The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over — but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, “Jesus, Interrupted”, Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.
“On the street,” wrote FBI special agent Joseph Pistone, who infiltrated the Colombo and later the Bonanno mafia families of New York under the name of Donnie Brasco, “everybody is suspicious of everybody else until you prove yourself.” If someone says, “I am ready to deal with you, pal,” or sports some item of clothing that conventionally indicates he is a criminal, such as a pair of dark glasses, these signals are hardly sufficient to prove that he is a criminal. As a professional thief put it, “language is not in itself a sufficient means of determining whether a person is trustworthy, for some people in the underworld are stool pigeons and some outsiders learn some of the language.” Proving oneself requires tougher tests than cheap talk.
The Big Short by Michael Lewis is finally out for the Kindle (well, it came out two weeks ago, about a month after the hardcover). You might remember the hubbub about the lack of a Kindle version.
Anyway, the book is excellent; I read it pretty much nonstop until finished. Lewis cleverly recasts the story of one of the biggest financial disasters in American history as a heroic tale. Heroic!
I just read J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and in discussing it, I got to wondering about the pronunciation of Zooey. I couldn’t find any record of Salinger discussing the pronunciation, so no one really knows how it’s supposed to sound. This Live Journal post has a few comments from people certain it rhymes with showy. It also has a few comments from people certain it rhymes with dewy. MetaFilter was also non-conclusive. Is it possible the internet doesn’t know?
Actress Zooey Deschanel is named after the book title, but pronounces her name Zoe. However, when asked about Salinger’s pronunciation, Deschanel said “I don’t really care what Salinger says about my name. It’s my name.” So let’s take her with a grain of salt.
For my money, I’m going with Zooey as in Zoo-y. If you want an analytical reason why, I’ll go with doubting the meticulous Salinger would have used the word “Phooey” in the book if the pronunciation was Zoe. If you find certain evidence otherwise, let me know.
Comments for this thread are open for a bit. I swear you guys, I’m going to be moderating, and if there’s any trouble, I’ll turn this comment section right around.
Update:
Via Jeremy Stahl in the comments, a disappointing end to the argument.
In a Guardian excerpt from the forthcoming At Home by Bill Bryson, some mysteries of the home are revealed. My favorite was why forks have four tines. Incidentally, eating forks were introduced by Thomas Coryate who also introduced the umbrella
Eating forks were thought comically dainty and unmanly - and dangerous, too, come to that. Since they had only two sharp tines, the scope for spearing one’s lip or tongue was great, particularly if one’s aim was impaired by wine and jollity. Manufacturers experimented with additional numbers of tines - sometimes as many as six - before settling, late in the 19th century, on four as the number with which people seemed most comfortable. Why four should induce the optimum sense of security isn’t easy to say, but it does seem to be a fundamental fact of flatware psychology.
Over at New York magazine, the Vulture Reading Room is reading/reviewing David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, an almost straight-up transcript of a 5-day Rolling Stone interview with David Foster Wallace in 1996. Participating are D.T. Max (author of a forthcoming DFW biography), Sam Anderson (New York mag book critic), Laura Miller (Salon book critic), Garth Risk Hallberg (from The Millions), and me (blogger, dad, slacker).
David Foster Wallace’s interviews were always show-stoppers: erudite, casual, funny, passionate, and deeply self-aware — like he wasn’t just answering the questions at hand but also interviewing himself, and his interviewer, and the entire genre of interviews. Last month, David Lipsky published essentially the Platonic ideal of the form: the book-length Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself — a sort of DFW version of a DFW interview.
Brought up an atheist, he has twice failed to pass throguh the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the first step toward becoming a Catholic. The last time, he made the mistake of referring to “the cult of personality surrounding Jesus.” That didn’t go over big with the priest, who correctly suspected Wallace might have a bit too much skepticism to make a fully obedient Catholic. “I’m a typical American,” says Wallace. “Half of me is dying to give myself away, and the other half is continually rebelling.”
For the 25th anniversary of his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy talks to a few of the book’s subjects (Bill Gates, Richard Stallman, Steve Wozniak) about how they’ve changed and what hacking means today.
On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” [Stewart Brand] said. “On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” His words neatly encapsulate the tension that has since defined the hacker movement — a sometimes pitched battle between geeky idealism and icy-hearted commerce.
Amazon has opened slightly their data kimono with a look at the most highlighted passages by Kindle users. The results aren’t that interesting (to me) because the bestsellers dominate: some Gladwell, Dan Brown, etc. To make it more useful, they should weigh the results by sales and cram some social in there: the most highlighted passages by my friends = gold.
Taking his central cue from Levitt’s conviction that “incentives matter,” executive producer Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”) directs several introductory segments featuring Levitt (the economist) and Dubner (the journalist) breaking down the book’s main assertions, aided by playful 2-D animation. The first of these sequences borrows from an early chapter in the source material, taking on self-interested real estate agents to explain the authors’ intention of parsing the motives behind many phenomena often taken for granted. While Gordon’s fluffy treatment of his chatty subjects suggests the potential for a “This American Life”-type television series, the individual short films embody their claims with a variety of methods.
