Judging People by their Book Covers

With the start of class this past week for everyone has been doing the rounds of “introduce yourself and tell us what book you are reading”.  I suppose it is quite natural given the bookish nature of the program that the question about what any one of us is reading at any given moment should come up, and it is fascinating to read people’s answers.  Having worked in children’s books for quite some time I’m not all that surprised by how many people admit they are reading children/YA books; I am surprise at how many of these YA loving book people are discovering Harry Potter for the first time.  I am also shocked by how many people admit they “aren’t really reading anything at the moment” (okay, maybe two people, but still, that’s a lot).  I actually don’t know how to react to that, people like that just aren’t in my realm of experience.  I start to panic if I’m only reading one book, usually I have at least two or three going so I can switch around based on my mood.  I’m more likely to max out a library card (the most I’ve ever maxed out at one time was three!) than I am to max out my only credit card—which has an astonishingly low limit, I couldn’t even use it to buy my plane ticket to Tasmania the limit is so low (why would I need a higher one? it’s only for emergencies).  I don’t understand people who “aren’t really reading anything at the moment”.  I’m not sure I trust them, seems shifty.  

The exciting thing about getting to pry into all my new classmate’s reading lists is that I unabashedly judge people by what they are reading (or not, if you aren’t reading anything, I just back away slowly).  My judgements usually consist of something along the lines of “OH MY GOD WE READ ALL THE SAME BOOKS!  WE SHOULD BE BEST FRIENDS!” or “Twilight? ewww!  Are you reading that ironically or do you really like sparkly vampires?”.  And the flip side is,  I fully expect people are judging me by what I’m reading.  I assume other people look at what I’m reading on the train or the airplane or in the coffee shop and judge me, just a little, by my book.  I take it for granted people think “Oh my god, she’s reading that? ewww!” or “hey, I loved that book! she must be cool”.  But even more than judging people by what they are reading I judge them by what they say about what they’re reading.  The thing that get’s the most respect from me (even if you are choosing to read A Clockwork Orange for Children*) is having an opinion about the book: good, bad, mediocre, I don’t care as long as you’re forming some sort of judgement about whatever you’re reading.    

I very clearly remember a conversation from several years ago with a friend of a friend about what he was reading at the time.  I’d gone to a pub to see my friend’s band play and was introduced to this guy whose name I have since forgotten who was reading a book while waiting for the band to set up.  The conversation went like this:

Me: What are you reading?

The Pretentious Git: Oh, you know, Catcher in the Rye, by Salinger.

Me (not judging yet): Oh, neat.  Are you liking it?

TPG (looking at me like I’m possibly stupid): Uhh, it’s Salinger.

Me (starting to judge a little but trying to be nice): Ok, have you read it before?  What do you like about it?  

TPG (looking at me like I’ve just admitted to enjoying eviscerating kittens): Well, it’s SALLLLINGERRRR.

At this point he stopped talking to me, turned around and kept reading.  I don’t think he ever actually turned the page and the book was angled a bit too high up for comfortable reading, but just the right way for everyone in pub to see what book he had.  Also, at this point, I got pretty judgemental and promptly renamed him The Pretentious Git.  

See, the problem wasn’t that he was reading Salinger it was that he couldn’t articulate what he thought about it (I still don’t know if he liked it, but I know he knows who wrote it).  I have far more respect for someone reading Fifty Shades of Grey (even though the writing is poor and there are much better books out there if you’re into that kind of thing) if they can give me a reason for reading it beyond projecting some persona to world.  TPG was clearly reading SALLLLINGERRRR because, in his mind, it presented whatever image he wanted to present; unfortunately for his carefully constructed image of himself, his inability to even tell me whether or not he was enjoying the book presented an much more asinine persona than he probably intended.

*actual title of a manuscript I received while interning in the editorial department at a publisher.  Yes, it was exactly what it sounds like.

