What are people reading, and has anyone used Google Books?
Bert Latamore
Before that I read "Wolf Totem", which I strongly recommend. Rather than write a review, here is a link to a short review I wrote for a friend's Web site: http://atravelerslibrary.com/2009/08/11/a-book-about-the-lost-mongolia/comment-page-1/#comment-857
Also, I wondered if anyone has downloaded out-of-copyright books from Google Books. If so, did that work well? What format(s) do they support? Some day I hope to get time to read some classic literature. At the moment I am trying to catch up with books (both ebooks and paper books) that I l aready own and have not yet read, which probably is going to take me at least a year, particularly since I keep coming up with new books that I feel I need to read. My latest on that list are the books by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. Given the importance of Pakistan on the world stage, I need to kjnow something about what is going on there. And if anyone can recommend good English-language books about modern Iran, I would appreciate that.
All the best for good end-of-summer reading.
--
Bert Latamore
IT Journalist, Report Writer and Book Doctor
From tweets and blogs to white papers and books --
You provide the information; I craft the words.
Kerry Lannert
Reader, as I do with about 99% of books I read. Unfortunately, the book
isn't available on Sony's store so I'm taking advantage of the Adobe
Digital Editions compatibility and using a PDF I bought on
BooksOnBoard.com. The pdf is not reflowable, however, which means page
breaks happen in strange places. Still, the book is readable and that's
all that matters. This brings me to your next question, about Google
Books. When Sony made Google Books available through their Reader
bookstore I downloaded a copy of something, can't remember what, only to
discover it looked terrible on my device. Frankly, at this stage in my
life I have no interest in fiddling with books to make them work, I
either read them or I don't.
- Kerry
Donald Stidwell
On Aug 14, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Bert Latamore wrote:
> Just an idle question. I wondered what people are reading or have
> read recently that they can recommend.
I'm re-reading Harry Turtledove's World War series. Turtledove is as
addicting as Star Trek for me - I can't get enough of his stuff. It's
been a while since I've read the World War Series, so going through
them all again. I own all the books in paper, but bought them all in
eReader format as well. I do so prefer reading on my iPhone or iPod
Touch to actual paper books. (Yeah, I'm one of those. I have no love
affair with paper at all).
Kristin Pilotte
When I go to physical therapy, I listen to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I actually read this on my Kindle a month or so ago and quite enjoyed it, this is just something to listen to while my PT is beating me up. ;)
At the gym and also when I'm in the car, I've been going through a re-read (ok, re-listen) to the Wheel of Time books, in anticipation of the 12th book's release later this year. I'm a little over halfway through the 6th book (7th, I guess, if you include the prequel), Lord of Chaos. On my lonoger cardio days, books make the time go by a bit quicker.
On my Kindle, I'm reading Infinite Jest, as a part of the Infinite Summer website (http://infinitesummer.org/). Thanks to craziness at work (we're getting ready for a launch next week), I'm quite a bit behind schedule, but I'm still making my way through the book...that is, I haven't given up yet, as it seems a lot of people have. I hope that this weekend, before things go absolutely crazy at work, I get the chance to read a bit more.
I am also entertaining the idea of reading Northanger Abbey. I recently watched The Jane Austen Book Club and was sort of inspired to read these books with a few of my friends. I've actually never read Jane Austen, I have a feeling that the writing style may be difficult for me to get into. I may start listening to it from Audible at PT, after I finish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
kristin
GO TERPS!
Nav Space: http://kristin.seidelmann-owners.com/
Blog (sometimes updated): http://gimpygal.blogspot.com
"Well-behaved women rarely make history." -Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
bignoseduglyguy
Bert Latamore
I agree with you about not wanting to fiddle with books to make them read well. If the ebook doesn't work well on my UX, either I just go on to the next one or get the paper edition. I probably read about 60% of my book in electronic format at the moment, although that is just a guess, mainly because some of the books I want to read aren't available as ebooks.
Does the PDF work well on the Sony Reader? I tried reading a (fortunately short) novel a friend wrote and published in PDF in Adobe Reader and found it totally unacceptable. I could not annotate it in any way, including adding bookmarks to mark where I was. I have a bad memory for numbers, and I ended up having to write down the page number where I stopped reading every night so I could find it again.
