Reading in a Digital World: On the path to conversion?

We've been having "the discussion" in our house.  Should we buy a Kindle or an iPad and take our reading into the twenty-first century?  If you like reading, you've probably had "the discussion" at your house too.  Heck, maybe you're reading the latest installment in the Twilight series from the Kindle DX.  Hardback?  So medieval!

I admit, I've been dragging my feet on this one.  I trained as a medievalist; I think vellum's pretty cool.  How can a screen compete with books the size of paving stones, precious metals, and images like these?  Not that I own any books like the manuscript linked above, but still.  For my fellow reader (FR) and spouse, though, the transition looks to be easy.  He "test drove" reading an e-book, using a PC and iPhone app called Stanza recently.  For him, the switch went flawlessly; in fact, I think he finished the book faster than he usually does.

The difference I think lies in our reading habits (although this Wall Street Journal blog post has an overview of a survey of e-books and gender).  My FR does his reading almost exclusively online.  News, blogs, it's all on screen and more information is a click away.  Switching topics is as easy as opening a new tab.  For him, the ability to have thousands of one books available through one, portable device is appealing.  In other words, e-books fit in with his already-established pattern of reading. 

My pattern of reading is different.  Reading is the last thing I do at night before falling asleep. Books are stacked haphazardly on my nightstand (a habit I might have to revisit if I move to a Kindle or iPad) and throughout the house.  On vacation I squish books into suitcases and carry-ons.  I pick books up, start and stop them at will, riffle through the pages.  My pattern of reading is firmly in the dark ages.

One thing this discussion has encouraged me to think about is the kinds of situations where I might actually want to use an e-book.  So far, I've ruled out vacations and plane travel:   one plus for a bound book is that you don't have to wait until after takeoff to read, and I wonder how a Kindle fares when hitting the beach?  Likewise, I can't imagine sitting down with a toddler and firing up The Cat in the Hat on the iPad, unless I really wanted to test the warranty. 

Realistically, we'll wind up with a Kindle or an iPad, and I'll venture further into e-books.  But I can't help but wonder how different the experience will be?  A few years ago, while waiting for a train in Birmingham, England, I had three hours to kill on a warm summer day.  I dashed into a City Centre Waterstone's, bought a book at on recommendation of a friendly clerk, and settled down to read in a churchyard. I carried the book home with me and it's sitting on a shelf today, a reminder of my trip.  How will that look on the Kindle?

Dear readers, if you have any thoughts on e-books, please leave a comment below!

Struggling in Shop Class. Again.

I am a poster child for Matthew B. Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft.  I haven't taken a shop class since eighth grade.  And I wasn't particularly good at it.  Shop class for me was a series of lessons in the depths of incompetence.  My little plastic picture frame had bubbles in it from where I heated it too quickly when bending and shaping it.  Sewing in home economics class wasn't much better.  I could never keep even pressure on the little "pressure foot" that ran the sewing machine.  It either crept along or raced as I tried to keep one eye on the thread that inevitably tangled and another on the clock in the twenty minutes we had to complete the entire project.  I had twenty minutes because I'd spent the previous two weeks trying to thread the bobbin on the sewing machine.  Seriously, those projects were bad.  My sixth grade telephone pillow, tragically understuffed, resembled a giant pink and black clutch purse.  And we won't talk about the hot pink and white polka dotted ensemble I "assembled" for our eighth grade sewing  unit.

So go figure that in my early twenties I took up knitting, have produced several complex projects including actual apparel that has been worn outside the house, and am considering taking a class in, what else, sewing. So much for "I was an eighth grade home ec. failure"

Matthew Crawford has an answer for this.  He argues that people's interest in making their own clothes, growing their own food, and building their own decks is because of their desire to bring things closer to home:

We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it.  This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home.  Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the global economy.    

But there's a big difference between enjoying completing a home improvement project like installing a deck and building a house.  Likewise, a difference between knitting a sweater and making all of one's clothes.   I prefer Crawford's other point which is stated in the book's subtitle:  "An inquiry into the value of work."  I'll have more to say after I finish the book.  In the meantime,  I'd love to hear your opinions about the value of trades, blue collar versus white collar work and home improvement projects, dear readers. 

