On 10 Years of Reading

llibreria,
originally uploaded by Mor (bcnbits).

My literature project has been in full swing for ten years now. It
started when I took a year out between school and university, and I
was brow-beaten by a co-worker who looked down at me for watching so
much television. That year was one of the best years of my life for
reading - I covered a great many of the classics, like Moby
Dick, and a lot of H.G. Wells. It marked the beginning, and over on librarything I'm keeping track of everything I've read since that year. What came before, I've hurriedly buried in the depths of my memory. Sure, I read before I was eighteen, but what did I read? Star Trek and Star Wars novels mostly. They weren't a waste of time - Peter David (Star Trek) and Timothy Zahn (Star Wars) are two excellent writers, and I thank them for helping me stick with reading in the first place. But as much as I read, my father would never say that I was 'well-read,' and with the added motivation of showing my co-worker I was no dullard, I set about my task.

Ten years later, I'm about to finish reading book number 300. This
happens to be "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton, which I am very much enjoying. But as much as I'm enjoying reading new books, I think it's high time I revisited some of those that charmed me, perplexed me, or informed me over the last ten years.

I spent a very enjoyable hour earlier this afternoon working through my librarything catalogue, adding the tag 'to_reread' to those books which fell into one of those categories, and came up with a list of 55 that I want to return to with the benefit of age. 55 is a lot of books, mind you, and I wouldn't be surprised if it takes me two or more years to work through all of them - keeping in mind, of course, that I will often be tempted by the new, by the unread, and will want to add to my tally and work towards my lifetime target (currently the rather random 2000).

Here they are, then: the books I'll be reading between now and when I turn 30, more or less, along with reasons for wanting to read them again.

Personal Favourites

One of the most wonderful friendships I currently enjoy began thanks to Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence," and the conversations we had together after this introduction. Now I want to read again those books that had the greatest impression on me personally, and that I hold closest to my heart and my sensibilities. It's one thing to say, for instance, that "The Razor's Edge" is my favourite book - but it's quite a shameful thing to admit to having read it only once.

1. 1984 (George Orwell)


2. Animal Farm (George Orwell)


3. The Beach (Alex Garland)


4. The Tesseract (Alex Garland)


5. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)


6. Contact (Carl Sagan)


7. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)


8. For Whom The Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)


9. Generation X (Douglas Coupland)


10. London Fields (Martin Amis)


11. The New York Trilogy (Paul Auster)


12. The Notebook (Agota Kristof)


13. The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham)


14. Samarkand (Amin Maalouf)


15. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)

Potential Favourites

I read these too quickly; I didn't pay enough attention; I've since changed and would now enjoy these books more, or less; simply put, I haven't decided. These books I want to read again so that I can really decide if I loved them or simply liked them.

1. Boredom(Alberto Moravia)


2. A Confederate General from Big Sur(Richard Brautigan)


3. Crime and Punishment(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)


4. Ethan Frome(Edith Wharton)


5. I Am Legend(Richard Matheson)


6. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea(Yukio Mishima)


7. Tallien(Frederic Tuten)

Thank you Stamford Library

Back in the day, my local library used to have a carousel devoted to European fiction, and it was one of the greatest collections of exotic literature I have ever known. To a young man making his first tentative steps into the world of serious reading, it was like a fire in the night, luring him closer and closer. I have read a lot since, and I'd love to return to where it all started. Sadly, the days of the carousel have long since come to an end, and a lot of the books have been sold off. But I will find them again, and hopefully experience for a second time the magic of the unfamiliar and esoteric.