I do have a license for the software that lets me reformat a PDF into eReader format, and if I am in that position again I will use that and read it in eReader. But I wanted to see what Adobe Reader had to offer for a book-length manuscript. My take -- not enough.
So what is Quiverfull about?
Bert
Jeff Kirvin
don't read it.
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 14, 2009, at 3:43 PM, Donald Stidwell <donald....@mac.com>
wrote:
Jeff Kirvin
Sent from my iPhone
Donald Stidwell
On Aug 14, 2009, at 8:59 PM, Bert Latamore wrote:
> Kerry,
>
> I agree with you about not wanting to fiddle with books to make them
> read well. If the ebook doesn't work well on my UX, either I just go
> on to the next one or get the paper edition. I probably read about
> 60% of my book in electronic format at the moment, although that is
> just a guess, mainly because some of the books I want to read aren't
> available as ebooks.
>
> Does the PDF work well on the Sony Reader? I tried reading a
> (fortunately short) novel a friend wrote and published in PDF in
> Adobe Reader and found it totally unacceptable. I could not annotate
> it in any way, including adding bookmarks to mark where I was. I
> have a bad memory for numbers, and I ended up having to write down
> the page number where I stopped reading every night so I could find
> it again.
>
> I do have a license for the software that lets me reformat a PDF
> into eReader format, and if I am in that position again I will use
> that and read it in eReader. But I wanted to see what Adobe Reader
> had to offer for a book-length manuscript. My take -- not enough.
>
> So what is Quiverfull about?
>
> Bert
>
Bert, what software let's you convert PDF's to eReader format? I'd
love to have something like that. I've several PDF books and have the
same problems you do.
Don
Kerry Lannert
Donald Stidwell
On Aug 14, 2009, at 10:07 PM, Kerry Lannert wrote:
>
> As for Quiverfull, it's a non-fiction book about the modern
> Quiverfull movement currently happening in a small subset of the
> fundamentalist Christian community. Quiverfull followers believe in
> producing as many children as possible and also in homeschooling
> them using the Bible and religious books for every aspect of the
> child's education (even the math books teach basic principles using
> Biblical references). The Duggar family, with 18 children, is
> probably the most famous family in the movement, they had a reality
> show and have been on lots talk TV. It's a very interesting read,
> but a little dense so I'm taking it slowly.
>
> - Kerry
>
Sounds like Fundamental Baptist missionaries! A lot of IFB
missionaries I know have 10-12 kids and few have less than 6.
bignoseduglyguy
Ian Barton
thoroughly recommend this, even if you aren't a mountaineer.
It also perfectly illustrates my problems with eBooks - it's only
available in dead tree format, as are most of the other books I want to
read.
Ian.
Bert Latamore
The software I referenced is "ebook studio" https://secure.ereader.com/ereader/software/ebookstudio.htm
It is available from eReader as a download. I only used it a couple of times some time ago but my memory is it worked pretty well. I converted a specific PDF I bought from soneone teaching a course -- rather than carry the paper text book with me. I still ahve the book and last read it a year ago.
Bert
Bert Latamore
Also, now that WinMobile seems to be losing ground rapidly in the market (the recent Microsoft/Nokia alliance is a symptom of that), does this reader software run on other platforms? What happens to your books when you have to move off the WinMobile platform? Of course a Windows tablet may be a good answer -- unlike the stand-alone book readers it has a color display, which is important for a lot of non-fiction books that use colored maps, graphics and photographs. One of the things I don't like about the stand alone book readers is that they are grey scale only (and seemingly focused on fiction, whereas at least half of my reading is nonfiction).
All the best,
Bert
Donald Stidwell
On Aug 15, 2009, at 1:48 PM, Bert Latamore wrote:
> I have a question for the WinMobile users: Aren't a lot of you using
> a Microsoft ebook reader? I have pretty vague memories of discussion
> a few years ago of eReader versus a WinMobile only book service from
> Microsoft. I presume this would also run on XP or Vista, is that
> correct? Is it still active and adding books? Now that I am using
> the UX for my reading I might look at it if it has books that
> eReader doesn't have -- they might have some of the books I am
> looking for.
