barrettchase.com

barrettchase.com
obey the rules. often enter. organize your material.

Wed, 18 May 2011

"Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years."
— Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

"In my experience, the thing about girls is — you never know. No, you never do. Even if you actually catch them, redhanded — bent triple upside down in mid-air over the headboard, say, and brushing their teeth with your best friend's dick — you never know. She'll deny it, indignantly. She'll believe it, too. She'll hold the dick there, like a mike, and tell you that it isn't so."
— Martin Amis, Money

[filepath: /assessment/reading]

Fri, 29 Apr 2011

Work in Progress

I suppose now that Christa has gone and spilled the beans, I should probably explain how and why I changed my mind about e-readers enough to actually go out and buy one. That's right, friends. The big bad Amazon corporation finally wore me down and convinced me to buy a Kindle.

This is all very embarrassing to me because a mere month ago I admitted my belief that people only buy e-readers because they feel guilty about not reading. Then a mere week after that, I admitted that I personally have not been reading much lately. So now when I say that I just actually bought an e-reader ... ugh.

Don't think I'm not aware of my own hypocrisies. Don't think I'm above hating and ridiculing a person for the simple reason that I'm exactly like that person. Apparently.

But this isn't true. Not exactly. I love reading and I don't believe I need help to force myself to do it. I was just skeptical of the e-reader, while at the same time being pretty damn curious about it. I didn't want to like the e-reader, and I had a list of reasons why I didn't need to explore that particular branch of technology. But most of my problems with e-readers had to do with comparing them to mp3 players. While the mp3 player does solve a problem -- how do I make my music portable -- the e-reader is not built to address this problem. Obviously, unless you are a student, you probably don't need to take your library with you everywhere you go the way you do with your music library.

My problems with e-readers, having never used one, were as follows:

If your device breaks or malfunctions, you lose all your books.
It's not as aesthetically pleasing as reading a paper book.
You can't lend or borrow e-books.
I hate digital-rights management. I don't want to buy things with DRM.

One by one, I've investigated or at least thought about these issues, and have managed to debunk all of them:

Kindle books are stored in the cloud. If your device gives up the ghost, your books are all still out there, and they're still yours to re-download for free.
This is pure idiocy. The aesthetic value of paper books varies on a case-by-case basis. I've refrained from reading a lot of books based on how they feel or how they look. I hate reading large hardcovers or books with embarrassingly garish or feminine covers. When you place a leather case on the Kindle, it isn't the same experience as reading a paper book, but it's enjoyable enough, and it's the same no matter what the content is.
I don't actually care about this. Our basement is full of paper books, and far too many of them are missing. Often Christa will suggest an author to me, and I will go down and pull one of that author's books off the shelf. "Oh, don't read that one," she'll say. "That one's awful. Read his other one." Well, you guessed it. The other one -- the good one -- isn't in the house because someone else borrowed with intent to keep.
It's true that Amazon e-books have DRM, but Amazon has always been a pretty good citizen about this issue. Their mp3s come without DRM, which is one reason I like to shop with them. I'm okay with some compromise here, and if I end up not liking this compromise, the Kindle isn't all that expensive anymore. It can be written off as a fun experiment. No one is forcing me to keep using it.

Here's what I like about the Kindle thus far:

Free classics. When it comes to books whose copyright has lapsed (i.e. books written before 1923), you can download them for free from Project Gutenberg and read them on the Kindle. Amazon also has some free or cheap classics you can get right from their site. Right now I'm reading The Trial by Franz Kafka, which I've been wanting to read for quite some time.
Seriously long battery life. Since the screen doesn't light up but rather looks like paper, the battery life is "up to one month."
Magazine subscriptions. It's going to be great to be able to read magazines without having magazines strewn all over the place. The selection is pretty small, because it's limited to text-heavy magazines, which are really the only kind of magazines that make sense to read on a Kindle.

Here's what I don't like so much:

The buttons take some getting used to. It's easy to forget where the page-turning buttons are and accidentally flip a few pages while you're putting moving the device around or otherwise adjusting your posture while you're reading.
There's a little glare. While the glare issue is way, way, way better than a glossy computer screen, there is still some glare. There's no glare with paper books.
The music player could be way better. You can put mp3s on the Kindle and listen to them as you read, but you have no control over them. They are played in the order you put them on the device and that's that. Why even have this option if it's going to be so useless?

So there you go. I bought a Kindle. It's been fun so far. I'll still read paper books. But I'll probably end up reading more old stuff on the Kindle. Or maybe just huge hardcovers with garish feminine covers.

Valley of the Dolls, here I come.

[filepath: /assessment/reading]

Wed, 06 Apr 2011

I Just Can't

After writing that blog post yesterday about how I haven't been reading much this year, I decided to pick up The Pale King and burn through a serious chunk of it. Um. Yeah.

I can't read this book.

I love David Foster Wallace's writing and I consider myself a pretty big fan. Infinite Jest was -- I'll go ahead and say it -- the best reading experience of my life. I've read a lot of his essays and I've never been sorry that I did. I listened to The Broom of the System audiobook, which was a mistake, but the problem was not at all the book but the format I chose to experience it in.

The thing about DFW (especially in the long form) is that you have to trust him implicitly in order to make his writing worthwhile. Reading Infinite Jest, you get at least 150 pages in before there's any inkling of a point, and even then it's only a minor inkling. The story doesn't really begin to coalesce until about halfway through the book.

I like to think of it like jumping out of a plane and trusting that the parachute will, eventually, open. But at first, you have this panicky free-fall where all of your instincts scream at you that what is happening right now is the worst thing ever. It takes a lot of courage to ignore those instincts, enjoy the fall, and admit that what you're experiencing is actually fantastic.

But The Pale King is an unfinished novel. How can you trust an unfinished novel? I can't, that's for sure.

I think if the book was as funny and entertaining as Infinite Jest, I would still enjoy the read. And even though I'm only about one-fifth of the way into the book, I'm pretty sure this is going relatively nowhere.

Consider this line from a review of the book in Esquire magazine:

You don't have to read it in a couple days or even a couple months. I'm not sure you even need to read it in any particular order. It's not that kind of book.

Hm. It's a rave review. All the reviews I've read are rave reviews. Who wants to be the only person to diss a long-awaited posthumously published book by one of the greatest American writers of all time?

Then there's this quote from the book's Editor's Note by Michael Pietsch:

The pages of the manuscript were edited only lightly. One goal was to make characters' names consistent (David invented new names constantly) and to make place names, job titles, and other factual matters match up throughout the book. Another was to correct obvious grammatical errors and word repetitions. Some chapters of the manuscript were designated "Zero drafts" or "freewriting," David's terms for first tries, and included notes such as "Cut by 50% in next draft." I made occasional cuts for sense or pace, or to find an end point for a chapter that trailed off unfinished.

Yeah, that doesn't inspire confidence. Sure, the book might be pretty good, but I can't imagine that it's anywhere near the book we would have seen if DFW had lived to finish it.

I'll keep it around of course and most likely I'll pick it up now and then, maybe reading portions of it as if they are short stories when I'm in the mood for that kind of thing. There is one character I encountered that I'd like to learn more about.

But right now, no way. Sorry, DFW. I just can't.

[filepath: /assessment/reading]