Once More With Feeling

I started re-reading The Princess Bride this week.  I love re-reading books: I always pick up on little details I’d forgotten, or nuances I hadn’t picked up before.  Sometimes I realize I’d forgotten major details and it is like reading a whole new book!  I know my mom experiences the whole new book phenomenon almost every time she re-reads something because she can’t remember a story once she’s finished.  It is very frustrating to talk to her about what she’s reading because once she’s put the book down she has no idea.  Just this weekend we were at Nana’s for dinner and when mom announced she’d finally finished her book, she wasn’t able to tell dad anything about how it ended; less than twenty four hours after finishing she’d completely forgotten the plot!  She always ends up accidentally re-reading books because she can’t remember if she knows the story.

On the other end of the spectrum I have a very good friend who never re-reads books; he buys books, reads them once, then keeps them like trophies (sometimes he buys books he’s already read but didn’t own just to have the trophy).  It’s odd and it’s more than slightly distressing; maybe it’s because he’s Dutch.  It is one of the few issues we just can’t come to any sort of agreement on.  Not re-reading a single book that you didn’t particularly care for is fine, not re-reading any book ever as a policy is downright weird.  I don’t plan re-read every book I’ve ever read, reading new books is exciting too.  Most of what I read are new-to-me books, but I just can’t understand people who won’t read a book again, it’s like eating mac and cheese and saying “well, that was good, but as a matter of policy I’ll never eat it again”.

Back to The Princess Bride, I’d forgotten how much I love this book!  I suppose I should thank my Tasmania friends, since they had someone do a reading from this book at their wedding.  I’d been thinking I really should re-read it, but listening some random man dressed as Miracle Max read from it in a tent in a paddock in Tasmania really brought home just how much I need to re-read it now.  So here I am, re-reading it.  The way things are currently going I might very well re-read it again as soon as I finish.  It has certainly been nice to read a bit of comfort literature after discovering the author of the last book I read primarily writes romance novels.

Just before the re-read started I finished a YA steampunk novel (the best description was the Goodreads review that called it “a bookish chimera”) which I enjoyed, even though it had a few irritating points.  The most irritating point came in the form of a wholly unnecessary time traveling character (time travel, really? you’ve already got Sherlock’s niece (Mycroft has a child? really?), Bram Stoker’s little sister, a cult that worships an Egyptian goddess, all set in a steampunk alternate history–do you really need to add unnecessary time travel into the mix?).  Now, I could get past the time travel thing (though I think the author had covered pretty much every other possible thing currently popular in YA fiction and would have been justified in leaving out something) had it not broken one of Mark Twain’s 19 rules governing fiction.  To be specific, it oblivionized rule 4, which states “that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.”  The time traveler did not, in my mind, exhibit sufficient reason for being there (there are quite a few other members of Goodreads who share my opinion on this).  Perhaps he will justify his existence in the sequel; equally appealing is the idea that he will be sent back to future or simply killed off, thus ridding the story of it’s least agreeable feature.

Obsoletism

I impressed the girl from New Zealand who is staying with us at the moment—impressed and maybe horrified just a little—when I asked to pop into the room where she’s staying and just grab a book from the reference section.  I guess it’s a little atypical to have a reference section in your bedroom, but where else am I going to put my dictionaries?  I didn’t try explaining that the general reference section does not include craft reference books (what kind of a crazy person would have their Knitting Bible next to their Grammar Bible?), nor does it include pre-modern reference books; I want my Anglo-Saxon dictionary by my Anglo-Saxon texts.  She was doubly impressed (or horrified, still not sure which) when I was able to walk right over to the shelf and grab Charles Lipson’s Cite Right almost without even looking; ah! the power of organizing your books!

I usually avoid telling people how I organize my books until I know them fairly well, once people find out your fiction sections are organized by intended audience, genera, author, and original publication year, “because it’s easier that way”, they tend to think you’re crazy (if they didn’t already decide you were crazy when it slipped out you have a “fiction section” on your shelves.).  I’ve also started getting really cagey about exactly how many books I have: before moving to London I culled it down to “between four and five hundred [495] if you don’t count proofs” and obviously any ebooks are excluded.  Since moving back from London I’ve added about 20 feet of books onto the shelves.  Yes, I measure books in feet when I add them to my shelves because you can never buy just one!  But I need them all, and have actually read most of them.  And of course I use my reference section all the time (including the pre-modern western European languages reference books).

