Library Loot 13th-19th April 2010

I've had some time on my hands lately. This time really should be spent doing coursework but I like to work under pressure. As a distraction, I have been wandering around various book blogs and stumbled upon this rather interesting idea:


Library Loot which is a wonderful idea from Eva at A Striped Armchair.

My low funds mean I have started using my local library for books. Usually I bought them from Amazon Marketplace but I cannot justify that expense any longer. Last week I requested Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins and recieved a phone call to say it was in. Yesterday was a surprisingly sunny day so I decided to wander down and collect my book. My local library is only 10 minutes walk from my flat. It's rather small but I was surprised how busy it was.

It's the Easter school holidays and the children's book department was full of toddlers, tweenagers, ratty parents and babes chewing on book corners. The available computers were all in use by the time I left. Turning a corner, I stumbled upon a book group having tea and a good old natter about the book they had been reading. Yes, it might be a small library but it was a used library. And there's nothing nicer than seeing a library in use.

The other advantage to the library is the book displays. I try to read a range of fiction but dislike Amazon's marketing choices sent to my email. One stand appeared to be devoted to How to Use.... books with an emphasis on Web 2.0 such as Twitter and Blogging. They are rather short books but I was amused to see printed books as a resource for Web based tools.

But hey, you want to know what I chose, right? Two books came from the The Herald/Tesco Summer Read campaign. The readers are either all Scottish or based in Scotland (Alexander McCall Smith for one) and small presses are represented as well as big sellers.

Finally (I hear you cry!) here is my library loot for this week:




(These two came from the library stand.)







It is doubtful I will get all of these read this week. Surviving and Corduroy Mansions are both two week loans whilst the rest are four week loans. Currently these books are proving good distraction techniques from looming deadlines.

Ask a stupid question......

Lately I have been dipping my toe back into the blogging waters. Not just writing posts but reading them as well. I have been rather impressed with people who post images of the books they're talking about. So, people who know more than me, what's the best way to do this? I know Blogger allows you to insert an image but is there a better method?

Death of an ipod Touch

Earlier this week my second ipod Touch in a year died on me (this was a replacement after my first one had some sound problems). I took it to my local Apple store and was told it would cost £106 to repair or I could trade in the frazzled model and get 10% off a new model.

The thing is that I'm not too sure I want to. Sure, I loved my Touch when I first got it. It was so handy to check email, Facebook and Twitter while I was waiting for the kettle to boil. But recently I have become a little uneasy about how much of my life was being swallowed by this little device. Bit ironic posting about the Internet stealing my life on a blog but bear with me.

Sometimes I can't sleep and I would spend hours on the Touch, jumping from app to app. Check out the news? I had my Guardian app. See who else is up at this time? Twitter and Facebook. Still can't sleep? Then I have ZombieFarm to play (don't ask). Trouble is that this started to seep into my 'awake' time. A day before the Touch died, I was horrified to discover that I had spent an hour faffing around on it. An hour! Surely Facebook wasn't that interesting? Although I'm on study leave I still have lots and lots of work to do. Work that wasn't getting done because I was distracting myself with the sodding Touch.

So I have decided to go retro. Him Indoors has an old ipod that lacks the snazzy new Interwebs access that the Touch posses. By doing this I'm hoping I don't waste so much time on doing nothing.

And, on that note, I am going to log off and go to bed ;)

Sunday Salon: DNF

I hate not finishing books. Absolutely hate it, even if I'm not enjoying reading it. Over years I have tried to implement a X page number rule. Always a little voice says in the back of my head "What if page X+1 is much better than the previous X pages? Keep going." Hard to do when I survey my Mount TBR which has been culled over the Easter break. I haven't counted my books but I have two tidy boxes and small piles scattered across my room. My two (small) bookcases are usually reserved for books that I plan to keep and are comprised of a mixture of books I have read and TBR books.

In the summer I am moving house after living in my current place for roughly two years. Despite the small space myself and Him Indoors live in, we have gathered a lot of stuff. Memories of our last move made me shudder, due to a combo of weak boxes and too many books. With this in mind the book scythe has been swift and without mercy.

But what book is this post about? The Book of Dave by Will Self. I like Will Self, I like his sarcastic opinion pieces, I liked his appearances on Shooting Stars. But, try as I might, I don't like this book. For those unfamiliar, the story is split between two time zones. One is set in the future after London has suffered from a major flood. This society follows the teachings from 'The Book of Dave'. The other time zone is set in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century and follows the story of Dave, an irate and clearly mental taxi driver going through a painful divorce and custody battle.

The problems I'm having centre around the sections set in the first time zone. Self has quite skillfully built a new world, complete with vernacular language. It's tricky to follow and my brain has been too lazy to follow it. Instead I've been skipping those sections and reading the 'easier' passages set in a more contemporary era. Though someone told me that those sections won't make much sense unless I read the A.D. (stands for After Dave) sections.