1. The Left-Handed Woman(Peter Handke)


2. In The Dutch Mountains(Cees Nooteboom)


3. Closely Observed Trains(Bohumil Hrabal)


4. The Hourglass(Danilo Kis)


5. The Outsider(Albert Camus)


6. Rebellion(Joseph Roth)


7. The Castle(Franz Kafka)


8. The Trial(Franz Kafka)

Polish Science Fiction

I discovered Stanislaw Lem on that carousel too, but I'm listing his books separately here. I fell deeply in love with his own special brand of humanised science fiction, but in the intervening years I have moved to distance myself from the genre. I can't say precisely why that is - it isn't fair to the s-f classics that are as good as mainstream literature to call them 'genre fiction.' I want to achieve two things by this particular revisit: firstly, I want to see if my love for Lem's writing still resides in my heart; second, I hope to use this opportunity to rebuild my enthusiasm for science fiction generally.

1. Fiasco


2. Memoirs of a Space Traveller


3. Microworlds


4. More Tales of Pirx the Pilot


5. Solaris

Back to the Beginning

I have a special place in my heart for those books I first turned to as a young adult, and then as my renaissance began, and these I would like to see once more, like old friends only half-remembered.

1. Around the World in 80 Days(Jules Verne)


2. Candide(Voltaire)


3. The Great Gatsby(F. Scott Fitzgerald)


4. Tender is the Night(F. Scott Fitzgerald)


5. Kim(Rudyard Kipling)


6. The Never-Ending Story(Michael Ende)


7. The Prince(Machiavelli)


8. A Tale of Two Cities(Charles Dickens)

Books that Educated more Literally

I've read a number of books now that really taught me something concrete, about the world, about science, or about myself. These books I need to read again, not simply because they deserve a second reading, but because I want to be able to quote from them more confidently. Don't worry though, I always give credit where credit is due, and you won't find me passing off Sven Lindqvist's ideas as my own.

1. The Selfish Gene(Richard Dawkins)


2. Lost Japan(Alex Kerr)


3. The Long Emergency(James Howard Kunstler)


4. A Little History of the World(Ernst Gombrich)


5. Exterminate All The Brutes(Sven Lindqvist)


6. A Brief History of Time(Stephen Hawking)

And Finally...

There are very few books in my collection that I read to the end and still disliked. If you look at my librarything catalogue closely, you'll see that most books have garnered three or more stars, and it is a rare thing for me to give a book a score of only one out of five - or less. But then the books that I've completed are the books that I've enjoyed enough to complete, unless I read that book as a favour to somebody: for instance, I've read more than enough Forsyth to know that I don't favour his style, but he was one of my father's favourite authors, so I thought it best to read more than just one of his novels. This last list contains those books that I have mixed, or incomplete, feelings about. Perhaps I thought they were wonderful, and now I'm not so sure; or I didn't understand them at all, and now want to go back see if there's something I missed during my initial read.

Fortunately, this is a short list, of mostly short books; if I decide having started any of them for the second time that I don't actually like them, it won't take me long to reach the last page.

1. The Bridges of Madison County(Robert James Waller)


2. The Catcher in the Rye(J.D. Salinger)


3. Heart of Darkness(Joseph Conrad)


4. Mao II(Don DeLillo)


5. Pedro Paramo(Juan Rulfo)


6. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(James Joyce)

On Relationships

A very good friend of mine, Ola, recently sent a book to me: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. I'm working slowly through it; slowly, because it's really a brief history of philosophy more than a fictional story, and I've always had to read philosophy slowly to make sure I understood it. At the start of the story, a mysterious philosopher sends Sophie little envelopes with riddles written inside, like "Why is Lego the perfect toy?" and so forth. These questions prepare Sophie for what follows; in this example, the philosopher then introduces her (and us) to Democritus and the atomic theory.

Well, now I feel a lot like Sophie myself. At the end of a recent email, Ola wrote

"Do you believe in a once-in-a-lifetime love or do you rather think that a happy relationship is a matter of goodwill?"

Email has taken the place of the envelope, but the theory is the same, and I've been stuck on this question all day. I'm going to try and answer it now, but since I've been brought up to believe in the power and necessity of empirical evidence, I'm not simply going to give you my gut reaction.

