So Yesterday was my half day off. I work until 12 and then I'm freeeeee to go. Which considering I live at work, isn't very far. But the idea is nice. So I did what any library worker would do on their day off. I read. For four solid hours. And it was fabulous. I popped to the shops, got some snacks, made a duvet/pillow nest on the sofa and DIDN'T MOVE. Except to pee. Because no-one can hold it for four hours.
The one mega difference I wanted to write about today was that the format of my book was not that of ink and pages. I had decided to take E-Reading on a test run. I received a tablet for Christmas, (thank you Uncle!) and came to the conclusion that now more than ever would be the time to trail E-Reading.
Prior to trying it I was sceptical. I am a huge fan of pages. The smell, the rustle, the whole damn feel of a book. All the pretty covers. I imagined E-Reading to be a dead experience. Just like reading anything else on a screen. But as they say never judge a book by it's cover. And you should never judge E-Reading before you've given it a go.
For the record, I was reading on a 7" Google nexus tablet, a book bought from Google Play store. Google books essentially.
I downloaded The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides as it's been something I've wanted to read for a long time and being relatively short, it meant that if E-Reading didn't appeal to me, I wouldn't have to bear it for long. I'll talk about the E-Reading experience first, and review the book a little further down.
The positives first. I could hold it with one hand. And it was light, and you didn't get the digging in thing you get when you've been reading an actual book for more than an hour. When you 'flip' the page it made a little sort of page flip across the screen, to emulate a paper page turning, which was nice. I enjoyed the bar at the bottom, telling me exactly what page I was on and showing me how many I had left to go. I like exact things sometimes. When you're reading a 358 page book and you're on page 61 you just sort of go "oh well I'm about...um...a fifth through?". Unless you're quick at maths, which I am not. So it was nice to know how I was progressing. There's a nifty feature in which you can hold down your finger on a word and it will highlight that word. You can then copy that word to search for it online. Or add your own notes in a little bubble underneath. Great for students studying certain texts, or for people who like to highlight favourite quotes (I do!). The best upside to this is you're not marking any actual books. You can delete these highlighted sections if you want to later, no harm done. You can expand the highlighted sections to include whole sentences rather than just words too. The text on screen was clear, everything was easy to use...so were there any cons? Only a few...
Although you can adjust the screen brightness, after four hours my eyes were ever so slightly beginning to hate me. Although they might also hate me if I'd stared at a normal book for four hours. I need my glasses back methinks (I neglected to being them back with me after Christmas). Also, because you're buying the E-Books through Google Play store to download directly onto your device, there's no way of getting into the fun process of seeing where you can buy it cheapest. You're stuck with whatever price Google want to charge you. Which isn't ridiculous. But I do like trawling round various website when there's a book I know I want, seeing where I can get the best deal. Or even better, stumbling across it in a charity shop for two quid. But overall I really liked my E-Reading experience. and although I don't see myself switching entirely to E-Reading, it's something I'll definitely be doing more of in the future.
But what of The Virgin Suicides itself? Well, let me tell you...
In the hands of anyone else this could be the most boring novel ever. We know what happens. It's given to us in the first sentence:
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide - it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese - the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
We know they're all dead right from the onset. We even have clues as to how they did it. So why would you want to read a story that you already know the outcome of? I'll tell you - because of the writing. It's fantastic. It draws you in and you can't stop because their lives - all too familiar and all too alien at the same time, appeal to anyone who has been through their teenage years. The style and mood perfectly encapsulates the feelings of the strange and yet normal Lisbon girls. Everything breaks down slowly. The story is told from the perspective of the boys living across the street from the sisters, who are drawn to them irresistibly, drawn to their mystery, to their beauty and by teenage curiosity, which is a form of curiosity unlike any other, usually tinged with lust and craving for the unknown and potentially dangerous. This was a debut novel for the author. And what a debut! I watched the film straight after, having picked up the DVD on my way out for snacks. It's along the same vein as American Beauty, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, maybe even Donnie Darko. Teenage suburbia, the breaking down of things, perfectly encapsulated in the book.
Basically, read it. It will hold appeal for both sexes. This is not a 'girly' book. It's damn haunting and I spent at least half an hour afterwards in total book-hangover mode. Staring at the ceiling going over everything in my head that I'd just read so it could stay etched on my brain forever.
So there you so, a review of a book and of E-Reading all in one go. I'm keen to give audio books a go next. I've never used them before and it might be nice to have someone read you a story like when you're little again. We'll see what the library has to offer!
For now,
Over and out.
Sunday 19 January 2014
Sunday 12 January 2014
Highlights from a lecture given by Neil Gaiman for The Reading Agency.
In October 2013, The Guardian posted an edited version of a lecture given by Neil Gaiman, that was entitled:
"Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming".
The lecture was given for The Reading Agency, as part of their annual lecture series and it's one of the most important lectures I've read on the subject of libraries and their future. I wanted to do a post, highlighting the quotes I thought were the most inspiring, especially for someone like me who would love a future working in a library environment.
A link to the edited Guardian lecture can be found here.
