Sunday, May 9, 2021

Some hasty thoughts for Mother's Day

I think I started getting told I will be "a wonderful mother some day" when I was about twelve years old. It was a pretty frequent refrain in my coming of age, and then time in college and my masters degrees. When I worked as a resident life coordinator, I was called casually,"dorm mom" and I took that title seriously. When Owen and I lived in Leiden I was asked if I was pregnant or "when do you think you'll you have kids?" many, many times. I don't say this to complain, and I do see these comments as compliments, but I only mean to say that that my whole life I've fit the mold of what people think of when they think of "a wonderful mother" without always thinking about what kind of mother I'd like to be.

Mothers do so much of the caregiving in this world. The loving, the feeding, the anticipating of conflict, the peacemaking, the calming, the supporting, the behind the scenes jobs, the basic routines of life, the organizing, the making sure the bag is packed with everything everyone will need, the watching the bags while everyone else engages in the activities, the prep for every emergency, and balm for every hurt. I am a huge fan of nearly all of these tasks, but less of a fan of them always falling to the same portion of society. My hope is that we can move away from the assumption that it's the mother's job to do these things, because I want these things to be everyone's job, and for mothers to also receive care. I worry about the ways in which the work of motherhood is referred to as "priceless" or of "infinite value" as a way of justifying the ways in which women are so often paid nothing for the essential work they do in this world, and even the under-recognition towards mothers is turned inside out as some sort of virtue of humility.

I think about all the women who are not mothers. I know many who are longing to be. I know many who are grieving children who have died. I know so many people mourning the loss of their mothers taken too soon, or whose mothers need care from them instead of the other way around. I know many women who are not mothers because they choose not to be mothers, and I am grateful for them, and sorry for the ways in which their choices are stigmatized while mine are applauded. I loved the years I lived without children, and as much as I love my daughter, this year was not the best year of my life. I'm not putting "be the silver lining in this pandemic" on my child's to do list, even as I'm grateful for the thousand ways she has brought joy into my life this year. As Gloria Steinem says, “A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.” None of us are served by stereotypes, even if they're positive ones.

This year has been a heavy introduction to motherhood with the pandemic adding layers and layers of complication to what would always have been a challenging and isolating time. I've watched myself in my exhaustion share less of myself on social media and more of my child, and in addition to worrying about her privacy, I've also worried about the ways in which my self is being erased from my life, or broken into too many pieces to be meaningfully combined. I remember when friends first started having children how their profiles disappeared behind new photos of their babies, and I too, and figuring out what all of this means. I've shared photos of my daughter growing month by month for several reasons which made sense to me, but I haven't had as much monthly reflection on how I am also growing and changing. I'm not sure any work, any job which is "essentially meaningful," as each has its boredoms and epiphanies, but I do think meaning is a thing we make, and that we often make it though how we live our lives. Owen and I work really hard to make intentional choices, thinking about what we want our life to look like, and what we want it to mean. We had a quote from Fredrick Buechner at our wedding which has this line, "If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings." It's been true of our lives so far, and we're continuing to figure it out together.

Because Dorothea came a little late I had more prenatal visits to the midwives than I was expecting, and at one of them, the midwife asked if I'd be working again and what that looked like for me, and she said something I've not stopped thinking about. Up until that point I'd mostly thought of the pull between my work as a teacher and a scholar and mothering a young child as pulls in opposite directions. That being a mother would make me worse at my job as an academic, and that I'd be less of a mother because I couldn't spend all my time with my child. But that midwife encouraged me to be on the lookout for the ways in which I will have not less but more to give because of the experiences of mothering a child, and even the experience of birth itself. I'm not sure yet what this means or what this will look like as time goes on, but I am, like my daughter, curious. Curious to hear the stories of others because every person has thoughts about parenting-- what they loved from their own parents, and what they wished were different. I want to be able to listen to the differences between myself and others and not see them as an insult or an affront but as another luminous soul making their way in the world. And maybe the forces in my life can be not a tug of war pulling the fabric of my life apart, but like wind in a sail. And even in wind which isn't blowing the direction I want to go, I, as a mother, can find my way.


