Ode to Books and Cases

I love bookcases almost as much as I love staircases, from a design point of view. (I love it even more when they combine.) I love when they are combined as well. I remember lining up my Babysitter's Club and Boxcar Children and American Girl series just so in the bookcase in the playroom I shared with my sister. These books went on the top shelf, where she couldn't reach. I couldn't really reach them either, unless I stood on the couch.

Later on, we got another bookcase, and lined it with an encyclopedia set a relative gave us, as well as a series on different countries of the world, with statistics for each. I loved browsing those books, and had to stack my young adult novels double, for lack of room. I wrote a report extolling the benefits of ebooks for a 7th grade class, but inside winced at the thought of giving up paper novels. I loved the smell of new ones from Barnes and Noble, and was familiar with the smell of fusty ones that I got from the school library. You cannot spend much time reading and loving books without also falling a little bit in love with their shape and feel.

As an ex-pat, however, it made a lot of sense for me to get a Kindle. It's difficult to find books in English in Taiwan. Plus, if I continue to travel, putting a Kindle in my purse makes a lot more sense than mailing boxes of books. Yet that is what my boyfriend is doing right now. We have a bookcase in our living room, completely full, filled with books that my boyfriend took with him from home, books that people who left Taiwan left with him, and books that I bought in a spending spree at a closing Borders. He thought he might leave the books here, but then he thought that he wanted our kids to be able to read the books in the future. One of his favorite memories is of browsing the bookcases in his grandparents' home.

From one level to another.

I have memories too, of looking at illustrated fairy tale books, encyclopedias filled with photographs and graphs, and a particularly good green thesaurus that my mother had. Because of Google, the internet is very specific. You can search and find exactly what you are looking for. The internet is also full of links that allow you to wikiwalk, but try as they might, web designers cannot replicate the experience of flipping through the pages of a good reference book.

When we went to Costco recently, I thought about how I wanted that for my children, especially when they are small. While technology is great, turning physical pages and looking at non-backlit screens is important for young children.  Books are also by definition curated. A bookcase, by definition, is limited, and a limited choice is often less stressful. Of course, my boyfriend and I probably will squirrel away many books on our ebooks and computers, and probably invest more in books on art and other visual media. My 2nd cousin once removed told me of how she and her brother encountered Frida Kahlo in one of her mother's books.

That is why, some time in the future, when my boyfriend and I have children, we will have real books, and bookcases. I dream of putting books in ascending order; the picture books on the bottom where my children can reach them, and books on "serious issues" on the top shelves where they can reach when they are older. I hope that they will love toddling over to the bottom rungs to pull out their favorite story, that one day they will stand on their toes to reach for a book that interests them, and I hope that they will always strain to reach ever higher.

Staircase of Light

Besides, I think that as Millenials start getting more money and grow out of our hipster phase, we may start investing in books the way we invest in Facebook pictures and twitter posts—as in, we will use them as identity markers. Sure, we may read bodice-ripper romances on our Kindles, but we’ll keep The Omnivore’s Dilemma on our reclaimed wood bookshelves. Also, the pendulum may swing the other way when the printing industry starts to promote "Real Books from Real Trees for Real People."

A Plethora of Storylines: A Feast for Crows Review

I just finished A Feast for Crows, or at least I finished Arya and Sam's parts. I felt bad about skipping ahead, since I value residing cover to cover, but it's hard to leave a cliffhanger chapter when you know you're not going to find out what's going to happen for 12 more chapters.

What I found at the end though, was that my skipping around reflected George R. R. Martin's choice to split A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons not by timeline, but by characters. I thought that his choice of who to put in which book a bit odd though. Characters are getting further and further apart, geographically, but I would have stuck to known entities in Affc, such as those in King's Landing, the Wall, Dorne, maybe Meereen. That would have left only those who were going on quests, but more importantly, those who all those at home are wondering about. That way Jaime and Cersei would continue to wonder about Tyrion, Jaime might wonder about Brienne, Jon would wonder about Sam, and we could all wonder about Arya, Brandon, and Sansa.

I'm not sure why the book was split the way it was. Maybe an editor went through it, marked all the ones that mentioned crows feasting, and said: those. I've never seen such heavy-handed references to the title before, though (maybe because of the references) I did get the idea of the decay left over now that the war is at a hiatus. I also think that if A Feast for Crows had followed Jon, that would have been an interesting play on how the Crows are doing.

How to Cultivate Style and Substance

Penelope Trunk has an interesting post about why the publishing industry sucks. I have to admit I merely skimmed it. Though her writing, informal, assured, and confessional, is mostly entertaining, I wasn't in the mood for her digressive lists today. The main point of the blog post is that the publishing industry has no idea how to promote books, mostly because Amazon is withholding their demographic information of book buyers. Also, again, publishing is dying. The exception may be fiction writing, of which the acceptance by a publishing house is still considered a measure of quality.

This may change though. After all, although Shades of Grey, a self-published novel, is almost universally derided as an example of bad writing, it's still a best seller. In addition, the Twilight series, published by Little, Brown and Company (of the Little Brown Handbook?!) is also a best seller, a major movie franchise, and also generally derided as an example of bad writing (among other things). Therefore, publishing companies may be willing to publish more and more best-selling trash in order to stay afloat.

My boyfriend wrote a post about why writing is hard. Writing well is difficult and writing something worth saying is almost impossible. I think those are two separate things though. Writing well is about style and is a skill that must be honed. Writing something worth saying is about content and critical thinking. I'm not sure where this comes from. Probably from one of the following a) inspiration b) a unique perspective of the world c) research d) experience e) all of the above.

When teaching writing, we do try to have students come up with unique theses and then make them support them with logical and convincing topic sentences, concrete detail, and commentary. The other half is to get them to write well.

Unfortunately, these two things do not always overlap. I am fond of reading The New York Times, but I often read the "Style" section, where articles with subjects as insipid as New York socialites holding viewing parties of Downton  Abbey (sometimes dressing up in tiaras). I have to admit, though, that New York Times articles are invariably well-written.

On the other hand, I also like reading Psychology Today. The articles are not always brimming with content, but the main problem is the inconsistency of the writing. Some articles are very short; so much so that they can hardly be called articles. Some articles are overly long; one article was 3 webpages long, getting to its main point in the last page. The extra padding did nothing to illuminate the idea. Some articles are weighed down by gimmicky terms in a bid for unique branding. They are all written by people with advanced degrees in psychology. Many of them spend their careers in pursuit of unique ideas in psychology.

Here's the rub. To be a skilled writer, according to a book by Malcolm Gladwell, one of those writers who has mastered both being skilled and being interesting, one should have 10,000 hours of practice. Writers probably develop that skill by writing for hours a day, sometimes about insipid subjects. To be an interesting idea, you need to . . . do things other than write.

After all, it is the job of lots of PhDs in the world to think of interesting ideas, which they then try to prove them true (at least some of the time). Most of them then proceed to write badly* about them because they were too busy researching to develop writing skills.

Let's just say that having something worth saying has to do with creativity, something as ambiguous as inspiration. People have endeavored to study it though. Research implies that creativity comes from having time to think alone, but also exposure to different opinions. Supposedly, one discovers one's unique perspective of the world through opposition to others. Ways to discover this opposition could occur through research or experience.

In which case the best way to write something with both style and substance would be to read a lot of well-written texts on a variety of interesting ideas, or at the very least a lot of texts on a variety of interesting ideas, at least some of which are well-written. We can then do what Buzzfeed does and just take popular ideas and then rewrite them in a more coherent, more developed way. But the most important thing is to read; read like we breathe.

*as stated by my social psychology professor, Matthew Lieberman.