A link to the video of the lecture and full transcript can be found on The Reading Agency's blog, via their website, here.
Quotes will be in Italics, my own notes in standard font.
I don't think there is such a bad thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. (...) It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. (...) A hackneyed, worn out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them.
This is something that really rattles my cage. They're reading...it doesn't matter what it is, just let them read! Comics, books about diggers, the star wars annual, Enid Blyton...whatever!
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. (...) You learn that everyone else out there is a 'me', as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world you're going to be slightly changed. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different.
Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up (...) the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue (...) They had no snobbery about anything I read. They treated me as another reader - nothing less or more - which meant they treated me with respect.
This is the kind of librarian I aim to become. One that can help develop a space that children feel comfortable being in, and adults feel comfortable leaving their children in. They do not need to be chaperoned around the shelves. Leave them to it, they might discover something.
But libraries are about freedom (...) They are about education (...) about entertainment, about making safe spaces and about access to information.
In the last few years we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. (...) We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.
This is something that often worries me. How do I know that the information I'm reading is correct, or unbiased? I don't. A librarian can try to help to filter out the useless, clogging nonsense and leave me with the bits I want, or need.
As Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old; there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.
Sharks terrify me. But I get the point. They're damn good at being scary though.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. (...) It's a place of safety. a haven from the world.
Vulnerable people, or people without access to the internet, can become cut off in this world in which much is done via a screen. Libraries are important for social interaction and gaining access to information via the internet. Email, job applications, council information. Being in an environment in which they can have help with things a lot of us take for granted.
...our children and grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. (...) They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable.
Books are they way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us.
Spooky. But a nice idea. As a (sort of, aspiring) writer it might be good to leave a published work behind. Like a memory, so my ideas can live on.
If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children.
We do. I hope to volunteer at some local primary schools this year to help children with their reading. A few southern children may come away with a slight northern twist on their accent, but hopefully I can help do some good.
We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. (..) the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining things can be different.
On quoting Albert Einstein: "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading and imagining.
Such a well though out lecture, making some crucial and inspirational quotes in proper Gaiman style along they way. What a guy. I admire this writer so, so much. I hope these quotes ring true with others out there also.
Over and out.
"Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming".
The lecture was given for The Reading Agency, as part of their annual lecture series and it's one of the most important lectures I've read on the subject of libraries and their future. I wanted to do a post, highlighting the quotes I thought were the most inspiring, especially for someone like me who would love a future working in a library environment.
A link to the edited Guardian lecture can be found here.
A link to the video of the lecture and full transcript can be found on The Reading Agency's blog, via their website, here.
Quotes will be in Italics, my own notes in standard font.
I don't think there is such a bad thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. (...) It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. (...) A hackneyed, worn out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them.
This is something that really rattles my cage. They're reading...it doesn't matter what it is, just let them read! Comics, books about diggers, the star wars annual, Enid Blyton...whatever!
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. (...) You learn that everyone else out there is a 'me', as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world you're going to be slightly changed. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different.
Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up (...) the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue (...) They had no snobbery about anything I read. They treated me as another reader - nothing less or more - which meant they treated me with respect.
This is the kind of librarian I aim to become. One that can help develop a space that children feel comfortable being in, and adults feel comfortable leaving their children in. They do not need to be chaperoned around the shelves. Leave them to it, they might discover something.
But libraries are about freedom (...) They are about education (...) about entertainment, about making safe spaces and about access to information.
In the last few years we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. (...) We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.
This is something that often worries me. How do I know that the information I'm reading is correct, or unbiased? I don't. A librarian can try to help to filter out the useless, clogging nonsense and leave me with the bits I want, or need.
As Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old; there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.
Sharks terrify me. But I get the point. They're damn good at being scary though.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. (...) It's a place of safety. a haven from the world.
Vulnerable people, or people without access to the internet, can become cut off in this world in which much is done via a screen. Libraries are important for social interaction and gaining access to information via the internet. Email, job applications, council information. Being in an environment in which they can have help with things a lot of us take for granted.
...our children and grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. (...) They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable.
Books are they way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us.
Spooky. But a nice idea. As a (sort of, aspiring) writer it might be good to leave a published work behind. Like a memory, so my ideas can live on.
If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children.
We do. I hope to volunteer at some local primary schools this year to help children with their reading. A few southern children may come away with a slight northern twist on their accent, but hopefully I can help do some good.
We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. (..) the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining things can be different.
On quoting Albert Einstein: "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading and imagining.
Such a well though out lecture, making some crucial and inspirational quotes in proper Gaiman style along they way. What a guy. I admire this writer so, so much. I hope these quotes ring true with others out there also.
Over and out.
Tuesday 7 January 2014
Hot off the shelf: What I read over the Christmas break.
Instead of writing post after post of reviews of books I read over the Christmas break I decided to do a single post, giving a brief description and a rating out of five for each one. Shorter, sweeter and gets me into the habit of not rambling. To the point. Abrupt. Etc. I read these over December and early January.
Numero uno:
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Rating: Four (and a bit) out of five.