Monday, May 20, 2019

Imaginative Book Suggestions for a Young YA/advanced middle grade reader

I'm in a delightful book group this summer where everybody just chats together about what they're reading, like goodreads, but more intentional, and with people who limit their contact with social media. And one of my friends put forth this call for desired books:

"Earlier this spring, a friend asked me for suggestions that fit in what she terms “the elusive genre.” The genre comprises sci-fi/fantasy novels appropriate for a 13-year-old, that engage in some way issues of racial and/or gender equity and justice, and/or feature authentic depictions of characters of minority races/ethnicities and/or who are female (EDIT: and/or that are written by authors who are female and/or minority races/ethnicities). And easy on the violence and romance, please."

Since it's been a long while since I've made a big list of book suggestions, I thought I'd do that here. I'll mention how the book fits into the categories above, and then say a little about the books and why I love them.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin is a true family read, it's set in China, with traditional Chinese folklore woven into the story, and it has gorgeous illustrations done by the author. Thirteen is not too old, but you could certainly read it much younger as well. As and added bonus, if you read this book you will learn the secret to happiness. If you read its sequel Starry River of the Sky you will learn the secret to peace, and if you read When the Sea Turned to Silver you will know the secret to immortality.

The City of Ember (first in a series) by Jeanne DuPrau is my favorite dystopia for a young audience. The main character is a young girl living in an underground city which was created in case the world outside was ever destroyed, but the instructions for reentry into the outerworld have been lost and they've been living under the surface for far too long. Although there doesn't seem to be a lot of consideration of race, there is a brave, determined main female character, and there are a lot of other social issues (such as scarcity, equality, and who we see as outsiders, especially in book 2).

Forest of Wonders by Linda Sue Park (first in the Wing and Claw series). This fantasy series is set in  fantasy Asia with magical properties in herbs which can be applied to animals to change their behavior. It opens some fascinating ethical questions and also has a theme of immigration/racial bias based on from where and when your family came to the land. Main character is a boy, but there's a quartet of four main characters, two girls two boys, who do most of the action, author is Korean American.

First Light and When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Both of these stories are sci-fi pretending (to varying degrees) to be contemporary realistic fiction. First Light depicts a scientifically advanced indigenous tribe who have hidden themselves away under the ice in Greenland-- two main characters, one girl, one boy. When you Reach Me is a little more subtle about everything, but some of the justice issues looked at in this book are economic ones-- there's also a pretty interesting plot around racial dynamics in the school. Both of these books are excellent-- When You Reach Me won the Newberry Medal, and it functions like a companion novel to A Wrinkle in Time.

The Inquisitor's Tale (Or Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog) by Adam Gidwitz This fantasyish story has a strong trio of two boys and a girl and looks at a lot of social justice issues (race, xenophobia, gender, antisemitism) in the context of medieval Europe. Also it's beautiful, really, really well researched and, for all it's sadness, a lot of fun.

Holes by Louis Sachar -- so it's only a little bit fantasy? There's a curse? And there are very few female characters in the book, (it's set at a juvenile detention camp for boys) BUT there's a pretty important racial theme going through it, and it's fantastic-- much better than the movie.

House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer - Nancy Farmer has been doing interesting, racially diverse fantasy for decades. This one is set in a small, imaginary country on the border between Mexico and the US whose entire export is drugs. Main character is a young boy who is a clone of the drug lord who owns the country-- bred so that his organs could be harvested for the drug lord, but things do not go according to plan. The story is thrilling, and opens lots of really interesting moral questions.it sounds like it would be too much to handle for middle grade, but I really think it's geared at 11-early teens. The sequel is also excellent.

Protector of the Small quartet by Tamora Pierce -- I don't necessarily recommend Tamora Pierce's other books, but this series is quite good, and really is a look at how institutionalized sexism might play out as a young girl seeks to be the first girl going through knight-training in the realm. I had a lot of fun reading them. Main character is quazi-European, but grew up in quazi-Japan so there's some intercultural interest there.

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. It's certainly a romance as it is a retelling of Cinderella, but the crux of the story is Ella gaining agency over her self, and on my last reading it felt almost like a manifesto in terms of what her particular curse (of always being obedient) has to do with femininity in general. Also her best friend has dark skin and is socially isolated because of that, her accent, and her relative poverty.

Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George. This is just a fun fantasy story with a castle that's always changing, and a happy family who live there together. It doesn't take on big issues, most of the time, it's just a light, happy story about a clever and perceptive princess. Could be read younger, too.

Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera is the story of a young Mauri girl who wants lead her people, despite the leadership only going to men. There are a lot of deeply fraught family tensions, and by the end of the book she becomes the stuff of legend.

If you're in the mood for broody, weird, whipsmart, mind bending fantasy you must read Frances Hardinge-- Maybe start with A Face Like Glass, (gender issues, and massive class/wealth inequality issues), but then also her books Fly by Night (Chapter titles like A is for Arson, and questions like who's allowed to print what? what should the relationship between the state and religion be?) and FlyTrap (amazing double city, where the rich and the poor live side by side but never see each other) which are just so good. All of the books I've read of hers have female protagonists who are ready to turn the world upside down.

Iron Hearted Violet by Kelly Barnhill -- I keep trying to get my hands on The Girl Who Drank the Moon by this author (winner of the Newberry), but in the mean time I read this high fantasy. A little bit of steampunkish worldbuilding, a little bit of taking fairy tales to task for the messages they send, and a lot of solid storytelling, as "love makes heroes of us all."

Ms Marvel: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson -- I don't even read superhero comics, but I LOVE these. These stories are pulling apart questions of race and gender pretty forcibly, as Kamala Kahn, a little muslim teenager in NJ gains superpowers. Favorite line: "Good is not a thing you are, it's a thing you do." There's violence, but like, flashy superhero violence. Nothing too scary.

The Thief and sequels by Megan Whalen Turner-- okay so... these don't tick a lot of these boxes, (they have a fair amount of romance, and some violence, but no sex, and the violence isn't graphic) but they are written by a woman, contain multiple incredible queens, and have a lot to say about power and who is expected to have it and what that looks like. They are also some of my favorite books of all time.

The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina is what The Hunger Games and Divergent would be if they were: 1) written by and cherishing a strong native (author is aboriginal Australian) voice, 2) interested in not just burning down bad civilizations, but also reforming them through a hopeful democratic movement without turning to violent uprising, 3) knew how to build romantic tension without just having extended make-out scenes... It's certainly YA not middlegrade, but it's not too steamy for a 13 year old, I don't think, and I was really impressed with its quality.

Okay. I have more suggestions for older YA as well which I'm happy to write about, but I'll leave it at this for now. Enjoy!

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Clara's Favorite books of 2018

I'm about to make this into a video over on my YouTube Channel, so by Jan. 1 there will probably be a video there with essentially the same content, but here are my favorite books I've read this year. I'd love to hear yours as well!

New Fiction to me:


The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
This is a City drama not only the story of the two title characters, but of everyone in their social web. It’s beautifully written and the way it pulled at my heart reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane.


Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor
This is book two of the Binti series-- They are Afrofuturism where the main character travels away to University in another galaxy, and in this book she returns home, but is changed.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferante
You have probably already heard about this book, its the first in a series, and the series has recently been airing as an HBO show. It’s an Italian personal drama about a young girl and her friend, and it’s gorgeous and devastating.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
A book of suburban American life, with especially striking perspectives on motherhood. It has a bit of a Middlemarch feel to it, in that just as you’re beginning to feel totally unsympathetic to a particular character the narration moves so you see things from their perspective.


Favorite Rereads: I did a lot of comfort reading and rereading to balance out all the reading I did for my prelim doctoral exams. So if we’re friends on goodreads you may know that I read a ton of children’s lit this year, most of it reread including


Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
I was going to a summer intensive learning how to read Elizabethan secretary hand and was coming to the end of each day pretty brain dead, and listening along as Harry faces trauma after trauma was oddly comforting. I finished the Battle of Hogwarts on the metro into DC; weeping quietly.
The next two are books that I think of as explicitly in conversation with each other, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle and When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead. This fall was the first time I taught my own course at the University of Minnesota, and I gave a lot of challenging readings to my students, but at the end of the semester while they were doing individual research I had them also read these two books so we had something to talk about in class. I thought it worked surprisingly well.


