A few months ago I listened to some excerpts from this book, and finally got around to actually reading the whole thing.

There’s something in the way Gomez has written this book that kept eliciting these knee-jerk, argumentative responses, and I’d find myself angrily relating some piece of what I read nearly every day that I was reading this book. I suppose even from the title, it’s apparent that he’s taking an incredibly provocative stance. The crux of his thesis is an analogy between music and books, and he aims to prove that books will inevitably follow music into the purely digital world. The comparison doesn’t sit so cleanly with me — recorded music is so different from books. Music existed for thousands of years before recorded music was invented. Yet books are so unto themselves. I find it unlikely in some apocalyptic scenario where books and digital gadgets were gone (and only real-time oral presentations were available for storytelling) that we would continue to see such complex narrative works.

While Gomez disclaims at the beginning that he’s not looking at how any of this will affect libraries and universities, that he’s looking primarily at adult trade publishing, I don’t think the debate can really exclude any of that. He might call that “bloat,” but I think those are key parts of the industry, almost more than adult trade publishing. I’m still concerned about how a push towards digital reading will impact educational communities that don’t have the financial ability to stay on top of potentially expensive technologies.

All that said, I do think at some point the right ebook reader will come along, and we’ll see a lot more books in electronic form. Right about now, I could do with an easy search function for this book — too bad Print is Dead isn’t on Google Books. But I don’t really agree with Gomez that printing companies will instantly go out of business (what about printers that print things other than books?), and books will instantly become just nostalgic collectors items. I don’t think publishers are “irresponsible” for not pursuing electronic books more aggressively, since they did on the first push, but the technology wasn’t there yet. And it’s still not quite there. Books and print are still very alive.

Unless kids today seriously cannot take to reading books, in which case I don’t think just books will die, but novels and the types of works that are too tied to the book format themselves.

This is one of those books that I didn’t know anything about when I started, and now that I’ve finished I have since been reading up about it and Jane Bowles and still feel like I missed something. I heard this mentioned on Show Me Your Titles film podcast as a suitable pairing to the movie Daisies. Thinking about the two together is the only thing that has made the book make any sense. They both involve two friends who wander off the path of “goodness,” though in the movie, that seems to mean eating a lot and other ridiculous activities.

In this novel, the ladies are incredibly privileged and attempt to abandon their lives, but not in any sense that they own up to their privilege. Miss Goering seems to think she will achieve sainthood through following her whims to sell her house and live in the country, to move in with a man who calls himself a “bum,” to then follow the next guy who pays her any mind. Mrs Copperfield goes to Panama with her husband and becomes attached to a prostitute. It seems like there is a lot of sexual aspects that are only vaguely implied. The GLBTQ encyclopedia says:

Bowles’s family and her lover, Helvetia Perkins, rejected her first novel, Two Serious Ladies, as too obviously lesbian, but despite recognition that the novel’s main theme is women’s sexuality, the novel’s lesbian content has yet to be seriously considered.

I read this out of Bowles’ collected works, which includes an introduction by Truman Capote. He mentions how she speaks several languages fluently and “perhaps this is why the dialogue of her stories sounds, or sounds to me, as though it has been translated into English from some delightful combination of other tongues.” The GLBTQ entry also mention this “curiously formal yet mocking” speech. It definitely lends a certain atmosphere to the story.

While I can’t say that I enjoyed this very much as I was reading it, I feel like I appreciate it more now that I’ve finished. It’s always strange when that happens.

I couldn’t quite figure out sometimes if things in this book were supposed to be funny or not and having to think about it got a little annoying. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was so good, and this is entertaining enough.. But something felt missing in this one.

The story is all third person but alternates between the points of view of a four family members, each of whom is in the midst of their own (up until now) private crisis. It reads quick because the chapters are so short and lead into each other, almost J.K.-Rowling-style. What I liked about it was how a lot of the interwoven stories involve miscommunication, so one chapter will have a character realizing or deciding on something only to find another character reveal something in the following chapter that will foreshadow an impending conflict.

Maybe it was that one gory chapter that I couldn’t even read that spoiled it for me. I carried a certain level of anxiety that there would be some kind of reprise for the rest of the book. Needless to say, I probably wouldn’t have read the book if it had come with this cover or one involving of these drawings by Haddon.

Back in 2002 I wasn’t yet officially, or perhaps consciously, interested in graphic design, but heard about Chip Kidd’s first novel The Cheese Monkeys somewhere random and put it on my Christmas list. That one is about a guy who goes to a university to study art and ends up in an intense design class that involves lots of outrageous projects. This one picks up a few years later after he’s graduated, as he sets off for his first job at an advertising agency.

Both of these books obviously have really creative, interesting designs since Kidd did them himself (well, the cover design is credited to Bulbous Medulla — with artwork by Charles Burns and lettering by Chris Ware — but I think The Cheese Monkeys said the same thing? It was in his book of book design). The stories themselves involve lots of pre-computer design nostalgia, not to mention general 1950/60s nostalgia through specific brands of products that are mentioned. But while the first one is full of quirky, funny situations that are kind of fantastic in a “life isn’t really that interesting” sort of way, this one attempts to pair the quirky, funny stuff with some existential angst — the combination doesn’t always mesh.

Additionally Kidd is sometimes very explanatory about technical design concepts and other times not. So people who don’t know a lot about design will sometimes not get things and people who do know a lot about design might feel annoyed that he’s explaining so much. I can’t remember if that was similar in The Cheese Monkeys, but then I knew less when I read that one.

I imagine I’ll hold onto these books just because they are so attractive and at some point I will read them again. But there isn’t anything so astounding about the stories, which I guess means that form triumphs over content in these books.

French and emo naïveté turned coquette frolicking around a rented villa on the Riviera—thematic pairings for an ideal summer read? Narrated by the precocious teenager not long after the events happened, it dramatizes her meddling in her “affectionate rogue” father’s love life while pursuing her own sexual conquest on the side. There’s something about Cécile’s voice that is beguiling though she seems a little too self-aware, even with a few months (or so) of hindsight to work with.

While the title translates as “Hello, Sadness,” it is itself the French translation of the Billie Holiday song “Good Morning, Heartache.”

I loved A Field Guide to Getting Lost, so it was only a matter of time before something else by Rebecca Solnit wound up on my hold list. This one is a pretty impressive history of walking, which has a rather left-leaning gait at times.

For whatever reason the second section, covering “From the Garden to the Wild” kept making me doze off on the train. Maybe I was just really tired or something, but those chapters all felt a little too academic and detailed, especially the entire chapter about William Wordsworth (who was an important walker no doubt), but so many quotes of his poetry? Were they really all necessary? I kept skipping around looking for something to latch onto before finally jumping ahead to the next section, “Lives of the Streets,” which looks at urban walking in cities after the Industrial Revolution. Maybe I can relate more to the story of De Quincey’s time wandering London where Solnit says at one part, “Streets were already a place for those who had no place, a site to measure sorrow and loneliness in the length of walks.”

The kind of beautiful thing about this book is that it manages to be very broad in scope while keeping a steady pace (save, perhaps only for my taste, the section “From the Garden to the Wild”) — if I tried to touch on everything this book covers, it would turn into a big boring list. It’s the sort of book you can only really get by reading it.

There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude—a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars. In the country one’s solitude is geographical—one is altogether outside society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the nonhuman. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one’s secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries. This unchartered identity with its illimitable possibilities is one of the distinctive qualities of urban living, a liberatory state for those who come to emancipate themselves from family and community expectation, to experiment with subculture and identity. It is an observer’s state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life’s most refined pleasures.