Raining Books in New York

Monaster/News, Thomas

Here we go again with another sad case of book trashing.  I realize that putting soon-to-be-junked books into the hands of readers who would really appreciate them is a lot easier said than done.  And, in this particular case, it appears that the folks just ran out of time to move the books to new, appreciative homes - or, at least, they claim they did.

According to the New York Daily News, this is what happened:

It was raining books outside St. Michael's Academy in midtown Monday.


The Education Department not only threw out thousands of books left in the building it is leasing from the Archdiocese of New York - it tossed them out the windows.

[...]

A massive stack of textbooks and literary works such as "Death of a Salesman" and "Sophie's Choice" sat piled more than 6 feet high on W. 33rd St. outside the building that will house the Clinton School for Writers and Artists in the fall. St. Michael's closed in June.


Archdiocese officials said they gave away as many books as possible before moving, but they ran out of time.


"When you close a school, there's an awful lot of work to do," said Mike Radice, who was in charge of the closeout of St. Michael's last spring.


The Education Department admitted to the trashing.


"There was no agreement with the archdiocese to save the books," a spokeswoman said. "We are recycling them." 

This does seem to be a combination of circumstances almost guaranteed to ensure that thousands of books would be destroyed rather than given away.  But, I still have to wonder why one or two people could not have stepped up and made all the difference, even in a situation where lack of time was the main culprit.  But was there really so little time?  Note the two words I've highlighted in red in the newspaper account of what happened.  These books apparently sat inside the school for several weeks before everyone "ran out" of the time needed to move them.

Just one guy from the Education Department willing to go the extra mile to coordinate with someone working with the Archdiocese of New York, or vice versa, could have made all the difference.
Where are book lovers when you need them?  Unfortunately, in this case, they were standing outside the school fence watching books fall from the sky.

Perfect Reader

Maggie Pouncey’s debut novel, Perfect Reader, tells a strong character-driven story about ordinary people who unexpectedly find themselves sharing the same life crisis:

Flora Dempsey, 28 years old, has been called back to Darwin to deal with the sudden death of her father, Lewis, a retired college president who was still very much a presence in this small college town right up to the day of his death. Cynthia is the lover Lewis Dempsey left behind, a teacher still employed by Dempsey’s old school, and someone whose very existence comes as a shock to Flora. Cynthia had hoped to spend the rest of her life with Dempsey – but now he is gone. Joan is Flora’s mother, the woman who divorced Lewis Dempsey almost two decades earlier precisely because she could not stand playing the “president’s wife” role assigned to her by small-town academia - and who is still angry that her ex-husband ever had the nerve to expect her to fill that role.

Flora is an unhappy young woman. She is not satisfied with her life in the big city, including the magazine job that makes that life possible, so she is almost eager to walk away from it all to begin a new one in the house she has inherited from her father. When she meets her father’s lawyer, a man whom she sees as a potential lover of her own, Flora learns she has inherited more than just the assets her father left behind. She has also inherited the obligation of serving as his literary executor and now she will have to decide whether the poems her father entrusted to her care will ever be published.

By entrusting his daughter with his final work, Lewis Dempsey may have been hoping to find his own “perfect reader,” that person who would read his poems exactly as he intended them to be read, with complete understanding of their message and source. Realistically, such a thing is near impossible to achieve and, in the case of the Lewis Dempsey and his daughter, their complicated relationship will doom it from the start.

Flora will spend much of her time in Darwin, a town she feels is “three hours from everywhere,” being reminded of her unhappy childhood there. Pouncey skillfully interweaves stories from Flora’s childhood about sharing time with both parents after the divorce, and about a devastating incident involving her best friend, with the current day experiences that trigger those memories. In the year-long process, Flora will learn as much about her own life as she does about her father’s and about the woman she has come to see as such a rival to her father’s memory.

Perfect Reader will particularly appeal to those readers who enjoy delving deeply into the heads of a novel’s characters and those with an interest in the inner workings of a small town college. This one is not long on action or plot twists, but it leaves the reader with plenty to think about.