The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
These are some of my very favorite books full of little secrets for the rereader, and they just get better every time I read them. Not everyone loves them, and the first book can be especially jarring on the first read, but to my mind reading now for the 100th time, it feels like I can see the author setting up the dominos to all crash down by the end of the book.


And some non-fiction:


Daring Greatly and Rising Strong by Brene Brown
At this point I feel like everyone’s heard of Brene Brown, but if you haven’t, she is extraordinary and doing incredible work with how we handle shame and vulnerability. I’ll link to some of her TED talks if you’d like to get a taste. https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en


Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren
I sometimes struggle with “Christian Life” books as they can seem either very cheesy or entirely out of touch with the culture but this book was pretty wonderful, tying the elements of the Anglican church into the everyday chores and activities of the day. For example, “Sitting in Traffic” pulls together with the liturgical year and “an unhurried God” It’s a gorgeous read.


Switch: How to Change things when Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath

I know of these authors from their wonderful book Made to Stick, which I also teach pieces of to my students. This book was really encouraging and exciting to read as I was finding myself stressed out and discouraged to hear again and again that change is possible, and there are clear doable methods for making it happen. If you have big new year’s resolutions planned, it might be a nice book to try and accompany those changes you’re going to make.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Thoughts sexual assault and proof

Our judicial system is based around proof; anyone accused is innocent until proven guilty. That burden of proof is high. The idea is that it is better for one hundred guilty persons escape than one innocent person should suffer. This is a very good ideal, and in most cases I am eager to find ways to be more merciful, with a greater eye to restoration and education rather than punishment. But where this ideal of the necessity of proof gets troubling is in crimes which by their very nature are private, are intimate, are difficult to prove.

When I heard that a colleague of mine had raped his exgirlfriend in grad school I thought, “Was she really raped, though? If she were raped, wouldn’t she tell the authorities, and seek justice? Just saying bad things about her ex doesn’t seem like the way to make things right.” It took me a while to listen to what was going on, and learn. What I didn’t know is that she was specifically advised by her therapist not to take the issue to court. She had dated her rapist in the past, and (as the therapist said) there’s not a jury in Virginia that will find him guilty. Even with a rape kit (DNA samples and all), even with photos of her torn flesh, there’s no way to meet the burden of proof. There is still an idea of rape happening in dark alleyways with masked strangers, not trusted friends, romantic partners, or authority figures, and it is hard to combat the cultural story of what rape is, especially when the other person in the court is saying, “that’s not true.” It is very, very hard to convince everyone that the victim is telling the truth and the perpetrator is lying, and so the price of going through the ordeal of seeking justice without hope of justice, was a price too high to pay.

Since then I’ve heard many, many of my friends and acquaintances’ stories of sexual abuse, assault and rape. I hesitate to add my voice to the mix, because my own experiences as the recipient of sexual harassment or touch I didn’t consent to seem pretty minor compared to those of many of the women (and men) around me. But I’ve been listening. And I’ve been thinking. And I worry that our ideal of the burden of proof is bringing about the opposite of its intention. Perhaps it is appropriate for crimes like robbery, or any nonviolent crime, but if we put the burden of proof so high on cases of rape? It’s no wonder people don’t report, or don’t until there is so much at stake that it’s worth the cost. Because if we fill in the characters of the actual situation many in our country face today, the proverb could be: better 100 rapists rape innocents without legal consequences, than one innocent lose their freedom without cause. And I know, it’s not only men doing the raping, and it’s not only women getting raped, but a system that rewards aggression and stifles those who stand up for themselves seems like a system that needs changing.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Disney's Opening Books

For several years I have been fascinated by the classic image of the book opening at the beginning of many classic Disney films. Wanting to learn more, I watched the opening few minutes of every animated Disney film ever made! If you’d like to see my notes on the films, you can find them here, but the exciting bits pertaining to opening books you can read all about below.  