I think my new Kiwi friend was bemused that not only did I own a book all about citations (she didn’t see the one I had checked out from the library as well), but I was actually using it.  Most people I know have switched to the internet as a primary source of knowledge for things like citation examples, in part (I’m sure) because information changes so rapidly things in a book can be made obsolete before they’re even published.  I also actually use my Grammar Bible, various punctuation guides, and even my hard copy Oxford English Dictionary (the all-in-one version with the little magnifying glass for added fun!).  This practice confounds people (along with my habitual use of “fortnightly” in conversation), half the time when I pull out my dictionary they look at me like I belong in a museum; more than half the time, however, I find the definition of a word in my book before their phone finds it on the internet.

Words Words Words

I had dinner with my Grandmother this weekend and she chastised me for using a particular word (sabbatical rather than sabbatic) incorrectly.  Of course, the particular word in question can be either a noun or an adjective in modern speech, but over a dinner of homemade mac and cheese I was told in no uncertain terms that sabbatical is and only should be an adjective—it was also rather heavily implied that this was the sort of thing that was causing the downfall of western civilization as we know it.  As I sat there, staring blankly at her shaking head (which she also managed to cradle in her hands for added emphasis that I was willfully contributing to the less than dignified slaughter of the English language), I couldn’t help but think “LANGUAGE CHANGES ALL THE TIME!  I’M RIGHT!  I WAS 100% ACCURATE IN MY WORD CHOICE! STOP ACCUSING ME OF NOT KNOWING WHAT I’M SAYING!” (I think I actually said something like “mmhmm” and tried not to giggle).  This is not the first time she’s bemoaned the butchering of the English language by those one or two generations removed from her own.  

That’s not to say that every instance of correcting a person’s word choice is wrong: I am personally quite disdainful of people who are past  the third grade and have yet to figure out your-you’re, or their-there-they’re.  With the exception of (actual) gross inaccuracies, I’m unlikely to correct someone at the dinner table; I will, however, admit to pedantically correcting certain friends of mine in private just to get their dander up—there is one friend in particular with whom I view this activity as a kind of sport.  No matter how much fun I may have at my little game with my dear friend (who hasn’t yet figured out she’s playing making it all the more fun and all the easier to get a rise out of her) I don’t generally assume that civilization will crumble if people have are a little bit fast and loose with verbiage in everyday speech.

DON'T PANIC!

I'll admit to being a bit wary of an online course; it's not that I don't think I can do it, but I think I'll miss the food.  My last course had a grand total of 4 people.  That was it, the whole department; Rebecca, Laura, Katie and me: 4 people, 4 countries represented, and one helluva lotta good food.  I know that seems like an odd thing to be thinking about in an assignment assessing whether or not I’m ready for an online course, but so much was about team work and how that works online it seemed natural to think about my last course, and my last academic team.

The Beginning...

There were two lectures to watch for the class, though I think I absorbed more by reading the transcripts after watching/listening to the videos.  They were all about team work, so of course I thought "great, I like people and working with them, how awesome to learn about applying that skill to my online schooling" (well, I probably thought something like "huh, neat" but the sentiment is the same right?).  According to Dr Haycock’s presentation my last academic team was barely qualified to use the term, but actually I thought we were just about the right size.  With only 4 of us we really got to know each other really well; we became familiar with the way we each approached challenges, and we influenced each others’ understanding of the materials in profound and meaningful ways.  Isn’t that an important part of team work, at least in an academic sense?  I want more from a team than just getting the assignment done, I want to actually get to know the people with whom I am working so maybe we can support each other beyond handing in the assignment.  I think it's easier to really get to know people in smaller groups, which is why I like smaller teams.