On Love
I would love to believe in the power of love, and that for every single one of us, there is a matching partner in the world; all that we have to do is find this one special person, our soulmate, and then the rest of our lives will be spent in perpetual bliss. It is a reassuring story we tell ourselves, much like we tell children that there's an Easter Bunny and Father Christmas. As we grow older, we find that the chances of finding this special person have diminished greatly. But some people do genuinely seem very happy in their relationships. When both partners in a couple can honestly say that they love the other, then that is exactly what Ola's talking about. So how does it happen? Can it last, and can it overcome all difficulties?

One theory doing the rounds is the idea that love is an addiction. Two scientists at UCL scanned the brains of people in love, and found that the areas most active didn't correspond to the areas active during other emotions, such as anger and fear. In fact, the closest similarity is to a person doing drugs. In her book, Why We Love, Helen Fisher concludes that

"[R]omantic passion is... hardwired into our brains by millions of years of evolution. It is not an emotion; it is a drive as powerful as hunger."

Scientific research, then, would seem to suggest that this once-in-a-lifetime kind of love does exist, and exists for a reason. Fisher goes into more detail than I can here, obviously, and also talks about the different forms that 'love' can take. The original article linked to above is well worth reading; it is, I think, reprinted from The Economist magazine.

On the happy relationship
I'm sure that science can go a long way towards explaining why love is possible in the first place - how it happens, and why - but human beings are far too complex for a simple chemical analysis to determine what will happen for the rest of the relationship. For those of us who, in the first place, don't find that special someone, and perhaps decide to settle for a person we merely 'like', then how likely is the relationship to succeed?

My reading suggests that a good relationship, perhaps one based on goodwill as much as love, has as much of a chance to succeed as one based on romantic love, going on Dr Fisher's definition. My search for information led me to The Gottman Institute.

Dr John Gottman has been studying human relationships for longer than I have been alive, and he's now quite good at it. The website describes his means of operation:

"By examining partners’ heart rates, facial expressions, and how they talk about their relationship to each other and to other people, Dr. Gottman is able to predict with more than 90% accuracy which couples will make it, and which will not."

If a relationship can be studied, it makes sense to say that a relationship can be managed and made to work.

On the answer to Ola's question

I don't think I've answered Ola's question here at all. I've looked at some of the evidence that suggests that romantic love is primarily all about chemistry, and how all relationships need management to survive, whether they are based on love or not. But I think Ola is also asking another pair of questions that need to be answered before any of this other discussion can take place: is it possible to find and fall in love with someone who also falls in love with you? If not, is it possible to find someone you can imagine managing a relationship with, to the general benefit of both partners?

For the latter situation, I really can't say. I'm hoping that it is possible, because I don't want to spend the rest of my life alone. I am looking for someone to share my life with, but I have very few expectations about falling in love and having that love returned to me. I have fallen in love before (I think romantically, but I'll have to re-examine my feelings in light of today's reading), but only a handful of women have found me attractive, and part of falling in love is, chemically and from an evolutionary standpoint, concerned with attractiveness.

We'll have to see. I'm very glad that Ola has put this question to me. I've had to think very hard about my reaction, and I've had a reason to do some reading outside of my usual interests; plus, it's been a while since I wrote anything that was actually meant to make sense.

Further Reading
If you're interested, here's a review of Helen Fisher's book. For more about Dr Gottman in the context I originally discovered him, read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink

On Buying Cool Things

I'm trying to find a book that I saw on a website somewhere. I was sure it was on neatorama but I've trawled through and not found it. Basically it's a book about sex, but it's not pervy (much) and it seemed interesting enough for it to be blogged about. It covers every facet of sex and the sex industry, but it's written in almost an encyclopedia-comic format. I don't think it's on taschen. In the meantime, I'm going to take a look around thinkgeek for some shopping inspiration.

On a return to the old school

I haven't blogged in ages; not properly at least. So today, having grown tired of facebook, I've gone old school. I've returned.