The first full length animated Disney film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937. In that film, the first shots are of an old and beautiful book which opens to show the beginning of the story. This book establishes the film in the tradition of storytelling, with all the authority of such a beautiful and historic volume. Furthermore, the volume appears not only historic and created with meticulous care, but magical, opening itself without the need of an assisting hand.  Though the book does not need our help to open it, the youngest members of its original audience may have needed help to read it, because the text beautifully displayed on the pages of the book was not narrated outloud. Given the age Disney’s current target audience, it is not surprising that this fact has changed, and even their next film, Pinocchio, the lines are read outloud by Jimminy Cricket, after he sings “When you wish upon a star.” In the Pinocchio book,  there are both words and pictures, and by zooming into the picture, the image becomes the animation of the story itself. This opening book motif was used again in Disney’s third animated film, Cinderella in 1950, again, with the illustrations becoming the animation of the film. The book houses the story of the film, as a rich symbol of history and the tradition of written stories. 

From 1950 to 1970 about half the films opened with the image of a book. In addition to Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, and The Jungle Book all featured the book, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp and The 101 Dalmations did not, even though all but Lady and The Tramp are based on stories from books. By this time, Disney movies were doing well enough that it was not necessary to establish their film’s legitimacy with an appeal to another medium. Merely having the “Disney” name on the film was enough to warrant attention. 

Start at 2:12 to see the bit in question
After 1970 the book opening died out almost entirely, with two notable exceptions. In 1973, the Robin Hood film opens with a book filled with text which, like Snow White, is not read outloud. “Long ago, good King Richard departed for the Holy Land on a great crusade. During his absence, Prince John his greedy and treacherous brother, usurped the throne.” Besides the text, on these pages are images of King Richard and his men going off on crusade, and of Robin Hood pulling a bow, (all portrayed as human) and then at the top of the page there’s a rooster with a lute. The image zooms in on the rooster, away from the text (saying something about Robin Hood being the people’s only hope) and the rooster turns to the reader and starts talking. The rooster says, “There’s a heap of legends and tall tales about Robin Hood. All different, too. Well, we folks in the animal kingdom have our own version. It’s the story of what really happened in Sherwood forest.” With that the film directs us away from the human story of Robin Hood, and shows us the cast of animals who will be telling the story of Robin Hood. The most interesting thing here, is that the authority of the book is dismantled. The rooster assures us, we’ll see “what really happened” but he also admits that there are different versions, and that this version will not be the same as other versions. For one thing, it will be told by animals. This film makes explicit what other films do implicitly; it says that tradition does not need to be followed. A tradition can be evoked and rejected.

The other instance of an opening book in the 1970s was the original Winnie the Pooh film in 1977, which opened with a live action portrayal of the bedroom of Christopher Robin. After panning around the room, the camera focuses on a book which becomes animated and opens to reveal the spread of Hundred Acre Woods, and all the animals living there. The Pooh Bear movies have their own little arc. In The Tigger Movie in 2000, the narrator is telling how Pooh is the favorite animal, when an animated Tigger, bounces into the still life action screen, objects to the constant preference for Pooh, pulls the letters off of the book, and writes, “The Tigger Movie” on the title page. It’s a fun invocation of the original movie’s opening sequence, and says, like the Robin Hood opening, that the story can be changed, even something as stable seeming as the book can be altered. 

Disney’s films in the 90s did a lot of opening sequences which seem similar to book openings, but did not contain books. Beauty and the Beast has a storytelling narration giving exposition in a similar manner to many of the book openings, but the story is told in the stained glass of the Beast’s castle instead of on the pages of a book. Pocahontas opens with a framed historical print of a sailing ship headed for the new world to give a bit of a historic flavor to the opening of its story. Hercules opens in a museum panning past vases and urns with a narrator telling about classical mythology, until the frame zooms in on a particular urn where the characters come to life and tell the narrator to not make it sound so boring. In Mulan, instead of an already written book, we see Chinese calligraphy being written in the first opening frames. These creative reimaginings extend the reach of the storybook to areas where the book is not the most natural medium for carrying the story, but all of them use an image of storytelling to begin. 