Dr Hancock went to cite research about the five dysfunctions of teams, all of which I think will be more pronounced in bigger teams and in an online environment.  It’s going to be a whole lot harder to trust the faceless messages in my inbox than it was to trust the smiling Englishwoman giving me tea.  The nature of an asynchronous environment is going to make all the dysfunctions more prominent and the early more conflict laden stages of teamwork longer.  The asynchronicity will also change the way I have to think about collaborating with teammates (emphasized quite a bit by both Haycock and Irwin); less traditional discussion, more emailing back and forth spending ages hashing out what could have been done in moments around a traditional table.  Without non-verbal cues communication has to be more formal and reserved or risk being misinterpreted and causing unnecessary trouble, I think this will also add to the challenges of teamwork in an online environment.

To be perfectly honest, I like teamwork.  I like collaborating with my fellow students and I always find the conversation is interesting and enlightening even (or perhaps especially) if we stray a bit off topic every once in a while.  I think it’s great that I can work with people whose approaches are quite different to my own and I think people can be more daring in their ideas and work when they are confident their weaknesses (real or perceived) will be buoyed by the collective strengths of the group for the benefit of all.  It's going to be tricky learning how to do all this with out the natural social aspects (and the warm fuzzy feeling when your new teammate offers the homemade brownies round the table); but talking to teammates is the key in person so I guess it makes sense both lectures heavily emphasized communication early and often.

I have to say I did not find either Haycock or Irwin particularly reassuring on the topic of online team work: if anything I am more nervous about online teamwork now than before.  I'd never before considered it a monster and Haycock's assumption that all people hate teamwork was, frankly, off putting.  Their tips were sound, but felt a bit like common sense at times (maybe it was just because I was annoyed at the assumption I, the audience, would rather work alone than on a team), but maybe the point was to remind people to take a respectful and common sense approach to teamwork in order to optimize the team's success. Maybe I hadn't thought about it enough to be worried, but I've always felt like as long as everyone makes the effort to communicate ideas, needs, worries, etc with their teammates teams can not only make the work more fun, but everyone can merrily enjoy the exultation of community learning.

Part Two: With My New Found Trepidation Towards Online Teamwork, Am I Ready For This?

The online assessment seems to think I’m ready, which is great!  Not that anonymous online surveys do all that much to assuage my fears my computer will spontaneously combust and The Internet will miraculously come to life and decide it hates me and won’t let me use it any more even if I get a new computer.  If you haven’t gathered it by now I have a slightly over active imagination and a totally irrational set of mildly neurotic fears; it’s why I put my phone on silent, take the battery out, and leave it at home before going to the cinema.  I like a challenge, which is good because I think this will be challenging, it’s new, it’s exciting, but there is an element of isolation that I think will be one of the most difficult things. 

I like working independently, but school and academia have always been more than just the work for me: the social aspects are, in my opinion, just as important.  I supposes it would be called “networking” but sometimes you don’t want to network, or do work, or talk about you dissertation you just want to go to the pub with your mates and read the Codex Argenteus over a couple of pints.  So that’s going to be hard for me.  The discussion areas will allow for some interaction with my fellow students, but if anyone is ever in Portland we should go for a pint an some non-shop talk.  After listening to the presentations I’m looking forward to teamwork with a little more trepidation that usual, but I think I’ll enjoy getting to know my classmates in courses when I work in teams.

I always love when the question comes up about organization.  I like organization, it’s fun, it makes life easy, and organizing your life makes for excellent procrastination.  I love my paper calendar, my Google calendar, my phone’s calendar and I have an unhealthy relationship with spreadsheets.  I have a color coded Thanksgiving cooking chart so I can cook a whole dinner for twelve from scratch (including bread and pie crust) in one day in a small, unfamiliar, British kitchen.  I scheduled wine breaks and panic attacks, just to be sure.  Of course sometimes the organization can get in the way of time management, I can get a bit too involved organizing things and suddenly I’ve barely enough time to finish (though I do turn in assignments on time and my books are organized by reading level, then author, then original publication date which is just lovely).

I’ll admit I laughed a bit at the thought it’s more reading that other courses.  I know I shouldn’t, I haven’t done it yet how could I know right?  But I just can’t believe that I will be in for more reading than the term I read a novel a week, plus supplementary reading for just one class.  I think the hardest part will be the type of reading—I doubt I’ll be reading a novel a week for class.  On the bright side I’m hopeful that all my readings will be in English, or at least a living language, so that will be exciting and new.