Blogger has improved since I was last here; not a lot, mind you, but in some interesting areas. For instance, I like the idea of adding 'labels' to your posts, to better organise them. This is a lot better than simple archives of all blog posts according to date. It's not a new idea by any means - how many sites have tags, and even tag clouds to go with them? - but it's a step in the right direction. When one considers just how much one can do on facebook with the applications there, blogger seems mildly pedestrian in comparison - unless you know a little html and adopt more of a do-it-yourself attitude.

The worst thing about not blogging is that I always used to use my blog as a way of keeping track of interesting things online. I haven't been doing that much lately. I'm behind in my internet browsing too. I only discovered video sift the other day, and now love it; and I'm coming across great blogs all the time, like The Book Design Review right here on blogger. I'm sure if I had my own computer I'd do a lot more linking, and would probably do what I've done in the past, and buy webspace. But that hasn't been the case for a long time.

I've started writing again too. I need to find a place online to publish my work, and hopefully get some feedback. My good friend Ola has agreed to critique my latest effort, which is something I'm looking forward to reading. She tells me she's going to be merciless, which sounds both wonderful and frightening.

Finally, I've decided to go back to my scientific paper method of naming blog entries - I kind of like everything beginning with the word "on."

To look at later

This might be interesting: Web 2.0 Award Winners. I'll take a look through these later when I have the time and actually feel like it.

10,000 Views!

Krakow suburbs in the dark
Originally uploaded by soylentgreen23.

I've finally passed 10,000 views on my flickr photostream - a fact about which I am inordinately proud. Of course, I've seen some people with 10,000 views on a single photograph, but I'm pretty happy all the same.

I've also found a wonderful little website for keeping track of what you've read and who's read what: Library Thing. Notice the little widget to the left of the screen? This is one of the things you get with LT, and frankly I love it. I've taken so many ideas from the site as to what I should read next, all I have to do now is actually read something instead of spending all day on the internet.

And on Thursday, I'm coming home, back to Blighty. I'm excited, more than I thought I would be.

On Darwinism and Wondir

If a change to an organism is to be successful, it must serve some purpose and it must allow the organism to survive in preference to its natural competition. Wondir has evolved, bit by bit, since long before I took any notice of it, but for it to survive without becoming no more than a niche animal - too specialised, like the sabre-tooth, to survive once its prey has gone - the next couple of evolutionary steps will prove to be most important.

I've written about the problems I see with the Wondir model, and I've written about the joys of being a Wondir contributor. Now that I've had time to reflect on what I've seen and thought, I can predict.

Wondir's main rival in the cannibalistic interactive knowledge market seems to be Google Answers, but I would proffer Wikipedia as just as big a threat. Many of the answers to questions I've seen on Wondir have linked to the wiki, or quoted from it or at least plagiarised from it; the best ones have been informed by wikipedia. This is certainly true of many of my own answers. To do justice to the question asker, I often read up on a given subject at wikipedia. I use it to confirm what I knew, to check facts and get the names of important theories, and often I use it as inspiration.

But what does this mean for Wondir? Is it competition? Returning to my initial speculation, suggesting the niche nature of the board, then yes. There is a great danger that those question askers arriving at Wondir because it offers something that Google Answers charges for will leave disappointed, because Wondir is not the same animal. Is Wondir a suitable place to ask in-depth questions? Is it reasonable to post a question that would require an investment of time of the answerer, or in these cases would it be better for that person to head over to wikipedia and leave the board to those who use it in its true spirit?

What then do I think is the true spirit of the Wondir board? Simply put, its existence is based upon its reactiveness, its spontaneity. Wondir contributors pride themselves on replying to a question as quickly as possible (ironically, the Hawaiian translation of 'wiki wiki'), often getting in an answer within minutes. What happens to a question that cannot be answered so quickly? It moves down the board, lost and forgotten as other questions arrive that demand attention. A question that moves past page 5, say, of the board is as good as lost. I've looked for myself - there are some damned fine questions in the deeper reaches of the system that I would like to answer but is there any point? Will anyone read it? Is the question asker still listening, or has he or she looked elsewhere at this point?