>
To the best of my knowledge, the Microsoft Reader is defunct, not that
it was all that well supported to begin with. The books came in
the .lit format and it used to come standard on Pocket PCs, but hasn't
come standard on any WM device in years. I'm not even sure it's
available anymore.
> Also, now that WinMobile seems to be losing ground rapidly in the
> market (the recent Microsoft/Nokia alliance is a symptom of that),
> does this reader software run on other platforms? What happens to
> your books when you have to move off the WinMobile platform? Of
> course a Windows tablet may be a good answer -- unlike the stand-
> alone book readers it has a color display, which is important for a
> lot of non-fiction books that use colored maps, graphics and
> photographs. One of the things I don't like about the stand alone
> book readers is that they are grey scale only (and seemingly focused
> on fiction, whereas at least half of my reading is nonfiction).
>
> All the best,
>
> Bert
I believe uReader (micro Reader) could read unencrypted .lit formatted
books, but again I don't know if it's still extant. Also there was a
command line program named Convert Lit that could be used to decompile
to other formats. Again, no idea if it's still around.
Bert Latamore
Okay. Sorry to hear that, both for the people who bought those books and for myself, as I was looking for a new source of books. I am interested in the new Barnes and Noble ebook reader, and now if I am looking for a book and don't find it on eReader I search B&N. So far, however, I haven't gotten a hit, so I haven't tried out the reader.
Of course B&N now owns Fictionwise/eReader. I was a little surprised that it chose to create yet another new reader software given that. I would think that the logical thing for it would be to combine all three into a single service, but so far that doesn't seem to be happening. I wonder if their purchase of Fictionwise and subsequent announcement of the B&N ebook software is a "toe in the water" approach. If so, it won't work. Amazon is determined to own the ebook space, and B&N needs a matching determination if it is going to carve out a viable space.
At the same time, the economics of book publishing and the issues of supporting the residual market for older books really does dictate a steady movement toward ebooks. You can see that in the history of eReader starting with PeanutPress. Back then it was primarily a geek book service, and its library was dominated by SF and fantasy -- the literature of the geeks (including me, btw! I do not mean "geek" to be in any way derogatory -- geeks are intellectuals).
Today, close to two decades later, they still sell a lot of SF/fantasy, but actually their largest sellers are romance, and that is definitely reflected in their marketing. I have nothing against romance, but the point is that that is an entirely different readership -- mostly female, not necessarily college educated (although certainly many intellectual women read romance for relaxation). Not the people you think of instantly when you think smartphone/PDA users. And behind the fiction eReader has a very healthy library of history, current events and other nonfiction. They have the latest book from Ahmed Rishad, which makes me hope they will publish his other books (B&N also has that book, btw). So the evidence is that the readership is growing steadily. I don't know what eReader's financial history looks like. But I suspect that the price, the ability to download a book instantly without having to make a trip to the bookstore, and the availability of books that are otherwise out of print are attractions.
If that is true, B&N might build a strategy focused on selling books that are out of print. That happens very quickly with novels -- unless the author is famous those books stay on the bookshelves for about three weeks, then they go into the remainder bin and are gone. But someone who discovers an author they like often wants to read those earlier, now out-or-print books by that same author. It is just a thought here, I have no idea what their thinking is. And certainly that is not the primary strategy at Amazon.com, which seems to try to bring out the ebook at the same time the paper book hits the shelves. But Amazon does not have an extensive network of physical stores, so it really isn't worried about the ebook competing with its retail operation. That has to be a concern at B&N.
Bert
Jesper Anderson
tried it on my WM6.1 flashed Pocket Loox, but it's really horrible
software. For the few lit files I retain I use allReader+ which can
handle them, and is MUCH nicer than MS reader ever was. But mostly I
convert everything to lrf files and use my Sony Reader. Convert Lit is
still around and works fine.
Jesper
John L. Cunningham
> Just an idle question. I wondered what people are reading or have read recently
> that they can recommend.