I guess to sum up I’m not totally sure if I’m ready and I think that’s a good thing.  I won't get complacent if I'm constantly a tiny bit afraid I've gone completely bonkers signing myself up for an online thing.  I’ll find support when I’m struggling, I’ll work though the difficulties I come across because I want to be here, and I hope my classmates do too.  I’ll get ready and be fine, this whole online school thing may be a path I tread ostensibly alone; but, I am by no means the first to do so and the path should be pretty well marked.  And if I’m not in a physical classroom with my classmates I’ll get to eat all the candied bacon chocolate chip cookies myself.

Unconquerable Imagined Difficulties

Starting my MLIS this week I was totally thrown by the question "what are you currently reading or what was the last book you read?".  I get asked this a lot when I attend friends' parties and don't know a lot of the other guests, they find out I'm an English lit major and they breath a huge sign of relief because surly they can engage an English lit major in a conversation about books.  It seems an innocent enough query; but, it is always one of my least favorite questions because I'm never quite sure how to answer it.  Do I tell the truth, that I am reading a stupidly long list of books, and yes I can keep all the stories straight in the my head; or do I try and pick just one (or two or three) that I feel that particular audience might be interested in (or not if I no longer really care to be speaking to the asker of the question)?  Usually the look of panic and the stuttered "uhhh….what I am reading?" causes the asking to back away slowly.

I'm down to one book I am deliberately reading at the moment, but a mere three days ago I was still in the middle of reading two others (or was it three?).  I started a book on the airplane flying to Tasmania in November but it's still buried somewhere in the exploded piles of holiday (and Holiday) debris, does that count as currently reading?  What about the copy of Jane Eyre that mysteriously disappeared between Portland and St Andrews third year of university, I don't think I finished that, am I "currently" reading it?

Then there is the problem of emergency books.  I've got the Kindle app on my phone so (as long as it's charged) I've always got a selection of books in my pocket for times when I don't have my on-purpose book.  Usually I read non-fiction tomes as an emergency book, but I'm working my way though Les Miserables again and I'm always happy to re-read about Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.  I've also got a few random hard copy books stashed in unusual places for emergency situations (cars, cupboards, sock drawers) that I may or may not be in the middle of reading.

The fact that I am usually reading about 8 books at any given time (though the list can change almost daily) means I have similar problems figuring out what I should say when people ask me the last book I read.  I mean, I finished a book between when I first read the question online and when I actually got around to answering it in the discussion forum.

Maybe I'm over thinking the whole thing, but I always feel like I'm going to seem rather pompous if I list all the books I'm "currently" reading or have recently read and then people will stop talking to me and I'll be the one standing in a corner by myself at the party trying to figure out if there is anyway I can use all my letters in one go on Words With Friends.

Second Edition

This blog originally started as a way to organize my book elevator pitches; what would I say to a customer on a busy Saturday afternoon at the bookshop to make them want to read that one perfect book?  No more than a couple hundred words, whatever I could say in a single breath.  Then I moved from London to New Jersey and New Jersey to Portland in just a few months and started a brand new job where I didn't get to talk about books all day and the whole thing kind of fell apart.  Somewhere I have all sorts of notes and quick reviews of books that maybe I will get around to posting but for now I think it's best to just carry on. 

So the new, with luck improved, blog will be a bit different: I'm starting an MLIS at San Jose State which means I will probably end up writing about things other than books but sort of kind of related to books.  Ideally I'll be posting at least a couple times a month (I'd say every week, but I doubt I'll do that) to organize my thoughts and keep a nice record of things for myself later.  Sadly I will probably have to schedule time on my calendar to do this and only post when I get an email reminder from Google.  Mostly I'm guessing I'll be about the only one reading this so it will probably seem odd and scattered to anyone else.  If anyone does happen to read this let me know, having an audience will make me fret over the whole a bit more but will also inspire me to write more often (maybe) and perhaps less insanely.