Recently in Books Category

As longtime readers of this blog know, I started my Master's degree at MIT in 2005, finished it in 2007 and then immediately went to work at MIT as the Communications Director for both Comparative Media Studies (the program where I'd earned said master's) and for the newly-formed Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. I was completely flabbergasted by the amount of work that being a grad student in CMS had entailed, but I was utterly floored when the amount of work as an employee was even more than that. Still, the past year-and-a-half have been incredibly rich and rewarding, and has allowed me time to continue my studies, which was my main reason for wanting to stick around. Even though I'm not currently in any kind of degree-granting program (and yes, the desire for that delayed Ph.D does have me occasionally wailing and gnashing my teeth), my time has been far from wasted – especially since becoming a researcher at GAMBIT in addition to its Communications Director.

The amount of media I've been consuming has been obscene. Barely a week goes by when I'm not buying another book, movie, or game in an attempt to bring myself up to speed in multiple categories. It's been a ridiculously overwhelming project, learning tons about scholarship, theory and criticism in games, films, comics and literature, but lately I've been noticing that I'm making serious progress. Granted, I'm still only about 75%-80% of the way through the AFI top 122 films and I've barely scratched the surface of a whole ton of material, but it's remarkable how much more grounded I feel now than I did when I was a graduate student – and most of that has come after graduation. I have a greater grasp now on Callois, Huzinga, Ryan, Bolter and other game theorists; I'm familiarizing myself with the work of David Bordwell and other film scholars; I'm reading up on the history of comics in the early 1900s; I'm digging deeper into experimental animation from characters like Svenkmajer and the Brothers Quay... Plus I've been filling in tons of gaps in my experience with the genre canon – for example, this weekend I read H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for the first time, observing carefully when and where I was caught up in his description of his bizarre world and when I was skimming paragraphs due to his blatant violations of 'show, don't tell'. I'm also hard at work revising my writing, banging out essays for possible publication, gathering my wits about me for possible short stories and researching both how to write book proposals and how to approach literary agents.

Long story short, even though CMS doesn't have a Ph.D, this is what I'd imagine a Ph.D in CMS would be like. Maybe someday we'll actually get one and I can set about turning this wooden puppet of research into a real boy of a degree. Then again, even if not, this is probably how the rest of my life will be when it's not being dedicated to errands, repairing houses and/or cars, raising kids and other life challenges. And actually, that sounds simply awesome. More actual writing and publishing, please, but this is pretty much the groove I've been looking for all along.

Life is good!

While reading this Mediabistro piece on Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Ford and why genre tags don't matter, I found myself reflecting on Borders' current struggles with solvency. I'd be devastated if Borders and Barnes and Noble went under due to Amazon, just as I've been deeply mournful of all the indie bookstores put under by Borders and Barnes and Noble, but there might be one upside to the disappearance of the physical bookstore: the possible death of genre-ghettoization of authors. As Chabon and Ford so eloquently explain:

Chabon pointed out that the idea that writers would only work within one genre is a relatively new one; look at the range of stories Edgar Allan Poe or Rudyard Kipling told, for example, or Isaac Bashevis Singer. "Singer is unquestionably recognized as a literary writer," Chabon explained, "but is also as much a part of the supernatural literary tradition as Poe." In this vein, Ford recommended that we both pick up Beneath the American Renaissance, a book by David S. Reynolds about the 19th-century popular culture that shaped what we now regard as American literary masterpieces.

"I don't know why it's such a big deal," Ford said of the genre-straddling, to which Chabon replied, "The people it matters the least to are the ones who are doing it. In so many other artistic mediums, it's not weird at all." He cites the career of filmmaker Robert Altman, who went from war comedy to private eye story to western (to take just one short segment) with ease. "The fact that he was working in all those genres--that's standard operating procedure in Hollywood."

Don't get me wrong – the idea of genre will continue to exist, but perhaps this idiotic categorization of authors into only one genre will finally disappear. Characters like Jonathan Carroll who write wonderfully difficult-to-categorize books will no longer be shunted off into just the sci-fi section or the literature section, since one of the most beautiful things about Amazon is that it's so easy to browse freely across books that are simply recommended through similar purchasing patterns.