Getting books back from the prisoners and letting them pick out new ones is a bit of controlled chaos. We stood outside the iron door to the house with our cart and had two prisoners come out at one time, check off their returned book, and pick out a new one. Each prisoner is allowed one book and one magazine. The most popular books are by far James Patterson’s novels, so popular in fact that we have to lock them up after book service because they tend to disappear. I wonder if James Patterson has any idea. National Geographic is the magazine of choice, and there is an entire box of them to choose from, some as far back as the early 80’s.
Writing for the New Yorker, Ken Auletta surveys the ebook landscape: it’s Apple, Amazon, Google, and the book publishers engaged in a poker game for the hearts, minds, and wallets of book buyers. Kindle editions of books are selling well:
There are now an estimated three million Kindles in use, and Amazon lists more than four hundred and fifty thousand e-books. If the same book is available in paper and paperless form, Amazon says, forty per cent of its customers order the electronic version. Russ Grandinetti, the Amazon vice-president, says the Kindle has boosted book sales over all. “On average,” he says, Kindle users “buy 3.1 times as many books as they did twelve months ago.”
Many compare ebook-selling to what iTunes was able to do with music albums. But Auletta notes:
The analogy of the music business goes only so far. What iTunes did was to replace the CD as the basic unit of commerce; rather than being forced to buy an entire album to get the song you really wanted, you could buy just the single track. But no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books.
I’ve touched on this before, but while people may not want to buy single chapters of books, they do want to read things that aren’t book length. I think we’ll see more literature in the novella/short-story/long magazine article range as publishers and authors attempt to fill that gap.
The NY Times’ Paper Cuts blog calls Cartographies of Time “the most beautiful book of the year”. I cannot disagree. In attempting to answer the question “how do you draw time?”, the authors present page after page of beautiful and clever visual timelines.
Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways-curving, crossing, branching-defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by their geographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history.
A book about Agatha Christie’s working notebooks reveals that the writer known for her intricate plots worked in a highly nonlinear fashion. Sometimes she didn’t even know whodunnit until late in the writing process.
The contents of the notebooks are as multi-dimensional as their Escher-like structure. They include fully worked-out scenes, historical background, lists of character names, rough maps of imaginary places, stage settings, an idle rebus (the numeral three, a crossed-out eye, and a mouse), and plot ideas that will be recognizable to any Christie fan: “Poirot asks to go down to country-finds a house and various fantastic details,” “Saves her life several times,” “Inquire enquire-both in same letter.” What’s more, in between ominous scraps like “Stabbed through eye with hatpin” and “influenza depression virus-Stolen? Cabinet Minister?” are grocery lists: “Newspapers, toilet paper, salt, pepper …” There was no clean line between Christie’s work life and her family life. She created household ledgers, and scribbled notes to self. (“All away weekend-can we go Thursday Nan.”) Even Christie’s second husband, the archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, used her notebooks. He jotted down calculations. Christie’s daughter Rosalind practiced penmanship, and the whole family kept track of their bridge scores alongside notes like, “Possibilities of poison … cyanide in strawberry … coniine-in capsule?”
I don’t know why this approach seems so surprising. From all that I’ve read about how book authors work, writing a book is like sanding wood…you can’t just start with the extra-fine sandpaper and expect a smooth surface.
OMG, Alice for the iPad, paper kids books are dead.
Alice for the iPad is indeed really nice:
My nearly 3-year-old son loves using the iPad. At best, the iPad is a proof-of-concept gadget for adults — they’ll get it right by version three — but it’s perfect for kids right now. It’s just the right size for little hands and laps and the interface is simple, intuitive, and easy to learn.
However, I’d like to assure the childless Rose that if paper books ever go extinct (they won’t), paper children’s books will be the last to go, particularly among the pre-K crowd. E-books are “broken” in several ways that are important to kids, not the least of which is that paper books are super useful as floors in really tall block buildings.
Instead of being against noise, I think we need to begin making a case for silence. This means getting imaginative about expanding our understanding of silence in ways that develop associations between silence and a vibrant, fulfilling life. Anti-noise activists often compare noise pollution to air pollution. But unlike smoke, lots of noises are good, at least some of the time. Instead, we might frame noise as a dietary problem. Most of us absorb far too much sonic junk. We need to develop a more balanced sound diet in which silence, and sounds we associate with quiet states of mind, become part of our daily regimen.
The author, George Prochnik, keeps a silence blog as well.
Around this time, I unwittingly made the first move that would unravel the whole deal. I applied for Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data.
In fiction, Dan Brown was #1 but James Patterson appears *five times* in the top 25. On the nonfiction side, a certain former Alaskan governor (no, not Walter J. Hickel) tops the list. The full list is here. (via the millions)
So why I had found it easier to read from my iPhone? First, an ordinary page of text is split into about four pages. The spacing seems generous and because of this I don’t get lost on the page. Second, the handset’s brightness makes it easier to take in words. “Many dyslexics have problems with ‘crowding’, where they’re distracted by the words surrounding the word they’re trying to read,” says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and chair of the Dyslexia Research Trust. “When reading text on a small phone, you’re reducing the crowding effect.”