This is my second attempt to read this book. I think I'm going to add it to the pile of DNF (Did Not Finish). It hasn't put me off trying another Will Self book though so perhaps I'll return it again.

In other news, I have been re-reading The Crucible by Arthur Miller for a university project. I have to encode a text so I chose Act III of the play. Alas, due to copyright issues, there is no electronic version. I had to key in the Act whilst checking it against my paper copy. Twenty-eight pages later, it's proof read and I can start tagging it.

The Crucible is impossible to avoid if you study Drama or English at an advanced level. At least it was when I was at school (almost ten years ago now!). Due to this it's a favourite of local drama companies because it guarantees bums on seats. To me, a play is not there to be read, it's there to be performed. Although I'm not reading it for this purpose, I have enjoyed re-reading the dialogue and getting caught up in the action of Act III (the act when Proctor confronts the court, Abigail and his wife, amongst other things).

This week's entry might be getting posting a little early. Tomorrow I have Easter lunch with Him Indoors and his family. Then it's off to my parents for Easter dinner. Busy old Easter Sunday.

Sunday Salon: A Day Late

I know, my bad. My Twitter feed has been clogged up for the past couple of weekends with numerous Sunday Salon updates. Each week I've thought 'I really must sit down and write a post.' Hence why this one is a day late.

My reading tastes seem to be swinging towards non-fiction at the moment. My bedtime book is currently a biography called The Bolter, written by her great-granddaughter, whose husband is the Shadow Chancellor. Not the most taxing read but it does prove the theory that real life can be more exciting than fiction. Idina Sackville was married, and divorced, five times between 1918 and 1945. Scandalous for those times, heck even scandalous for this day and age. Osborne did make an interesting point that the perception of affairs changed in the early twentieth century. In the Edwardian era, having affairs was a way of married life for the upper classes. As long as no-one got pregnant or wanted a divorce, all was hunky dory (in theory) and become something everyone knew about but didn't talk about. Once divorce laws became looser and went on the increase, affairs became more public. Hence more scandal.

Idina seems to have trumped them all. She emigrated to Africa with her second husband and set up home in Kenya. Her parties become known as "orgy hotspots" and romantic entanglements ahoy! I'm halfway through the book, on husband no. 4 (I think...) and the story is becoming more about the author's grandfather, Idina's child from her first marriage. Not sure where that's going to go but I shall keep you posted.

I finished No Logo which was my bus book for most of February. I thought it was about time I got around to reading this book about the power of the branded world we live in. As much as I hate to admit it, buying ethically can be very difficult for the ordinary consumer to do. People do appear to be shunning brands for cheaper retail shops such as Primark but, in turn, this creates a market for cheap labour to produce clothes. In the age of a recession, ethics can be an entity that goes out the window very quickly. Klein's prediction of a short term contract and freelancer job market seems to have hit in some industries. Not sure where that's going to leave us.

Currently, archives are seeing something of a 're-branding' in the UK with moves to encompass libraries, archives and other areas as 'information management' and break down barriers of job titles. This has caused bristling in some areas and I don't think this change is particularly welcome. Yes, working together with libraries but not interchanging archive and library work without good reason. Lots of archive money is being sucked out by the Olympic Games hoover which has lead to a decline in jobs. Most jobs advertised are for short term jobs, average pay with lots of uprooting. So I read Klein's 'No Jobs' part with some bitter pessimism. Apologies for the tangent.

My current commute read is The Search which is about the rise of the search engines. It's hard to believe but, in the early days of the Interwebs, people didn't think search portals were going to make any money. Hard to believe in this so-called Google era. This book is not necessarily about the foundation of Google but about the change in how business can be conducted on the web. Some information is slightly outdated. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is treated very cautiously rather than a staple of on-line marketing.

So yes, a very weird switch to non-fiction over the past month. It hasn't been intentionally. Fiction is still a major love judging by my piles of books everywhere. Study leave has started for this semester so my reading intake could go up. In lieu of doing any revision of course.

Valetine's Day and Why I Hate It

Personally I am not a big fan of Valentine's Day. When asked, as a "grown-up", I usually respond with some rant about how it's capitalist, just another way of spending our money, how insecure your relationship is if you need a £2.99 card and an expensive meal to reaffirm your affections, blah blah blah.

"But what about Christmas or Easter?" they usually cry. Well, the reason is that I was happy at Christmas or Easter. Valentine's Day was just another humiliation event to face during the school calendar.