After 2000 the openings of Disney films which referenced books did so in self-referential ways. Once Dreamworks had opened Shrek with a fairytale book used as toilet paper, Disney embraced that sarcastic style in Chicken Little. The movie attempts to open several times each time the narrator stops and says, “no, no, no…” too boring, too cliche for this movie, so they begin in the story itself with a big action scene after rejecting “once upon a time,” an opening book, and The Lion King music. In The Princess and the Frog, the movie opens with Tiana’s mother reading the story of The Frog Prince from a big book to the two young girls. The book is not magical, it’s just reminding the audience of the loose plot connections of the movie with a fairytale story. Enchanted has an entirely new storyline, without any connection a particular fairytale, but in Enchanted they pull out all the stops and show the book in a tower of the Disney castle, with extremely traditional choral music in the background, explicitly referencing the fairytale books from Disney’s early days. While Snow White was establishing its legitimacy by pointing to the tradition of beautiful historic storytelling tradition housed in books, Enchanted establishes its legitimacy by pointing to Disney. The one twist they make to the original motif is to make Enchanted a pop-up book. This appears not only at the opening of the story but also in the final scene sequence as a means of transitioning back and forth between the animated Andalasia world and the live action world of New York City. While some of the most recent films have a stylized opening sequence of storytelling (Wreck-it Ralph, Zootopia, and Moana to name a few) this motif seems so thoroughly used that it has become worn out. Turning it (as Enchanted does) to look back at itself brings the story full circle, and reminds the viewer that whether we notice them or not, books and movies follow scripts, and recycle motifs, all in one giant cycle of storytelling. 

Thursday, May 4, 2017

The Book is a Survivor

One of my favorite classes in my masters’ studies was a course called Textual Culture. Our professor, Paul Menzer, was constantly stretching the ways we thought about text and the technologies used to store and use that text, be they seemingly simple technologies (paper and pens) or the mysteries of microchips. A lot of us were pretty scornful of reading on screens, and he would bring up other times in which people have resisted technological changes. Think of people’s disdain for horseless carriages. A lot of the arguments being made at that time, (the beauty, the elegance, the emotional significance, just liking horses) are similar to the ones being made today. A lot of people said, “I will never ride in one of those horseless carriages.” And they never did. And then they died. His point was that just because some people have an emotional aversion to change, that is not enough to keep that change from happening. However, the analogy never sat quite right with me. Although horses and their owners do die, the books themselves can live much longer than their users. It is true that we are in a large moment of cultural change, and it is true that the role of books and paper in this world will not remain the same as it was in my childhood, but I think there are many reasons why the physical, paper, “low-tech” book has benefits which its digital counterparts cannot replicate, and one of them is longevity.

While moving this past summer the box I was least happy about carting around was the box of dead electronics. The old ipods which can no longer sync with today’s apps, the GPS which doesn’t turn on anymore, the computers we used three years ago, eight years ago, 10 years ago, all shuttered into a closet or something no longer usable for even a fraction of their intended purposes. None of these are more than 12 years old, and all of them are useless or next to useless. People seem to think that computers, phones, and e-reader tablets will threaten the codex, but they seem like flimsy and finicky replacements for a technology which has stayed essentially constant as it shaped the world for well over a thousand years. People are looking at books as if they will be as replaceable as the changes in the dissemination of audio; changing from lps to eight tracks to cassette to cds to digital downloads in less than half a century.

A different day in that same Textual Culture class, Menzer was talking about early modern printing and so he bought in some books from the college collection. Wearing white gloves he carefully turned the pages, and showed us some of the leaves before handing the book to the closest student to pass around. The student balked, not having gloves, and Menzer just smiled, saying that that book was better made than most books today; the strong, beautiful pages were made of rags, that it was in nearly pristine condition despite being in use for over four hundred years. The gloves were just for show.