I just read two books that got me to question many assumptions that I
didn't know I was making:
Life, Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff
I found his explanation of the incorporation, how it began, how it
developed, and how it changed our society, to be very interesting. The
author's perspective is that this is a bad thing overall, and offers
some lame solutions to try to take back economic power, such as creating
and using local currencies.
The End of Overeating by David Kessler
Unfortunately, reading this book didn't stop my overeating. However, I
did stop eating at chain restaurants. Dr. Kessler interviews food
technologists, dietitians, and other experts in the restaurant and food
industries, and provides a fascinating description of how and why their
food has been designed to encourage unhealthy eating habits. He then
goes on to provide some tips on overcoming habitual behavior that anyone
who has read a self-help book already knows.
--
John L. Cunningham
Kerry Lannert
>
>
> The End of Overeating by David Kessler
> Unfortunately, reading this book didn't stop my overeating. However, I
> did stop eating at chain restaurants. Dr. Kessler interviews food
> technologists, dietitians, and other experts in the restaurant and
> food
> industries, and provides a fascinating description of how and why
> their
> food has been designed to encourage unhealthy eating habits. He then
> goes on to provide some tips on overcoming habitual behavior that
> anyone
> who has read a self-help book already knows.
> --
I read David Kessler's last book, "Mindless Eating." About halfway
through it stopped being about science and started being a diet book,
which wasn't really what I wanted to be reading. The science stuff was
great, though. You might want to look at it (though I don't know how
much of the same territory is covered in the new book, and it could be
a lot).
- Kerry
Bert Latamore
He seems in the podcasts at least to want a return to the older style of farming, pre Earl Butz, in which farmers had multiple crops and livestock on their farms. There are real advantages to that form of farming, particularly in the abilty to recycle things (animals eat product and produce "waste" such as leaves, their droppings in turn become manure that gets spread on the fields.) The issue is that the price of food would double if we went back to that kind of farming.
Which is not to say that his points are all off the mark. Modern agriculture is much to dependent on oil. Just one factoid I learned years ago -- did you know that pigs are shipped from one facility to another something over 10 times during their growth and maturation, before they go to the slaughterhouse? Incredible, but I had that directly from someone in the pork industry, so I don't doubt it one bit. In a world in which oil production has probably peaked and started declining worldwide while demand in countries like China and India is growing rapidly, this is not a good situation.
Bert
Kerry Lannert
You bring up a lot of points that are covered in Michael Pollan's "The
Omnivore's Dilemma." It's a great read, full of detail about every
aspect of agriculture, both the traditional kind and the modern kind.
In addition to oil used to transport crops and livestock, petroleum is
also the base for the fertilizers modern farmers use. All that
livestock waste gets dumped into enormous cesspools, while chemical
plants turn oil into fertilizer for our corn. That book totally
changed the way I view everything about food and even politics.
- Kerry
Bert Latamore
Yes, I think you are right -- I was thinking of Michael Pollan. He has a new book out about how American's have stopped cooking and how that impacts culture and diet. Again it sounds very interesting. I am fortunately in that my wife does cook, and I can also cook (although I am not exactly a gourmet chef). I had never thought about the larger implications of this, however. I might need to read his books.
Bert
Laura Conrad
Bert> Yes, I think you are right -- I was thinking of Michael
Bert> Pollan. He has a new book out about how American's have
Bert> stopped cooking and how that impacts culture and diet.
I haven't read that book, but he also wrote an article in the NY Times
magazine that I found irritating. I blogged about it at
<http://laymusic.org/wordpress/?p=1278>. My sense is that a larger
fraction of the people I know now cook than of the people my parents
knew in 1960, and that there were ways to pay other people to do the
cooking, shopping and cleaning for you hundreds or even thousands of
years ago.
I'm not saying that a lot of what he says isn't true, and I get
irritated at Food Network shows for a lot of the same reasons he does,
but he's romanticizing the pre-tv-dinner era of food preparation.
I have really enjoyed several of Pollan's books, including _The Omnivore's
Dilemma_.