 

Beyond the Threshold of Immortality

Read Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and you'll never look at a blood sample in the same way again. The book, which follows success of scientists' successful attempts to grow and sustain the first immortal line of human cells in a lab, of course raises questions about ownership of genetic material: to whom ultimately belongs the rights to blood and organs, the scrapings of tissues we leave behind in little labeled vials when we go to our doctors' offices for routine tests? Given that millions of dollars can turn on our cells and the patents that can come from them, the question is far from academic.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is far more than a medical history. It is a biography, and, finally, an elegy, for a woman whose cells contributed to advances in medicine such as the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, and in vitro fertilization but who has been identified in textbooks, magazines, and on internet sites as Helen Lane. Even today her cells are known by the abbreviation HeLa. Skloot helps to shed light on the woman behind the cells and the family she left behind when she died of cervical cancer. The most moving parts of the book are Skloot's descriptions of the Lacks family fathoming and measuring their loss through the lens of the HeLa cervical cells.

By reminding us of the woman who exists behind the research, Skloot shows us both how far we've come and how far we need to go.

I'm baaack!

Dear readers,
Wow! I knew it had been a while, but not almost 2 years! Tempus fugit. Life and finishing my dissertation have kept me from informal writing. But the opus horribilis has been filed, and today I'm officially free to come back to reading and writing about books, culture, and whatever else catches my eye.

Welcome back and just plain welcome. If you stumble upon this collection of opinions, rants, and musings, please do leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you!

Commentary: Damned if you do. . .

I recently read two books, one silly, one serious. I don't recommend Jerramy Fine's Somedaw My Prince Will Come. It's a silly, silly book. Its subtitle, True Adventures of a Wannabe Princess is, quite frankly, nauseating. This would be a fine entry in the weaker sort of chick lit category, but is frightening when contemplated as a memoir. Bascially, Fine decides at a tender age that she's meant to be a princess of the English Royal Family (first her parents and later she decide that the strength of her resolution is because she was a princess, or at least nobility, in a previous life). At the age of six, she decides that her future spouse would be Peter, son of Princess Anne. The rest of the book chronicles her attempts to remake herself into a "proper" upper-class Englishwoman and meet her future prince. One of the book's strengths is its voice; although Fine is over thirty, she sounds quite convincingly like the teenager and young twenty-something her book covers.

On the other hand, I can recommend Kate Clifford Larson's book on Mary Surratt, The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. Larson has done her homework on the scholarship surrounding Lincoln's assassination as well as the conspirators' trials. Larson does a nice job balancing clear writing with an eye for larger detail such as the role border states played in the Civil War, and the truly divided feelings of border states' residents without getting bogged down in the scholarship.

These books have no apparent connection on the surface. What I found striking about them is the ways both books undercut the messages of femininity they apparently espouse. Lawson's Mary Surratt and Fine's self-portrait wind up defying the assumptions that go with wife/mother and would-be princess.

Surratt was the first woman executed by the US Government. Her crime was conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Larson's book is an exploration of Surratt's role in the plot, her trial, and the evidence against her. In the Introduction, Larson admits that she thought Surratt was "more innocent" (xiv) when she began her research, although she later changed her mind. A crucial point to Larson's exploration is the conflict between Surratt's real-life and Victorian values. Larson suggests that although Surratt was part of "a new breed of troublesome woman" (xviii), one that included woman soldiers and spies during the war, the gender norms of the day resisted the idea that a woman could be involved in such a horrific crime. Added to this was her age and the fact that she was a mother. Post-trial appeals that asked for commutation of her sentence gave her age and her gender as the reason.