As it is, the floundering of Borders is causing all kinds of consternation. Allow me to point you to Gregory Frost's recent essay in The Wild River Review, "Books Without Borders", wherein he laments Borders' recent decision to not stock his new novel. A bookstore opting to "skip" a new novel is unfortunately not at all that uncommon – as Andrew Wheeler notes, zero is the default order for any new book – but it's surprising in Frost's case because he's a well-established novelists whose novels are consistently solid-sellers, if not New York Times bestsellers. Frost's not alone – Borders has been slashing its orders on all kinds of authors in a mad struggle to stay afloat, including even Geoff Ryman, according to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet / Small Beer Press. As Link and/or Grant puts it so perfectly:

[Borders] is sitting tight, not ordering books, trying not to go bust. So, best of luck on the not going bust, might be a bit hard if they're not actually carrying the books people are expecting to find.

I'm torn, myself. Honestly, I think the widespread advent of book-buying online is a great thing insofar as it blows the doors off the amount of great niche content that's made available relatively quickly, and provides access to such special editions as those offered by Subterranean Press and Payseur & Schmidt, as well as a business model for tons of great new up-and-comers in film, comics, books and games all over the world. However, I'm also well aware that there's a serious threat of increased difficulty in making a living at this when it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

What I honestly don't know is how much the new models of online promotion and distribution (including word-of-mouth on blogs, free content distribution and ebooks) will offset the loss of physical copies in bookstores being picked up by people browsing. It might, or it might not – I honestly don't know how long it will be before any kind of definitive answer ever appears. The biggest reason to go with one of the Seven Sisters now is the big rumbling engines of their publicity departments – but if physical bookstores go away, how much will that still matter? And will the CPM on online book sites go through the roof if suddenly physical browsing ceases to be a feasible method by which to find new stuff?

This has been an amazing month for attending lectures. First there was Kelly Link at the Harvard Book Store, reading to promote her new book Pretty Monsters; then there was Jonathan Carroll at the Harvard Book Store, reading to promote his new book The Ghost in Love; then this week there was Maria Tatar and Gregory Maguire at the Brattle Theater (organized by the Harvard Book Store) to promote his new book A Lion Among Men; last night there was Art Spiegelman at the Brattle (organized by the Harvard Book Store) to promote his new/old book Breakdowns, and then today there was Jeet Heer, Ho Che Anderson and Diana Tamblyn at MIT courtesy of Sarah Brouillette, CMS, FL&L, Literature and the Kelly-Douglas Fund.

The upshot of all this? Living in Boston is awesome. MIT is awesome. And the Harvard Book Store is amazing.

Courtesy of the lovely Small Beer Press newsblog comes my discovery of a new favorite group. Ever heard of the Winterpills? No? Then get thyself over to their official site or their Virb.com page and give their stuff a listen. Close harmonies, beautifully wistful and poetic lyrics (as SBP notes, yes, "You were born immortal and you'll die immortal" is a bloody amazing line, and I wish I'd thought of it, as is "We met first in cafés / and later in ruins" – I mean, day-um) and a myriad of both acoustic guitars and slightly distorted tweets, chirps and burbles make this group easily one of my favorite new discoveries of 2008. And yes, they're on iTunes. There went thirty bucks...

And now I must away, as Laura and I have tickets to tonight's Gregory Maguire / Maria Tatar event at the Brattle and I am sufficiently stoked for both of us and all of you out there in Internetville.

If you had told me when I was sixteen that later in my life I would, in the course of approximately one year, spend some genuine facetime with Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Mike Mignola, Kelly Link and Jonathan Carroll I would have said that you were nuts. (Well, I would have also said "Who's Kelly Link?" back then, but that's beside the point.)

If you'd told me that I would have gotten the chance to meet Rand Miller (the co-creator of Myst), Bill Willingham (who writes Fables), befriend Raph Koster and listen to a lecture by Guillermo del Toro in that same year, I'd've told you that you were also insane.

If you'd told me that if you extended that window out to eighteen months it would also include getting to meet Jeff Smith and graduating from MIT, I'd've told you were completely barking mad.

Yet, that's the eighteen months it's been for me. When I look back on 2007-2008 and think about all this economic disaster and political hoo-rah and all the rest of the bizarreness afoot in the world, that's what I should remember – that this year-and-some-change has been amazing, wonderful and incredibly stimulating.