--
Laura (mailto:lco...@laymusic.org)
(617) 661-8097 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139
http://www.laymusic.org/ http://www.serpentpublications.org
If there happens to be a number of greater voices in the Concert than
your own, they will swallow you up; therefore in such a case, I would
recommend to you the resolution (tho' not the impudence) of a
discarded actor, who after he had been twice hissed off the stage,
mounted again, and with great assurance he thundered out these words:
"I will be heard".
William Billings
Bert Latamore
Bert
pdr
and we read all sorts of things (we are now reading Hardy's "Jude the
Obscure" which I downloaded onto my Kindle from manybooks.net), from
Jhumpa Lahiri to Jose Saramago to Reginald Hill to Dostoyevsky and
Proust (but no science fiction, as none of us are fans). We read
Pollan's "In Praise of Food" and I read the piece in the NYTimes
magazine and while I find some of the information about the food
industry interesting, his solutions seem me quite idiotic: he is
imagining some warm kitchen with women (yes, women, not men!) cooking
all day long. This is in complete disregard of what the world has
become, for better or worse: too few people have the time to prepare
whole meals, which is why the prepared-food industry has come into
being. I live in NYC and I don't see any farmers around. My wife is
from Southern Ohio and when we visit there we don't see a lot of
people who grow their own vegetables or produce their own meat. In
fact when we go to the local Kroger's we see all kinds of people
buying frozen foods but very few people in the fresh foods section. We
can all bemoan this and reminisce about the good old days (what's good
is that they're gone) which never were as imagined, or we can look for
realistic solutions, and for that we must look to someone other than
Pollan. Quite frankly, I have seen and tasted (I'm sure you all have)
some very good synthetics and my view of the future is quite
different: we can make synthetics and leave the good earth to develop
on its own without our messing in it.
Laura Conrad
pdr> I am part of an-all male and elderly (we are all over 60)
pdr> book club, and we read all sorts of things (we are now
pdr> reading Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" which I downloaded onto my
pdr> Kindle from manybooks.net),
I read that last winter. It's depressing even by Thomas Hardy
standards. If I were in a book club, I'd push reading one of his
other books instead.
pdr> We read Pollan's "In Praise of Food" and I read the piece in
pdr> the NYTimes magazine and while I find some of the information
pdr> about the food industry interesting, his solutions seem me
pdr> quite idiotic: he is imagining some warm kitchen with women
pdr> (yes, women, not men!) cooking all day long.
I think that's a little unfair. If you read _The Omnivore's Dilemma_,
it's clear that he does cook himself.
But the skill required to make the effort required to cook, shop, and
clean for unprocessed foods similar to that required for processed
foods is clearly not something that's ever been universal in any
society I know about.
--
Laura (mailto:lco...@laymusic.org)
(617) 661-8097 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139
http://www.laymusic.org/ http://www.serpentpublications.org
No, it's my subject.
Gore Vidal, when asked whether he had ever considered leaving the
United States permanently.
Bert Latamore
I think it is a matter of priorities, and our priority is eating healthy meals. Those prepared foods have huge amounts of extra fat, salt, and often sugar as well. None of that is remotely good for you. I heard a science podcast presentation on what sodium does to your cardiovascular system that was frightening.
So you can do it if you want to. It is a question of what is important to you.
Bert
Jesper Anderson
> My wife and I both work full time, and we cook most of our meals. We do eat
> pasta some nights, which is easy to do, and we do prepare things ahead of
> time sometimes. And while I work from home, my wife does much of the
> cooking. And she generally gets home at 7 pm.
>
> I think it is a matter of priorities, and our priority is eating healthy
> meals. Those prepared foods have huge amounts of extra fat, salt, and often
> sugar as well. None of that is remotely good for you. I heard a science
> podcast presentation on what sodium does to your cardiovascular system that
> was frightening.
Pasta is pretty terrible for you as well. It's only one step away from sugar.
I noticed that when I stopped thinking "tonight I will have pasta" and
instead thought "tonight I will have salmon/beef/tofurkey/chicken" and
had a little salad and pasta or similar with it the quality of my food
as evidenced in my energy levels increased a lot.