Hence why I agree with this school's decision to ban Valentine's Day cards. Most comments are from outraged parents, including this mother who says: "It's a tradition, I can remember when I used to receive cards from boys in school. It's a lovely thing to do." Yeah but you got cards, didn't you love? Speaking as someone who never received a Valentine's Day card that wasn't from her gran, it hurts. Like most schools, there was a postbox system for delivering your cards. Actually it was the same box used for delivering Christmas cards to classmates except a massive heart was stuck on the top; with the fake snow almost hidden from view. In high school, it was incorporated into "Business Enterprise" and plucky students would go from class to class offering a range of services. You could buy a fake plastic rose for £1 going right up to a small box of chocolates, a card AND a rose for £3. The one year I was brave enough to send a card, I was laughed at. And it hurt.

Seeing these cheap gifts and expensive cards being handed out only reinforced how unpopular I was. Being constantly told I was ugly and disgusted chipped away at my confidence. Early high school was not fun. Therefore banning these cards will help those who know they will not receive such gifts. Yes, it's a bit of fun for those involved. But those left out? It sucks.

Out of interest, this Sunday Him Indoors and I will be celebrating Valentine's Day by eating lots of takeaway food and watching that romantic classic of Hackers.

Sunday Salon: Writing on the Page

I started writing my response to this post on my Facebook profile but I felt I could squeeze a blog post out of it. For the link-phobic, the article concerns the issue of unrelated marginalia. The author goes beyond annotating the text to using a book as a temporary notepad (repository?) of their immediate thoughts. One such tale includes a scribbled note to phone someone. Now they cannot remember why they needed to contact this person but it remains a constant reminder of a point in their life.

Sometimes I am not sure where I stand on annotated books. Books have always been precious objects to me. In primary school I lent a so-called friend pristine copies of my Roald Dahl books to read in class. Two months they came back, tatty, dog eared, one cover even ripped. Even now, that moment when she handed my prized possessions back to me still brings a small lump to my throat.

Then I started university and had a massive reading load to battle with. Luckily I could afford to buy most core texts but still refrained from writing in the margins; preferring to make my notes on paper. Then I got a Sociology teacher; probably one of the best teachers I have ever had. Her class had a mouthful of a title (Titles of Comparative Sociological Thought and Theory, to paraphrase) but she had taught a previous class in Sociological Theory that I had been rather impressed by. I signed up and went to the first class. There the teacher said it would be "extremely" helpful to annotate the texts that we were studying. "Bring a pencil, do it in pen, use those colour tabs, anything! Even buy a cheap second hand copy," she told us. Now, one problem I have with annotation is that I have big, messy handwriting. On an average line of paper I maybe fit five-six words; less if I'm in a lecture and writing fast. So I took a deep breath and got my pencil out. To make a confession, I rather enjoyed it. The text I remember most was Persian Letters by Montesquieu. My copy is still somewhere in my mountains of books and has notes scrawled all over it. It makes me happy seeing them; reminding me at one time I loved and enjoyed studying Sociology.

However I have not continued annotating every book I own. My reading taste is dominantly contemporary fiction and I enjoy analysing in my head, as I go. Sometimes I annotate a text for studying (if my camera hadn't died I would have posted one of my course textbooks that has a forest of colour tabs growing out of it). I especially enjoying doing so to printed out journal articles. But I would never do so with a library text. It still narks me when I get a book out the library and someone has left their notes written in the text. Or, worse, highlighted passages. It's very distracting if I'm reading the same text but for different purposes.

At the same time, my stance seems hypocritical when you consider my Bookcrossing habits. For those who don't know, Bookcrossing is a website that tracks books. When you register a book, it is given its own unique tracking number called a BCID that needs to be written or recorded on the book. You can simply write the number on the book or stick a bookplate into the book that captures the same information. A lot of Bookcrossers have similar feelings to mine. "You want me to do what to my books? Write on them, stick labels in them, good Lord!"

A theme that keeps cropping up on my course is the sanctity of the text, or specifically, the printed book. As a potential archivist, it is part of my job to look at objects, manuscripts, notebooks, journals, anything to assess its uniqueness and importance for future study. Take your bog standard printed book, Mass Paperback by A.N. Other. Typically it will not be accessioned by an archive. But what if this book belonged to Barack Obama in his student years and, being the rebel he is, coated the book in his own annotations of his thoughts and feelings? In that example it is the information that matters, not the medium it is recorded on.

In an attempt to conclude, I am not promoting the mass annotation and defacement of books. Even in this 'age' of the e-book, many readers still favour the interaction with the physical object of the book; the touch of the page, the smell, the spotted front cover. Shared texts should not be actively annotated. For a new reader, this can interrupt their interaction with the text, that wonderful feeling of entering a new world that books open up. But for your own personal collection? Go wild. Annotate, highlight, scribble. Alas I will not be joining you (she of the messy handwriting) but I wish you well and God speed.