All of this is brought up by my attending back-to-back lectures by both Stephen Greenblatt (the noted New Historicist from Harvard) here at MIT and Jonathan Carroll (one of my favorite novelists) at the Harvard Bookstore last night. Consider my mind officially blown.

I have just discovered that, in addition to Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, Pratchett's Nation, Link's Pretty Little Monsters and Carroll's The Ghost in Love, Louis De Bernieres' new book A Partisan's Daughter hit shelves today.

I yield! I yield! My poor wallet! What else could this fall possibly throw at me?

(Well, there's this, this, this, and this, not to mention this, this, this and this. Arrrgh.)

Consider this a public service announcement that Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, Terry Pratchett's Nation AND Jonathan Carroll's The Ghost in Love are out today. TODAY. Go! Stop reading this and go, dammit! Hie thee to a bookstore! Or Amazon!

I could also note that the 2-disc Blu-Ray set of Iron Man is out today, but I suspect that will take care of its own sales figures, thankyouverymuch.

Two additional things I will note, however, is that Jonathan Carroll's jonathancarroll.com has received an astonishingly beautiful makeover, using a palette similar to my own and a design that I wish I'd thought of (and may indeed lift bits of at some point in the future, especially the gorgeous blend of blacks and parchment and breathtakingly beautiful photography); and that Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters is out next week, so you might as well pre-order that while you're clicking away at Amazon. I mean, it's just the efficient thing to do.

(I myself would be clicking away if I weren't so damned impatient. Off to the mall I go ASAP after work, I suspect...)

I love that blessed and beautiful feeling when you discover something that's been missing for all too long. For me, lately, that feeling has been coming in waves with the discovery of an entire collection of my peers that are working in the slipstream / interstitial / contemporary reinvention-of-genre spaces. I blogged about this before in the beginning of June (the first post was "Where to begin?" and the second was "A magnificent deskful of guilty pleasures"), but this exploration has unearthed an entire treasure trove of brilliant new writers. It started with Kelly Link and a collection of anthologies I mentioned in those earlier posts, and exploded when I attended Readercon 19 earlier this month.

Holy cats, Readercon.

Not only did I make some excellent new friends (hi, Erin) and ran into some old friends (hi, Ellen and friends-of-Kasi), but I also got to meet some of my old favorite writers and discover even more brilliant new ones. I shook the hands of Jonathan Lethem and James Morrow, happily listened to Ekaterina Sedia, John Crowley and Kelly Link hold forth on their works, had some brilliant conversations with James Patrick Kelly and Gregory Frost, and met a whole host of other brilliant up-and-coming authors. I also developed a serious hetero-geek-crush on literary critic John Clute, whose work I had admired before but after actually listening to the fellow on multiple panels, I have added to the small list of personal influences whom I would happily sit and listen to even if they were only reading their laundry lists. The fellow is brilliant.

Another major score of the weekend was in the bookstore, a massive bonanza of vendors all peddling a myriad of tomes, most of whom I struggled not to acquire. (What with the trip to Greece and other splurges this month, July has been easily one of the most expensive months in recent memory. Seriously. Ouch.) I whimpered and passed up a $100 hardcover edition of Jonathan Carroll's first book, Land of Laughs, which I'd been hunting for over a decade, and instead spent way too much money on a whole bagful of bargains. By the time the dust settled I was the proud owner of a hardcover edition of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners and whole host of fantastic paperbacks from Prime Books.

There's been a bit of a recent kerfuffle in the blogosphere lately about writers' experiences with Prime, but everything I've read so far sounds like exactly the kind of issues that plague all small independent presses (and I say this as a man who for the longest time was a small, independent press). Given the quality of the books and the authors Prime publishes, they're definitely on my short-list of publishers to query once Bones of the Angel is well and truly finished. Not only do they publish Ekaterina Sedia, Theodora Goss and Jeff VanderMeer, but they're also responsible for Cabinet des Fees and the beautiful new paperback editions of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Black Thorn, White Rose, Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, and Black Swan, White Raven. I got to meet Sean Wallace at the con and he cut me a great deal on a whole stack of books, and he certainly seemed to have his heart in the right place, and I do happen to think Prime is in exactly the right position for a small niche publisher to be these days. So much so, in fact, that one of these days I hope to interview him for some of my academic work.