Another concern with the rise of ebooks is the lack of substance of what is bought and sold. Rather than buying or selling an object, ebooks function as a sale of a non-object. There is no thing being sold, merely the information. The text without a body. Of course, in some ways this is the appeal of ebooks. No need to burden the book shelves. No need to carry multiple volumes with you while you travel-- your virtual library is with you wherever you need it. But because books are now no longer an object they are not a good that can be sold by anyone other than the publisher or those privileged sources, the companies buying rights to the ebooks. If you loved a book you cannot lend it to a friend (Kindle has a very complicated borrowing policy which I have never heard of anyone using), and if you didn’t love the book, it is still yours forever. You can’t pass it on to a charity shop or leave it in a little free library. Started using a pretty basic Kindle when I lived in western Europe for three years, and I had no access to English libraries. Instead of purchasing the slow-shipping paper books for a book club I was a part of, I would sometimes just buy the ebook. It was however a very strange thing if someone wanted to borrow the book I would need to give up my whole kindle library, and, (since a kindle is very much intended as a private device) there was something very strange about passing off the record of everything
I’d been recently reading to an acquaintance. Passing around a book in a classroom is infinitely preferable to passing around one’s phone. In addition to limiting the reader to the devices they themselves own, ebooks have a certain amount of vulnerability of price. Reading at the beach or in your bathtub is a tricky thing with your $700 iphone-- but a paperback you can just leave on your towel when you go into the water for a swim. If you drop a book into the tub, sometimes the books are well enough made that if you dry it quickly it’s still usable, but if not, you are probably not going to pay more than $20 replacing it. You can leave books in the car without worrying about theft. There are obviously exceptions for rare or collectable books, but for the most part, having one object do one job means that the object can be very good at that job.

Those tear-stains are so good!
The creativity available in book formatting, in their style and variability, is also a tragic loss of ebooks. In an ebook, the text is assembled in an infinite scroll, artificially broken into pages based on each reader’s preferences. You can change where the page breaks are by changing the font or the size of the words. In some ways this is wonderful. It has allowed people with limited eyesight to read books in type as large as they need. But there is a great deal to be lost in such a transition as well. The editors and designers whose job it is to make books beautiful and functional are stripped of their domain. Harry Potter seems impossible out of Adobe Garamond type, yet buy the ebook, and your only options are the three fonts kindle allows, and none of the delightful switches in fonts for letters or pronouncements or even this gem of Hagrid’s tearstained letter. The proportions of the book are also set by the size of the e-reader making picture books or poetry a mess. When it was published in 2012, Chris Ware’s mammoth graphic novel creation seemed to both celebrate the paper book and break out of its confines: The book is sold as a cardboard box full of little booklets of various shapes and sizes all telling stories related to architecture. Odd in that it is not quite a paper book, (made up of too many small pieces, and of course the box) but certainly resisting the possibility of reading on a screen. Picture books are also typically not published for ereader, because they are not designed for a single tablet but a codex, where the turn of the page adds to the drama of the book. The versatility options in a screen based reading experience actually limits the possibilities of design, as everything must flow in a continuous stream of text.

And while I have saved the personal attachment to books as objects for last (it being the most mutable of these defenses for the book as an object) it is also significant. While the distinctives put on books by the publisher are a significant loss to the book as it loses its bodily form, the distinctives and personal details added by the owners and users of the books are even more significant. An autographed copy, a first edition, a scribbled note in on the flyleaf, these all add value to the book for an individual reader, but am also very fond of books with marginalia from unknown sources. This fall I bought all used copies for my class on the 19th century novel. Some inherited marginalia was appalling-- whoever the scribbly first owner of my Balsac was, they clearly did not understand or finish reading Pere Goriot, but the inscriber of my Bleak House? I felt as though I had the half-blood prince guiding my reading, pointing out themes, exclaiming in neat, witty side comments, and I felt this loving kinship with the unknown reader who sold her (his?) book back to the great sea of textbooks. I love rereading books I marked or marked by my friends, or by myself when I was young, and find a strange representation of my progress, being shaped, learning, ingesting the written word. The ways of doing this via ebooks are so clumsy and so technical that the warmth, the immediacy, the sensory closeness is lost.