Rated at: 4.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Me and Mac

The hard drive on my old PC has been teetering on the brink of destruction for weeks now and it finally got to the point where I could no longer ignore its creakiness and reluctance to crank up for another day's work.  I knew something had to be done but I was finding it hard to pull the trigger on buying a replacement PC for the sick one because, over the years, I have come to believe that planned obsolescence of PCs is all a big plot to force me to buy replacement software every few years.  Bill Gates and company always manage to kill some of my favorite software when they come out with a new version of the Windows operating system.  The other software companies seem to have little incentive to offer the fixes that would make their older versions compatible with "Ultimate Windows" because, of course, they would rather have the customer return to buy the version that does work with Ultimate Windows or next year's Best Windows Ever.

Well, I refuse to play that game anymore.  Instead, I ponied up for my first iMac yesterday afternoon.  And now I'm faced with the huge task of moving all my old files over to the iMac so that it will do all the things I need it to do.  It is a relatively easy process, I find, to move things over to the Mac from my backup drives; the kicker is getting them to open up in the iMac software.  But even though this is my first ever exposure to working on an iMac, I continue to make steady progress - although I did have to make a run to Barnes & Noble this morning to find an illustrated user's manual that could explain a few of the things that had me stumped.

So far, I have only destroyed one thing - well, at least, so far as I can tell.  Somehow, I managed to lose everything in the inbox of my main email account, the one tied here to Book Chase, in fact.  I remember there were close to 70 emails in that box, so I apologize if I've deleted anything that required me to respond to any email from here.  I'm still hoping I'll find the inbox sitting safely in some snug little corner of Mac's big file room but, so far, that hasn't happened.

All of this computer time has limited both my reading and my posting this weekend - and I'm starting to wish I had made the switch a year ago when I first considered it because this is a snazzy machine, and I'm loving it already.  I suspect that this time-challenge will last for another few days, though, so bear with me as I struggle to get all the way back to square one again.  What is it they say about the journey again?

Why Not Give Away E-Book Readers?

So Amazon has announced a new, slimmed down version of the Kindle selling for only $139 and the company is taking pre-orders now for delivery at the end of August.  This is the cheapest Kindle to-date and it will further accelerate the e-book reader price war that's been brewing for the last few weeks.  This is all good news for those in the market for these devices, of course, and it will be interesting to see where prices bottom out.

But this has me wondering if e-book makers such as Amazon, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Borders aren't using the wrong business model.  After all, the real revenue stream, and the most profit, for these companies will come from selling e-books to those who own one of their devices.  Each of these companies has an online bookstore from which new e-books can be downloaded to the readers, and the expectation is that those who have readers will need an endless supply of reading material.  Makes sense.

So why don't the Big Four makers mark the readers down to something like $50 a pop?  Get those readers into the hands of readers and then sell the heck out of e-books to them.  Lock them in to your device and then aggressively market your continuing service to them.  Heck, why not use the safety razor business model and send coupons out to targeted readers offering them free devices?  How better to gain instant market share and ensure long term profits?

Of course, this will not work for the makers of the more generic readers not supported by their own online bookstores.  But, I suspect, even these manufacturers would find a way to make more money if the overall e-book market expanded by a factor of ten or more.

In the meantime, I'm watching with interest to see how all this shakes out.  I suspect there will be more losers than winners if things keep going the way they are.  Is anyone brave enough to try my suggestion?  I sincerely doubt it, but wouldn't it be fun if one or two of them decided to give it a shot?

Best of 2010, Update 23

It's already been almost three weeks since my last update,so here goes.

To be considered this time are four novels and three nonfiction titles: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Seth Grahame-Smith), Shadow of the Swords (Kamran Pasha), Blockade Billy (Stephen King), Ordinary Thunderstorms (William Boyd), War (Sebastian Junger), That's No Mob, That's My Mom (Michael Graham) and Me of Little Faith (Lewis Black).

