month, which would open up the number of decent reading places massively. But it's not an impatience I've had all year, just in the past week or month. If a book is worthwhile, I can read it on the floor or the stairs.

The bigger problem may just be that I want something compelling, a book to read all at once; but then the book is done, and I am back to all the others, a bit at a time, when there's a chair and some time and pages left.

I've been thinking about e-books recently, and what they might imply for book covers. E-books don't need book covers, after all. The books - all the many of them - are all contained within the device. A cover image is purely a decorative extra feature, so far as it's concerned.

I like book covers, especially when in social spaces. I like being able to see what other people are reading, without being intrusive, on the Underground or in coffee shops. It's a quick, superficial survey of a snippet of current reading tastes and trends. Sometimes, seeing someone reading a favorite book or author, that glimpse makes me happy, an invisible commonality with a stranger.

There's no point making a book cover visible on an e-book reader to other people. I can imagine several ways it would be done. A protective gel skin printed with the image and stuck on the other side - but then it's so much fuss to bother changing when moving on to the next book, so why bother? The image and the book need not correspond, but that discrepency partially defeats the point of having it there in the first place. (It would be more akin to displaying pins on bags and logos on clothing.)

The image and book need not correspond for a two-sided, two-screened e-book either, theoretically designed to display an image of the cover to the world. In practice, such an outward-facing screen would be widely use for other purposes instead, whether public service weather reports or insults.

By making reading even more private an experience than it already is, the e-book pushes its brand to the forefront as the visible point of interest, not the content. This allows much greater privacy, but it strips out most of the interesting information shared in the physical presence of a reader.

I knew I'd put the last two books somewhere safe. Somewhere memorable. It was time to leave to go meet a_d_medievalist, but without a book to read on the train, I found myself searching the house for those last two unread books. I knew where the last five I'd read were, but it was too soon to reread any of them. I knew where hundreds of others were, read and unread, but taped away in boxes, they were effectively inaccessible when in a hurry. Eventually, despite it all, I need to go. I took Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants, and finished it one stop before my destination.

For years, I've been thinking of myself as a non-compulsive reader. In Toronto, I couldn't afford to be in the middle of unscheduled non-academic reading when I had work to do; my mind would be distracted. At Limehouse, my travels were broken up into segments, five minutes here, ten minutes there. A book was pleasant, but an optional extra. I could spent ten minutes looking at subway posters, or just pondering the world. Sure, I still needed books for longer-distance travel (trains, planes), but they were merely choice distractions; good conversation or an mp3 player would do just as well.

But yesterday, worry of being on the Underground for 45 minutes without a book niggled at me, and a_d_medievalist kindly accompanied me while I choice from a limited selection of bestsellers at a small W.H. Smith (enabling, along the way, my first glimpse of the renovated grandeurs of St. Pancras). I couldn't loiter and I recognized almost none of the books. major_clanger's recent endorsement of Marr's History of Modern Britain swayed one of my purchased, and for my half-price second, I went with a Richard and Judy book list endorsement, Addition, for lighter prose. Worry asuaged, I went on to nab yet another book in the BSFA raffle. I was more than set for my ride home last night, a selection of books weighing me down, and peace in my book-needy mind.