Jesper
Bert Latamore
And yes, pasta is not the ideal meal, but it is a lot better than all that preprepared stuff. The problem with all that precooked stuff basically is that in order to cook the food rapidly on a production line it is flash cooked at temps much higher than your oven cna reach. But cooking is a chemical process and cooking at temps well above 500°F releases a lot of locked in bitter flavors. The result is uneatable food. So to fix this the food processors disguise the taste with salt, fat and sugar. The latest research also indicates that those things create the desire to eat more and more in the consumer. So it is a kind of addiction. I can tell you that after three+ years of fairly intensive dieting (and losing nearly 60 pounds so far) I no longer look at food the same way. I eat a lot less without even thinking about it, and there are a lot of things I no longer have any interest in eating. For instance, I seldom eat any dessert at all even when my diet would allow it. And I had a real sugar addition at one time. Today I just don't think about it many nights.
Bert
pdr
all the ads for clothes and food) are now having to face two daunting
obstacles: we are going through an obesity epidemic and our population
is aging, so we must now learn to deal with a new set of health
issues. We all want to be younger: this morning's NYTimes has an
article on an experimental drug that will lessen the effects of age,
though it doesn't sound all that effective. And so we focus on food,
and all that is good and bad with it. We have health food stores all
over, and continue to spend money on organic products (when even the
government cannot clearly delimit what "organic" means). The problem
with all of this is that much of what we are and become is genetically
determined: how much we can affect that is open to question. Healthy
food can preserve what you are born with better, but there is no magic
wand. If I have objections to what a Pollan writes it's that he
implies - he cannot firmly state it - that his food remedies are a
kind of magic wand.
Laura, I stand by my comment about his romanticizing of past kitchens:
that he cooks (so do I) changes nothing. To live as if that past could
be recreated is pointless. Jude the Obscure, which I read for the
first time when I was in college a very long time ago, is indeed
depressing, as is all of Hardy, but I think it is his best novel, as
he understood well what it is like simply to fail at whatever is
important.
Laura Conrad
pdr> Laura, I stand by my comment about his romanticizing of past
pdr> kitchens: that he cooks (so do I) changes nothing. To live as
pdr> if that past could be recreated is pointless.
I agree about the romanticizing, as I think my blog post made clear,
if what I said on the list didn't. I do think it's unfair to consider
Pollan as sexist, based on what I've read.
pdr> Jude the Obscure, which I read for the first time when I was
pdr> in college a very long time ago, is indeed depressing, as is
pdr> all of Hardy, but I think it is his best novel, as he
pdr> understood well what it is like simply to fail at whatever is
pdr> important.
I only occasionally get in the mood for depressing novelists like
Hardy and Dostoievsky, so _Jude the Obscure_ is the only major Hardy
I've read for several years. It's certainly a better novel than
_Under the Greenwood Tree_, which a lot of my musician friends read
because of all the details about the music. But I'm not sure it's
better than _Far from the Madding Crowd_, or even _The Return of the
Native_.
--
Laura (mailto:lco...@laymusic.org)
(617) 661-8097 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139
http://www.laymusic.org/ http://www.serpentpublications.org
At dawn, the magpie sings, and by day the black cockatoo wing their
way across a sunny sky. The koala, possum, dingo and carpet snake are
silent on the land below. A mist covers the mountains. We and our
land are crying for you.
Eve Fesl, Matriarch of the Gubbi Gubbi tribe, eulogizing Steve Irwin
Bert Latamore
And you are quite right with what you say. Most people will never go back to cooking their own food -- many of them have no idea of how to begin, and the cooking shows do not really teach how to cook any more. Nor do the schools, where home economics pretty much died when people decided that "homemaker" was not a valuable profession. I am so glad that I grew up before that and that my mother took pride in her homemaking and loved being a mother. And I should say that we were upper middle class, well educated and reasonably well read. But things were still like that in the US in the 1950s.
There are no magic wands to stay young, but two very good rules for slowing aging and improving your health in general are: Do not smoke or tolerate smoke-filled environments (second hand smoke is in some ways worse than first-hand), and be conscious of what you eat. A sensible diet, which starts with recording what you eat and breaking it down (I recommend Calorie King) and then trying to make your diet more healthy overall can make a huge difference. Just start by getting five servings of fruit and vegies every day. which many people do not do. Every medical person I have heard speak on health says that is a basic need. And you don't have to cook all your meals to do that -- add a fresh salad to your meal, eat fruit for dessert, put fruit on your morning cereal, eat a fresh tomato for a snack or as part of your lunch (I often have tomatoes and mozzarella with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and a piece of bread for lunch). Regardless of your genetics or weight, this is basic healthy eating.
