Social Media Highlights Our Relationship With Books

Recently this photograph has made the rounds on Facebook:

In case you can’t read the text, it reads 

“A book commits suicide every time you watch Jersey Shore.”  

I found it hilarious, and metaphorically accurate!  I commented on Facebook that it was representative of all reality t.v. shows.  So many of my friends “liked” and commented on the photo, even friends that don’t read compulsively and aren’t bookworms.  They shared this sentiment at least in part.  To be fair, it may just be Jersey Shore backlash, but I don’t think so.

This question arose from observing the reactions to the photo, “Is reality t.v. actually helping increase book sales?”  I took stock of how often I’d turned the t.v. on in the past month looking for something informative or entertaining, only to turn it off in disgust less than 5 minutes later.  Several hundred channels and there’s nothing on!  Not even on my DVR!  What the bleep, people?  Again, I asked myself if this might not be a contributing factor to the increase in e-book sales.  While my trend-spotting radar says “Yes”, I have no definitive proof, only anecdotal evidence.  As in, my own observations.

In addition to the above photograph, a link to a website called “Book Porn” was Tweeted this past week by Susan Haws, a member of my writers’ group.  The name sounded just awful, but Susan is so conservative, it had to be a play on words.  So I bit and clicked out to www.bookshelfporn.com.  It was not, as I feared, so many books on pornography being sold off a virtual shelf.  Instead, it is photograph after mind-numbing, drool-worthy photograph, of places with bookshelves.  These can be home libraries or public ones, bookstores or works of art made from books.  It is incredible and astounding, and I’m so mad that I didn’t think of it first.  All I’d have needed to do is scan and upload to the internet all of the pictures I have saved over the years of different places and ways people store and display books.  There are some on their site that I have in my scrapbook, and there are some I have that they do not.  Drool worthy ones that I might share some day.  

This site points toward another trend:  The Comeback of the Hardcover Book.  We who love books will always love the sensory experience that comes with holding a book.  Not just the heft of a hardcover in hand, but the smell, the weight of the paper it is printed on, the design and color of the cover and the end papers, the subtle nuances upon which a true bibliophile can base a relationship with a book.  There was even this quote among the photographs on Bookshelf Porn:

"Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us."

Why second hand bookstores smell so good, from “Perfumes:  The Guide” by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.

Another quote on this site is something that I’ve done in my own life, long before ever hearing this advice:  

“We need to make books cool again.  If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.”  John Waters

More than once, I’ve had a date pick me up at home and upon entering, the comment was made, “You have too many books!”  It’s not like my home is a fire hazard.  They just don’t all have a home.

“There is no such thing as too many books.  There are just too few bookshelves,” I’d reply.  They might as well have insulted my friends to their faces.  I was deeply offended, and more than a little hurt. 

There was never a second date.  I knew there would not be before I picked up my purse to leave with the guy for the first date.  Once those words left their lips, there was not a chance in hell he was going to get lucky, that night, or ever.  

My mother read to me whilst she was pregnant with me.  She took me to the St. Louis Public Library when I was two weeks old, that is not a typo, and got me my first library card.  The librarian tried to dissuade her at first, but didn’t have an argument for the fact that there was no age requirement for someone to acquire one, only a parent’s or guardian’s signature.  By the time I was two years old, I was reading on my own.  Not Chaucer or Shakespeare, but first readers.  By the time I reached school, I was impatient with those just learning and read ahead because I wanted to know what happened next.  When it was my time to read the next sentence aloud, I had no idea where we were.  I’d been too absorbed in the story, and I was passed over.  The nuns were scary, and I didn’t want to admit I’d broken the rules.  The day the school called my mother and said they would have to hold me back because I could not read, she almost fell off her chair.  They sorted it out pretty quickly, and I was left alone to read ahead after that.  

My point here is, books have been an integral part of my life, and I could never form an intimate relationship with someone who does not himself have at least an understanding of my love of books.  It was at one time my goal to read every book in the library, and I developed a system to get through them all before I realized that not all books are created equal, therefore not all books are worth reading.  Today it is my goal to own a house with enough room to create a library.  Anyone I am with will have to know going in that this is a non-negotiable item.  Indoor plumbing, a library, and a garden.   Electricity is optional, but not the library or running water.  

One of the loveliest blog posts I have seen to date is “A Girl You Should Date” by Nona Merah at http://nonamerah.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/869/?refid=12.  In it she describes why a boy should love a girl who reads, and how to approach her once he finds one such female.  A quote from her post:

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve." --Nona Mereh 

And finally, I leave you with this link to “20 of the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries”:  http://www.oddee.com/item_96527.aspx, yet another reason to thank www.bookshelfporn.com.

All this social media chatter around books is good news for writers and the publishing industry.  The last few days I have been held hostage by a manuscript that I hope to get out in e-book form this fall, and another one I’d love to see in hardcover next year.  We’ll see if I break free in time.  Meanwhile, it is nice to know that market demand for reading material is, for whatever reason, on the rise.

Until next time, fellow travelers on the road paved with words, go do your share to increase our collective IQ's and GDP's:   Turn off the bad television shows, and read a book instead!