Anyway. My latest discovery from that pile of Prime books was The Bone Key by Sarah Monette, which is a brilliant example of experimental publishing models in this day and age. Monette has pulled off (brilliantly, I might add) an experiment I was considering for my Winter Children series – she introduced her character Kyle Murchison Booth in a short story, and then proceeded to write an entire series of short stories featuring Booth and publishing them in various magazines, thus building an entire network of introductory points to her character and his world. It's an old model, to be sure, but seeing it done now – and done so well – makes it a terrific case study in contemporary serialized narratives. It's not quite a serialized narrative, insofar as each short story stands on its own, but seeing them all collected together in The Bone Key makes me suspect that just such an experiment conducted with chapters of a larger story could work very well indeed.

Mwa ha ha.

As I said, The Bone Key is brilliant – I finished reading the second short story in the collection, "The Venebretti Necklance", on my way to work this morning and when I set it down I burst out laughing out of sheer delight. Charlaine Harris' quote at the top of the cover, "Sarah Monette can write like a dream," is entirely accurate. Monette takes an old horror trope straight out of Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado, modernizes it and makes it her own. It's by turns funny, creepy and altogether excellent, with enough character quirks and nuances that Booth could definitely carry a novel all of his own – and I'm sure Monette's working on it. I haven't read any of her other stuff – her website suggests that the majority of the rest of her work is pitched more at the fantasy / supernatural romance set – but she's now definitely on my list of Folks To Watch. I would suggest that you dear readers do the same.

Maybe it's because I'm just getting back into it after letting it lie dormant for so long, or maybe it's because it had been gathering hype for a ridiculous amount of time (approximately 3.5 years) before shipping, or maybe it's because my imagination almost always outstrips what reality finally serves up on a chipped, faded platter... But Delicious Library 2 isn't delivering on its hype yet.

I still love the premise of Delicious Library, which is part of the problem – a gorgeous app that packs amazing potential, such as the ability to not only catalog my vast collection of media but make it available online to help me find out whether or not I already own a hardcover copy of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (I don't) or Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (I do), and enable my friends peruse that collection to see if there's anything they'd like to borrow (and, honestly, hopefully gape at the wide array of awesome that I've managed to accumulate over the years) AND help me track which of those friends have borrowed what, so I can remember whose fingers I need to break for never giving me back that copy of The Arabian Nights that my grandfather gave me before he died (I'm looking at you, Yvonne).

Delicious Library 1 suggested that these features were coming, but Delicious Library 2 only delivered a half-baked (and incredibly download-heavy) web publishing system that, as near as I can tell, won't let me sort or search my published library from my iPhone, nor does it include any component of social networking whatsoever. What would be awesome is if I could search my library for a book and have it give three tiers of results: first, whether or not I own a copy; second, whether or not any of my friends own a copy that I could borrow; and third, what the going price for that book is currently on Amazon, Powell's, eBay or wherever. I cannot, as near as I can tell, use the camera on my iPhone to scan a barcode in the store and have the software give me any of that data, which is ludicrous. Granted, the iPhone camera is notoriously bad, but similar services have existed in other phones for years now and not having it in what is supposed to be the flagship library management software for the Mac (it even has an entire "Delicious Generation" named after it, for crying out loud!) is frustrating in the extreme. It doesn't even have a custom iPhone icon included in the published pages. This is amateur hour.

Yo! Wil Shipley! What gives? Is all this stuff still coming down the pike, or is Library doomed to remain a half-baked shadow of the glorious golden exemplar that its potential suggests it could be?

Update: well, I guess Shipley warned us:

Mike and I have talked a lot about Delicious Library 2.0 on wired.com and slashdot.com, respectively. I'd like to weasel a bit here and point out that although we have a ton of lofty goals that we're calling "2.0," not all of them will actually be in "2.0" the product. We'd love it if they were, but PLEASE don't buy the app based how cool you think 2.0 might be. If you like what 1.0 does, buy it now, and if you think 2.0 sounds like the first version that will be useful to you, then go ahead and wait.