Alice in Wonderland is one of the most adapted works in cinema, which is surprising, really, when you reflect on the fact that the book is pretty much unfilmable. There’s no real narrative thread besides ‘Alice is curious’ and the story is little more than a series of tableaux where Carroll can flex his surrealist prose. In light of the recent Burton riff on this very popular story, I thought I’d do a little historical trek through the numerous filmed versions of this famous novel. (No I haven’t seen the 1976 porn version so don’t expect a review).
And let’s not confuse shyness with modesty or humility. Charles Darwin, who was very interested in shyness, correctly diagnosed it as a form of “self-attention” — a preoccupation with self. How do I fit in here? What do they think of me? It’s not always virtuous to sit on one’s personality and refuse to share it.
I don’t have it in front of me right now, but I read David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself a few weeks ago (more on that in an upcoming post, I hope) and IIRC, during his sprawling conversation with David Foster Wallace, Wallace discussed the self-absorption of shyness: in unfamiliar or uncomfortable social situations, the introvert is always thinking of the me. (via fimoculous)
The judges have spoken in a close race between The Lacuna and Wolf Hall. My vote went to Wolf Hall:
All three of the Tournament books I read (including Let the Great World Spin and The Lacuna) were more or less historical fiction, but Wolf Hall was the one that most put the reader into the action; it read very much like nonfiction. For that and Hilary Mantel’s graceful and beautiful and just flat-out great prose, Wolf Hall gets my vote for the Golden Rooster. (There is a Golden Rooster, right?)
Trophy Books - books that are most frequently purchased, but never actually read. Burning the midnight oil - books that keep people up late at night. Read Speed - which books/authors/genres have the lowest word-per-minute average reading rate? Do readers of Glenn Beck read faster or slower than readers of Jon Stewart?
The semifinals in The Morning News Tournament of Books begin today with yours truly attempting to decide between The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.
Consider the book as an object, as a vessel for the novel. Readers are warned against judging books by their appearances before they’ve read the novels within, but designers, publishing companies, and bookstores conspire against us. They use what economists refer to as signalling to compel people to buy (but not necessarily read) books. The physical size and shape, the page thickness, the fonts and colors used, the choice of title, the back- and front-cover blurbs, the embossed book award and/or Oprah stickers, and the cover — especially the cover — are all signals to the potential buyer that (a) this book is worth her time and money, and more importantly, (b) make her feel a certain way about herself: intelligent, hip, involved, safe. When you see a book, you can’t not have an immediate reaction to it. Your brain does so without consent.
Twenty minutes into Let the Great World Spin and I knew everyone would expect it to beat The Lacuna. But which did I go with? Read on…
In a review in Prospect, Matt Ridley, who is no slouch as a science writer himself, calls Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion “one of the best science books in years”. Pretty high praise for what Ridley also calls “the biography of a graph”. Specifically, this graph:
You may have seen it in An Inconvenient Truth in this form. The graph shows the dramatic rise in temperature in the northern hemisphere over the past 100 years caused, presumably, by humans. But as Montford details in his book, the graph is incorrect.
[The author] had standardised the data by “short-centering” them — essentially subtracting them from a 20th century average rather than an average of the whole period. This meant that the principal component analysis “mined” the data for anything with a 20th century uptick, and gave it vastly more weight than data indicating, say, a medieval warm spell.
As often as not, he turned up what he called “ick” investments. In October 2001 he explained the concept in his letter to investors: “Ick investing means taking a special analytical interest in stocks that inspire a first reaction of ‘ick.’” A court had accepted a plea from a software company called the Avanti Corporation. Avanti had been accused of stealing from a competitor the software code that was the whole foundation of Avanti’s business. The company had $100 million in cash in the bank, was still generating $100 million a year in free cash flow-and had a market value of only $250 million! Michael Burry started digging; by the time he was done, he knew more about the Avanti Corporation than any man on earth. He was able to see that even if the executives went to jail (as five of them did) and the fines were paid (as they were), Avanti would be worth a lot more than the market then assumed. To make money on Avanti’s stock, however, he’d probably have to stomach short-term losses, as investors puked up shares in horrified response to negative publicity.
“That was a classic Mike Burry trade,” says one of his investors. “It goes up by 10 times, but first it goes down by half.” This isn’t the sort of ride most investors enjoy, but it was, Burry thought, the essence of value investing. His job was to disagree loudly with popular sentiment. He couldn’t do this if he was at the mercy of very short-term market moves, and so he didn’t give his investors the ability to remove their money on short notice, as most hedge funds did. If you gave Scion your money to invest, you were stuck for at least a year.
Really fascinating. In a recent review, Felix Salmon called The Big Short “probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written”.
The Morning News Tournament of Books is underway with a first round matchup between Nami Mun’s Miles From Nowhere and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. As a semifinal judge, I know at least one of the final two books and for your betting purposes, I’ll open the bidding on that knowledge at, say, $50K.
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