On libraries: They are magical →

The only thing missing from this awesome rant is the old, “Dude, someone should totally start a Netflix for books!” It’s been done already. It’s called a library.

"I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before."

Colson Whitehead, interviewed by Harper’s about his upcoming novel Zone One. (via thebronzemedal)

“Cloud Atlas,” by David Mitchell

This was a fun book to read. It’s divided into six stories, and each one has its own distinct style, characters, setting, and mood. It was great because everything was always changing, and I didn’t know what changes were coming next. Spoilers follow.

Home and the desire or impossibility of returning home figures into the plot of each of the stories. Adam Ewing, on his long-delayed boat journey, wants desperately to return to his wife and family. Robert Frobisher has been banned from his parents’ home (the “Frobishery”) and, despite his glib statements to the contrary, would like nothing more than to be welcomed back again. Both Luisa Rey’s apartment and her wealthy parents’ home are invaded by varying agents of that story’s antagonist. Imprisoned Timothy Cavendish must plot his escape. Sonmi~451 realizes that her “home” is a lie and, once freed from it, she can never return. Zach’ry’s home is destroyed by the Kona people, he must live out the rest of his life in exile, keeping its memory alive through stories.

In fact, the entire novel can be read as a sort of hero’s journey — except the journey is through time and the reader is the one who takes it. We begin at “home,” with a good-hearted if naïve character guiding us, and find our ourselves on an unexpected journey through time and space. The complete metanarrative moves into the future and back into the past, or up into the future (and into the clouds of the title) and back to the ground again, as though the text is scaling a mountain and then coming back down. That the central story — “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” — has at its center a literal journey up a mountain and down again makes the narrative mountain seem even more deliberate. After we journey back down through a long series of climaxes, we wind up back with Adam Ewing again and on the doorstep of his literal home. But like the hero in the traditional hero’s journey, we have changed, and thus everything around is altered beyond recognition. Every glimmer of technology or subjugation now horribly prefigures Sonmi~451 and Zach’ry.

I loved reading Cloud Atlas, because it showed me how a unique text can still constitute a novel. Even with six very different parts, a complete narrative still emerges. In fact, the overall structure of novel makes that metanarrative even more powerful.

Amazon / Wikipedia

The State of Publishing →

This has been an interesting few years for the book industry. There have been many changes and realignments, and these changes have led many to predict that (a) reading is dead; (b) books are dead; (c) publishing is dead; (d) all printed matter is dead. Or that all of the above, if not already dead, will be dead very soon.

The good news is that there isn’t as much bad news as popularly assumed. In fact, almost all of the news is good, and most of it is very good. Book sales are up, way up, from twenty years ago. Young adult readership is far wider and deeper than ever before. Library membership and circulation is at all-time high. The good news goes on and on.

“Some good news from the world of books,” from McSweeney’s. Not at all satire and very very hopeful: they’ve asked fifteen researchers to look into the health of the publishing industry, and will be posting the results throughout the week.

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booksnbuildings:

Library of the Colnaghi gallery. (via)

(via booklover)

"An unread book is all possible stories." →

So begins Kirsty Logan’s essay Confined by Pages: The Joy of Unread Books. It’s a beautiful look at the power of imagination, and how unopened books can contain greater stories than anyone can possibly write down on paper.

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I want to live here.

misplacedmemory:

garyoldman | les autres | Ohio Memory | feuilleton

Interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, photographer unknown, 1874.

In 1874 the Public Library of Cincinnati took possession of a small building intended to be an opera house. According to John Fleishman, “the parcel at 629 Vine Street was transformed in two stages into a library building that startled America with its cutting edge design. Its vast Main Hall featured five tiers of cast-iron book alcoves that could house over 200,000 volumes.”

(via fyeakbookshelves)

I know exactly how Holden Caulfield feels. Whenever I read anything by Craig Thompson I feel the same, whether I’m reading Blankets or Carnet du Voyage. Lately I’ve been getting this feeling just by looking at his sketchbook.

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye

The Books They Carried →

Anglobibliofile examines photographer Jason Travis’ documentation of what Atlantans are carrying in their bags/purses/briefcases/pockets. Not surprisingly, many of them are carrying books. (The set, located on Travis’ Flickr account, is called “Personas.”) It’s a cool look into readers’ private lives.

Good reads: "Magic for Beginners," by Kelly Link →

It’s a little longer than most of my good reads, but “Magic for Beginners” is worth it. It won the 2006 Nebula Award and 2006 Locus Award for best novella and is the title story of her awesome second collection (which can be downloaded here under a Creative Commons license).

If you like this opening sentence you’re sure the love the rest:

Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.

Boy, do I ever.

52books:

The smell of e-books just got better

Ah, my new cologne is here.

Paris Review Interviews: Kurt Vonnegut →

INTERVIEWER: The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse Five, I believe.

VONNEGUT: Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any new thoughts?

VONNEGUT: I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one.

INTERVIEWER: And who was that?

VONNEGUT: Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.

Ouch. (via)

July reading list

Fiction

• Annabel Scheme (December 2009)
• Tainaron (January 2010)
• The Things They Carried (March 2010)
• Love in the Ruins (May 2010)
• The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (June 2010)
• The Invisible Bridge (July 2010)
• Prodigal Summer
• What is the What
• And You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Nonfiction

• The Portable MFA in Creative Writing
• Sickness Unto Death
• Writing Down the Bones
• The Artful Edit

"

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

"

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. I just finished reading The Invisible Bridge, and after the horror at the end of the war I could only wish that things would happen as Billy Pilgrim sees them.