Arguably (and I'm hoping to generate an argument - or at least a debate), Wondir is a reflection of modernity, a mirror into which we gaze. Its short-comings highlight our own, and its illumination to outside observers on the zeitgeist is more valuable than the throw-away questions one sees asked time and again. The bad grammar, the incomprehensible questions, the requests for information that could have been found with a copy and a paste into Google's search engine, the replacement of depth and consideration by speed and efficiency - all this could be describing the world in general, and not just a question and answer board.

Praise be to those whose hard work rewards the unworthy. At the time of writing, a dog breeder by the username of jevette has contributed more than 11,300 answers to the community, and it would be irresponsible and inaccurate to say her efforts have all been in vain. I have now answered over 100, and some have proved memorable, directing my thoughts away from where they usually reside. But what has become of my time? Have I provoked a discussion with my words? Have my answers been challenged? Has anyone else noticed the questions I've taken so long to answer, now that they're as far away in Internet terms as the Moon is from London? Has anyone else had their thoughts moved elsewhere, in new and exciting directions?

I hope so. For, if Wondir is the zeitgeist posing as an online answers board, it would be depressing if the answer to this question was no.

On Giving an Answer

Why do I answer questions posed on Wondir? What's the point? What's in it for me?

I've thought about this a lot recently - I've had the time to do so, and this is what happens when all you have is time. I answer questions posed on Wondir because: it is something to do - a hobby of sorts; it is a chance for me to participate in something that other people are involved with; it gives me the opportunity to demonstrate my learning; it highlights the gaps in my knowledge and gives me the motivation to fill them; it makes me better at succinctly answering sometimes difficult or open-ended questions; it gives me pause for thought as I frame what I want to say, and make sure that I'm saying the right thing, rather than just jumping straight in, as I am sometimes wont to do.

That's why I do it: so that I learn through answering just as others learn through questioning; I learn about myself.

On Wondir

Recently Boing Boing reported on the launch of a new service, operating in competition with Google Answers. It's called Wondir, and differs most importantly in that it is a free service, and questions can be answered by anyone.

So how does it compare with Google Answers? The google variant asks for a price upfront: if you want a question answering then you have to pay for it. The beauty of this sweeps both ways: the person answering the question is rewarded for their efforts, and the person asking the question makes for damn sure it can't be answered with a two-second search on Wikipedia.

I haven't spent much time on google's site, but I'm keen to; soon I'll have a lot more free time and I want to put it to some good use. I don't what the vetting process is for becoming a researcher; I get the feeling from the "over 500 carefully screened researchers" statement on the front page that it's fairly stringent. I've signed up with Wondir already, and answered some questions, but a lot of them are phrased so badly as to be wholly unintelligible, and others are a plain waste of time.

However, the good questions are the kind you won't see on google. They're generally more personal, or personable, questions, such as this one on Donnie Darko. Answering this question is a totally different experience to researching a question on a specialist or niche topic. These questions are one of wondir's redeeming features; the other is the tip jar.

Like the answer you've been given? As a way of saying thank you, you can give the respondent a cash tip, or just provide some peer-review feedback, similar to Amazon's reviewer ratings. I doubt anyone is going to get money out of the site (but that may change as it grows) but I like the feeling I get when I see that my peer rating has improved (these are the green stars that show how well received your responses are; the gold ones show how many posts you've made, relative to the peer group in general).

Wondir has a lot of work to do if it wants to seriously compete with the likes of Google Answers. Sure, it's a free service, but to survive it will need to attract a lot of repeat custom. I would suggest that in time the number of inane questions will diminish, since these are posted by people who have been led to the site by some link or other and decided to have a laugh by asking "Does Jeeves like men?" Getting people to come back is enormously difficult (attracting them in the first place is only slightly easier, of course), but by instilling a sense of community it has a good chance, and I don't mind putting the hours in until the site either matures or dies.

Oh, and the name: Wondir. Reminds me of the Oneders from "That Thing You Do." Hardly the finest name...