So, after due consideration, this is what the fiction list looks like after 56 fiction books read:

1. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese (novel)
2. Matterhorn - Karl Marlantes (Vietnam War novel)
3. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
4. Shadow of the Swords - Kamran Pasha (novel about the Third Crusade)
5. Remarkable Creatures - Tracy Chevalier (historical fiction)
6. Drood - Dan Simmons (historical fiction)
7. The Secret Speech - Tom Rob Smith (historical thriller)
8. Far Cry - John Harvey (police procedural)
9. Home, Away - Jeff Gillenkirk (baseball novel)
10. Whiter Than Snow - Sandra Dallas (historical fiction)

And the nonfiction list from a total of 18 read changes a bit:

1. Lies My Mother Never Told Me - Kaylie Jones (memoir)
2. War - Sebastian Junger (about the daily lives of our soldiers in Afghanistan)
3. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley & Eddie Dean (biography)
4. Losing My Cool - Thomas Chatterton Williams (memoir)
5. Jane's Fame - Claire Harman (on the evolution of Jane Austen's reputation)
6. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz - (memoir)
7. The Tennis Partner - Abraham Verghese (1998 memoir)
8. Game Change - John Heilemann & Mark Halperin (political nonfiction)
9. Damp Squid - Jeremy Butterfield (on the evolution of the English language)
10. Unfinished Business - Lee Kravitz (memoir)

It is obviously getting tougher to crack the list because only two of the seven new ones made it this time: Shadow of the Swords, at number 4 on the fiction list and War at number two on the nonfiction one. Both books earned high spots on the list and will probably still be there at the end of the year.

That makes these the best 20 books of the 74 I've read so far this year, with another five months to go.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

To start, I have to admit that the judgment I made of what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies  would be like prior to reading it was totally wrong. The whole concept of morphing a Jane Austen novel into a blood-soaked zombie farce seemed silly and beyond merit. I was certain that it would be a complete waste of time for any reader over the age of 15. I was wrong, but let me qualify that. I experienced Pride and Prejudice and Zombies via its audio version  and, largely because of the superb performance of Katherine Kellgren, I thoroughly enjoyed the story, even to the point of laughing out loud several times. On the one hand, I still doubt that reading a printed version of the book would even come close to matching the fun of the audio book. On the other, I can honestly say that this is my favorite audio book to this point of 2010.

England has been beset by zombies for more than five decades and, in order to protect his family, a man like Mr. Bennett does what he has to do. Bennett, a man with five daughters but not a single son, makes the most of having numbers in his favor by sending the girls to China for training in the “deadly arts.” Upon their return, the ladies become Hertfordshire’s primary defenders against the “unmentionables” that plague the countryside.

But despite the great joy the girls take in personally disposing of hundreds of zombies, they and their mother believe that their lives cannot be considered complete unless they make a good match as early into their twenties as possible (if not at an even younger age). Mrs. Bennett’s sole purpose in life seems to be placing her daughters into situations from which they can attract the most suitable young men in the region. So, while the daughters are busily chopping off heads and limbs, pulling still beating hearts from the bodies of sparring ninjas, and setting zombies afire, Mrs. Bennett eagerly welcomes young bachelors into her home in hopes of snaring a new son-in-law or two for the family.

Admirers of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will already be familiar with the Bennett family, Mr. Darcy, Mr. Collins, Charlotte, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, among others. Now, Seth Grahame-Smith tells the rest of their story. And what a story, it is.

Katherine Kellgren’s presentation of the novel mimics the style of whichever author’s work she is reading. When she reads the words of Jane Austen, characters speak in a voice and tone that will be very familiar to fans of movies made from the Austen novels. The words of Grahame-Smith require an added edge and vigor but Kellgren presents them in a way that sounds perfectly natural to Miss Jane’s version of the girls. Throw in Elizabeth’s wholehearted adoption of the warrior code and its requirement that one’s honor must be defended at all cost, and the new Elizabeth Bennett is, if different, more fun than ever. Call me weird, but the idea of Elizabeth Bennett yanking the heart from an opposing warrior’s chest and eating it during a tea party makes me laugh.

This audio book is great fun, and readers curious about this kind of genre mash-up will do well to start here. Whether or not they will feel compelled to venture further into the field is an open question. I do not; others might want more.