I have a hard time seeing Surratt as a "troublesome wwoman," if that term is defined as a "woman doing things atypical to our expectations." Although Surratt's son, John, was a spy for Confederate forces, and a young woman who was a spy, Sarah Slater, stayed at the Surratt boardinghouse occasionally, what I find interesting is that while Mary Surratt could be called a "troublesome woman" by conspiring to kill the president, her participation appears to have fallen largely along mid-Victorian notions of women's participation in society. Surratt did not shoot Lincoln herself, nor did she attack any of the other men whom Booth targeted. Instead, she offered both her Washington boarding house and her Surrattsville tavern in southern Maryland as a refuge for conspirators and a hiding place for weapons. Despite her travels back and forth between her two properties, she did not hide guns herself in her tavern; instead she sent one of the male conspirators to do so instead. Larson echoes Andrew Johnson's comment that Surratt "kept the nest which hatched the egg" (xix), itself a very maternal image. Surratt appears to have been a kind of conspirators' Angel in the House. As Larson herself concludes, "In providing a warm home, private encouragement, and material support to Abraham Lincoln's murderer, she offered more than most of Booth's supporters" (230). Ironically, the woman executed for assassination, one of the most notorious characters of the day, participated in one of the most traditionally feminine ways.

Fine, on the other hand, appears to be caught in the most traditional narrative of all: the faithful girl, waiting for her prince. Fine does anything but wait, however. She moves to London, enrolls in the LSE, finds a job, makes the "right" friends, lives in the "right" places, and learns how to fit in with her new upper-class crowd. While wrapped up in finding Mr. Royal Right (with lots of Mr. Slightly-Less-Exalted Wrongs) and meditations on why Fine can't seem to leave her dream world behind and grow up, at its heart, this narrative is the quintessential American tale of how to recreate yourself. Fine is Jay Gatsby without the tragic ending. For all its fluff and silliness, Fine is an example of grit, determination, and the desire to be somewhere and someone else. If her choice seems narrow and deplorable, Fine does achieve, in the end, a meeting with her fantasy spouse, a long-term job in London, a boyfriend, and, eventually, some perspective.

Both Jerramy Fine, or really "Jerramy Fine," and Mary Surratt show both how pervasive our narratives of women as princesses in waiting, wives, and nurterers are. And yet, both books hint at how complicated they can be.

Review: "Farewell My Subaru," by Doug Fine

A Fine Green Life

Doug Fine's book is subtitled "An Epic Adventure in Local Living," and there are some epic-worthy moments in the book: Fine fording the flooding Mimbres river in his Subaru, named the LOVEsubee, with two kid goats to get back to his ranch; his subsequent fordings of the river to fetch hay for the goats; being caught out in a epic thunderstorm during a run. But these moments are leavened by humor that does much to undo the "epicness" of his achievement. Consider this description of Fine fording the Mimbres, against all advice, with the two baby goats in the car:

Mulling my choices from the driver's seat, I opted for the "going as fast as I can will get me across faster" method. This meant that I left foot-deep tire tracks in the moments before the LOVEsubee hit the river and went briefly vertical as the goats loudly wondered, "Do we not have any say in who adopts us?"

A scene where a chicken is snatched by a coyote in Fine's horrified sight is, despite the trauma, rendered equally funny. Fine has a talent for making the very hard work of growing one's own food, protecting rosebushes from goats, protecting livestock (chickens, goats) from predators, and installing and maintaining solar panels and related equipment seem easy. Bill McKibben, one of the authors quoted on the book's jacket, concluded that "It'll make you want to move!"

Moving, or at least, changing his lifestyle to become more green, more sustainable, is part of Fine's motive. He was determined not to jettison such trappings of modern life as his Netflix subscription, subwoofers, and ice cream, and, by and large, he appears to have been successful; one casualty, however, was his Subaru, traded in for a diesel Ford F-250 (christened the Ridiculous Oversized American Truck, ROAT for short) so that Fine could drive on recycled restaurant grease rather than gasoline. Fine includes little snippets of information throughout the book such as this one: "Organic farming can produce enough food to sustain even a larger population than the current worldwide one, without increasing the amount of agricultural land needed." Presumably, these tidbits will help the reader be motivated to make some lifestyle changes. In his afterword, Fine offers more advice for living sustainably and detaching from the grid.