Weasel, indeed. If you check out the original Wired interview, you find this:

Matas and Shipley have big plans. Delicious Library is now a cataloging program, appealing to those with an obsessive, Nick Hornby-esque desire to catalog every song, book and movie on their living room shelves.

But from the start, the software was planned to be social, allowing friends, neighbors and colleagues to see what's in each others' media libraries, and turn collections into personal lending libraries.

Version two, due later this year, will allow users to browse each other's libraries. It will be location-aware, letting users know who has what in their neighborhood or city.
It will also work on local networks (using Apple Computer's Rendezvous), so people can browse their colleagues' or fellow students' collections, just as Apple's iTunes exposes other users' playlists.

The current version already has a checkout manager for keeping track of loans.

As well as running personal lending libraries, the software can set up social connections: What better barometer of someone's personality than their taste in books and film?

"If you look at my movie collection, you can learn a ton about me," said Matas. "It's like a personal profile on Friendster listing interests and hobbies, but it's much more natural. It's not done consciously. It's a natural profile of yourself."

The software also includes a recommendation engine built on Amazon.com's recommendation system.

Matas said the company talked to Amazon about a partnership, but the retailer didn't like the lending feature. Why would people buy when they could borrow?

Matas said he convinced Amazon that people buy movies expressly to lend them out. They watch a movie two or three times, but want to own it so they can lend it to family or friends.

"I love the movie Baraka," he said. "I've seen it three times but I've lent it out a million times. And my friends have bought it also because they also want to spread the word."
Matas said cataloging books is just a first step in the grand scheme.

"The bigger picture is social idea sharing," he said. "Right now it's for obsessive-compulsive collectors, but we're going to flip a switch in the next version and it will turn into social software."

I bought both versions of this software, and so far I don't see any switch having been thrown. There's an ability to mark what books you've loaned people, and you can e-mail a book to your friends, and you can email your friends the URL of where you've posted your stuff (my work-in-progress library is up at http://homepage.mac.com/geoffreylong/deliciouslibrary/ but is woefully incomplete) but all of this does not social software make. I could do much the same thing with simple cut-and-paste in Safari, Excel and Mail.app -- so what gives, Shipley? What happened to the Delicious Library 2 we were promised?

I would be remiss if I didn't point out to all my media-loving friends out there the buy one get one free sale currently going on over at DeepDiscount.com. My picks:

Box Sets
Monsters and Madmen (4 films)
Olivier's Shakespeare (3 films)

Akira Kurosawa
Sanjuro
Seven Samurai

Frederico Fellini
La Strada
8 1/2

Ingmar Bergman
The Magic Flute
Fanny and Alexander
Sawdust and Tinsel

Others
Mr. Arkadin
Carnival of Souls
Thief of Bagdad

These aren't on the AFI list I've been plowing through in my sort of Film Studies 101 "independent study" but many are classics nonetheless – and I'm also always interested in the artful depiction of magic and wonder, and a number of these are known for doing that really, really well. There are all kinds of other finds on the list – such as The Threepenny Opera, The Third Man, Sullivan's Travels, The 39 Steps, Beauty and the Beast, Brazil, M, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, all of which I own; Charade, Withnail and I and Yojimbo, which I don't own but have seen recently enough to postpone their purchase, and Bowie's The Man Who Fell to Earth, which Criterion is putting out on Blu-Ray this fall.

More blog posts are pending – I have all kinds of things I want to write about, including the ITRA Conference and our trip to Greece, as well as my thoughts on a number of recent events in the media universe. Right now, though, I must run off to the lab for a meeting.

One last parting thought: likeminded souls in the Boston area should check out Readercon this weekend, where I'm hoping to meet up with some old acquaintances (like Ellen Kushner and Nick Mamatas) and meet a few of my favorite authors (like John Clute, Kelly Link, and James Morrow). It'll be the first time in the three years I've been here when Readercon falls on a weekend where I'm actually in town, so I'm thoroughly excited to go.

Oh, and one last thing: other likeminded souls in the Boston area should check out the midnight showing tonight of The Dark Knight at The Somerville Theater in Davis Square. That's where all the cool kids will be (namely myself, Laura, Matt and Clara).

Stay tuned!