Books can also be extremely sensual. One autumn morning when we had gotten in the fall art books at the bookstore it was my job to fix up the art book display table. Now, this table was the centerpiece of the store, right underneath a row of skylights, and the frontlist artbooks in the autumn are the publishers gems of the year. In hopes of surging profits with the holiday wave of shopping, and these huge glossy books are all sold wrapped in clingwrap to keep them from damage. However, in order to sell them, it is necessary unwrap one of each book to have it on display. Coursebook rush had just finished and my own ears were ringing with the hundred times I had told students that books “cannot be returned as a new book without the plastic wrap intact,” as I found myself with a dozen books (each costing more money than I would make working that afternoon) ripping them out of their clinging plastic. As I stood in the morning sunlight holding each one, one at a time in my arms, peeling them out of their sheer dressings, seeing the glossy pages fall open to Japanese botanical prints, or a history of fashion full of texture and color, a book on Rolling Stone magazine its cover slightly embossed, I was both nervous and excited by the gentleness and strength required by these volumes. But books are not just a pleasure to the eye and the touch!
The smell of old libraries is so appealing that luxury candles are sold in the scent of books or libraries. David A. Carter has a pop-up book focused on the sounds of paper as it flips or thuds or crunches. Phones have got to become pretty sexy if they are going to compete with books in the long run.

So what does come next for books? If ebooks are not enough to eclipse paper books what will the buffet of technological offerings look like in the future? My guess is that books will become more multifaceted, that publishers will embrace some of the differences between physical paper books and the other mediums. And to some degree this is already happening. Pop-up books draw attention to the paperiness of books, and the past twenty years has seen innovation in pop-up books like never before. By contrast, digital means of reading are starting to take advantage of the possibilities of that medium. Heuristic Media and Ian McKellen have put out a Shakespeare app which makes reading the play a much more interactive experience. You can read, or have parts read to you, or there are images from productions, graphic novel style art, or even scenes acted all at the disposal of the “reader.” So far, it has very good reviews.

Even more traditional books are taking advantage of the plurality available when published through different forms. Books like A Monster Calls have come out in very different versions in quick succession. The paperback and the ebook have only a few illustrations, but the hardcover is almost a graphic novel, full of double page spreads of moody black and white illustrations. Notably, the fasted growing book industry is neither paper nor ebooks, but audiobooks. Flourishing with the digital dissemination, companies such as Audible, and libraries taking on Overdrive, celebrities reading books, and a new podcast culture, audiobooks are on the rise. Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking originated as a TED talk, and became a book, very conscious of its distinct forms. The paper or e-book contained many images, but directed the reader to Amanda Palmer’s website to listen to the music described. At the same time her impressive audiobook (“Written, read and sung by Amanda Palmer”) contained a lot of music, and a great deal of performance even in her reading her own words. Part of the success of audiobooks is this understanding of the ways in which a book may need to change to suit its format. Even stars of the internet (writers of The Oatmeal, xkcd, and Hyperbole and a Half to name just a few) are moving from the screen to the page, translating their writing across mediums, from the new medium to the old. Perhaps this is just to make more money, (they certainly haven’t stopped generating content for the internet) but there is something stable about books compared to the everflickering limelite of the internet. When Allie Brosh talks about her book on her blog, Hyperbole and a Half, she explains that she wanted it to exist on real pages.

I think a lot of the success of these forthcoming generations will be found in finding the right medium to raise your voice. I wrote this paper as a blogpost rather than as a formal academic paper, partially because I wanted to include quite a few images, and it is so nice to be able to just click on the links. I also wanted it to be read by more people than just my own professor, and this seemed like a good place to share it. If it had been an academic paper it would have been harder to strike a warm and inviting tone. In the future I hope to have a friendly approach and an effervescent sparkle to my academic prose, but I haven’t got there just yet. But perhaps most importantly, writing words on this blog seemed like the right place for this argument. Reading about the importance of paper on paper would I suppose emphasize the idea, but reading on a screen about the importance of paper is a reminder that this is not the only way to absorb ideas. Perhaps (if you are very lucky) when you finish reading this sentence, you might have the liberty to go shut off your screen, and read a book.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Announcement: Owen's blog is moving

Hello dear friends! This is just a brief announcement to say that I'm moving my blog to my new website, which as of this writing is mostly empty but for the blog posts I've copied there.

You can find my new posts, including today's (Three ways to do your to-dos) here:

http://owenbiesel.com/blog


Does He Collect Butterflies will go back to being Clara's blog with the occasional guest post by me. Thanks for reading!