Still, after reading Fine's book, I can't agree with Bill McKibben's encomium. I didn't want to move to a remote valley in another state to give over my life to food and livestock raising. Having grown up with various animals large and small (dogs, cats, rabbits, horses, donkeys), I know how much work they can take. And my 8-5 job is neither portable nor does it allow me to spend the primary part of my day on growing my food. Presumably, Fine's occupations provide him more flexibility. On his website, he describes himself as "Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder." "Where's the book for people like me?" I found myself grumbling at the end of the book.

Despite its idealism and realistic struggles with living locally (Fine swears off Wal-Mart in New Mexico but can't resist visiting Whole Foods and Trader Joe's on a trip to Arizona), Farewell My Subaru is not a how-to manual in sustainable living. Fine's life at Funky Butte Ranch may simply be too unrealistic for many people to achieve. However, it might inspire you to make some small changes. Realistically, there are many things people with 8-5 jobs can do to live more green. As Fine points out, we can buy the environmentally friendly toilet paper to send a message to CEO's among other things.

So, even if you can't quit your job and move to a remote place like Fine, or Thoreau for that matter, to change your life, read Fine's book for its humor and its attempts to make real change. And next time you're at the store, buy that Seventh Generation Dish Detergent.

Reading Hand-Wringing: Warner's "Domestic Disturbances

Last week, the New York Times published a story on expensive sleep-away camps and the lengths the staff go to to accomodate the questions, demands, and complaints of parents. One camp employs a full-time staff member to do nothing but handle parents' calls and to attempt to help parents overcome the need to be connected 24/7 to their children (some parents flaut the "no cell phone" rule at one camp by sending their children to camp with two cell phones so that when one is confiscated, they can still call their children).

Judith Warner responded recently in her weekly column in the Times, Domestic Disturbances, to this story. Warner analyzes the cause for such behaviors in the course of her column. But it's her conclusion at the end of the article that frustrates me. Warner ultimately advises that it's up to the institutions to rein in this behavior:

The buck has to stop somewhere. It's clearly not going to be stopped by this generation of befuddled parents. It's time that the professionals we entrust with our children stopped catering to their "clients" and started treating them like grown-ups.

I find Warner's shift in the last sentence (which is the last sentence of the column) interesting. Up to this point, she has written as a detached observer. However, in the last sentence, she lets herself, as much as the obsessive parents she's observing, off the hook. I conclude that, while Warner doesn't go so far as to consider herself "befuddled," she too, is incapable of "acting like a grownup," and must look to those professionals to do it for her. I have found this stance, alterntively obsessed and dismissive, typical of Warner's column. In the first column of Domestic Disturbances I read, Warner mulled over the problems of "supersized" birthday parties while making petits fours for her own daughter's party. In Warner's cloumn, you're likely to hear what the other obsessed parents think, her children think, and what outrageous thing the sadistic PTA requires now. There are sporadic forays into policy such as the occasional columns on birth control, behavioral drugs such as Ritalin, and parental leave. What's frustrating about reading Warner is that she's clearly a very intelligent woman unable to separate herself from her own neurotic, obsessive parental lens.

While Warner is quite good at pointing out the foibles of the helicopter parent set, she's less adept at confronting the consequences in ways that might lead to change at either a policy or individual level. Demanding that it's up to the professionals to set boundaries with parents ignores the negative results already taking place from this mindset. A brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education on teacher attrition quoted the 2005 Met-Life "Survey of the American Teacher" which stated that, among other things, new teachers were stressed by their ". . .relationships (or lack thereof) with parents." So much for the professionals being able to change the parents' behavior. Read some of the comments after Warner's columns and you'll find the same dreary arguments that surround modern parenting, especially the so-called "Mommy Wars," repeated ad infinitum. The sad thing is that some readers see only their own fears confirmed, rather than anything to challenge their assumptions. One respondent to the camp column admitted that she, as the parent of young children, would be a "neurotic overworried micromanaging mother" if that would get her children "a spot in a winner take all society." Her final comment is indicative of the problem Warner brings up but doesn't confront:

But regardless of how society is going, I will teach them human kindness and ethics and hope that these things will serve them well and don't backfire and place them somewhere on the loser heap.

So our choices are either to be demanding, difficult and successful or kind, ethical losers? Perfect Madness, indeed.