The Upside of Quiet Winter Days

This is my second winter back in Missouri after eleven years in Southern CA, where winter isn’t as wintery as it is here in the Midwest.  Last year was brutal here, with ice and snow, a couple of snowstorms that bordered on blizzards, power outages and subzero temperatures.  Parents who would be stuck inside for days at a time with rambunctious kids and marathon video game sessions flooded the grocery store before each of those storms, filling their grocery carts with several bottles of wine and a few of the harder stuff and cases of beer (which one was the chaser?), leaving the shelves in the alcohol aisle near empty. 

This year, though, winter has been pretty mild.  The sun is shining, but it is getting pretty cold again after a few days of near 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  Temperatures dip below freezing at night, which is a good thing if you know anything about bugs.  If we don’t have a “good freeze” or two over winter, the mosquito, tic, chigger, and flea populations rejoice.  Those critters go forth and multiply as they would do normally, but the existing populations from the previous year are not killed off when there’s no freeze, effectively doubling the population of all those blood suckers.  It makes for an awful summer.  Have you ever had 60 mosquito bites and a sunburn at the same time?  It makes scratching an exercise in masochism.  You have to make some Faustian deal over which is worse:  The itching or the pain from the burn.

Even in a mild winter such as this one, there is a sense of dormancy, of things lying in wait, resting, reserving, and refueling.  This dormant energy lends itself to quiet activities, such as reading, writing a novel (or three, if your like me and can’t focus on one at a time), planning a garden, planning your spring break or your summer vacation, getting in touch with old friends and family members you’ve not seen in too long.  While this is a good time to do these things, we don’t always get them accomplished.  To think of a thing is not the same as doing that thing.  To that end, I have made lists of things I want to accomplish, and each day as I write my daily to-do list I check to see if I am doing at least one of those things from my bigger lists.  Sounds like too many lists, doesn’t it?  Not really.  

This is how I broke it down, a method I learned from reading Alan Lakein’s book “How To Get Control of Your Time and Your Life”:

Lifetime Goals List

Yearly Goals List (2012, for example)

Monthly Special Emphasis List

Weekly Goals List

The Lifetime Goals List is the inspiration for the other lists.  My big goals are to make a living writing, to produce certain works I have in mind, to get my boys through college, and to travel the world.  

My monthly Special Emphasis List actually has less to do with my Lifetime Goals and more to do with seasonal activities or short term goals.  For instance, every month I like to decorate for that month’s holidays or the season, but I don’t always do it because it’s not written down somewhere and it gets away from me.  However, when I do it, it keeps my house and yard tidy because I get into the nooks and crannies every month and move things around, take things down, etc., for a fun reason rather than for drudgery.  It keeps me cheerful because the decor is never dull.  Floral arrangements change with holidays and seasons, the wreath on the door can be swapped out, from winter to summer the curtains may even change to let in more light.  

Always for the Month’s Special Emphasis List I add at least two family members that I wish to visit because too much time has passed.  This has become important to me since I went to my mother’s funeral in April and realized how many people were there that I hadn’t seen in years, some in decades.  I didn’t want the next time we saw each other to be at one of our own funerals.  I resolved then and there to make the effort.  There are also special, one-off projects; books I want to read (a combination of genre and classic novels); books I ought to read; special occasions and events; deadlines; things like that.  This year my goal was to read a classic novel each month, so each month I write down which title I want to read so I won’t let that goal fall by the wayside.  

My Weekly Goals List is taken from the other Lists, chipping away at the big stuff a little at a time, hoping to move the ball forward on my long-term goals.  In this way, I can see which things I can realistically fit into one week.  I still overdo it and end up carrying some things over, or just crossing some things off because they weren’t as important as I’d initially thought, but since using this method I have become far more effective and get much more accomplished.

The Daily List keeps me honest.  It includes all the little nitty gritty things I am required to do in Life, but also time for writing, and I hold it religiously, even turning off the WiFi and the phone to avoid interruptions.  There is time for reading each day (it’s still not enough!), and finally, some of those things from the Weekly List make it onto this Daily List. 

I like the feeling of accomplishment that comes when I cross off an item from my to-do lists, especially from the larger, more long-term lists!  

This week I will finish up the Alan Lakein book, “How to Control Your Time...” and hopefully I will be able to read Juliet Blackwell’s “Hexes and Hemlines”, my brain candy book for this week.  I need to begin this month’s classic novel, “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin.  The books I ought to read are writing related, about story structure, and writing mystery novels and romances.  

It’s a lot to juggle, but I find it much easier to track with a binder to hold all my lists written on looseleaf paper and a desk calendar which I use to track my writing projects and deadlines, also known as an “editorial calendar”.

My favorite thing to do when it’s cold outside and all the plants look like they’ve died?  Bake something.  It’s so life-affirming, and cozy.  Here’s the link to my new favorite banana bread recipe, complete with cinnamon crunch topping, from www.allrecipes.com:  http://allrecipes.com/recipe/bates-banana-bread/detail.aspx.  It’s called “Bates Banana Bread”, and it is awesome.  

Enjoy :-)