Bert
pdr
to believe I consider Pollan a sexist, and frankly the thought never
crossed my mind. What I meant was that Pollan was resorting to an old
cliche image, that of the housewife (and not a man) in the kitchen. I
did not mean to imply that he was sexist, I have no idea nor do I care
if he is or isn't. Interesting that you consider Dostoyevsky
depressing: many of my colleagues (in a former career I taught Russian
literature) consider him uplifting.
On Aug 18, 3:16 pm, Laura Conrad <lcon...@laymusic.org> wrote:
>
> pdr> Laura, I stand by my comment about his romanticizing of past
> pdr> kitchens: that he cooks (so do I) changes nothing. To live as
> pdr> if that past could be recreated is pointless.
>
> I agree about the romanticizing, as I think my blog post made clear,
> if what I said on the list didn't. I do think it's unfair to consider
> Pollan as sexist, based on what I've read.
>
> pdr> Jude the Obscure, which I read for the first time when I was
> pdr> in college a very long time ago, is indeed depressing, as is
> pdr> all of Hardy, but I think it is his best novel, as he
> pdr> understood well what it is like simply to fail at whatever is
> pdr> important.
>
> I only occasionally get in the mood for depressing novelists like
> Hardy and Dostoievsky, so _Jude the Obscure_ is the only major Hardy
> I've read for several years. It's certainly a better novel than
> _Under the Greenwood Tree_, which a lot of my musician friends read
> because of all the details about the music. But I'm not sure it's
> better than _Far from the Madding Crowd_, or even _The Return of the
> Native_.
>
> --
Laura Conrad
pdr> Laura, I now realize that I expressed myself in a way that
pdr> has led you to believe I consider Pollan a sexist, and
pdr> frankly the thought never crossed my mind. What I meant was
pdr> that Pollan was resorting to an old cliche image, that of the
pdr> housewife (and not a man) in the kitchen.
I suppose sexist is an imprecise characterization of what you said
about Pollan, but you have just reiterated that you believe he's
characterizing the role of cook as female.
I think he's insufficiently sensitive to the fact that there has
always been division of labor that meant that some people cooked (or
farmed or made clothes or played musical instruments or wrote books)
for other people. But I haven't seen anything to indicate that he
supports the idea that these divisions of labor should be based on
gender.
pdr> Interesting that you consider Dostoyevsky depressing: many of
pdr> my colleagues (in a former career I taught Russian
pdr> literature) consider him uplifting.
Again, it's been a long time since I read any. As I remember it, when
you manage to slog through to the end, there is an uplifting effect,
but you really do slog through a lot of depressing characters and
circumstances. I do think of him and Hardy as similar in that
respect, whereas Dickens and Tolstoy and George Elliot (whom I read
more frequently) have more relief from the depressing circumstances
sprinkled all the way through.
--
Laura (mailto:lco...@laymusic.org)
(617) 661-8097 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139
http://www.laymusic.org/ http://www.serpentpublications.org
I’m at the very peak of my decline.
Leonard Bernstein
Bert Latamore
Okay, two questions, but both about Russian lit.
All the best,
Bert
pdr
answer. There is humor in Dostoyevsky but it is a humor of spite and
even nastiness. Try "Notes from Underground" or "The Double" (you can
use the Penguin translations). If you are going to reread "Crime and
Punishment", by all means use the Pevear/Volkhonsky version which also
contains notes on the difficulties of translating. Dostoyevsky's
language is vigorous and charged, much like Dickens (whom he read and
admired). He can be messy, as he wrote in serial form (again like
Dickens), so if you are looking for a writer whose works are models of
neat structure, he is not the writer for you.
Bert Latamore
Dr. Housseini has since written a second book, which I have not yet purchased. A friend who read it first said she really enjoyed it, and it has received very favorable reviews.
Bert