All about the illusion of living vs the reality. A book about 'society'. A 'self absorbed decadence' is a phrase I read somewhere that I thought rang really true to this book. It's stark and brilliant. It's teeny tiny, a novella really, and written beautifully. Eloquent. Read this book. And in all honesty, Baz Lurhman did a great job on the new film. But I might just be biased because I have an immense crush on Baz Lurhman's films anyway. I didn't think I'd like 'The Great Gatsby'. But I did. Because it wasn't pretentious, affected or egotistical. Some of the characters were, but the book was not. It was just magic.
Read it to the end, just for those last couple of lines.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Rating: Four (and a bit) out of five.
All about the illusion of living vs the reality. A book about 'society'. A 'self absorbed decadence' is a phrase I read somewhere that I thought rang really true to this book. It's stark and brilliant. It's teeny tiny, a novella really, and written beautifully. Eloquent. Read this book. And in all honesty, Baz Lurhman did a great job on the new film. But I might just be biased because I have an immense crush on Baz Lurhman's films anyway. I didn't think I'd like 'The Great Gatsby'. But I did. Because it wasn't pretentious, affected or egotistical. Some of the characters were, but the book was not. It was just magic.
Read it to the end, just for those last couple of lines.
Number two:
The Fault In Our Stars, John Green
Rating: Four out of five.
I read this book becasue it's one that goes on 'walkabouts' often at my library (basically it get's stolen) and it's all the students at my school can talk about. It's all they request. It's all they want to read. "John Green" this and "John Green" that and "OHMYGOD you know John Green?!"
The Fault In Our Stars, John Green
Rating: Four out of five.
I read this book becasue it's one that goes on 'walkabouts' often at my library (basically it get's stolen) and it's all the students at my school can talk about. It's all they request. It's all they want to read. "John Green" this and "John Green" that and "OHMYGOD you know John Green?!"
So I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
It's depressing and really good. That's kind of all I can say without giving any of the plot away. Hazel has a terminal lung cancer and meets Augustus at this cancer kid support group. So it's kind of a teen romance novel but the twist is that neither of these kids will live for very long. I can see why the kids at school love it. It's written well and seems well researched and isn't too 'fluffy' about any of the cancer stuff. It is honest and blunt. Why only four out of five? I sort of loved the characters and sort of felt they were ever so slighly too...I don't even know. Hipster? For want of a better word. Maybe I'm just getting old (THE HORROR). I really like the idea that was given, that even when Hazel gets her 'wish' (a charity in the book grants wishes to termanilly ill children), it isn't all it's cracked up to be. More reality. The plot doesn't pity their illness and I think Hazel (and the reader) like it that way.
It didn't make me cry and I feel like it should have done. Maybe I've read worse, or maybe I've just got a heart of stone.
It's depressing and really good. That's kind of all I can say without giving any of the plot away. Hazel has a terminal lung cancer and meets Augustus at this cancer kid support group. So it's kind of a teen romance novel but the twist is that neither of these kids will live for very long. I can see why the kids at school love it. It's written well and seems well researched and isn't too 'fluffy' about any of the cancer stuff. It is honest and blunt. Why only four out of five? I sort of loved the characters and sort of felt they were ever so slighly too...I don't even know. Hipster? For want of a better word. Maybe I'm just getting old (THE HORROR). I really like the idea that was given, that even when Hazel gets her 'wish' (a charity in the book grants wishes to termanilly ill children), it isn't all it's cracked up to be. More reality. The plot doesn't pity their illness and I think Hazel (and the reader) like it that way.
It didn't make me cry and I feel like it should have done. Maybe I've read worse, or maybe I've just got a heart of stone.
Tres:
Maddaddam, Margaret Atwood
Rating: Five out of five. And so much more.
I finally got a copy! Many thanks to my Mum and Dad! (For my comments on the previous books in this 'series', and general Atwood lovin', see my review of 'The Year Of The Flood').
Maddaddam, Margaret Atwood
Rating: Five out of five. And so much more.
I finally got a copy! Many thanks to my Mum and Dad! (For my comments on the previous books in this 'series', and general Atwood lovin', see my review of 'The Year Of The Flood').
What can I say,? She finished off the trilogy so, so perfectly. It didn't always necessarily end well but it definitely ended. I felt satisfied, even if a bit sad. She doesn't give the whole game away about the future of the survivors, but she rounded off the characters lives we all knew so well by then, Toby, Zeb, Adam etc, very eloquently and movingly. I cannot sing this woman's praises enough. It was nice to hear more from the Crakers perspective (a peaceful species we were introduced to way back in the previous books that have been bio-engineered to replace humans) and understand their flaws and characters. She makes you think - and as I've said before, the books that can do that, are worth reading over and over. I could literally start reading the series over again right now. Anyone who hasn't had the pleasure, go buy/beg/borrow a copy of Oryx and Crake and begin this journey.
I'm sorry for the lack of posts recently. Lack of a laptop/internet and moving around a lot over the Christmas period hasn't left much time for me to do much here. More posts soon!
Over and out.
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